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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’

#241

Post by UncleEntity »

kpU8efre7r wrote: post #76
peteradio wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Two weeks ago I could have reached one of my life goals of ramming a waymo robocar if I were making a U-turn rather than a left so they still have quite a ways to go before they're ready for prime time. Maybe next time...

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

#242

Post by AnimalMuppet »

joefourier wrote: post #196
michaelt wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There's no need for a theory of mind - the self driving car can identify the kid as a pedestrian, recognize that it started moving in a possible collision course, then disappeared, thus prompting either slowing down to a non-fatal speed until the truck has been passed. Children playing in the street are a common occurrence in residential areas, I see no reason why you would not develop a set of rules and heuristics t…

It's worse than that. That small thing heading toward the road... was that a leaf blown by the wind, or was it a ball? If it's a ball, you'd better be already braking, because a kid is likely coming right behind it, and paying attention to the ball rather than the road. If it's a leaf, though... you don't want to hit the brakes for every blowing leaf.

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

#243

Post by twblalock »

tabtab wrote: post #146

We don't need all-or-nothing. A good many people stay off the road anyhow during poor weather, and those who do go out usually stay on familiar routes, such as to work or their favorite grocery store. If self-driving cars/buses stick to a subset of streets and don't go out in big storms, they can still be widely useful. Set up (require) a universal network/database of road conditions on the main streets that all self…

Should everyone own a self-driving car and also a normal car they can drive in situations the self-driving car cannot handle? Keep in mind that public transit is nonexistent in many of the places that have weather conditions self-driving cars can't handle.

For me personally, if a self-driving car cannot handle 100% of the driving and I have to own a second car, I might as well just make that second car my only car and save a bunch of money. In that sense, it is all or nothing.

I don't really think treating self-driving cars as a ridesharing service is a good way around this. People don't want to share cars with strangers who trash the interiors and vomit in them after a night at the bar. People want to keep stuff in the trunk, go to Home Depot and buy a bunch of stuff, transport their pets, etc. -- all things that are difficult to do with a ridesharing service.

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

#244

Post by [deleted] »

skywhopper wrote: post #41

This has been obvious all along to anyone who has ever driven or used a computer before and thought about the reality for more than a couple of minutes. But the press and VCs bought into the hype from the likes of Uber who needed to keep generating huge new investment to stay afloat and Tesla which is run by a delusional snake oil salesman who had a single hit with the Model S. The shocking examples of crazy unexpect…

[deleted]

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

#245

Post by MegaButts »

sixplusone wrote: post #118
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…

Agreed. Navigating the world is basically an AI-complete problem; we don't let 12-year-old kids drive and these current enhanced cruise control systems are nowhere near the AGI of that.

I think the reason we don't let 12-year-old kids drive has nothing to do with cognitive ability, but emotional maturity.

That said, I don't think the most advanced AI is even close to a 2-year-old.

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

#246

Post by afthonos »

notahacker wrote: post #192
HALtheWise wrote: post #166

When read literally, there is no way that any system ever, human or automatic, will be able to drive on "any road" with "perfect safety". Crazy freak accidents happen, and human drivers regularly aren't able to handle them. On top of that, most people just can't safely drive in thick fog, icy conditions, or pouring rain. No amount of intelligence will allow a car to drive through a sufficiently flooded street. Just l…

Faster reaction times are "low-hanging fruit" until the reaction is wrong... Even taking Alaskan fog banks out of the equation, a machine need to be pretty near AI-complete to not be fatally wrong about how to react more often than every few hundred 100 million miles, which is the human benchmark (including inexperienced, tired, drunk and stupid drivers) if it's driving in normal road conditions without a human fails…

That’s an impressively difficult number, but I wonder where you got it from? What is a “time”? A second in dangerous conditions? A trip? How do you get a hundred million iterations of anything at human driving scale?

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

#247

Post by kevinofe »

gre wrote: post #53
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…

How about a gunman stopping the car. Will the car just let the passengers be robbed or executed mafia-style? (I'm rewatching The Sopranos)

I've always wondered why more attention isn't paid to this. A driver's ability to make a decision to run over a possible assailant is a huge deterrent that is not fully appreciated. To an autonomous vehicle all people will look the same and they will have to stop.

I'm most curious about the self-driving trucks. If they are driving across the country through sparsely populated areas, what is to stop a group of robbers from making a chain on the road that forces the autonomous truck to stop and then offloading the cargo? Legally, this would not be considered "robbery" since there is no person involved. As anybody who has driven is USA knows, time and distance would be on your side in the crime as there are tons of backroads and different routes to make a clean getaway...

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

#248

Post by ljlolel »

bilbo0s wrote: post #204
pedrocr wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Someone should redo the old "Spam Solutions" form except for self-driving cars. Automating being dismissive of discussion does sound like a great idea... > Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once It requires setting stricter traffic rules and having them be followed. Something that's done everywhere in the world every year. It can be done as gradually and as locally-specific as needed. > Asshats…

Back in the late 90's, early 00's, the segway was released to much the same breathless prognostications that we hear today about self driving cars. Doerr said it would be more important than the internet. Kamen claimed it would restructure global transportation. I don't need to go into everything that was said, you can google it. There was one thing said, however, that I think would be appropriate to touch on here. K…

Yea but now electric scooter are all the rage and he was basically right (execution was wrong). Cities are even thinking about restructuring roadways to accommodate them (and more bikes).

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

#249

Post by learc83 »

There's a professor at Oklahoma State with a popular Youtube channel who has a proposal to create an Autonomous Truck Corridor as a way to fix a lot of our infrastructure problems. His proposal works with the autonomous driving technology available today--not level 5 autonomous driving that may be available sometime in the future.

http://www.acpa.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/OKStateUniv-A...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ev6hIQYKYY

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

#250

Post by roymurdock »

bjornsing wrote: post #238
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…

> 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. “Never” is kind of a strong word in this context... My personal belief is that we could very well have level five autonomy within the decade, using only two video cameras and two microph…

This probably isn't going to happen.

Getting to level 5 will require "V2X" technology - vehicles communicating with other vehicles and the road/traffic infrastructure itself.

We will need a forward-thinking government to start building sensors and communication tech into roads, stop lights, parking spots, and a secure/interoperable internet for all these sensors to communicate autonomously.

Currently the cost of implementing such a system is way higher than the return to drivers who can...what, work on more powerpoints or facetime while they're in the car instead of driving? Not to mention the huge security and safety and liability risks this would open up.

That's why we solved this problem with public transportation in the past - hire one person to be the "V2X sensor" AKA bus driver.

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