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

291–300 of 440 posts

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#291

Post by cwkoss »

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…

'Series of malicious actors dressed as police directing car into a shipping container to kidnap occupants'

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#292

Post by kens »

felipeerias wrote: post #267
linuxftw wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"There's a ball in the middle of the road, is a kid going to pop up from behind a parked car and run towards it?"

I've seen this multiple times as a situation that people can deal with instinctively but computers won't. However people need to be trained to handle this situation; it is explicitly mentioned in the driver's handbook.† So I don't see this as a "win" for people over computers.

† CA driver's handbook page 37: http://driveca.org/cms/assets/uploads/2014/09/dl600.pdf

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#293

Post by teraflop »

tomp wrote: post #275
teraflop wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, as long as you have reasonably well-calibrated cameras and optics. Back-of-the-envelope calculation: assuming 1920x1080 camera sensors with a 90-degree horizontal field of view, each pixel covers a visual angle of approximately 0.001 radians. If you have two cameras separated by 5 feet horizontally, and your measurements are accurate to within a pixel, then you can measure the distance to an object 500 feet awa…

Ah, I meant for humans. As in, how much is depth-perception actually necessary for driving... Obviously, humans also use higher-level cues, which IMO are much more important.

Whoops, my bad for skimming the comments and overlooking the context of your question.

I found a page [1] that summarizes the level of visual acuity required to obtain a driver's license in each US state. It appears that all states will potentially issue a license to someone with vision in only one eye. Some states impose additional conditions, such as requiring a favorable report from an ophthalmologist, limiting the maximum speed, or restricting the driver to vehicles with outside rear-view mirrors (to compensate for the loss of peripheral vision on one side).

[1]: http://lowvision.preventblindness.org/daily-living-2/state-v...

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#294

Post by tim333 »

iabacu wrote: post #74

The argument that autonomous tech will save lives is the most dangerous. This will take decades to be true. The same companies who are pushing for that narrative, are also the first ones to blame the drivers when their tech goes wrong. There’s so much data fudging to push for those narratives — they want the credit for lives saved, and at the same time don’t want the blame or liability for accidents caused.

Waymo have driven 8 million miles and had one minor accident that was the cars fault where it thought a bus would give way and a dent resulted.

I've driven about 200,000 miles and done considerably worse including two cars written off, though no injuries. I'd say Waymo seems safer than me. And judging from my insurance premiums which are low, I'd be safer than the average human driver.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#297

Post by thereisnospork »

wpietri wrote: post #257
xyhopguy wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tough part about this line of reasoning is you can't tease apart the discriminatory power of human knowledge from human vision. How good does our expert system need to be? How good do our sensors need to be? I'm not so sure this is an easy to question to resolve

Exactly. Children have decent hand-eye coordination as toddlers. By 3 or 4, they can drive toy cars; by 5 they're riding bikes. But it takes them another decade or more to have the knowledge and judgment needed to drive a car in traffic. And even then they're not great; teens have a crash rate something like 3x other drivers.

Because of immaturity, not cognitive or physical capability. Kids start racing go karts as young as five - and that's a far more difficult, requiring fast reflexes, precise car control, and situational awareness. It's a far more challenging task than an average commute.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#298

Post by majewsky »

pretendscholar wrote: post #243
ddoolin wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> we aren't intelligent enough to create such systems

Evolution suggests that you can, in fact, create systems that are more intelligent than what came before them.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#299

Post by saalweachter »

burlesona wrote: post #281
dwighttk wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, that's not offensive. FWIW those 62% live in "incorporated paces" or cites, which would include my town (as long as I'm understanding that correctly.) Down under "new incorporated places" it mentions Sandy Point, TX, population 200. It's crazy that even including little towns like that you're still only talking about 3.5% of the land.

Yeah it truly is crazy. I think it also speaks to how relatively solvable some of the urban problems are in the sense that we could be intentionally building new cities (not just attached suburbs) if we wanted to, and that would - if it worked - take some of the pressure off the places that are struggling right now. For whatever reason America just stopped doing that after WW2. Maybe it’s time to start again?

The really meaty space of "cool impactful stuff we can do now" are all organizational problems, not engineering. How do you organize 10k people to build a new city, get them to agree upon a basic design and location, and then get them to actually go do it? There's nothing really stopping you.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#300

Post by majewsky »

wpietri wrote: post #248
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 f…

I had a look at his predictions re: self-driving cars. He clearly invested quite a lot of thought went into these because he makes a lot of subtle distinctions. However, one of his predictions (probably the one that you're referring to) is this:

> A driverless "taxi" service in a major US city with arbitrary pick and drop off locations, even in a restricted geographical area.

> Not Earlier Than 2032

This is odd because isn't Waymo doing just that in Phoenix with a general release date of 2019? I checked the source because I wanted to verify that it says "a city" and not "any city".

Post reply on HN