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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’

#261

Post by qznc »

d--b wrote: post #55

Just to play the devil's advocate: the level at which autonomous vehicles operate today was unthinkable in 2000. Literally unthinkable. The progress in AI has been a massive step forward in a very short amount of time. We may be years away, but the truth is we are one or two "massive breakthrough" away. These could happen tomorrow, or in 50 years, or never at all.

"Literally unthinkable" is too much. Here is a self-driving van back in 1993: https://youtu.be/JTnBiTIvGqY

Sure, it is an empty highway. I guess that is what you mean by "the level at which autonomous vehicles operate today". Still, people surely were thinking about Waymo like performance.

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

#262

Post by pedrocr »

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…

What I'm saying is that it helps, not that it's a silver bullet. But we seem to be stuck in a mindset that self-driving needs to be perfect within the current practice on the road. The more I drive the more it's obvious how human drivers are horrible and often in ways that are extremely easy to police automatically (e.g., tailgating can be checked for with the current toll infrastructure in some of the roads I use). If we want self-driving sooner we may very well have to attack it across the whole system and work on regulation, enforcement, road-design, etc, in parallel with working on the flashy technology bits. If instead we decide that self-driving has to work in the complete mess that are roads today then AGI is quite possibly a requirement.

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

#263

Post by SomeOldThrow »

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…

> self-driving is here and soon would be common place.

Ehh, "soon" and "common place" are both hedge words large enough to represent any future. Heck, you could say it alraedy is common place—you can see them all over the place in SF.

My instinct is that this entire self driving hype is to distract from how direly we need to invest in public transit.

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

#264

Post by jakeogh »

pedrocr wrote: post #258
jakeogh wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We have plenty of rules already. Rules get broken. The more enforcement approach is a road to China.

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

#265

Post by pedrocr »

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…

What I'm describing isn't reshaping your city to fit in self-driving cars. It's doing the things that we should be doing anyway to make road fatalities less embarrassingly huge and with that helping self-driving be an easier problem to tackle. Human drivers should be keeping much larger following distances and indicating properly. Road markings should be much clearer. Signage should be unambiguous. We should do all those things even if we don't care about self-driving cars just because they avoid accidents in general.

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

#266

Post by pedrocr »

jakeogh wrote: post #264
pedrocr wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We have plenty of rules already. Rules get broken. The more enforcement approach is a road to China.

I personally don't think enforcing rules around roundabouts so I don't have the near-death experience I had the other day "a road to China". I actually love driving myself and don't particularly care about self-driving technology. But as far as I can tell it's not even possible for me, a reasonably fit human, to drive in way that prevents those risks. If we are not willing to tackle that and at the same time expect airliner reliability from self-driving cars then we've defined the problem as impossible.

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

#267

Post by runarberg »

beat wrote: post #162
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.

Which is why I keep saying autonomous driving doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be better than humans. And that's a much lower bar, because we are lousy drivers.

I vote for neither. We don’t need to drive, and we certainly don’t need computers to do it for us. There are other—much more easily automated—systems that are several orders of magnitudes more efficient then driving and—if implemnted sufficiently—almost always faster.

Autonomous driving doesn’t need to be perfect because we don’t need it. With sufficient alternative systems the only reason for driving will be for hobby (and we don’t want that automated anyway) and heavy load work (like agriculture, mining, or logging) which is already heavily automated.

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

#268

Post by qznc »

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…

The "safe" part is a huge one. We need a definition of "safe" on a formal level of ISO26262 which is also feasible. From what I have heard the validation would require billions if not trillions of miles driven. If you retrain the neural net, you start from 0. Currently, it is not feasible to sell a safe self-driving car.

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

#269

Post by jakeogh »

pedrocr wrote: post #266
jakeogh wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have plenty of rules already. Rules get broken. The more enforcement approach is a road to China.

I personally don't think enforcing rules around roundabouts so I don't have the near-death experience I had the other day "a road to China". I actually love driving myself and don't particularly care about self-driving technology. But as far as I can tell it's not even possible for me, a reasonably fit human, to drive in way that prevents those risks. If we are not willing to tackle that and at the same time expect a…

Consider your half example, how do you propose to do that?

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

#270

Post by runarberg »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #220
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…

Seriously, please automate highway driving first. You get all the benefits for shipping and efficiency and logistics, so the money is there. The problem is so much more simple, and there can be convergent infrastructure (embedded sensors, mesh network updates, higher standards of road quality). On long trips on highways it just kills me that I have to stare at the same image for hours basically, and that a program co…

It seems there is a solution for your problem already: Busses.

Although not strictly automated, they are externalized. That is you are not the one doing the driving, and therefor you are free to sleep, read, work, etc, while you wait to get to your destination.

The beauty about busses is that they exists. There is no unsolved technology problems with busses. And they can be (and most likely already are) implemented without any or minimal additional infrastructure in your area.

If busses are overcrowded your local government can simply buy more, so they scale really well. If they become congested, we also have a solution called trains. Trains also solves your problems with driving and as a bonus get you to your destination far quicker then driving.

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