I think autonomous driving advocates would do well to look at the history of computer handwriting recognition, an easier technical problem with lower consequences that received significant investment over decades. But it has never gotten good enough to succeed in the marketplace against alternatives. Why? It never exceeded consumer expectations, which are extremely high for automated systems. Even a correctness rate…
Handwriting recognition works very well if you can capture the actual strokes used while writing and not just the end result.
So by analogy, autonomous driving will work very well if we can capture all the roads as they're being built?
Yes. Current self-driving might be safer than the avarage driver, but what most people forget is how unsafe it is when it fails. It fails harder than most avarage drivers and even bad drivers. In my eyes self-driving should still be called driving-assistance.
> Current self-driving might be safer than the avarage driver Citation needed, as far as I know this is not true at all.
"In the 4th quarter, we registered one accident for every 3.07 million miles driven in which drivers had Autopilot engaged. For those driving without Autopilot but with our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 2.10 million miles driven. For those driving without Autopilot and without our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 1.64 million miles driven. By comparison, NHTSA’s most recent data shows that in the United States there is an automobile crash every 479,000 miles."
Yes, people disengage auto-pilot (or it does so itself), but it is at least plausible to say that in this like-for-like comparison of drivers and vehicles self-driving is at least comparable in safety.
I was quite confused by this. He knew the car was taking a consistently erroneous action that was likely to have fatal consequences, but he continued to use autopilot on that same stretch anyway. To be clear, I think Tesla has been cavalier and careless in their approach to autopilot. But Walter Huang knew what he was doing and did it anyway. His death is largely by his own hand. I don't see this as different from pe…
Think of the "dumb" folks who take a selfie on top of a skyscraper and then slip off. It's not until you are careening towards the abyss that the reality of the situation is fully learned. Up until then, only theoretical.
I can’t help but think that our culture-wide experiment in the normalization of deviance when it comes to speed limits (both how they are set and how they are observed) has something to do with this.
A crash at 55 mph would have 40% less energy than at 71 mph.
I avoid new technology, exactly because I'm an engineer. I wonder if that is just me, but when new technology is introduced and hyped, I usually take a quick look at implementations, research, and talks just to get an idea of what the state of the art really is like. As a result, I have become the late adopter among my group of friends because the first iteration of any new technology usually just isn't worth the iss…
This whole self driving, fully autonomous thing has become some sort of strange faux-religion. It's followers see no other possible solution as acceptable. Instead of putting our heads together to make really good driver assistance technologies and being satisfied, the darn thing needs to also drive itself everywhere otherwise we're leaving something on the table! Untill we have zero deaths, we cannot stop demanding…
We could have achieved "self driving" in a sense, even back in the 80s, if we had the will to spend billions (maybe over a trillion) on putting monorail power line tracks on roads, having designed electric cars that latch onto them, and have a national traffic control system that controls/drives them. The traffic control system would have perfect knowledge of where every car is, and could direct traffic in a highly optimal manner from point A to point B for each vehicle. The vehicle's themselves would have systems in place that prevent collision (similar to the system that NYC subway has). Altogether, it could have been achieved, but would have required an unprecedented level of public spending.
I avoid new technology, exactly because I'm an engineer. I wonder if that is just me, but when new technology is introduced and hyped, I usually take a quick look at implementations, research, and talks just to get an idea of what the state of the art really is like. As a result, I have become the late adopter among my group of friends because the first iteration of any new technology usually just isn't worth the iss…
This is why I don't understand the sad conclusion of the story in the article. The driver knew that AutoPilot had issues with that stretch of the freeway and was able to repeat the issues on several occasions but still thought it best to be on his phone, while driving 71 mph, at the mercy of AutoPilot? Especially considering that he was an engineer who had expressed concern over this, it seems silly to me that he wou…
Maybe he was fulfilling Apple's demands: either attend a meeting on the phone while driving, or wake up earlier.
(Definitely not singling out Apple here.. at IBM I had a coworker who was in an accident during a phone meeting- luckily non-fatal).
This whole self driving, fully autonomous thing has become some sort of strange faux-religion. It's followers see no other possible solution as acceptable. Instead of putting our heads together to make really good driver assistance technologies and being satisfied, the darn thing needs to also drive itself everywhere otherwise we're leaving something on the table! Untill we have zero deaths, we cannot stop demanding…
Count me guilty then, because I am also hoping to one day take a nap while the car drives me around. Until then, I found the next best thing is booking an Uber. They'll even use venture capital to subsidize my ride :) But wait, isn't that exactly why they are now in such a rush and cannot accept anything less than full autonomy? From what I heard, Uber has been burning billions of VC money to capture market share. An…
> So they attempted trickery to pay them less as "independent" contractors
An Uber driver is the very definition of an independent contractor. Many drivers also drive for Lyft. How can they be “employees” of Uber while also driving Lyft? Or doing Door Dash?
If Uber drivers were employees, they would have to work where and when assigned. As it is now, Uber drivers come and go as they please.
I am not sure how an Uber driver is any different than a freelance journalist or musician.
Everyone thinks they are "good" drivers, even the person weaving in out of lanes, even the person that has a car that has 500 dents all over it from previous impacts that were all caused by "other bad drivers not me" What will happen is human-controlled cars will become $$$$$$ to ensure once Level 5 is better than humans. At that point, if you can afford it sure you can reject it but get out your wallet
Why should insurance be more than today? Unless you're arguing that safety systems in other vehicles make you driving one without those systems more dangerous.
Insurance is about risk pools, if Level 5 becomes a reality the risk of a human driver will go up, and has more and more people adopt level 5 (which they will contrary to what people on here think) the number of human drivers to spread that risk over will go down, small risk pools with increasing amount of risk means higher premiums
I avoid new technology, exactly because I'm an engineer. I wonder if that is just me, but when new technology is introduced and hyped, I usually take a quick look at implementations, research, and talks just to get an idea of what the state of the art really is like. As a result, I have become the late adopter among my group of friends because the first iteration of any new technology usually just isn't worth the iss…
This is not new technology at all but perhaps this is technology which is being used in an unnecessarily complex manner. I sat in on a lecture given by University of Maryland circa 2000 here in Florida concerning their W4 video surveillance system which could tell the difference between different objects quite well. It did this on a 400Mhz dual-pentium machine and could even recognize different signs at driving speed. This was before TensorFlow or Python really took off or GPUs where powerful and did not require a supercomputer to operate or a cloud either it was just Math: