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Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

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Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#161
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever heard about that thing called fog?

As an existence proof, people drive through fog every day. We prove that it's possible to take binocular visual data and convert that into a series of control signals that will propel a car through fog. Sure sometimes accidents happen, but every day thousands upon thousands of people safely navigate fog in e.g. San Francisco or London. I see no reason machines shouldn't be able to perform at least as well one day.

I think olivewell's comment in this subthread is what dooms the idea of camera-only self driving for a really long time horizon: you basically need general AI for it.

I work in machine learning in a different area (healthcare) so my perspective may be incomplete, but what I see in ML/AI is that models are really good at memorizing, not so good at understanding. What I mean by that is that a human navigates the world by knowing what a car is, what fog is, what a person is, what a plastic bag is, all sort of things. Object detection can get much of the way there, whether it can get enough of the way there is an open question, but ok we'll grant that. Whether AI/ML can actually make the step from knowing what the object is to knowing how that object interacts with all the other objects in the world is another.

In other words identifying an object is just step one, understanding what that object means in context is the next absolutely required step, and it's way harder. We have a leg up as humans so we can rely on visual alone, but machines almost certainly will need other sensors that report additional information because they don't "get" context in the same way. And I'd say it's an open question whether even with those sensors, they'll be able to get there. I hope so, but the game is far from won.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Driverless trains are a solved problem, so why don't we just build some of those?

Driverless trains are not a problem to begin with. If you have a train and it carries hundreds of people [or trainload of cargo], it is economically irrelevant whether it has a human operator or not. So it is safer to have a human there just in case.

The tech for automated road trains is vastly closer than where self-driving cars are. If you feel this way about trains, then you should feel the same way about highway-specific automobile autonomy.

We also need to focus on the actual problem we're faced with. Cities are hitting limits to growth due to congestion and we can't build more roads. The state of tech right now is capable enough to solve that problem by increasing the throughput of the major arteries of LA / DC / etc.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will very likely kill far fewer per mile driven than humans do. Unfortunately you're right -- it probably still will kill some. Even nonfatal accidents will be scrutinized heavily and leave a lasting impression of fear/loss of control.

That's totally unproven, the technology doesn't even exist yet and we're still assuming we know what it will look like. In their current state self driving cars would kill far more people than humans if all cars used self driving 100% of the time, and no one knows if we will ever move past that.

> In their current state self driving cars would kill far more people than humans if all cars used self driving 100% of the time, and no one knows if we will ever move past that.

Really? No one knows if we will ever improve on self-driving cars than the current technology today? I'm going to stick my neck out and say "Yes, I know that will move past that."

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#164

I think a lot of people in this field did see this coming. I knew a few people in this space about a year ago and I pretty much hear: "realistically, 15 years out at the earliest." I really really hate the concept of a driverless car. It's an incredibly difficult problem space; and for the same cost, America could build up municipal rail and bus infrastructure to where they were in the 1940s/1950s. We need more citie…

Yep. And driverless, electric locomotives are decades-old technology.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#165
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

­>A lot of people think that mass transit is for the poor That's because it is. I had to take the metro in Montréal to get to work this week, hadn't taken it in months because I usually bike, it's such a shitty experience. It smells bad, it's hot, it's filled with tired people that don't feel like going to work (you feel it in the air), beggars harass you, it's slow (it can take 3x as much time as riding a bike to ge…

My wife & I live in San Francisco. SF Muni fares are a flat $2.50. So for the two of us, a Muni trip is - total cost: $5 - usually takes 30-60 min to get wherever we want to go in the city. - we need to to figure out the optimal route, schedule, and entry & exit stops. - we need to make sure we will arrive at the stop on-time. - we need to walk 5-10 min to closest stop on either end This process is familiar to anyone…

This is cherry-picking. It always makes more sense to take a car service when multiple people start and end at the same places and can easily coordinate (e.g. a married couple). But this tells us nothing about the average outcome. The _average_ car contains only 1 person.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#166

I think a lot of people in this field did see this coming. I knew a few people in this space about a year ago and I pretty much hear: "realistically, 15 years out at the earliest." I really really hate the concept of a driverless car. It's an incredibly difficult problem space; and for the same cost, America could build up municipal rail and bus infrastructure to where they were in the 1940s/1950s. We need more citie…

This is the part that drives me crazy - America HAD electric railroads all over the place. Or at least Illinois (my homestate) did. You can look up 'Illinois InterUrban' and see maps of rails connecting every rural city. Many of the carriages were used as scrap metal for WWII, and once cars took off the demand wasn't there to rehabilitate them. But it would be so much cheaper to build out than even just replacing the…

Freight traffic dominates the utilization of the rail network in the US and is prioritized over other traffic. Freight trains travel slowly.

