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

nytimes.com

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

#181

Post by ABCLAW »

magashna wrote: post #111
crispyambulance wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not sufficient for these systems to just be "better" than humans in terms of accidents/mile/vehicle, they have to be FAR BETTER than humans. Today, when accidents occur, blame and liability goes to the responsible parties. We're talking about millions of accidents and millions of drivers. If you suddenly have a car that drives, the blame and liability for all accidents then gets focused like a giant magnifying g…

Why can't we accept a little better now and keep striving for far better? Seems stupid to have an all or nothing approach, especially when plenty of luxury vehicles have pieces of automated driving in them already. Liability is for insurance leeches to figure out

Because the proper comparison isn't X accidents vs Y accidents. It's X accidents and Z billion dollars spent vs Y accidents, where that Z billion dollars could have gone to other efforts. If the delta between X and Y is minor, Z is wasted.

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

#182

Post by stale2002 »

crispyambulance wrote: post #93
kpU8efre7r wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not sufficient for these systems to just be "better" than humans in terms of accidents/mile/vehicle, they have to be FAR BETTER than humans. Today, when accidents occur, blame and liability goes to the responsible parties. We're talking about millions of accidents and millions of drivers. If you suddenly have a car that drives, the blame and liability for all accidents then gets focused like a giant magnifying g…

This isn't as hard of a problem as you make it seem.

The people who pay for accidents will be the same people who pay for them now. It will be the insurance companies.

I am sure that insurance companies will jump at the chance to save money, by insuring statistically safer vehicles.

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

#183

Post by nharada »

mhermher wrote: post #84
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.

Will a computer ever write War and Peace or compose the 9th Symphony too? How about solve an unsolved math proof? No reason it can't be automated, right?

> solve an unsolved math proof

Yes actually, although there are some philosophical objections to computer assisted proofs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_color_theorem#Proof_by_co...

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

#184

Post by aeturnum »

Edmond wrote: post #169

Detractors of self-driving cars are always eager to lap up a story like this as proof that it will never happen or it would take decades...."Years" doesn't mean decades, even 10 yrs is a relative short time, i owned my last care for about 13 yrs. Some proponents of self driving cars might have gotten too ahead of the hype train but nevertheless, self-driving is here and soon would be common place. It would obviously…

The question of "how much and how fast" matters more than you give it credit for, I think.

Take drones - drones are "here" in some sense. You can buy one, they work. But there's a big question about how common drones will be and what they will be used for. How much we care about drone regulations, safety, tracking, etc, will depend a lot on how often we see them. Right now they're rare-ish, but if delivery-by-drone works they could be very common.

The same is true of self driving cars. Of course we will have some number of self driving cars and self-driving features will probably exist on most new cars eventually. But how many and how much they can do matters a lot! I think people point out existing problems to suggest that the magnitude and universality of the technology is still unknown and impactful.

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

#185

Post by reroute1 »

beat wrote: post #167
chillacy wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things are impossible till they aren’t. It’s not like we solved Go the board game, but we did build some killer AI which has now surpassed all human players. And that was within a matter of years: first it was a fluid game of human intelligence impossible for a machine, then it was obvious machines could be better.. but look at this other thing humans are still better at.

Google's AlphaZero AI went from not knowing chess at all to beating the best current software (Stockfish) in mere hours. It's a whole new world out there.

For playing computer games maybe. Chess is such a simple proposition compared to real life and you are only comparing this AI against other AI...

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

#186

Post by michaelt »

suprfnk wrote: post #26
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…

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.

Imagine you're driving down a street when a kid playing on the sidewalk runs behind a truck and disappears from your view.

If the kid appears in the road from behind the truck, the computer can handle slamming on the brakes very easily - probably faster than a human can - without understanding the kid any better than a group of LIDAR points or a rectangle of pixels labelled 'obstacle' by a neural network.

But if you want to brake before the kid appears from behind the truck? For that, a fully attentive human driver will be making a bunch of estimates about what the kid is doing, whether they seemed to have noticed the car, how old they were, and so on. In other words, applying a theory of mind.

Needless to say, if the latter is a must-have feature, that's a pretty hairy problem.

Of course, it's possible the decrease in deaths from being fast on the brakes in simple situations will outweigh the increase in deaths from lacking a theory of mind in complex situations. If that's the case, the self-driving car programmer's job would be a good deal simpler!

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

#187

Post by gradys »

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…

Here's Krafcik reacting to how what he said there was quoted and interpreted:

"Yeah some context missing here, but it did make for a fun headline.( said the same thing about my own driving.) The point is that autonomous driving, like human driving, will always have constraints."

https://twitter.com/johnkrafcik/status/1063281250088042496

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

#188

Post by ghaff »

sandworm101 wrote: post #150
rimliu wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In poker, the computer knows, that none of the players will suddenly start playing chess instead of poker. On the road, the number of possible situations is way way way bigger.

Not just bigger. Bigger can be fixed with more cpu time. It is a fundimentally different problem. Nobody has a good theoretical answer even with infinite cpu time. I say this while on a car ferry. Getting on this boat required me to navigate several strange road markings and obey a half-dozen hand gestures from staff, including several that were contrary to the painted lines. No AI is even contemplating car ferries.

Right. And, sure, that's an edge case for most people. But even if such edge cases only crop up every now and then, you're now at the difference between a reliable automated door-to-door system and one that can drive you around most of the time but every now and then forces a hopefully sober/licensed/competent driver to get behind the wheel to take some actions.

That's a huge difference. Maybe you can address it with some sort of remote OnStar-like system but now you're forcing a remote operator to jump into an unknown context and take actions that were too hard for the AI.

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

#189

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

mordymoop wrote: post #116
gamblor956 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A million miles is not a lot. For comparison, the people of LA drove a million miles by 5a this morning. The drivers in SoCal will drive over 100 million miles just today. The fact that many accidents involving human drivers still make the news is telling. It's not commonplace.

This is a weird hill to want to die on. Self-driving is currently statistically safer than human driving. Yes, caveats, for only the domains on which self-driving has been well-trained.

>Self-driving is currently statistically safer than human driving.

I don't know of any statistics saying so. I've seen plenty of stats like 'self-driving in easy conditions is safer than human-driving in typical conditions'

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

#190

Post by pif »

Every time I read about autonomous cars, I wonder if these points have ever been discussed:

- Yielding to an emergency vehicle with sirens on.

- Moving backwards to a safe and large enough spot when the route is too narrow to fit self-driving car and oncoming huge lorry (and there is no line marking the limit between road and ravine).

- Upon instructions from authority, recognizing that the highway is closed due to an accident and, no matter what the driving code says, you actually have to make a U-turn on the highway and follow the crowd. Alternatively, just take that route (yes, the one with the large no-entry sign at the beginning) or that narrow path in the wood (yes, it exists, even if Google Maps isn't aware of it). At the bare minimum, park yourself off the road and let the others move on.

- Verifying whether a queue is forming behind you. Listening to the honkers, they may be right. When you are an obstacle to the most part of traffic, moving to the side and letting others pass from time to time is sincerely appreciated.

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