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Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'

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Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'

#791

Post by acdha »

femto113 wrote: post #642
acdha wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is better and more easily addressed by car sharing services like car2go than autonomous cars. This is not the conclusion I would draw from car2go failing out of North America. They still had the problem that you are required to find a legal parking spot and there's no guarantee that there will be a car available anywhere near you. Taxis and private vehicles solve the latter and former respectively but they all…

In the end the availability comes down to fleet size. car2go worked best here when they blanketed Seattle with Smart Cars, the fleet peaked around 750 and they were easy to find. After they switched to Mercedes exclusively the fleet was smaller and it became harder (though not impossible) to find them close by. My guess is that 2,500 cars would be enough to make them feel ubiquitous. A small fleet of autonomous cars…

The catch is the cost of parking: they weren’t hard to find here in DC but if you’re seeing lots of available cars nearby that means they’re paying a fair amount for all of that unused capacity. The Uber/Lyft model shifts that cost to the drivers so it looks cheaper as long as you don’t factor in congestion.

Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'

#792

Post by cbhl »

j-c-hewitt wrote: post #788
cameronh90 wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nothing and it happens all the time. This is something that a human driver familiar with the road will notice and it will be unlikely to cause an accident. An out-of-towner might get into an accident. An automated vehicle would ideally not even be looking at signs and just operating from its stored data.

The obvious counterpoint to "operating from stored data" is an accident or construction causing a lane to be closed, or a child chasing a ball across the road.

Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'

#793

Post by ksec »

wwweston wrote: post #32

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…

I am late to the discussion. I dont understand why we cant have new Cities that only allows self driving cars. Full AV can react to other drivers, but they can surely act upon themselves.

This way, you can set out home with cars and you only operate the last part going to Cities for work. And when you leave you drive out to high way and then every full else will be automatics. It also partly solve housing problems and people can now live further away from work.

Surely this is a solution that is simply enough for the short term. What am I missing here?

Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'

#794

Post by KKKKkkkk1 »

speedplane wrote: post #736

To build a true self-driving car, as a prerequisite, you'll need a true general AI. Imagine a complex construction site in an intersection with police navigating traffic. The AI driver will need to understand the officer's visual and audible cues and act accordingly. That level of sophistication requires something far more advanced than anything we're seeing today.

There are much more mundane cases. Imagine a self-driving car arriving at a toll booth that takes only cash payments. There is a long tail of situations like this that a human driver handles easily and would require a cross-functional team of engineers to implement the appropriate solution.

Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'

#795

Post by j-c-hewitt »

cbhl wrote: post #792
j-c-hewitt wrote: post #788

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing and it happens all the time. This is something that a human driver familiar with the road will notice and it will be unlikely to cause an accident. An out-of-towner might get into an accident. An automated vehicle would ideally not even be looking at signs and just operating from its stored data.

The obvious counterpoint to "operating from stored data" is an accident or construction causing a lane to be closed, or a child chasing a ball across the road.

In the hypothetical world in which self driving cars are the norm and not the exception detours would be in the system so that SDCs would not need to read signs. Even now a lot of traffic maps get updated to show detours, delays, and temporary closures due to accidents.

FWIW I am a near-term self-driving car skeptic and have been for a long time. I just think that these are not the kind of issues that really pose a major obstacle whereas drunk people wandering across the street are.

Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'

#796

Post by Consultant32452 »

davewritescode wrote: post #787
TwoBit wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you destroy a yield sign, the system will immediately know because all the cars previously recorded it.

Ideally we get to a point where we’re at least publishing signage to a database so that cars don’t have to rely on visual cues both human and automated. I personally don’t think it’s possible to make automated cars work well without a ton of infrastructure support.

Your car wishes to inform you that there's a sign for McDonald's where they're having a sale 2 for 1 quarter pounder with cheese.

Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'

#797

Post by ozim »

aantix wrote: post #785
kohtatsu wrote: post #725

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self-driving vehicles should be implemented with the same care Apple has given Touch ID and Face ID in regards to protecting sensitive data. Having a central database capable of being scraped and process to determine where any person is at any given time is a non-starter. Care needs to be taken to scrub all extraneous data from the fleet's network.

