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Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

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Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#401

Post by ux-app »

jimmy1 wrote: post #397
ux-app wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> These are literally the least difficult issues around self driving cars. You are either young, or extremely naive (or both) if you don't think these are going to be challenging problems. > so we should stop trying? Not sure why you thought that this begged that question. What I am saying is we should stop making arguments that compare driverless car habits, problems, and safety to the current habits, problems, and…

> if you don't think these are going to be challenging problems.

are they show stoppers? c'mon assessing risk is old as the hills. There's an entire profession that is devoted to assessing and pricing in risk. With regard to liability, the courts will decide. It'll be messy but it'll get sorted out in time.

>Trying to sell a generation on driverless cars on some unproven projection that "they will be X times safer!" will fall on deaf ears to drivers who have made it a lifetime of safe driving.

people will get over their fear in time. People feared cars when first introduced too.

from https://timeline.com/forget-self-driving-car-anxiety-in-the-...:

"With all the anxiety around driverless cars lately, it’s worth remembering there was a time people worried about cars exactly because they had human drivers. In fact, it was the removal of the horses—the horseless carriage—that gave some people fits.

In the 1890s, the prospect of a person driving without the aid of a second intelligence was a real concern. A horse, or team of horses, acted as a crude form of cruise control and collision aversion.

In 1896 Alfred Sennett warned, “We should not overlook the fact that the driving of a horseless carriage calls for a larger amount of attention for he has not the advantage of the intelligence of the horse in shaping his path, and it is consequently incumbent upon him to be ever watchful of the course his vehicle is taking.”

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#402

Post by TheCoelacanth »

candiodari wrote: post #374
krainboltgreene wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do humans handle edge cases anyways? A minimum 14 years of "human learning".

Or, judging by traffic's constant deaths ... Their don't . 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…

"Constant deaths" = 1 per ~100 million miles driven

Self-driving cars might be able to beat that, but most of the self-driving car models aren't even close to 100 million miles driven.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#403

Post by anticensor »

stefan_ wrote: post #177
aaaaaaaaaab wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. And driverless, electric locomotives are decades-old technology.

It's amazing the serious face some people keep "re-discovering" 100+ years old, derived from basic principles technology. The ultimate of this is the autonomous truck convoy: wouldn't it be amazing if we could just have trucks follow each other closely and save a ton on air drag? Well, yeah, it exists, it's called a train, it's magnitudes longer than any "autonomous truck convoy" ever will be, and instead of the bill…

And the train will not fail if one single brakepad fails unlike a truck convoy.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#404

Post by dv_dt »

akvadrako wrote: post #369
dv_dt wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"...

That's at the heart of the problem. Once traffic time is lower 'cost', then people will likely immediately start spending that savings. A one hour acceptable commute becomes shifts to 4 hrs being acceptable, and you get maybe 4x more traffic into the same commerce centers.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#405

Post by dmix »

ntsplnkv2 wrote: post #261
dmix wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And regardless no tax break could be comparable or relevant compared to the cost of nation wide improvements to mass transit. Plus driverless car tech is global. The US infrastructure problems are irrelevant to me as a Canadian or the billions of people in Asia.

Asian cities have far worse infrastructure than the US for cars. Toronto has horrible traffic too.

Calling for better US gov infrastructure still doesn't solve this problem for them. Nor will American or Chinese tech companies. In the meantime I'll take driverless electric cars who are actually making progress pls.

Instead of fantasizing about the day modern nation states are marginally functional at delivering services, like they were half a century ago. Basically everything they touch, especially under the false guise of 'private' partnerships ends up a decade late and 2-4x the cost (in billions). And often delivering only half of what was originally planned.

The less we gamble on such a trainwreck the better IMO. Unless, of course, something changes. But every year and every election it seems to get worse.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#406

Post by amthewiz »

orthecreedence wrote: post #190
pjc50 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The great invention for dealing with this is a public utility that provides water to everyone. A mass transit system for water.

But why not a fully-autonomous robot that employs machine learning to detect nearby lakes and streams that can hand-deliver the water?

Tuche!

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#407

Post by DATACOMMANDER »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #157
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How could it do that? The safety statistics quoted by Tesla is "fatalities per mile of Autopilot-enabled vehicle", compared to "fatalities per mile for the average car on the road". It's by no means an accurate comparison, in fact they're inflating their relative safety versus other cars by more than an order of magnitude.

Tangential to your point, do you think it's fair to compare AI driven cars to "average" drivers? I think it's more reasonable to compare them to "average [worst_category_of_driver]." For example, how does the Tesla car compare to teen drivers? If it's better than a meaningfully sized category of human drivers, it's probably ready for the road. Being on the real road is where the best data will be collected.

This seems backwards to me. Shouldn’t we be comparing the performance self-driving cars to the performance of competent human drivers? The variance in human driving ability is quite high, which suggests (to me) that self-driving cars will become better than a significant fraction of human drivers well before they become (what I would consider) safe. I personally don’t want to see any more below-average drivers on the road. It’s true that there’s a constant influx of inexperienced human drivers, many of whom (in my opinion) shouldn’t have been granted licenses, but that’s a separate problem. (I’m talking about the US. I’ve read that licensing requirements are more stringent elsewhere, but here in the states we give out driver’s licenses like candy.)

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#408

Post by lsc »

fouc wrote: post #388
lotu wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Divide by millions. Statistically quite low failure.

I think it's still close to the most likely cause of violent death for an American; Neck and neck with gun deaths, if you count the self-inflicted.

I mean yeah, compared to medieval statistics, it's great, but in comparison to the other non-medical ways to die you face as a 21st century American? automotive fatalities are quite high, and the problem deserves a lot of focus.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#409

Post by lsc »

linuxftw wrote: post #396
candiodari wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, judging by traffic's constant deaths ... Their don't . 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…

> And yet you can't drive from SF to San Jose without seeing a human driver screw up. I don't think anyone is debating that in perfect conditions the computer cars can sometimes out perform the worst drivers. If your concern is terrible drivers killing themselves and others, what you should be arguing for is much stricter standards for obtaining a driver's license. Probably removing 'full coverage' insurance and only…

>If your concern is terrible drivers killing themselves and others, what you should be arguing for is much stricter standards for obtaining a driver's license.

Or for keeping a drivers license.

>Probably removing 'full coverage' insurance and only allowing liability would go a long way as well. Can't keep wrecking your vehicle if nobody's buying you a new one.

I disagree... a used car is pretty cheap. Cheaper than full coverage, if you have a bad record.

I think this should be attacked by increasing the minimum liability coverage. right now, in California, you can drive with homeopathic levels of liability insurance... $35K isn't going to cover very much hospital time/time off work if you hit someone who has a good job. The minimum liability coverage should be 2-3 orders of magnitude higher.

Of course, for either of these things to be politically possible, we first need a society where it's reasonable to get from A to B without a car. An idea that is fought against daily even in relatively dense places like where I am now.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#410

Post by naravara »

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).

>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).

For the amount of money it would take to completely overhaul the country's entire transportation infrastructure to accommodate self-driving cars in this way, you could have built a phenomenal train and bus system with bike/scooter lanes everywhere.

So what exactly is the value add of cars then?

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