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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’

#251

Post by x0x0 »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #199
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…

>> 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. But you mentioned two somethings: "Setting stricter traffic rules" and "having them be followed." The very first examples in the TFA were from Argo's testing i Pittsburgh: Recently, one of the company’s cars encountered a bic…

And strange things happen all the time in high traffic high congestion urban environments.

...

ie where we want to use cars.

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

#252

Post by thfuran »

afthonos wrote: post #246
notahacker wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The rate of fatal car accidents in the US is about 1 per 1e8 miles traveled. Of course, that's a terrible measure of driver error rate: Less than 1% of all collisions are fatal and with maximally safe cars that could ensure all occupants will survive any possible collision at any possible operating speed, the worst possible driving system would receive perfect marks.

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

#253

Post by jakeogh »

thorwasdfasdf wrote: post #225
mhermher wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You will never define a complete and consistent algebra. You will never exactly measure the momentum and position of a particle. They're not brutally hard problems, they're not possible. We know that there are a set of things that are impossible. Why is recreating human intelligence in silicon beyond that consideration?

The reason why, is because people believe the human brain is just an incredibly complex state machine. If it is, then it should be reproducible.

That assumption may be technically correct (I don't think it is but that's a different conversation), but it's very likely to be practically wrong in the "galatic alg" sense. By that I mean that the complexity is so many magnitudes off that it's intractable with traditional binary computing. The pre programmed car would melt it's way through the concrete.

This is relevant: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.50....

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

#254

Post by beat »

ben_w wrote: post #176
beat wrote: post #157

It doesn't have to work perfectly - it just has to work better than humans. Our sensors ain't real great in snow and rain, either.

It needs slightly more than that: when it fails, it needs to be able to demonstrate that no human would’ve succeeded in its place. This isn’t a moral or a technical issue, just public relations. If a system reduces road deaths from ~30,000 per year to 365 per year, but one of those deaths was it mistaking a grey skirt for an open road [1], there will still be calls for its use to be outlawed — basically what’s happen…

And if there are no examples of machine-only failure? Then they will be invented, good ol' fake news.

Because our anxiety about AI driving isn't about whether or not the tech will work.

edit: Our fear of autonomous driving is akin to fear of flying. Flying is, by any measure, far safer than driving, but people are terrified of flying in a way far different than how they feel about driving.

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

#255

Post by TeMPOraL »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #203
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…

If the standard of self-driving becomes something akin to how airplanes fly, then weather will be a delay, bypass, or do not fly precondition to the execution of the flight plan. All this stuff about "it's right around the road" vs "it'll never happen" is all unspoken assumptions around what it means to take a "safe" "trip" "in a car" "driven" "autonomously". Safe? Compared to humans that are alert, humans with smart…

> I think what needs to happen is that you need programs tailored to specific routes/roads. As you drive any distance, you download/cache the programs for the routes and execute them.

Wow. That's so obvious in retrospect. I wonder why I haven't considered it before, nor why I haven't read of it before either.

I imagine having stationary "traffic controllers", semi- or completely automated, that keep real-time information about conditions on the segments of the roads they monitor, and which continuously assign "travel plans" to cars. An autonomous car wouldn't have to recognize weather conditions or static obstacles in fraction of a second, because there would be a static sensor network and processing centres responsible for this. All a car would have to do is follow assigned route at assigned speeds, and monitor its environment for dynamic obstacles.

This makes more sense than trying to pack all the intelligence into the car, and doubly more sense than having the car hooked up to the cloud. Unfortunately, I feel companies of today may find it difficult to coordinate on designing such a system.

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

#256

Post by compiler-guy »

ljlolel wrote: post #248
bilbo0s wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Electric scooters are barely a blip in a city's overall transportation scheme. The biggest regulations going on is how to keep them from blocking the sidewalk.

Even restructuring a citys roadways for bicycles--a long-term, proven good technology--has been incredibly slow going. And this with something governments are actively trying to improve.

It will be decades until there is substantial enough change that self driving cars are viable as described in the great-grand-parent. And that's if it moves quickly.

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

#257

Post by qznc »

tyingq wrote: post #50
rwmj wrote: post #8

We don't need self-driving cars that can go anywhere (ie. level 5) for them to be widely useful. A car that only worked in bright sunshine on a preprogrammed set of roads would be immediately useful to me.

Semi trucks, solely on well done roads (Interstates in the US) seem more likely to happen sooner. There's an obvious strategy for "ports", dealing with exceptions, etc.

Robo taxis in retirement communities also seem likely to me. https://voyage.auto/

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

#258

Post by pedrocr »

jakeogh wrote: post #237
pedrocr wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> much less be able to replicate human cognition that goes into operating heavy machinery in a busy multi-agent social context This holds if you expect self-driving cars to be able to work like humans in picking up "body-language" cues around other drivers. But we can also approach the problem the other way around and set better fixed rules for how driving needs to be done and adjust the road and car infrastructure t…

The "humans are the bugs" fallacy. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18447674 What's next? Walls on sidewalks? Computers are not smart or dumb. They are machines. Anthropomorphizing them ("self") is foolish.

My point is humans are already behaving extremely poorly as drivers and that already causes accidents. There are ways to help that be less of an issue that also helps self-driving become possible. But instead we accept those ridiculous risks when driving ourselves and yet expect to hold self-driving to a much higher standard while also complaining if it's not aggressive enough in traffic. That may very well turn self-driving into AGI but that's a choice not a characteristic of the problem.

You're attacking a strawman. I'm not saying the solution to self-driving is to change the environment completely to make the problem trivial (i.e., walls on sidewalks). I'm saying that some of the poorly defined and even worse enforced rules of driving could be worked on and that would help self-driving as well. How much would be enough to bring it out of being AGI I'm not sure, but it would definitely help.

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

#259

Post by TheBeardKing »

mikestew wrote: post #57
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 think your prediction will turn out to be as closer or closer than any other. Certainly more on the money than the breathless “won’t be a problem in a few years when self-driving...” But as I read your probably-on-the-money prediction, I was thinking “here we go again, dumping money for the two-ton wheelchairs while alternative transportation goes begging again.” Where’s my fucking barrier-protected bike lane? Or a…

We're already doing that in my neck of the woods with toll express lanes on the insterstates. The moneyed skip the traffic at the expense of widened roads which would help all. These express lanes will logically be the first to allow automation, but at least in that case the affluent will be paying to prove the technology which will eventually benefit everyone.
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