This is why US passenger train service is so poor compared to Europe.

> The picture for freight is different. According to Panorama 2009 , 46 percent of EU-27 freight goes by highway while only 10 percent goes by rail, while in the U.S. 43 percent goes by rail and only 30 percent by road. (In both cases, nearly all of the rest is waterways and pipelines.)

> So, it isn’t so much that Europe decided to move people by train rather than by automobile. It is more that Europe decided to use its railroads to move people while the United States decided to use them for freight. America moves almost six times as many ton-miles (or tonne-kilometers) of freight by rail as Europe, while both move about the same number of tonne-kilometers by road. While Europe moves about twice as many tkm of freight by waterway as the U.S., we move six times as much oil by pipeline. [6]

  - area of Continental US: 3.12 million sq mi [1]
  - area of Europe: 2.306 million sq mi [1]
  - rail network length, US: 141,808 mi [2]
  - rail network length, Europe: 157,667 mi [3]
  - goods carried, US: 1.558 trillion lg tn mi/yr (long ton-miles per year) (world rank: 1st) (2015 estimate) [4]
  - goods carried, "Europe":  0.32604 trillion lg tn mi/yr (long ton-miles per year) 
[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=continental+united+sta... [2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=total+%7C+United+State... [3] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=total+%7C+Europe+%7C+r... [4] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=total+%7C+United+State... [5] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Europe+%7C+rail+transp... [6] https://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=11847

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife & I live in San Francisco. SF Muni fares are a flat $2.50. So for the two of us, a Muni trip is - total cost: $5 - usually takes 30-60 min to get wherever we want to go in the city. - we need to to figure out the optimal route, schedule, and entry & exit stops. - we need to make sure we will arrive at the stop on-time. - we need to walk 5-10 min to closest stop on either end This process is familiar to anyone…

This is cherry-picking. It always makes more sense to take a car service when multiple people start and end at the same places and can easily coordinate (e.g. a married couple). But this tells us nothing about the average outcome. The _average_ car contains only 1 person.

Does anyone have back-of-the-napkin estimates of total passenger throughput for central public transportation vs ride share transportation for any metropolitan area?

If public transit i.e. Muni serves 10x or 100x riders each day vs ride sharing than I see your point... I think.

Wait. Maybe you could spell it out?

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How could it do that? The safety statistics quoted by Tesla is "fatalities per mile of Autopilot-enabled vehicle", compared to "fatalities per mile for the average car on the road". It's by no means an accurate comparison, in fact they're inflating their relative safety versus other cars by more than an order of magnitude.

Tangential to your point, do you think it's fair to compare AI driven cars to "average" drivers? I think it's more reasonable to compare them to "average [worst_category_of_driver]." For example, how does the Tesla car compare to teen drivers? If it's better than a meaningfully sized category of human drivers, it's probably ready for the road. Being on the real road is where the best data will be collected.

only if you are exclusively giving the Teslas to that smaller, worse, category of driver

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#169
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In level of stupidity, the concept of self driving car in my opinion is second only to a flying car. The second disregard, that well... there are airplanes. The first, that driverless busses that creep at 30km/h and do emergency brake every every 10 minutes thanks to overattentive collision avoidance system also been around for decades.

I guess you don't know many people that have died at the hands of human drivers if you think it is "stupid"

If you ban cars, and only allow computer controlled ones, things do suddenly begin to make more sense, and look rational. I wouldn't challenge that.

But then, you effectively get a copy of a rail system, only without rails. Saudi experimental city once played with the concept

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#170
post #71

Driverless cars are coming along just fine. Waymo is making steady progress. The sensors are getting better. The problem comes from all those "fake it til you make it" startups, Uber and Tesla being the worst. Both have killed people. This is mostly about sensors and geometry. Machine learning has a role, but only in target identification. That's how Waymo does it. The fake it til you make it crowd had the fantasy th…

No one thinks that you just hook up ML to a camera and you're done. Literally everyone working on this only uses ML for identification. When that Model X crashed into a highway divider, it was because the lines on the road were very faint and there was a fork in the line that actually wasn't the _real_ lane line. The car followed that by mistake, but only because of the misidentification of the lane line.

How are more sensors going to tell the difference between a plastic bag and a cat? How does lidar tell you which car is parked on the side of the road and which one is in your path? Relying on a dozen sensors seems like the crutch to me. Nothing about our current world has been designed for lidar and radar. It was designed for binocular vision. Sure, if your only goal is to not hit things at low speed in perfect weather, lidar is great. But you can't get much further than that.

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