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Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

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Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#171

Post by alistairSH »

SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #101
tomjakubowski wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't speak for Montreal, but there are countless counterexamples of cities in wealthy countries (not as wealthy as the US) where metro users are drawn from more or less every income level. Turns out you can actually make riding a metro into a good experience with a bit of effort. New York, Chicago, Tokyo, Taipei, London, Berlin, Munich come immediately to mind. And as sibling commenters have pointed out, in some p…

Taipei... yes, absolutely. That was a great experience and easy to use. NYC... altright, better than 15 years ago but still not great at all. Not as good as Germany or DC. Tokyo... lol, no! While clean and efficient, it’s a joke that you have different rail stations owned by different companies, different cards that may work on each other but probably not. The ticket machines are almost all cash only. And instruction…

Not as good as Germany or DC.

Did you just claim DC public transit is good? Wow. Coherent bus lines are few and far between. Light rail is non-existent. And the Metro is falling apart at the seems... Prone to excessive delays. Entire lines are brought down for extended periods to perform decades of deferred maintenance. There's no ring routes - to get from Dulles to Rockville, you have to go all the way downtown and back out again. The system was built without consideration for express lines. And neither of the DC airports are on the same line as Union Station.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#172

Post by SilasX »

tertius wrote: post #133
erikpukinskis wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hasn’t Tesla autopilot saved more lives than it took? So it’s more net beneficial (so far) than cautious Waymo?

So did the surgeon who killed that poor girl because he was overconfident and took too many risks.

Is there a specific case you're referring to here?

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#173

Post by [deleted] »

dwighttk wrote: post #168
Consultant32452 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[deleted]

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#174

Post by Shivetya »

djsumdog wrote: post #15

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…

municipal rail is a money sink. currently across the nation there is over a hundred billion dollars of deferred maintenance on municipal rail; light and heavy. worse bus service tends to suffer because they try to force people to use rail by making bus service less attractive which in effect is just damages the concept of public transport.

no the real solution is get over this mythological idea that America is too car heavy. everywhere that people get freedom of travel they go their own transport. what automation will bring is freedom to those who cannot drive so we best better figure out how to get cars talk to each other and which areas will be reserved for automated driving only.

funny you mention Seattle, a city that blew over their recent rail budget by half a billion dollars [1]. plus is it also a city deferring maintenance to hide the costs of their folly.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/500...

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#175

Post by spitfire »

ModernMech wrote: post #132
Jdam wrote: 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.

Just as a point of reference here - I'm not taking sides in this debate, I vividly remember reading about the 1999 Toronto 87 car pile up.

Fog on a straight road caused an 87 car pile up after a trailer jackknifed. The point in the article I remember at the time was a mother recounting watching her 14-year old daughter burn to death. Mom got out, but the daughter had been pinned by her leg.

The quote from the time was ""Mama Sheila, please don't let me die. I'm only 14," Marceya McLamore begged."

I suppose my point is that neither human or machine are good enough yet. and not to treat this as an abstract academic topic, it's real people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Highway_401_crash https://windsorstar.com/news/15-years-after-401-crash-trauma... https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/inquest-hears-...

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#176

Post by beat »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #95
Animats wrote: 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…

Hasn’t Tesla autopilot saved more lives than it took? So it’s more net beneficial (so far) than cautious Waymo?

Arguably, but it's hard to demonstrate the negative. At best, we can compare Tesla accident rates to those of other vehicles in the same class (luxury sedans). I'm sure you're right, but proving you're right against the naysayers is a different problem.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#177

Post by stefan_ »

aaaaaaaaaab wrote: post #164
djsumdog wrote: post #15

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.

It's amazing the serious face some people keep "re-discovering" 100+ years old, derived from basic principles technology. The ultimate of this is the autonomous truck convoy: wouldn't it be amazing if we could just have trucks follow each other closely and save a ton on air drag?

Well, yeah, it exists, it's called a train, it's magnitudes longer than any "autonomous truck convoy" ever will be, and instead of the billion dollar AI machine learning big data system we have to keep them close together, we use a fricking mechanical linkage.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#178

Post by leesec »

tree_of_item wrote: post #158
erikpukinskis wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hasn’t Tesla autopilot saved more lives than it took? So it’s more net beneficial (so far) than cautious Waymo?

How would we get accurate information on the number of lives Tesla's "autopilot" has saved?

Humans die on average every 80 million miles driven ( not sure the metric for highway miles only ), but prove that Tesla can beat that metric and you can assume lives are being saved.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#179

Post by beat »

photos_victim wrote: post #159
erikpukinskis wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hasn’t Tesla autopilot saved more lives than it took? So it’s more net beneficial (so far) than cautious Waymo?

How did you conclude this? There are other similarly-priced but more-numerous models of car where literally nobody has ever died after crashing one. Controlling for price (as a proxy for the wealth of the occupants) Tesla has a poor safety record.

Cite?

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#180

Post by spitfire »

mikepurvis wrote: post #144
ModernMech wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Machines will be (and already are) held to a much higher standard than human drivers— there are a lot of reasons for this, ranging from the emotional to the pragmatic. Just because thousands of people roll the dice every day driving in unsafe conditions does not mean that we should tolerate machines doing so.

One note is that perhaps people roll the dice because they want to feel some control and forward momentum. But if you're sitting in the car, being autonomously driven somewhere will you be so impatient?

I assume the car will give you an ETA, so you'll check the clock and go back to your book/social media. I'm okay with "slower, but smoother".

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