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Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

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Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#331

Post by BurningFrog »

dboreham wrote: post #185

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).

There are plenty of driverless trains deployed all over the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_urban_metro_...

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#332

Post by clay_the_ripper »

I think it’s important to distinguish between a self driving car that can work in every scenario, and a self driving car that can take over part of the time. Personally, if someone could make a car that was extremely good at highway driving so it could sit in traffic for me and drive on the highway (basically if Tesla autopilot actually worked and was 99.9999% safe) that would be AMAZING. that’s good enough for me. I don’t need a car that can self drive in the snow.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#333

Post by stretchwithme »

I think we underestimate how amazingly versatile even an 85 year old grandmother's brain truly is.

I am certain AVs will work EVENTUALLY. And that will radically change the economy.

But robotic killing machines will be working long before that happens. And you can bet somebody is working on that.

Maybe we're focusing on the wrong things.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#334

Post by stretchwithme »

chongli wrote: post #330
Fricken wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The infrastructure driverless vehicles rely on is their own internal maps, which have lanes and signage marked out. Being able to visually detect these things is important, but it is a measure for added redundancy. Great strides have been made in using machine learning to filter out obscurants such as snow. Perception for autonomous vehicles is effectively a solved problem. The biggest technical challenges are relate…

As a human, you understand that if you behave one way, it will cause the pedestrian, the cyclist and the other car to respond a certain way, but if you respond to the situation another way, it will cause all three to respond differently. Why does the self driving car have to restrict itself to extremely subtle human nonverbal communication? Just put a loudspeaker on the outside of the car and have it announce its int…

How about a man carrying a lantern ten paces ahead of it?

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#335

Post by stretchwithme »

logifail wrote: post #319
markdown wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Great strides is not 'perfected' The goal isn't perfection. The goal is to be as good as humans. Eg: An autonomous vehicle driving through snow backed by millions of miles of experience driving in snow is better than someone from the tropics driving through snow for the first time.

>> The goal is to be as good as humans. Which particular humans? >> An autonomous vehicle driving through snow [..] is better than someone from the tropics driving through snow for the first time Better than the worst human we can imagine? Better than the average human? Better than the average human who drives on that road at that time of year?

The very best limo driver seems like a good human to emulate.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#336

Post by stretchwithme »

briandear wrote: post #308
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…

Aircraft are the perfect driverless technology candidate.

I guess rockets are a kind of aircraft. That's working.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#337

Post by chemicalnovae »

thereisnospork wrote: post #297
wpietri wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not really, racing carts is primarily about the ability to control the thing under very well defined conditions (read: much better than your average 3 lane highway with hundreds of other road users) with other road users with the exact same end goal.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#338

Post by lotu »

fouc wrote: post #320
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…

How do humans handle edge cases anyways? I think it comes down to being able to model the world around us, having a model for human behavior, animal behavior, etc. If we see a baby deer, we look for the mother deer. It feels like we're also really good at creating multiple open-ended stimulations in the back of our mind about how things might play out, where they can easily be paused or fleshed out depending on which…

> How do humans handle edge cases anyways?

30,000 deaths per year suggest that humans fail at these edge cases all the time. Maybe ate their best a human outperforms a machine but as any person who drives if other drivers are at their best.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#339

Post by ghusbands »

jimmaswell wrote: post #255
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…

> Both have killed people. Are you referring to the midnight jaywalker in Uber's case? I still feel like most of the blame goes to the pedestrian.

Look at other people's videos of driving through that section of road around the same time - the pedestrian would have been clearly visible and the car and safety driver should both have easily seen them and stopped. If you read about the preliminary NTSB report [1], it's clear that the car had six seconds of warning and 1.3s of certainty of impact, yet did nothing to avoid it, not even alerting the safety driver. The pedestrian may have been foolish, but the car could easily have avoided killing them.

[1] https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20180524.as...

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#340

Post by stevep98 »

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…

Driverless cars have advantages over humans too. Faster reaction speed, constant 360 degree surveillance, lack of distraction, (theoretically) better control of brakes and steering to handle skids.

Waymo has demonstrated solutions for many of the edge cases you mention. This video is from 3 years ago: https://youtu.be/tiwVMrTLUWg?t=530

Regarding snow, it maybe a difficult problem, but if cars can't see road markings, neither can humans, so how do they do it? Sometimes by following a car in front. Though far from real autonomy, my Tesla doesn't need to see road markings for autopilot to work, it will fall back to following the car in front.

And.. Why does Waymo have to solve this inclement weather problem now? Surely it would be better to demonstrate safety in good weather, then light rain, then heavy rain, then light snow? They can just refuse to operate in bad weather unless they are confident about it.

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