If I had to choose between privacy of my location or the convenience of a self driving car, I’d choose the car. Every single time. Convenience wins out over privacy for me. It’s the same for the billions that elect to use Facebook. I don’t care if Tesla’s knows I visited the supermarket.

Tell that to guy that had smartwatch and his wife noticed he had high heart rate somewhere at night where he should be doing something else.

I don't have link for the story. But idea behind this is not that one should not cheat on his wife because he will get caught. To be really a human and be honest, one must not have an urge to cheat on his wife(husband) because he loves her. If someone has dirty thoughts and only thing that is preventing a person from fulfilling that is that "Tesla will know"...

People should be able to cheat, they also should be caught, but being good only because you are constantly watched?

This argument looks like "because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say".

Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'

#798

Post by lrem »

john_minsk wrote: post #770
lrem wrote: post #718

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Human level AI" is a tricky wording. Sure, we may never get a program we would trust to serve in a jury, convince us about existence of God or just have a casual conversation with. But ask Go players how is that resistance to machines going. When I drive and there's a child walking on the sidewalk, I'm not analyzing the chances the child will jump onto the road. I'm just assuming the parents have succeeded at explai…

Or we can allow Google to have the same amount of accidents as regular drivers and not penalize them if they don't go out of certain margins. let's say if the vehicle has 1 accident on every 10m km travelled - google can go on. Sure, some people may die, but each accident will contribute to safety of the system. So called "Antifragile" property. Then you give users of the service a choice: maps where service was very…

But we can't allow Google to have the same amount of accidents as regular drivers, because we are not allowing them to have the accidents in the first place. "Everyone" breaks the code and the police is not enforcing unless some special conditions happen (e.g. the infraction is in front of a policeman or a well marked speed trap). The code generally is designed to prevent accidents, e.g. by stating that if there is a child nearby a road, you should slow down. But how often do you see drivers going significantly below the limit because of pedestrians on the sidewalk?

Now, drivers take these risks because they subconsciously learned that the probability of accident is vanishingly small, while probability of being honked at for going anything below the limit is rather large. Thus, they subconsciously balanced the expected reward/punishment to lean to the direction of taking the risk. But AI is always aware of the risk and very well able to calculate it. Now imagine the headlines "Google's AI intentionally kills X children per year" and the regulatory reaction.

Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'

#799

Post by cmonagle »

aantix wrote: post #785
kohtatsu wrote: post #725

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self-driving vehicles should be implemented with the same care Apple has given Touch ID and Face ID in regards to protecting sensitive data. Having a central database capable of being scraped and process to determine where any person is at any given time is a non-starter. Care needs to be taken to scrub all extraneous data from the fleet's network.

If I had to choose between privacy of my location or the convenience of a self driving car, I’d choose the car. Every single time. Convenience wins out over privacy for me. It’s the same for the billions that elect to use Facebook. I don’t care if Tesla’s knows I visited the supermarket.

I wish there was a way for individuals to make that decision for themselves alone.

As a pedestrian being observed by AVs, your [valid] choice has a significant impact on my ability to choose privacy over convenience.

Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'

#800

Post by timidiceball »

macinjosh wrote: post #221
colordrops wrote: post #165

I agree in part in that I am skeptical that full self-driving cars will happen in the next few years, but he is completely wrong when it comes to the long term. Not only will the tech get as good as humans, but most forget to account for the fact that the environment will meet the cars part way. We will eventually update markings and beacons on the roads to make it easier for the cars, implement networks in which the…

There are millions of miles of roads just in the US that will never have that sort of infrastructure because the cost of keeping beacons running and marking in place would be astronomical. Sure maybe California will have some of that around big population areas but that's probably about it. What happens to all these markings when it snows a couple centimeters?' Fully self driving cars won't happen in our lifetime, pr…

I always felt the film minority report was onto something with regard to this: the vehicles depicted in the movie are (non-optionally) self-driving within dense urban regions and drivable by humans in the country
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