Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 445 posts

Re: Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’

#71

Post by 7j »

hateful wrote: post #25

I think it would happen this way: firstly you would automate things that go on a track - like trains - which I think we already have. Then secondly you could have certain lanes or roads that are designed for specific self-driving vehicles. This could help buses and trucks (in certain areas) get around. Then you would keep adding more of those, until many roads have those and very few manual lanes. It wouldn't immedia…

I would expect full self-driving to come through remote operation capability - at first a single person can remotely operate one vehicle. After some improvements it would be possible for a single operator to control 2 vehicles and so on.

Re: Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’

#72

Post by maskedinvader »

brk wrote: post #48
maskedinvader wrote: post #42

Id take this article with a large pinch of salt, considering their previous predictions about technology. case in point below: "Hence, if it requires, say, a thousand years to fit for easy flight a bird which started with rudimentary wings, or ten thousand for one which started with no wings at all and had to sprout them ab initio, it might be assumed that the flying machine which will really fly might be evolved by…

Your best case example is a statement made over a century ago?

well if you see the link I posted, there are 11 examples from various points in the past. I was just making the point that their track record with technology predictions isn't stellar.

Re: Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’

#73

Post by xamuel »

mirceal wrote: post #32
CPLX wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because driving a car is essentially analogous to full artificial intelligence. We don't know how to do that. Like at all.

hmm. i have to disagree. driving a car is a walk in the park compared to AGI. they’re not even in the same ballpark. for driving we at least have an idea how to make it happen and we need better tech, more training data and maybe alter the infrastructure to solve some edge cases. AGI? we’re guessing at this point (at least what’s public)

>driving a car is a walk in the park

In the average situation, not the edge-case. The way you should think about it is, "If I had a black-box oracle that can drive a car exactly like a human, could I use that to simulate an artificial general intelligence?"

The answer is probably yes. For example, in order to "ask" the AGI a yes-or-no question X, you could contrive that the car find itself at a fork in the road with a roadsign that says "If the answer to X is 'yes', then the road to the right is closed. Otherwise, the road to the left is closed."

Re: Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’

#74

Post by leetcrew »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #44
suprfnk wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a human can do it, I see no reason why an autonomous system can't, eventually, do it. It might take a very long time, but "never" seems short-sighted.

Humans can't do it. When your stopping distance (including reaction time) exceeds your visibility there's no way to drive safely, but humans do it anyways.

> When your stopping distance (including reaction time) exceeds your visibility there's no way to drive safely, but humans do it anyways.

this is bad, but not quite as bad as it sounds. most of the time, you only need to stop as fast as the car in front of you. it's pretty uncommon to encounter a stationary object in the middle of the travel lane. in fact, outside of driving on surface streets in the city, I can't remember the last time I had to avoid a stationary object in my lane.

I'm much more worried by how closely people follow the car in front of them, regardless of visibility. many leave barely enough room to react at all.

Re: Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’

#75

Post by 60654 »

casefields wrote: post #2

Nothing makes a huge group of us cringe more, than people saying it's just around the corner. The worst part is it also comes from people who should know better. >Waymo’s CEO, John Krafcik, has admitted that a self-driving car that can drive in any condition, on any road, without ever needing a human to take control—usually called a “level five” autonomous vehicle—will basically never exist. At the Wall Street Journa…

Well said. Autonomous navigation is still a huge open research problem, in the sense that we don't even know how it _could_ work, there is no AI work capable of integrating all of the necessary pieces. Heck, we don't even know how simple bird or lizard intelligence works, much less be able to replicate human cognition that goes into operating heavy machinery in a busy multi-agent social context.

So promising that it will be not just solved, but productized into a polished consumer gadget, in 5 or so years, was an astonishing, unbelievably foolish promise.

And worst of all, yes, it came from people who should have known better.

And as a quick aside: there's much talk about "ethical AI", but here's a more common AI ethics failure: taking money from funders, shareholders, and customers, with promises of imminent deliverables, while knowing full well that the AI advances required for that haven't happened yet, and there's no evidence for when they will, if at all.

