Earlier quoted context omitted.
'Series of malicious actors dressed as police directing car into a shipping container to kidnap occupants'
Malicious actors posing as police officers pose just as much risk to human-driven cars.
Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality
371–380 of 440 posts
Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality
#372Earlier 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…
> That's because it is It largely depends on the country or even city. Me and my gf went to Switzerland by car a couple of years ago (we live in Eastern Europe) and I’d had expected that we’d visit different parts of the country by car. What happened once we got there is that we “forgot” the car in the hotel’s parking lot for a week and we did all our travel by train, it was wonderful. Even traveling inside the city…
While the electrification of the mass transit systems is super nice, unfortunately it came about because of the World Wars. Switzerland was hit really hard, and no one wanted to trade their precious coal away (Switzerland had no coal mines). Thus out of sheer necessity they began electrifying all the trains. So unfortunately there's not replicable policies other countries can use to achieve what Switzerland has achieved in terms of electrification, so it'd take some creativity.
Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hey, you know what would fix the drunk driving problem? Autonomous cars.
Cars don’t cause drunk driving. Drunk drivers cause drunk driving.
That's not a concern with a robot car.
Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality
#374Earlier quoted context omitted.
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? A minimum 14 years of "human learning".
Anyone who's seen a Waymo car drive around the valley knows they're much safer than human drivers. They're annoyingly good, because for instance they just never miss a bike and are careful around them, and if you can't tell why it's a bit annoying.
But I've always come away from such incidents with a feeling of "I should have seen that". I've yet to see them screw up even once.
And yet you can't drive from SF to San Jose without seeing a human driver screw up.
Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
And as a society we reject a lot of possible technology out of hand. For example, we could have a device on cars that transmit basic information. Such as licence ID number, speed, location, pedal position etc. It would be ridiculously useful data for a whole host of different things. You could use it to bill parking, catch speeders, sequence traffic lights, and warn of hazards ahead. And maybe even help self driving…
> From a technological point of view this is a no-brainer. Yeah, it becomes a brainer, though, when you ask “how do you deal with malicious transmitters”, since the answer to that tends to involve developing the systems to monitor the same variables externally without trusting the transmitted values, and once you do that, what is he transmitted data for? Using transmitted data for less safety-critical things like rou…
Maybe you could have a lower power transponder style technology in addition. This would just broadcast an ID after a fixed amount of time in response to a request. This could be compared against radar,visual, and broadcast information to actively verify data. And critically it could be independent of the rest of the cars systems. Obviously that is not a solution, but it does add another layer of redundancy
Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 becau…
Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
No one thinks that you just hook up ML to a camera and you're done. Literally everyone working on this only uses ML for identification. When that Model X crashed into a highway divider, it was because the lines on the road were very faint and there was a fork in the line that actually wasn't the _real_ lane line. The car followed that by mistake, but only because of the misidentification of the lane line. How are mor…
If the Model X in your example had LIDAR, it would have been able to build up a decently accurate collision model of the world, which it could have then used to say "there is an object in the path I'm on, maybe I shouldn't plow into it." As opposed to relying on implicit and apparently unreliable cues like lane markers. That particular fatal crash seems like a sensors and geometry problem. "Nothing about our current…
Ermm, actually yes, in the sense that anything human made was designed for and by those with binocular vision themselves.
Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality
#378Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think his note clarifies it pretty well: "This is what Uber, Lyft, and conventional taxi services can do today." What I've seen about Waymo (and maybe I've missed something) is very hazy. And it's not out yet. I'll be very surprised if they go from "operating in secret" to "completely competitive with Lyft" in one jump. My guess is that there will be significant limitations for whatever their first release is.
Waymo is available right now, and has been for almost a year, to normal non-employee citizens, in Phoenix, albeit behind a private invite system. And as mentioned above, it'll become an open beta by 2019. Also, most of the limitation at this point has to do with regulation, they'd be in many more places if not for that. That is much much closer than 2035.
Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality
#379Earlier 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…
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.
Sadly, no one seems to have figured out a way to economically motivate human drivers to do this.
Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality
#380Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I mean, you are right about humans as a species, but oh god, not as drivers. As a cyclist commuter, pass/get passed by a lot of cars and see a lot of irregular/irrational behavior. Everytime there is a change in the traffic rules along my route (detour, construction, closed lane, new signalling) you will get a pretty high rate of people who either ignore the change, panic and drive recklessly, or panic and come to a…