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Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

economist.com

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Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#141

Post by l33tman »

It's easy to make polarized judgements, like "AI driving can only follow lanes or drive on wide broad sunny streets". I recently watched a lecture where a guy from Waymo talked and demoed some situations, check out the 3 seconds or so in the timestamp in this video which made me re-evaluate that pessimism a bit:

https://youtu.be/Q0nGo2-y0xY?t=865

Sure it's still nowhere near the general understanding necessary for completely autonomous driving but still much more impressive than simple lane-following.

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#142

Post by coffeefirst »

mxcrossb wrote: post #116
crocal wrote: post #8

The article misses an important point. It’s not only a problem of technology, it’s also a problem of risk acceptance. While we accept to be killed by our own mistakes at the wheel, society (we) will not accept that a machine makes the same, even if the failure rate is on average /better/. This is the fundamental issue Elon Musk has. The driverless bar for safety is way higher than very clever driver assistance or eve…

Is this really true though? Frequently I hear claims that safety standards are too strict and liability too great, but all of that could be addressed through suitable government policy. Maybe these companies just want it both ways. They can then brag about how safe their AI is, but blame the ignorant masses for it not actually being deployed.

Yes, and to shrug off responsibility when something horrible happens.

At this point the ignorant masses are pretty astute to see beneath the hype there’s a disturbing amount of reckless optimism.

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#143

Post by rkangel »

There is an anecdote I half remember, that I would like to find the original source of, because it's illustrative when explaining the issues. It goes something like:

In the 70s/80s a research group was working on a CAD system. After adding all sorts of features, the professor assigned a task to one of his students to make it respond to voice commands. The professor expected this to take only a few months.

It is difficult, even for experts, to have a good intuitive idea of where a good ML implementation is going to be easy or hard. You can be making good progress and then hit the "diminishing returns" part of the curve unexpectedly.

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#144

Post by [deleted] »

random_upvoter wrote: post #106
koonsolo wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same can be said about airplanes, which have a way longer history of automation. Anything in an airplane is automated: takeoff, flying and landing. Pilots make mistakes all the time, but they still need to do things manually to keep their practice high. People just do not want to go in an airplane without any pilots. In metro's it's not that obvious if someone is driving it or not. But airplanes, 'we' want a huma…

> Anything in an airplane is automated: takeoff, flying and landing With airplanes there's a whole system in place to make sure that every airplane essentially gets its own private road. This simplifies the problem of automation immensely.

[deleted]

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#145

Post by i_am_proteus »

rhino369 wrote: post #15
crocal wrote: post #8

The article misses an important point. It’s not only a problem of technology, it’s also a problem of risk acceptance. While we accept to be killed by our own mistakes at the wheel, society (we) will not accept that a machine makes the same, even if the failure rate is on average /better/. This is the fundamental issue Elon Musk has. The driverless bar for safety is way higher than very clever driver assistance or eve…

I think the fundamental issue Musk has is that his cars can’t drive safer than even a below average driver. Oh wow, it can stay in a lane and match speed! So can every car manufacturer. They’ve got a level 2+ system and cars won’t be safer until level 4.

Drivers immediately seem to offload their responsibility into this capability.

Anecdotes:

"I might be too drunk to drive, but I'm sober enough for my Tesla to drive."

And every Tesla driver I see engaged in two-handed cell phone operation with no hands on the wheel.

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#146

Post by adrr »

sliken wrote: post #85

Tesla claims that autopilot is involved in one accident for every 4.34 million miles driven. Seems like a useful number, of course the media reports that the average is 1 accident per 500,000 miles. So 9 times safer... right? Question is how many accidents do similar people (read that as rich enough to buy a $50k+ car) in similar conditions (highways) with similar cars (newish luxury cars) without autopilot? No fair…

I use autopilot everday on my 50 mile one way commute. This statistic is so misleading. Autopilot is used while i ride in the HOV lane for 45 miles of that commute. Autopilot including Navigate on Autopilot can't get me to cut across 5 lanes of traffic in under 1 mile or do the city driving where i am 10x more likely to get in a car accident.

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#148

Post by rayiner »

KaiserPro wrote: post #68
rayiner wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cars are way more comfortable and more convenient than public transit. Working Parisians who take transit spend 113 minutes a day commuting: https://www.thelocal.fr/20160418/parisians-spend-23-days-a-y... DC, where most people drive, averages about 70 minutes. Commuters in Dallas, where everyone drives, spend just 54 minutes a day commuting: https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Hou...

your implied conclusion is that its better to drive doesn't stand up. You _can't_ drive to central paris. London you're looking at a £15 charge and a time penalty of ~15-45 minutes.

Most jobs aren’t in central Paris.

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#149

Post by ossworkerrights »

bogle wrote: post #133

If we expect driverless cars to be further delayed and we continue building our cities to encourage micromobility (bikes, electric scooters, segregated lanes, car free streets, etc.) then at which point does the value of the driverless car become moot because we no longer drive? Does this sound unlikely? Consider European cities like Copenhagen and Amsterdam which have encouraged cycling over the last two decades and…

But why do we even need to cluster in massive cities, when today’s technologies allow for remote work for pretty much any non physical type of work? Accountants, developers, designers, architects, customer support, and so on can all be done remotely. That would reduce both the need to drive and to cram people in overcrowded public transport options.

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#150

Post by ghaff »

bogle wrote: post #133

If we expect driverless cars to be further delayed and we continue building our cities to encourage micromobility (bikes, electric scooters, segregated lanes, car free streets, etc.) then at which point does the value of the driverless car become moot because we no longer drive? Does this sound unlikely? Consider European cities like Copenhagen and Amsterdam which have encouraged cycling over the last two decades and…

Lots of people don’t live in urban cores. And it’s outside those cores where people can drive significant distances where self-driving has the most value. I actually expect we will eventually see self-driving on limited access highways and other “easy” situations. Self-driving in cities and as taxis may be indefinitely postponed.
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