Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen' • Hacker News Board

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

#871

Post by giancarlostoro » Mon, Jan 20, 2020, 5:13 AM UTC

chrischen wrote: post #190

giancarlostoro wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heck. With Toyota building a city of the future. They might make self driving cars entirely common once you are free to design roads for them.

Yea they could put down visual markers on the road to make it easier for CV or ML models to be trained against, or maybe even physical tracks to mechanically guide these cars so that minimal software is needed. Multiple cars can be linked together for efficiency.

Yeah I think if car manufacturers can come together on standards for signs... And even maybe signs that send RF signals to cars to give them hints of what is nearby it could go a long way. Instead of pretending like the only way is to make cars work with our human friendly system.

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

#872

Post by Bendingo » Mon, Jan 20, 2020, 5:24 AM UTC

spookthesunset wrote: post #289

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…

What about dirt forest service roads? What about the dirt parking lot at that wedding you just went to? How will it find a parking spot? How will it get into a ferry where people direct you to the correct spot? How will it deal with an accident up ahead where some drunk bystander is trying to direct traffic? How will it know to ignore the drunk guy? What if it isn’t a drunk guy but a sober person directing traffic? D…

Most realistic comment in the entire thread.

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

#873

Post by Groxx » Mon, Jan 20, 2020, 5:30 AM UTC

jaclaz wrote: post #759

Groxx wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of the data I'm able to find on road types covers only fatalities , not accidents ... but New York has accident rates per road type (and junctions!) for several years[1], and their rates are very roughly 1 accident per 300k-500k for rural roads, and 1 per 500k-1m for "[fully] controlled access" (which I read as highways, with divided being by far the lowest rate). So even if it's just on highways, A…

Still, there is IMHO a sampling error that makes the comparison not fully accurate. The pool of "all vehicles" traveling on the road, comprises very old cars and pickup/trucks/vans, and all kind of drivers, including teens (or however inexperienced drivers) and older people that may be more likely to have slower response times or some other condition, like (say) poorer vision. Besides the fact that Tesla's are at the…

To play devil's advocate slightly, you could pretty easily argue that self-driving tech is most useful to apply to the lower-safety brackets, which pull down that average.

So even if it's not as good as the healthy-and-wealthy bracket that might be safer, if it's better than the average then it'd be potentially significantly better than the non-healthy-and-wealthy. In that light this seems like a massive win.

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

#874

Post by DrScump » Mon, Jan 20, 2020, 7:44 AM UTC

michaelmrose wrote: post #688

pjkundert wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, your family would be ok that your car sheared you off in a quirk unnecessary accident, so long as the overall stats were better than average? Non-ergotic stats are not comparable to ergotic (group) stats.

Given 100 individuals who would have died in everyday accidents all would prefer a 99% chance of survival. Given a population of a million all would prefer a 1 in a million chance of death under a semi to a 1 in 10k chance of being smeared in a more average fashion. Your argument is the same one used against seat belts with people advocating a strictly inferior survival strategy to prevent a rare misadventure.

Let's say your autodrive system replaces 100,000 driver-hours.

Let's say those driver-hours would have resulted in 3 deaths of others (in vehicles or pedestrians) but your autodrive results in 1 different death (which wouldn't have occurred with the human drivers).

Your stats are no comfort at all to the loved ones of your victim.

It's like the Trolley Problem but the humans are unidentifiable.

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

#875

Post by masonic » Mon, Jan 20, 2020, 7:48 AM UTC

michaelmrose wrote: post #688

pjkundert wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, your family would be ok that your car sheared you off in a quirk unnecessary accident, so long as the overall stats were better than average? Non-ergotic stats are not comparable to ergotic (group) stats.

Given 100 individuals who would have died in everyday accidents all would prefer a 99% chance of survival. Given a population of a million all would prefer a 1 in a million chance of death under a semi to a 1 in 10k chance of being smeared in a more average fashion. Your argument is the same one used against seat belts with people advocating a strictly inferior survival strategy to prevent a rare misadventure.

It's essentially unheard-of that one's own failure to use a seatbelt results in injury or death to some other party hit by the flying driver/passenger who was unbelted. That's the appropriate analogy.

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

#876

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jan 20, 2020, 8:07 AM UTC

justapassenger wrote: post #870

ericd wrote: post #863

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It certainly can cause unexpected regressions, but of course that's being monitored during training. I'm not saying this is some real time learning system, nor that the system behaves perfectly on an exception case as soon as it's added to the training set. My point is that their engineers are getting an incredible amount of data on tricky driving situations to train their models on, far more than a human will see in…

It’s one of great misunderstandings (or more likely - very effective way of getting money) to claim that machine learning is a data problem. We’re so far away from that point, that we have literally no idea what’s needed to make ML a data problem. Algorithms are extremely simple, and it’s all more or less curve fitting. Media (and surprising amount of tech people as well) tend to claim that ML learning is like human…

[deleted]

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

#877

Post by dx034 » Mon, Jan 20, 2020, 8:42 AM UTC

runarb wrote: post #387

darkerside wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When one of those black boxes malfunctions it gets taken off the road. When the AI malfunctions, are we going to shut down entire classes of vehicles until the problem is confirmed fixed? Not to mention that most software fixes cause other bugs...

> When the AI malfunctions, are we going to shut down > entire classes of vehicles until the problem is confirmed fixed? Yes, a malfunction AI would have to be grounded, just like for example the Boeing 737 MAX is now.

Or a car model with severe problems. This rarely (if ever) happens because with that many cars, severe problems tend to be noticed fairly quickly. That shouldn't change with self driving cars. With several million miles driven each day for more popular models, even rare edge cases should appear within days.

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

#878

Post by toper-centage » Mon, Jan 20, 2020, 8:44 AM UTC

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…

You will never, ever, have only self driving cars on the roads, unless you're talking exclusively about reserved motorways. You'll always have, at the very least, pedestrians and cyclists.

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

#879

Post by trasneoir » Mon, Jan 20, 2020, 9:49 AM UTC

"[Engineers] tend to overestimate what can be done in the short-term and underestimate what will be done in the long-term."

I'd expect level 5 autonomy to be slow, because level 4 delivers 80% of the benefits for 20% of the cost.

BUT "never" seems crazy unless you've got a very pessimistic outlook on humanity's medium-term future. Other than extinction or the collapse of civilization, what could cause it to "never" happen?

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

#880

Post by jaclaz » Mon, Jan 20, 2020, 10:52 AM UTC

Groxx wrote: post #873

jaclaz wrote: post #759

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still, there is IMHO a sampling error that makes the comparison not fully accurate. The pool of "all vehicles" traveling on the road, comprises very old cars and pickup/trucks/vans, and all kind of drivers, including teens (or however inexperienced drivers) and older people that may be more likely to have slower response times or some other condition, like (say) poorer vision. Besides the fact that Tesla's are at the…

To play devil's advocate slightly , you could pretty easily argue that self-driving tech is most useful to apply to the lower-safety brackets, which pull down that average. So even if it's not as good as the healthy-and-wealthy bracket that might be safer, if it's better than the average then it'd be potentially significantly better than the non-healthy-and-wealthy. In that light this seems like a massive win.

Yep, only that the lower-safety bracket cannot afford it, not today nor - presumably - in a near future.

And - to be fair - think "Sabrina" (the movie with Audrey Hepburn), really rich people traditionally had professional drivers (chauffers) which maybe had an even lower rate of accidents.