Driverless cars are stuck in a jam • Hacker News Board

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#351

Post by zrm » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 4:54 PM UTC

_xnmw wrote: post #93

zrm wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problems like that have technical solutions. You phase in updates over time. A hundred vehicles a day for the first week after release, then a thousand a day, then ten thousand a day and so on. That way if there is a serious bug, you find it when it's running on hundreds of cars rather than hundreds of millions.

Aside from the suggestion of beta testing on human lives, you are assuming that your phase-deployment mechanism always works correctly. Even Google has previously botched phased deployments and slow rollouts.

> Aside from the suggestion of beta testing on human lives

There was no such suggestion. You can do thorough internal beta testing and still not uncover every bug that will surface in production, because encountering every possible scenario that will occur in a complex system following mass deployment is only possible following mass deployment, and it is still worth reducing the impact of those bugs.

> you are assuming that your phase-deployment mechanism always works correctly.

It can work correctly 30% of the time and still be 30% better than not having it, because then a serious problem has to coincide with a failure of the phased deployment in order to have widespread consequences. This is why safety-critical systems are layered, so that you don't need them all to work all of the time as long as having all of them fail at the same time is sufficiently rare.

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#352

Post by rootusrootus » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 4:55 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #224

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OP is simply stating the base case: cars without drivers shouldn't be safer than cars with drivers. The industry claims that their cars are safer without drivers because AI. The industry must provide the evidence for its very strong claim. The fact that a majority of the public think it's the opposite way around, that skeptical opinions about self-driving cars must provide evidence, is the industry's succes- the…

Computers don't get board and start daydreaming (when I win the lottery where will the pool go in my mansion). Computers don't get distracted reading (ie facebook) while driving. Computers can have redundancy so the equivalent of a heart attack won't be endanger everybody (this assumes of course the redundancy works - computers have a lot of failure modes of their own) There is plenty of opportunity for computers to…

OTOH, humans can tell that a merging lane is a merging lane. Hard problem indeed :).

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#353

Post by rootusrootus » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 4:56 PM UTC

jaxn wrote: post #176

nkrisc wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Personally the only justification I've heard for self-driving cars being safer is "computers are faster than people". Yes- but at what? Faster at making the right decision - and the wrong decision too.

Computers can "watch" every direction at once.

But can they remember that they just saw something that is not visible any more because it went behind another object?

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#354

Post by zapita » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 4:57 PM UTC

lkbm wrote: post #347

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…

> Also, why would I prefer a driverless taxi if an electric car with a human driver costs no more? I believe the number one cause of death for Americans under the age of 30 is traffic accidents.[0] It's around 40,000 deaths per year (in the US alone). Cars are getting safer, but humans aren't getting better drivers. Individuals humans will get better with experience, but experienced drivers cycle out and new drivers…

Wouldn't the safety of self-driving cars relative to human drivers also become moot if cars were no longer needed?

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#355

Post by zhobbs » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 4:59 PM UTC

evo_9 wrote: post #248

I don't understand why there is so much focus on automobiles instead of just about everything else. In every other instance - airplanes, boats, long-haul trucking - the problem in significantly less complex to solve. The only tangible reason I see for such disproportionate focus is some sense of false futurism; aka, driver-less cars have become the 'flying cars' of our times.

Is it a cost structure issue? Ie, replacing the captain on a ship that holds 15,000 shipping containers, does that lower the cost of each container by a couple of dollars? Similarly, with airline pilots, how much of my ticket cost is pilot labor?

However, if you look at Uber, if you removed driver labor cost from my fare, does each ride now become 60-80% cheaper?

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#356

Post by rootusrootus » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 5:00 PM UTC

tyfon wrote: post #250

Zarath wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good to see improvement, but is this controlled for the fact that autopilot is mostly on highways? I'm not sure what the crash rate per mile is on the highway vs driving in a city.

