Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 440 posts

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#181

Post by burlesona »

dwighttk wrote: post #116
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…

rail and bus infrastructure is never going to be feasible in the small town in Texas where I grew up, 1.5 hrs from Ft. Worth. Not to mention all the even smaller towns in that county and the counties around it. How is one supposed to move 3 horses across the state using rail and buses? What about my parents driving to surrounding lakes to kayak? Just cary that on a train that for some reason actually goes to these la…

No offense, but this conversation is not for you or your family. The car is the second best thing that ever happened to rural life, after the tractor, and nothing is going to change that.

This conversation is about the 62% of Americans that live and work in 3.5% of the land area. (Source: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2015/cb15-33....)

There’s no reason for rural America to act like these ideas are crazy, nor for urban America to act like these problems are universal. So often these two sides act in opposition to each other when they really have no conflict with each other - except perhaps that both side has a hard time relating to the other lifestyle.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#182

Post by beat »

dragontamer wrote: post #130
fabiospampinato wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fake it til you make it crowd had the fantasy that you just hook up some cameras to a machine learning system, train it, and you have self driving. There are about 7 billion instances of those learning systems though. Will this be replicated with machines in the next 10 years? I have no clue. Is this doable at all? Sure.

There's absolutely no equivalence between a CNN created today with deep learning, compared to the Neural Network in a human brain. The problem with the human brain is one of inattention. CNNs / Artificial Neural Networks can remain at attention 100% of the time due to their artificial / machine nature. But CNNs, despite being at 100% attention the entire time, still have issues determining if that splotch on the scre…

The 100% attention thing I why I have tremendous faith that computers will be out-driving humans in short order. Even really good human drivers have a limited perspective and focus. And even the best human drivers are subject to emotional state.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#183

Post by mikepurvis »

dwighttk wrote: post #140
zrail wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course there are going to be wide swaths of the United States where passenger rail and bus service isn't going to make much of a dent for local transportation. Regional transportation is an entirely different question. Is there a rail line running through the small town in Texas where you grew up? I bet there is, and I bet there is the remnants of a passenger station too. What would it mean to your small town if p…

There is a rail line, but no passenger station. Realistically there would be 1 train per day max to the big city and you'd have to spend the night instead of making a day or half day trip. (I currently live in Durham and I can catch a morning train to Charlotte and back in the evening according to the schedule, as long as I can fit my business in between the arrival time of the morning train and the departure time of…

For a data point on this, I'm in the Waterloo region, about an hour's drive into Toronto when traffic is good, or 2-2.5 hours when it's not. The government regional rail (GO Transit) operates four commuter trains into the city on weekday mornings, and four back again in the evening.

Despite being slow and expensive, those trains are packed, day after day, with commuters who would rather live out of the city, and not spend 15-20 hours of their week sitting in traffic on the 401. They recently extended two of the trains with additional carriages to handle the capacity.

We've been clamouring for hourly bidirectional service for over a decade and it's only in recent years that the relevant authorities have finally gotten their act together to build out the necessary infrastructure to make it possible (twinning a bunch of track sections, building a bypass for US-bound freight, and electrification).

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#184

Post by moultano »

Shivetya wrote: post #174
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 ca…

> everywhere that people get freedom of travel they go their own transport.

They have freedom to travel, but not freedom to live where they want. The United States has entirely banned dense housing in everywhere that people want to live, and this consequently makes transit impractical. Get rid of zoning restrictions on housing, and we'd be in a much different place.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#185

Post by dboreham »

Driverless vehicles are "the new fusion power". Always "about 10 years in the future".

>Driverless cars are coming along just fine.

Even if this were true it doesn't mean humans will be fine with them being deployed. We had working driverless trains 20+ years ago yet almost none are deployed today (AND we have plenty of human-caused fatal train crashes that might be a good reason to want driverless trains).

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#186

Post by Consultant32452 »

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

The point is that we allow teen drivers on the road with the expectation and understanding that they will improve over several years. Why would we not expect to have to make the same concession for AI?

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#187

Post by dwighttk »

save_ferris wrote: post #21
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…

> But in most of America we need to get back to the point where cars are no longer a necessity While I completely agree with you, the cultural barriers to this are petty much a non-starter in much of the country. I love not owning a car and being able to rely on mass transit where I live (Austin, TX), but Texas is so culturally opposed to anything like this. A lot of people think that mass transit is for the poor, an…

>Go where you want, when you want (but you're gonna be bumper-to-bumper most of the way there.)

I can count on 1 hand (ok, maybe both hands) the number of times I've been in bumper-to-bumper traffic in my life. One of those was in Austin. There's lots of places to go that aren't big cities.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#188

Post by mikepurvis »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #76
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…

> America could build up municipal rail and bus infrastructure to .... I don’t think the killer market for driverless cars in America in the first place. Places like China that have all that (commuter rail, subway) but lack places for new roads and parking would benefit greatly from optimizing their limited road infrastructure. They already have people who are used to taking taxies everywhere, now make the ring roads…

Most North American cities also lack the space for new roads and parking, at least in the places people actually want to go to.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#189

Post by photos_victim »

100ideas wrote: post #167
photos_victim wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Don't bother with napkins. The data is open. TNC trips average about 150k / weekday [1], BART carries about 415k trips / weekday [2], and Muni carries about 750k [3]. Thus, public transportation carries about 8x more people, with the caveat that not all BART journeys start or end in SF.

On the other hand, 99% of vehicle trips in SF are either private cars or TNCs.

Neither of these was my point, though. My point was that comparing cost between a per-trip price and a per-person price will always favor the former when there are multiple people. But most trips don't involve multiple people, which is why such an analysis is besides the point.

1: http://tncstoday.sfcta.org/ 2: https://www.bart.gov/about/reports/ridership 3: https://sfgov.org/scorecards/transportation/ridership

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#190

Post by orthecreedence »

pjc50 wrote: post #93
amthewiz wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? I don't like to fetch water from a lake every day to my house. Instead of using technology to bring water to my house, what lifestyle changes or hard choices should I rather make?

The great invention for dealing with this is a public utility that provides water to everyone. A mass transit system for water.

But why not a fully-autonomous robot that employs machine learning to detect nearby lakes and streams that can hand-deliver the water?
Post reply on HN