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Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

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Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#241

Post by incompatible »

naravara wrote: post #207
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…

>You can maybe identify "traffic light", "car", "pedestrian", and "deer" with machine learning. That's just used to guess what they're going to do next. It's not used to decide if they're an obstacle. Obstacle detection and avoidance is all sensors and geometry. Honestly, getting them to work to this basic level is the "easy" part. Real world driving conditions in urban environments are suboptimal at best. You're not…

Roads are currently designed for human drivers. Roads designed for automated vehicles could use different signalling systems for intersections and road works, and even parking (it would help if unattended vehicles could be moved at will for tighter packing).

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#242

Post by SlowRobotAhead »

cevn wrote: post #127
SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Suica cards work practically everywhere. You can poke a button to use english, usually clearly labeled. You need cash everywhere in Japan so not sure why that surprised you. My experience with Tokyo metro was pretty good. I've never seen a metro as well-organized despite 15 private rail companies splitting the system. The only problem is the operating hours, the last train rush is insane some nights.

The English button does work great... But doesn't tell you a DAMN THING about which line to transfer to get to some location just how much it costs. And when you need to transfer green to blue, good luck, because you better know that this one blue arrow pointing left means you need to go upstairs, cross the street, go into an entirely different station and then go down two flights of stairs with basically no more directions in English.

I was surprised that the machines only took cash, but it was annoying as hell that we were 10yen short and the nearest ATM was 2 blocks away under the street then back up again.

The rush for the 11-11:30pm trains are nuts. I've never seen so many black suits filled by unsmiling faces than the last train out near Tsukiji.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#243

Post by pretendscholar »

ddoolin wrote: post #236
eddieplan9 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An intelligence animal being able to do something != "with enough processing we should be able to do the same with a control system".

Why not?

One possible answer would be that we aren't intelligent enough to create such systems. I don't think that's true but its a possibility.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#244

Post by eckza »

beat wrote: post #226
Alupis wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Today, 3000 people die in the US every single day because of car accidents Whoa... that's over 1 million people annually... you probably mean globally? Depending on the year, it's somewhere between 30,000 - 40,000 annually[1][2][3], or in the worst-case, about 109 people daily in the US. When you examine those numbers further, you'll see about 10,000-18,000 (depending on the year) are sadly still alcohol related[4]…

Hey, you know what would fix the drunk driving problem? Autonomous cars.

Cars don’t cause drunk driving.

Drunk drivers cause drunk driving.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#245

Post by fipple »

linuxftw wrote: post #204
jimmy1 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Driverless cars are coming along just fine. I am curious why you believe this to be the case? Driverless cars have yet to even come close to being workable in adverse conditions, to my knowledge, please correct me if I am wrong. > This is mostly about sensors and geometry. And mostly about the limitations of sensors, and the limitation of available algorithms to overcome geometry. A algorithm a driverless car uses…

I think interesting edge cases include: 'empty cardboard box or log?' 'Deer just crossed road, is there another one close behind?' 'Driving temporarily on the wrong side of the street due to construction or a downed tree limb' 'Police directing traffic' 'Driving on wrong side of road to avoid collision' 'One lane bridges' 'Busy parking garage with blind corners' 'City Bus driver forces themselves recklessly into your…

Things like snow aren’t necessarily a problem in the beginning because you can start by selling a self driving car that doesn’t work in the snow. There’s still a market for it.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#246

Post by 7952 »

AlanSE wrote: post #150
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…

> You can maybe identify "traffic light", "car", "pedestrian", and "deer" with machine learning. What you wrote makes a lot of sense to me. However, I would also hope that in a matured self-driving environment, traffic lights would be mapped ahead of time. It's always possible that a traffic light shows up in an unexpected place, but in my mental image of the future, this raises a flag for system management to modify…

Ideally you would have a radio transmitter on the traffic light that broadcasts its location, metadata, and state information. You could still have a database, but it would be much more redundant to have live information.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#247

Post by tigershark »

linuxftw wrote: post #204
jimmy1 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Driverless cars are coming along just fine. I am curious why you believe this to be the case? Driverless cars have yet to even come close to being workable in adverse conditions, to my knowledge, please correct me if I am wrong. > This is mostly about sensors and geometry. And mostly about the limitations of sensors, and the limitation of available algorithms to overcome geometry. A algorithm a driverless car uses…

I think interesting edge cases include: 'empty cardboard box or log?' 'Deer just crossed road, is there another one close behind?' 'Driving temporarily on the wrong side of the street due to construction or a downed tree limb' 'Police directing traffic' 'Driving on wrong side of road to avoid collision' 'One lane bridges' 'Busy parking garage with blind corners' 'City Bus driver forces themselves recklessly into your…

You forgot ‘A woman in an electric wheelchair chasing a duck with a broom’ and ‘people playing frogger on roads’. And Waymo self driving car didn’t seem to have a problem with that.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#248

Post by wpietri »

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…

Coming along fine, sure, but isn't the point about reality versus hype?

The guy who started iRobot, Rodney Brooks, doesn't believe we'll see a true driverless car operating throughout a city on normal roads until 2035 at the earliest: http://rodneybrooks.com/my-dated-predictions/

As software developers, we all know how big the difference between "a demo the boss is excited about" and "reliably working in production for all users" can be. Given how complex the domain is and how many edge cases it has, I can easily believe Brooks is right here.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#249

Post by enord »

stale2002 wrote: post #78
bussierem wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Self-driving cars need to be even better or people will die. He is right - the problem with your response to this statement is that it doesn't identify the _actual_ reason behind why they need to be better, and it's a problem identified by the article in question: When a human driver swerves randomly and kills someone, we know EXACTLY who is to blame, and something can be done. If a driverless car, or even a car wit…

You argument is basically that it is more important to figure out who to blame for deaths, than it is to get rid of those deaths in the first place. That strikes me as weird. Also, the people who will be paying out damages will be exactly the same as the people who are paying out for them today. The insurance companies. The simple solution to these "ethical" issues is for everyone to have insurance, and for the insur…

Nobody will accept liability for actions outside of their control, and car manufacturers can not possibly afford to insure all cars they sell in perpetuity.

Insurance only works if the insuree bears the risk (and it has to be an actual risk with nonzero probability times cost, i'll leave why as an exercise to the reader) and in the case of car accidents, that risk is liability, which people have and computers don't. Can TSLA or Uber be charged and convicted of vehicular manslaughter?

Lower rate of accidents will just lower the market rate of insurance contracts.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#250

Post by skybrian »

linuxftw wrote: post #204
jimmy1 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Driverless cars are coming along just fine. I am curious why you believe this to be the case? Driverless cars have yet to even come close to being workable in adverse conditions, to my knowledge, please correct me if I am wrong. > This is mostly about sensors and geometry. And mostly about the limitations of sensors, and the limitation of available algorithms to overcome geometry. A algorithm a driverless car uses…

I think interesting edge cases include: 'empty cardboard box or log?' 'Deer just crossed road, is there another one close behind?' 'Driving temporarily on the wrong side of the street due to construction or a downed tree limb' 'Police directing traffic' 'Driving on wrong side of road to avoid collision' 'One lane bridges' 'Busy parking garage with blind corners' 'City Bus driver forces themselves recklessly into your…

These are tough issues, but they're probably not all relevant in the suburban Phoenix area where Waymo is getting started. Maybe it rolls out one city at a time for many years and that's okay?
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