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Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

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Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#361

Post by joe_the_user »

Fricken wrote: post #223
linuxftw wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can they perceive where on the road they should be located when the road is totally covered in snow and you can't see the pavement, let alone the line markets, possibly only tire tracks, if that?

Yes. An autonomous vehicle with lidar and maps can locate itself using any landmark, or series of landmarks it can see, it isn't limited to lane markings.

Just think, the remains of the last self-driving car will help the next self-driving car avoid the trap. But only if Google carefully catalogs it and no one moves the wreckage.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#362

Post by surfmike »

markdown wrote: post #274
linuxftw wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Great strides is not 'perfected' and I don't think perception for autonomous vehicles is a solved problem whatsoever. What is a driverless car to do if it slides out of position on the road and is now facing the wrong direction? Does it have the ability to…

> 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.

Autonomous vehicles (rightly so) will be held to a higher standard than humans

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#365

Post by travisjungroth »

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.

Having both flown planes and driven cars, they are definitely not.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#366

Post by ux-app »

jimmy1 wrote: post #327
zanny wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> come close to being workable in adverse conditions Given how people drive in the rain and snow in the Northeast, I would argue human drivers have not even come close to being workable in adverse conditions. We drive in them anyway, despite often times magnitudes more risk of crashing, because we want to.

I see this fallacious argument made as a counterpoint time and time again and it is getting tiresome. If you look at all the relative statistics, both IIHS and insurance, the drivers who practice safe driving techniques and do not drive distracted have something crazy like a 3-4 fold lower accident rate. Moreover, those drivers who have had an accident are much more likely to have another one. Have you ever met someo…

>the drivers who practice safe driving techniques and do not drive distracted have something crazy like a 3-4 fold lower

That's quite the qualifier. Problem is I see at least 3 people with their eyes on their phone during every 30min commute to work ...so...

>When the "worst" AI's that are responsible for some amount of crashes, who is going to pay the price? Whose license is going to get deducted? Whose insurance is going to go up? In the world of driverless ubiquity, who is going to be the check and balance? What self-selecting mechanisms are going to protect us? You think Waymo will give a shit?

These are literally the least difficult issues around self driving cars.

> There are other reasons this argument is fallacious, the most obvious one that driverless cars have not yet proven they are safer or can remain statistically significantly safer than safe human drivers.

so we should stop trying?

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#367

Post by batiudrami »

incompatible wrote: post #241
naravara wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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).

That would be great but in reality we're going to need self driving cars which are near enough perfect with the existing infrastructure to get some major traction before roads start getting designed for them.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#368

Post by archagon »

tomjakubowski wrote: post #86
dpc59 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

­>A lot of people think that mass transit is for the poor That's because it is. I had to take the metro in Montréal to get to work this week, hadn't taken it in months because I usually bike, it's such a shitty experience. It smells bad, it's hot, it's filled with tired people that don't feel like going to work (you feel it in the air), beggars harass you, it's slow (it can take 3x as much time as riding a bike to ge…

I can't speak for Montreal, but there are countless counterexamples of cities in wealthy countries (not as wealthy as the US) where metro users are drawn from more or less every income level. Turns out you can actually make riding a metro into a good experience with a bit of effort. New York, Chicago, Tokyo, Taipei, London, Berlin, Munich come immediately to mind. And as sibling commenters have pointed out, in some p…

In St. Petersburg or Moscow, it feels as natural as walking.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#369

Post by akvadrako »

dv_dt wrote: post #287
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…

I suspect that if someone could deliver a fully autonomous car at say 2x the cost of a regular car, the next immediate problem would be massive autonomous traffic jams where you would still need mass transit to work back scaling costs on the transport networks.

At least now the 4 hours you spend in traffic every day can be useful — catch up on some sleep, check your email, train your car's AI by playing "I spy"...

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#370

Post by joesb »

wpietri wrote: post #344
chemicalnovae wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly. "Immaturity" includes a big lack of detailed domain knowledge and domain-specific judgment, which is one of the things I think is going to be very hard to teach to computers.

I think domain specific judgement is what computers excel than human.

What human has advantage of is utilizing knowledge in unrelated domain to another domain.

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