Re: Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’

#76

Post by kpU8efre7r »

peteradio wrote: post #70
kpU8efre7r wrote: post #54

Could be saying that to defeat competition. Don't bother trying it's decades away! And Ford is notoriously behind the rest of the pack so I'd believe even less of what they say as well. I don't listen to executives with a stake in the game regardless of which side they are playing. The barriers to this seem mosly man made. Regulations, restrictions, taxi lobby, trucker unions, etc. A lot of it depends on where the li…

> Simply being safer than humans is easy- we are already there. Seriously?

Just Waymo was driving over 1 million miles a month in 2018. How many people have they killed? The fact that an autonomous vehicle or Tesla "autopilot" fatality makes national news is telling. It's not commonplace.

Re: Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’

#77

Post by JustSomeNobody »

I don't understand why independent full automated self-driving is the goal. This just leads to competing "standards" so to speak. I think auto manufacturers should be working with governments to create smarter roadways and define an automated driving standard. You'd have smarter cars that would be able to link up in trains on the roadways. They'd be more efficient aerodynamically. It would be safer. You'd have "road ranger" style e-vehicles that could link up and charge you without ever stopping. And you could help fund it all using tax payer money.

Re: Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’

#78

Post by leetcrew »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #38
satyavh wrote: post #27

Even if it will be technically possible, and I'm pretty sure some day that will be solved. That's the easiest part. The biggest hurdle for self-driving cars will be ethics, such as 'the car brakes for a child suddenly crossing the street but then kills the old woman' or perhaps even make decisions based upon social status. Lots of options here. Those ethics have to be agreed upon, and they will likely differ per cult…

I believe that this scenario is very over-blown. If you're in a situation where you have to choose between swerving into another car or hitting a child that darts out onto the street then the question really is: why were you in that situation in the first place? At 20mph pedestrian collisions are almost invariably non-fatal and emergency stops are almost instantaneous. So if you're on a street where a child can appea…

a child can appear instantly on any street. they can even run into the highway if their parent pulls onto the shoulder for a bathroom break or something.

of course, it's much more likely to happen in a neighborhood than on the highway, so we drive slower in the neighborhood. but anything that can happen eventually will, so there ought to be some policy.

that said, I think there is a certain segment of the population that gets overly excited about mapping the trolley problem onto autonomous driving. I expect that little will change other than the liable party (the car driver vs the company) and it will mostly work out.

Re: Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’

#79

Post by bryanlarsen »

leetcrew wrote: post #74
bryanlarsen wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans can't do it. When your stopping distance (including reaction time) exceeds your visibility there's no way to drive safely, but humans do it anyways.

> When your stopping distance (including reaction time) exceeds your visibility there's no way to drive safely, but humans do it anyways. this is bad, but not quite as bad as it sounds. most of the time, you only need to stop as fast as the car in front of you. it's pretty uncommon to encounter a stationary object in the middle of the travel lane. in fact, outside of driving on surface streets in the city, I can't re…

Accident rates in the US on the highway are on the order of one per million miles. And in a million miles of driving you will encounter quite a few stationary or otherwise unexpected objects in the middle of the travel lane.

Re: Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’

#80

Post by bryanlarsen »

leetcrew wrote: post #78
bryanlarsen wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that this scenario is very over-blown. If you're in a situation where you have to choose between swerving into another car or hitting a child that darts out onto the street then the question really is: why were you in that situation in the first place? At 20mph pedestrian collisions are almost invariably non-fatal and emergency stops are almost instantaneous. So if you're on a street where a child can appea…

a child can appear instantly on any street. they can even run into the highway if their parent pulls onto the shoulder for a bathroom break or something. of course, it's much more likely to happen in a neighborhood than on the highway, so we drive slower in the neighborhood. but anything that can happen eventually will, so there ought to be some policy. that said, I think there is a certain segment of the population…

Exactly. The maximum safe speed in a neighborhood is 20mph, and the maximum safe speed passing a stopped car on the freeway is a lot less than 60mph.
Post reply on HN