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Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

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Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#301

Post by WhiteMonkey »

jimmy1 wrote: post #152
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…

> 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…

Fundamentally, if a human can drive a car with nothing but two relatively poor eyes with a pretty small field of vision set in a single location inside the vehicle, an AI can be trained to drive using the same inputs - any more sensors are a bonus.

The other thing people forget is the bar isn't that high: self driving vehicles don't have to be perfect, they just have to be better than humans are. All of the "whatabout" edge cases people proffer as examples of areas an AI would have trouble with, people have trouble with too. The difference is that once an AI learns to solve that edge case, it doesn't have to relearn going forward.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#302

Post by briatx »

danenania wrote: post #72
briatx wrote: post #45

Generalized self driving cars seems like such a hard problem, laced with a huge amount of hard to handle edge cases and a huge amount of hard to enumerate possible scenarios. I think it will still happen, but they need to simplify the problem. The way to simplify it is to create automated driving lanes, similar to the current HOV lanes, that have standardized markers that are easy for computers to read, and then even…

Afaik, highways in non-severe weather are already pretty much solved, so I’m not sure that special lanes would make much difference, except perhaps during snow storms. The edge cases seem to be mostly around city driving, rural back roads, and bad weather.

> highways in non-severe weather are already pretty much solved

And yet all the automated driving driver fatalities have been on the highway, with the Mountain View crash in particular having been caused by weathered / confusing road markings.

I wouldn't consider that solved at all.

But to the larger point, self driving lanes would only be a first step. Eventually it would develop into a standard set of markings and signage for automated driving friendly roads so that you could safely have self driving cars in things like snow storms.

There's no need to limit it to highways only, although there I think there is some benefit in the near term to segregating automated driving cars from human driving ones.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#304

Post by maxerickson »

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?

You have to compare it to other widely deployed driver assistance, not to the absence of Autopilot.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#305

Post by curun1r »

stephengillie wrote: post #44
save_ferris wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I'd like to join in on the bikeshedding mass transit into solar-powered self-driving car-apartments that can always drive anywhere with no congestion for free, need no maintenance, and aren't controlled by a monolithic entity with an abysmal reputation for profit over users. Mass transit is expensive, boring, and thankless. How many bus companies have ever applied to YC?

> How many bus companies have ever applied to YC

Does Remix (https://www.remix.com/) count?

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#306

Post by techiferous »

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…

Other edge cases include: Amish buggies, rotaries in Boston, Syracuse's upside down traffic light (green is on top), etc. The possibilities are endless; how can you test them all? Humans are really good about adapting to novel situations on the fly, not so much computers.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#307

Post by woodandsteel »

The people who argue that driverless cars can't match humans have a real double standard going. They talk about all the conditions like snow and edge cases that driverless cars can't handle now.

But they have nothing to say about all the real conditions that everyday make human-driven cars unsafe, like lack of sleep, alcohol or illegal drugs, youthful showing off, road rage, texting, arguing with a passenger, old age, poor vision, and so on.

Remember, the problem is not to make driverless cars perfect, it is to make them as good as humans, and that is much easier.

Also, let's remember, the transition to driverless cars will not come all at once, with all vehicles handling all conditions. Instead we will gets lot of partial, easier cases, like a truck that drives only along a well-mapped route, or people using it only when weather conditions are reasonably good, and so on. As the AI and sensors improve, new uses will be added, until eventually we get it to be universal, or nearly so.

And finally there is the likelihood of infrastructure improvements to make it easier.

So want we are going to have is not suddenly one day driverless cars take over, rather a gradual increase in their use.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#308

Post by briandear »

jimmy1 wrote: post #152
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…

> 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…

Aircraft are the perfect driverless technology candidate.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#309

Post by rohit2412 »

esalman wrote: post #279
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…

My machine learning professor used to say that people tend to sensationalize self-driving car fatalities, without realizing that if every car on the road was self-driving, deaths would go close to zero. I think the hard part of the problem is the infrastructure. Everyone wants to fix the cars, but they'll leave the hard part to the government- which is the development of autonomous-ready infrastructure.

I think we need to distinguish between assistive technologies, ADAS, self driving, autonomous, and driverless. They don't mean the same thing but are all interchanged.

For your professor, yes assistive technology like lane keeping assist and collision avoidance will save lives, but are no reason to go driverless.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#310

Post by scythe »

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…

>A lot of people think that mass transit is for the poor, and the car represents independence and freedom. Go where you want, when you want (but you're gonna be bumper-to-bumper most of the way there.)

What the hell is going on in Austin?

Bumper-to-bumper traffic happens mostly at commute hours in commercial zones and during special events. It's very much not the norm for driving at other times. To wit, I live in San Francisco, one of the densest and least car-friendly cities in the U.S., but the last time I returned from a road trip, I traversed the whole city corner-to-corner -- from crossing the Bay Bridge to arriving at my home near the zoo -- in less than fifteen minutes. Why? Because it was midnight! Cars provide unparalleled mobility for irregular trips outside of peak commuting times, even in the largest cities.

I wholeheartedly support deprioritizing car infrastructure and working towards a norm where most people do not drive to work, but I nonetheless believe that car ownership provides a lot of independence and ought to be accessible to the modal citizen, at least outside of the very dense coastal cities (SF/LA/NY). Cars work really well for irregular trips outside of rush hour. They work terribly when large amounts of people need to go to the same place at once.

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