571–580 of 923 posts
Opinion: level 5 autonomy would be cool, but it's not where most of the value of self-driving cars is. Most of the value in being able to travel by auto without attention is in trips longer than 15 minutes. Commutes, tourism, vacations. Shipping. Most of which is certainly highway driving. If it's possible to automate highway driving under most conditions (and safely transition either to a stop or human-piloting when…
Spoken like someone who does not drive regularly in snow.
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What's stopping people from destroying yield signs and other safety critical road infrastructure now? Sometimes common sense helps, but it you're out to cause chaos, there's a ton of things you can do today that would cause crashes - but most of the time, people don't.
If you destroy a yield sign, maybe it will eventually cause some problems, or maybe not. We could imagine a world in which destroying smart infrastructure could pretty instantaneously and reliably cause massive traffic jams, which seems like it would appeal more to certain trolls and perhaps protestors. We could also imagine a world in which more subtle attacks could reliably and fairly quickly cause injury/fatality…
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Yeah but if the system is designed in the wrong way, hackers could kill millions in a single moment. Admittedly, this danger already exists as in all modern cars between driver and car there is a layer of (hackable and wireless network connected) software.
I think what they meant by "tricking" the cars is to paint roads in a deceiving way to make cars meander into lakes or something like that, not hacking everyone's cars.
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We can't even bloody keep the yellow markings on the road visible, and "paint" is a technology we've had for thousands of years. Where in dog's name is the money for installing and maintaining all that smart infrastructure going to come from?
I am more fearful of trolls, tricking the technology. I doubt, that the software / hardware will have a common sense, like we humans have. Its this common sense that keeps us alive in unexpected scenarios, like when the paint on the road is missing.
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Trains kind of suck though. I used them a lot in the UK because I didn't have a car. The UK has an OK train network. The problem with trains is that they are very, very inconvenient for most journeys. Sunday evening? forget it. After 11pm? Nope. Journey that runs perpendicular to the local line to London? Lol, enjoy a 5 hour journey to go 100 miles. Want to take cargo like a new washing machine? Lol. Want to go somew…
1) trains go basically everywhere frequently in Japan, it’s very much a functioning rail network, they exist and kick ass. 2) a train doesn’t need to replace 100% of personal car trips to be useful. I’m sure you’re not transporting dishwashers or taking trips after 11 pm every day. Covering 90% of use cases is sufficient, and the other 10% can be handled by either renting a car or taking an Uber. 3) we can and should…
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"some time in the future"... ... while Musk promises "you'll be able to self-drive, coast to coast, this year" (haha, no).
For a bunch of "tech visionaries" that Hacker News is supposed to embody, this thread is full of such shortsightedness. I self-drove from Southern California to Phoenix, Arizona, so I guess that's like 1/10th of the way. I couldn't have imagined that ten years ago. Part of the job of being a CEO is to sell the dream, even if it's years or decades away.
In Jan 2016: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/686279251293777920
“In ~2 years, summon should work anywhere connected by land & not blocked by borders, eg you're in LA and the car is in NY”
Four years later, summon works in parking lots at 2-3 mph, while a person is supposed to be monitoring and watching the car the entire time and holding a button to keep it moving.
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> Hackers could hijack a missile and kill a lot of people too. That's a sunken cost fallacy. Only because other things are hackable as well doesn't mean there is no danger. > And honestly modern cars are so computerized already I think your argument applies to them as much as autonomous cars. I've said that in my comment above as well, but it was in an edit before you replied so I guess you didn't refresh before subm…
> That's a sunken cost fallacy. Only because other things are hackable as well doesn't mean there is no danger. It's really not a sunken cost fallacy. It's good evidence that the "think of the terrorists" angle is overblown. There are plenty of other problems with self-driving cars, but not that one.