Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’ • Hacker News Board

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

#301

Post by Fins » Wed, Jul 17, 2019, 7:27 PM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #216

Fins wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not really the only compromise Tesla has. It got terrible ergonomics, lack of what is now isn't considered particularly luxury features, mediocre build quality, repairs that can take months etc. But it got fart jokes! So it all evens out. /s For my personal usage, when I am traveling (which usually is something like driving 2000 miles with a single long stop) filling/charging time makes all the difference betw…

You might have a point if there wasn't any demand, but Tesla is shipping almost 360k vehicles a year (and Gigafactory 3 in China is about to turn up). Someone likes the cars they build. Very, very few people use their car as you describe (2000 miles in a single sprint). If you must perform such a trip, most will fly or rent a car just for that trip.

Oh, of course there is demand, that's quite obvious. (Well, there was demand for Juicero, too, for a while)

Not too many people might use the car exactly like that, and I do it only when I actually need to get the car there. Otherwise flying is more pleasant. But there are quite a few use cases where recharge/refuel time, usually for people who need cars to make a living.

Personally, I just will not, ever, buy anything from Musk, because I think that he is a terrible (even by SV standards) person, but yeah, sure, Teslas obviously work for some people. But saying that they are the bestest, uncompromiziest, never before had the world seen anything as awesome super-vehicles is just ridiculous.

If anything, driving across Southern US, even if you are on a leisurely road trip, in a car with cooled seats (a $30K Hyundai works) is far more pleasant than in a car with fart jokes.

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

#302

Post by Majromax » Wed, Jul 17, 2019, 7:27 PM UTC

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…

> If you need for people to restructure their laws and cities solely to accommodate your new technology,

To be fair, this did happen -- with cars.

But that also sets the bar: to warrant re-architecting cities, an advance needs to be as superior to cars as cars were to horse transport.

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

#303

Post by Majromax » Wed, Jul 17, 2019, 7:32 PM UTC

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #209

ben_w wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

By "fail" you mean crash, or it detects that it's uncertainty gets too large and it pulls over safely, forcing you to wait or take over yourself? Insurance companies will force the adoption once they become proven safe. The added insurance costs for luddites will price them out of the market.

> The added insurance costs for luddites will price them out of the market.

What added insurance costs? It's not like adding self-driving cars to the road will make manual driving more dangerous.

No safety technology could make insuring self-driving cars any cheaper than free. Would free car insurance act as enough inducement to drive the fearful away from their steering wheels?

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

#304

Post by rossdavidh » Wed, Jul 17, 2019, 7:34 PM UTC

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…

I think the highway freight problem is also a good place for humans to act as a backup, since you more or less know when that will be needed (the beginning and the end). Also, a human driver on their 7th hour of driving is often not as alert as they normally would be, so the level of comparison is easier for AI to meet.

Unfortunately, what the people paying for this want to achieve is the ability to not have to pay for a human driver, and if you need a human for the beginning and the end of the drive, you have to pay them for the whole time. So, while this would be an excellent application, I fear the business incentives are not aligned for it to happen first like it ought to.

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

#305

Post by ghaff » Wed, Jul 17, 2019, 7:34 PM UTC

Majromax wrote: post #300

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Nobody's asking them to be able to drive at 70 MPH through a fog bank in Alaska with ice on the road, even if that is technically part of the requirements for Level 5 that even humans can't obtain. What is required is a vehicle that can decide not to drive at 70 MPH when it's going though a fog bank in Alaska. Humans can drive that fast in such low visibility, but we (often) have enough brains not to.

> Humans can drive that fast in such low visibility, but we (often) have enough brains not to. I think your "(often)" is doing a lot of work in this sentence. There are many unsafe conditions that don't require an icy road plus fog plus highway speeds: any bad thunderstorm is likely to combine poor visibility and the risk of puddles/hydroplaning, for example. But the highways don't clear out during summer thunderstor…

>But the highways don't clear out during summer thunderstorms;

Part of this is that people (and I include myself in this) tend to have a mindset of slow down but power on. (Although in my experience not enough people slow down enough.) But it's often also a reality that pulling over isn't really safe. And, even if you can get to an exit, in the case of something like a snowstorm you may have a long cold night in your car if you decide to wait it out.

