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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

#451

Post by rootusrootus »

bluGill wrote: post #386
rootusrootus wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Today that is a factor. When (if...) computers figure that out though they never forget to look to see if the lane is merging.

At the risk of showing just how ignorant I am of current state-of-the-art AI, it feels like the biggest block with self-driving cars is how short their memory is and how little high-level logic is implemented. The computer doesn't feel like it's driving the car as an activity so much as simply responding to inputs as they come into sensor range, sometimes correlated, frequently not.

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#452

Post by turk73 »

fredophile wrote: post #430
DickingAround wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is kind of silly. It's nice to imagine a world where people don't need cars. But most/all european cities, many of which we laid out before cars, still have cars. We all have cars because cars are incredibly useful; Got 4 young kids and you need to get groceries for the week? You're not going to bicycle them to the store and all that food home again in the mountains. Live in the city and want to go hiking 20 mil…

I think we just need to have more flexible options that don't require owning a car. When I lived in Vancouver I didn't own a car. I got around using transit, biking, or walking most of the time. I was also a member of a local car coop. If I needed a vehicle for a short trip or to run an errand I could rent one in one hour increments. I appreciated the flexibility of being able to rent a truck for an hour or two to ha…

Did you have kids?

I swear all these public transit weenies forget that your time is valuable and these alternative modes all make you suffer more. Come up with something that saves me time and I'll pay attention. But wasting my time watching a car charge or waiting for a train or bus? No thanks.

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#453

Post by rubicon33 »

KingMachiavelli wrote: post #408
rubicon33 wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just yesterday while driving to the gym, I witnessed the person behind me at a red light, violently gas it and swerve out into oncoming traffic lanes, drive past all the cars waiting for the light, and blow straight through the red light. He went on to blow another red light before turning off onto a side street. This kind of shit would never happen with a self driving car. The bar for self driving cars is incredibly…

Well, that kind of stuff would still happen since in that case the driver was deliberately driving recklessly. In fact, people could start accounting on other people's self driving cars being cautions and deliberately betting on their safety features. e.g If most people were driving a Tesla I could more safety run red lights since their other cars will stop for me automatically. Unless we are going to make self-drivi…

> Unless we are going to make self-driving ONLY cars that is.

This is the dream.

EDIT: More specifically, I envision a world where to manually drive your car you have to past a MUCH more rigorous test than the current licensing process. Including background checks for infractions such as DUI, would ban / block you from obtaining a manual driving license.

You would of course retain your freedom to have a car that can drive itself.

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#454

Post by CompanionCuuube »

nradov wrote: post #302
300bps wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't need to drive why would you buy a driverless car? I don’t anticipate many people will ever buy a driverless car. The whole concept of buying a car is kind of ridiculous. You pay for it then you continue paying for registration, insurance, maintenance, park, etc all while it sits idle 90% of the time. Driverless cars allow you to be picked up at your front door and dropped off exactly at the spot wherever…

I buy cars so that I can leave my stuff in them instead of having to load and unload every day. That convenience is worth a lot. Whether the car drives itself or not is an entirely separate issue.

Somehow I doubt work would be willing to relax their weapons policies so that I could bring in the training weapons that sit in my car.

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#455

Post by greedo »

astrodust wrote: post #326
javagram wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Democracy. Other than Manhattan, everywhere else a majority of residents own cars (Even in Manhattan I think it’s like 40% or something own a car). Moreover, the last 70 years of migration have led to a common pattern of people living in the suburbs and commuting via car to their workplace - replacing that with micromobility feels like a threat to their way of life and they will fight it vigorously. What we actually…

Car ownership is declining and will continue to decline because it's an expense many people would rather avoid.

Car ownership in the US has been steadily increasing over time. There's a small increase in "no-car households" since 2010, but it's around a .5% increase.

https://investorplace.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Screens...

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#456

Post by ezzzzz »

Animats wrote: post #443

Self-driving got taken over by the "fake it til you make it" crowd. Uber, Cruise (go find Cruise's original demo video and marketing claims), Tesla, etc. Only Google/Waymo approached it as a hard problem, and only Waymo has something that's deployed, even in a limited way, without a "safety driver". Somebody will probably make it work, but it may come from some boring old company like Ford or Continental or Fujitsu.…

I honestly wouldn't be surprised if these 'Auto-Pilot' cars are actually being controlled remotely from some off-shore ops center.

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#457

Post by lkbm »

scythe wrote: post #437
lkbm wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Self-driving cars can share their experience perfectly, I'm not a machine learning expert, but I'm not convinced this assertion is well grounded. If you have two ML systems, I don't know of a simple, general, reliable way to transfer the "knowledge" stored in one to the other without disrupting the "knowledge" already within the other. If you mean just copying the video feed, sure, but that's only one input variabl…

You're right, it's not perfect, and it might be sub-linear improvement, but it can practice on its predecessors' input in a way a human can't. (There are plenty of scifi stories where they found a way to do this for humans as well, so it's certainly conceivable, but seems a long way off, whereas "feed all existing training data into the new model" is something we have now.)

You're pretty much guaranteed that self-driving technology "skills" will collectively improve over time, at some positive rate, whereas we don't expect "Gen Z" to be more skilled drivers than previous generations.

This is all entirely skill-focused. We're not guaranteed that self-driving cars will actually get safer if we don't have the proper incentives to favor safety over speed or cost. Similrly, despite the stagnancy of human driving skill, I anticipate safety will improve with human drivers for non-skill-related reasons -- specifically, driver assistance technology, and a shift towards just getting a Lyft if you're impaired.

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#458

Post by TheMinorityGuy »

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…

Biking to work or micro-commute is a hipster activity. Most folks do not care about such things and at any given time only a small % of total commuters are "micro commuting". God forbid if this number goes up it will create chaos on our pavements.

Public transport is more efficient and better alternative to cars but has its own constraints. The only thing that can totally replace cars is some kind of teleportation technology.

Economics of Driverless cars.

Electric bulb did not replace candles. In fact we sell more candles today than 100 years ago. Electric bulb opened up new unforeseen possibilities. One of which was that people were able to be productive at night. That caused a revolution in human productivity. Suddenly there were new industries, night schools and what not.

Driverless cars will not replace human drivers any time soon and yet will turn out of be revolutionary in next 10 years or so. Google's honeycomb sensor in itself is finding uses in various other sectors. Waymo's plan is not to have a fleet of vehicles that replace Uber for you. Rather they will provide their services on fixed routes to begin with. (Example from airport to a train terminal). Even such minor improvements will help them get profitable soon.

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#459

Post by notJim »

tomerico wrote: post #398
notJim wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Live in the city and want to go hiking 20 miles away? No reason trains can't solve this. When I lived in NYC there was plenty of hiking off the NJ transit. Popular hiking destinations here in the PNW have huge problems with traffic that would be helped greatly by building rail lines to them.

Why create new rail lines when driverless cars can take you anywhere?

Does nothing about the traffic problem, massively wasteful of electricity and other resources that will have to go into replacing every single car.

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#460

Post by IMTDb »

_xnmw wrote: post #283
IMTDb wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even 5 minutes per year is totally acceptable. 5 minutes is 300,000 miliseconds. Split over the course of 365 days at 86400 seconds per day, we are looking at roughly 1 milisecond of erratic behaviour every 105 seconds. Not enough to crash a car

My practical experience with system failures is that they tend to not be evenly spread out in any kind of predictable pattern. Instead they tend to be acute and concentrated at a few points.

I agree that my assumption that failures will be evenly spread out is too optimistic. But on the other hand, if failures are concentrated on a few points, they should be that much easier to detect and correct.
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