I use autopilot even on small roads even if it's not designed for it. After V10 it also handles roads without a centre line just fine. However I do pay attention and keep my hands on the wheel, I think autopilot + human is much safer than either one, but since the latest updates I rarely have to take control if not going in roundabouts or junctions. I also had one instance a few weeks ago where I tried to enter anoth…

That sounds promising. OTOH, my car tried to drive into a tractor-trailer a couple weeks ago. That was a momentarily interesting experience. It seemed to become confused by the onramp merge joining my travel lane (pretty normal for autopilot to screw this up), but then it "realized" the mistake and dove for the other lane. I haven't been as happy with v10 as I was with v9.

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#357

Post by rootusrootus » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 5:02 PM UTC

michaelt wrote: post #127

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> slightly more comfortable transport. Slightly more comfortable than what? Horses? Bicycles? Walking? There were 158,493 registered deaths in Australia in 2018, [1] of which 1137 were due to motor vehicle accidents [1]. Motor vehicle related deaths don't even rate in the top 20 causes of death. [also 1] The rate of motor vehicle related deaths in Australia peaked in 1970 at 30.4 per 100,000 population per year, and…

> Motor vehicle related deaths don't even rate in the top 20 causes of death. According to [1] in the US road traffic accidents are the 17th-most-common cause of death across all age ranges. But among 15-24 year olds? Number 1 cause of death. In fact you have to reach age 45 before road traffic accidents are even outside the top five. If you really want to ramp up the rhetoric, compare road deaths to mass shootings a…

> compare road deaths to mass shootings

Well, if we are going to do that, we need to compare the utility of those mass shootings compared to the utility of a car.

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#358

Post by rootusrootus » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 5:04 PM UTC

Steltek wrote: post #268

diffeomorphism wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ideally, I would like a pony. Realistically there is no alternative option, so there is no question. > for slightly more comfortable transport In some large metro areas, maybe. Outside of that bubble millions of people depend on a car to even be able to work.

Large metro areas effectively subsidize the rural areas. Those millions of people have enjoyed amazingly subsidized civil engineering to have that car commute. If those commutes built-in the correct costs in land usage, gov budget impact, and environmental impact, those commutes would be untenable.

Large metro areas also include an incredibly large proportion of suburban homes where people absolutely continue to rely on cars.

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#359

Post by lkbm » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 5:05 PM UTC

_xnmw wrote: post #95

listenallyall wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree and think a lot of smart people still don't really comprehend how non-linear the task is. In other words, they believe if a self-driving car handles itself properly in 95% of situations, the final 5% is right around the corner, when in fact the final 5% (often the difference between life and death) may, in all likelihood, take longer to get right than the previous 95%. It's just that much harder to be perfect…

Furthermore, even 99.99999% reliability is not good enough, and that's already incredibly hard to achieve. Five 9s of reliability still means 5 minutes of unreliable behaviour per year, which is unacceptable in the context of driving.

> Furthermore, even 99.99999% reliability is not good enough, and that's already incredibly hard to achieve. Five 9s of reliability still means 5 minutes of unreliable behaviour per year, which is unacceptable in the context of driving.

40,000 traffic accident deaths per year in the US.

So more than 1 fatality per year per 10,000 drivers. There's a 99.99% change that you won't kill someone while driving in a given year.

That's just fatalities.

> In 2017, there were an estimated 2,775,608 police-reported motor vehicle crashes in which at least one passenger vehicle (i.e., a passenger car or a light truck) was towed from the crash scene in the United States, which resulted in an estimated 1,686,240 known passen-ger vehicle occupant injuries.[0]

So 0.6% per driver per year.

So far today I've seen one driver going the wrong way down a one-way road, and one run a red light. (Plenty entering the intersection on yellow and leaving on red, but at least one where it was blatant). I was on the road for maybe thirty minutes.

Do you think the average driver spends less than five minutes per year driving unsafely?

[0] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#360

Post by francisofascii » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 5:05 PM UTC

catalogia wrote: post #331

Steltek wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Large metro areas effectively subsidize the rural areas. Those millions of people have enjoyed amazingly subsidized civil engineering to have that car commute. If those commutes built-in the correct costs in land usage, gov budget impact, and environmental impact, those commutes would be untenable.

Without populated rural areas to support them, people in cities would start cannibalizing each other within weeks. You seem to have a lot of disdain for people that make your urban lifestyle possible.

OP is referring to people who live in a rural area but commute to/from a city. Sounds like you are talking about farmers.