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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

#491

Post by bpyne »

the_watcher wrote: post #480
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…

[Speaking about the US, specifically] Micromobility in major cities doesn't really change the realities for the vast number of Americans who don't live in a place where this is realistic. I grew up outside Palm Springs (so not just talking about the very rural part of the country, which is vast and still populated). It would have taken me almost an hour to bike to my high school from my house, but only took ~20 minut…

I'm not sure he meant "no longer drive" literally or if he meant that the number of drivers has curtailed enough that the problems autonomous vehicles were created to solve are no longer problems.

As you described, clearly there are good cases for driving. Cities are not one of them.

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#492

Post by SilasX »

tehsauce wrote: post #382
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…

You're misusing big O notation

How so? There, n means "the number of [this type of] drivers", thus the GP is saying that "self driving cars improve in a way proportional to the number of self driving cars [that are collecting and sharing data], while humans improve their driving skills in a way independent of the number of humans driving."

(I think that's slightly wrong -- humans are probably O(log n) because large populations of humans invest in heuristics and teaching methods that enhance driver improvement rate, and for SDCs, the "lessons learned" between units are probably somewhat redundant, so it might scale as something like sqrt(n). But I don't see a problem with the O(n) usage.)

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#493

Post by jandrese »

GhettoMaestro wrote: post #474
bllguo wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

interesting, but what a terrifying job that would be. dealing with life-or-death scenarios all day long. and the liability questions would become even more complex

I think it really becomes a question of what to do when the computer senses it is getting into a scenario that it can not handle with a reasonable confidence %. You wouldn't flash hand-off the car from auto-drive to the operator without some basic safety measures also occurring. One of those will be slowing (or stopping if possible) the car until the remote operator takes over. You won't hand the human "the bag" (res…

Yes, the AI did come to a stop before ringing up the support desk for assistance. The example video showed a construction site where the entire road was blocked off and the way through was to drive on the shoulder past the construction. However, in the demo the road was completely empty otherwise, which I didn't think was terribly realistic. The memory feature in particular was only useful as a convenience to the next operator, it didn't help the AI become any more self-sufficient.

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#494

Post by dredmorbius »

rayiner wrote: post #479
kiba wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We all have cars because cars are incredibly useful; Got 4 young kids and you need to get groceries for the week? This only work that way because that's how your life is structured, not that it is a law of nature. If you live near a grocery store, you wouldn't have to buy enough grocery to last you a week. You can just buy what you need.

How do you find a place within easy transit distance of your work, your spouse’s work, a grocery store, your kids’ school or daycare, your kids’ activities, and your kids’ friends’ houses? How do middle class people do all that in a country where cities have made it illegal to build new housing?

Used to be when I lived in a semi-civilised place that the grocers was a half block from my tram stop and three blocks from the house.

Trolley carts.

https://www.homedepot.com/p/Easy-Wheels-Mini-Shopping-Cart-i...

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#495

Post by braindeath »

lmm wrote: post #422
braindeath wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course hiring a car for a weekend costs a couple of hundred quid, but realistically you're going to do that what, ten times a year at most? Nice. The “at most” is an interesting rhetorical (and grossly dishonest) trick you used there.

Go on then: how many times did you actually go hiking over the weekend in the last 365 days? In my experience people greatly overestimate how much time they're actually going to be able to spend on their hobby; they plan things out with the idea that they're going to spend every weekend doing xyz, but life gets in the way.

Hiking? Once or twice. Then again I’m more of a watercraft and skiing person as the season dictates.

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#496

Post by ezzzzz »

jandrese wrote: post #464
ezzzzz wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In fact at least one company is looking into this, having the car self-navigate as much as possible, but when confronted with a difficult situation like construction or debris in the road it would call back to a remote operator who would take over until you are past the difficult situation. They also saved the operators response so when the next car hits the same obstacle and calls back the next operator can just rep…

I don't know enough about ML to comment with any authority, but I think this approach makes sense. Your call-center ops people would provide real-time QA (i.e. make sure the machines aren't killing people) as well as provide training data for your model. If this were in fact the approach, I'd be much more receptive to the promise of 'Autonomous Vehicles'. I for one, refuse to believe the hype that real-time distributed computer vision applications are 'nearly solved'. Consider the amount of variables (pedestrians, pot-holes, un-marked lanes, obstructed signage, other drivers etc etc) at play here...

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#497

Post by bluGill »

_xnmw wrote: post #293
l33tman wrote: post #141

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 co…

That clip is far from convincing. Sure, the video showed an AI making the correct decision in a single complex circumstance. But that is assuming you have a correctly-modelled situation with accurate sensors. Even if you could guarantee that the AI could make the correct decision every single time, millions of times per year, you have the problem of potentially inaccurate and/or failing sensors which give the AI an i…

It isn't hard to have redundant sensors so that you can drive for a bit on less than all of them. If there is a failure you drive to a mechanic and get the senor fixed before there is a second sensor failure.

The odds of a dual sensor failure is low enough to still be substantially better than humans. Assuming of course that the dual sensor failure is dual unrelated failures. That means care in the wiring of power systems, fail safe modes, over design such that failure can't happen, and other engineering tricks.

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#498

Post by gmadsen »

rossdavidh wrote: post #380

The "easiest" (read: least difficult) to automate would be long-haul, between cities. But, we have an "automated" system for that, it's called railroads, where one driver can steer dozens or hundreds of cars. The hardest to automate is in-city driving, where the environment is much more complicated to parse, and there are many more kinds of fellow-users (pedestrians, bicyclists, etc.). So, naturally, that's where the…

cargo by rail is actually pretty expensive. A fleet of autonomous trucks driving interstates would definitely be more cost effective

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#499

Post by charstarstar »

rayiner wrote: post #486
lmm wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, the suburban life was a strange fashion that took hold for a few decades but never really made sense, and thus it's now in decline as people return to the city cores. For the older generation owning a car was a status symbol, but the younger generation doesn't care.

That trend lasted about 10 seconds: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/29/millennials-are-fleeing-big-... I like living in the city. My wife and I did it with our daughter until she was 5. But the problem with American cities isn’t cars. It’s that they offer no solutions for parents who aren’t rich. (And almost everyone ends up becoming a parent at some point.) Schools, family centric activities, transportation, affordable…

So, that CNBC article summarizes an article in WSJ that cites 27,000 people leaving some of the largest cities in the US. The problem is that the changes in each city are actually much smaller than the margin of error for the data that WSJ uses (I think it was ACS 5-year estimates).

This post goes into more detail on why that narrative is most likely noise: http://cityobservatory.org/no-youth_exodus_signal-noise/

Edit: 27k is approximately 0.25% of all 25-34 year olds living in cities with pops over 500k (which is what WSJ reported on). Not an exodus at all and it's really a bit of a nonsense narrative that WSJ has been pushing hard.

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#500

Post by [deleted] »

rayiner wrote: post #486
lmm wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, the suburban life was a strange fashion that took hold for a few decades but never really made sense, and thus it's now in decline as people return to the city cores. For the older generation owning a car was a status symbol, but the younger generation doesn't care.

That trend lasted about 10 seconds: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/29/millennials-are-fleeing-big-... I like living in the city. My wife and I did it with our daughter until she was 5. But the problem with American cities isn’t cars. It’s that they offer no solutions for parents who aren’t rich. (And almost everyone ends up becoming a parent at some point.) Schools, family centric activities, transportation, affordable…

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