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

#306

Post by Majromax » Wed, Jul 17, 2019, 7:35 PM UTC

jameslevy wrote: post #299

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…

Shouldn't it be possible to train for these scenarios using imitation learning and expert demonstrations? For example, Tesla seems to save replays of when its vehicles would have behaved significantly differently compared to how the driver actually behaved, and this data is supposed to be quite useful. Is this type of crowdsourced driving data a crucial part of achieving Level 4+ self-driving? If so, it seems that dr…

> For example, Tesla seems to save replays of when its vehicles would have behaved significantly differently compared to how the driver actually behaved, and this data is supposed to be quite useful.

I don't think such a system would catch a false negative like the above, where the human would slow down cautiously but the self-driving system would do nothing. That situation is indistinguishable from a human slowing down to read house numbers.

To realize the problem, the system would need a full model of "what would the car be doing if not for the human input" in order to find a later point of alarming divergence.

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

#307

Post by rossdavidh » Wed, Jul 17, 2019, 7:35 PM UTC

celeritascelery wrote: post #98

I honestly think that even when we do get full self driving cars, you won’t be able to own one. They will be rideshare only. The reality is that autonomous vehicles are so complex that you need advanced mapping of very well known conditions to make this feasible. Companies will make these sort of maps for major cities where they run their ride service but anywhere else cars will just not be advanced enough to handle…

It is also the case that the downtown area of cities is often the place where parking your own car is the most problematic, so being able to use a self-driving rideshare would be really helpful for that reason also.

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

#308

Post by AnimalMuppet » Wed, Jul 17, 2019, 7:38 PM UTC

chillacy wrote: post #136

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?

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.

mhermher's examples are 1) proven impossible, and 2) impossible until we get a completely different theory of physics, respectively. "Until they aren't" makes a nice glib dismissal, but is fails to address the actual impossibility that mhermher has pointed out.

Now, neither of those examples is actually relevant to the topic at hand, namely, AIs driving cars. The question then is, what category are AI's driving cars in: The go-and-chess category, or the logically-or-physically-impossible category, or something in between? My guess is "something in between". But "until they aren't", while it may apply to that category, may still be "longer than your lifetime".

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

#309

Post by getalyft » Wed, Jul 17, 2019, 7:38 PM UTC

How about just programming human driven cars to obey speed limits (downrated in bad weather or visibility conditions). Many accidents are caused by people driving at an unsafe speed (who has not gone into a turn a little bit too fast). No AI needed, just a speed limit overlay onto existing GPS maps, plus a bit of logic to reduce speeds in certain conditions (night, low visibility, etc).

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

#310

Post by asark » Wed, Jul 17, 2019, 7:44 PM UTC

getalyft wrote: post #309

How about just programming human driven cars to obey speed limits (downrated in bad weather or visibility conditions). Many accidents are caused by people driving at an unsafe speed (who has not gone into a turn a little bit too fast). No AI needed, just a speed limit overlay onto existing GPS maps, plus a bit of logic to reduce speeds in certain conditions (night, low visibility, etc).

Unexpected (by the driver) braking, possibly while making a turn, or controls failing to respond (the accelerator, say) seems more dangerous than the status quo.

Plus you'd have to roll it out everywhere at once, or my merge onto a 60mph limit highway where flow-of-traffic is closer to 75, in my software-crippled car that thinks I shouldn't exceed or maybe even match the speed limit in the on-ramp, is gonna be way more dangerous than having no such feature.

Then there's GPS often not quite knowing where you are most of the time (the route-finding apps just guess a lot—watch what happens when you make a wrong turn and it takes a few seconds to correct, because it's just assuming the diff between where you are and the road you're supposed to be on is an error, because there often are errors that large)