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Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

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Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

#111

Post by ghaff »

jacquesm wrote: post #98
zarmin wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respectfully, it sounds like you've only read about driving and have never been in or driven a car. People are _terrible_ drivers. Cars are safer than they've ever been. The number of deaths is not the right metric to evaluate driver quality.

Respectfully, with about 30 years of driving experience and some years (fortunately long behind me) with crazy mileage, it sounds like you're wrong, and that experience includes Canada (including winter), a very large portion of the United States, Europe (both East and West) and Latin America. People are great drivers if you take into consideration the conditions that they drive in, and that traffic deaths include al…

>don't drive when there is ice / snow / excessive wind

For me, that's been one of the big wins coming from working from home at least some of the time for almost 20 years at this point. I'm pretty much fully WFH or traveling these days but even prior to that I rarely needed to drive in if conditions were bad.

Because of various circumstances, I've had to do a few fairly long drives in bad weather for personal reasons the past couple of years and it's not something I miss at all. (And I came way closer to having an accident because of ice last weekend than I am happy about.)

Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

#112

Post by vorpalhex »

mullingitover wrote: post #64
cletus wrote: post #33

Alternate headline: Some people overstated how simple this problem was because they didn't know what they were talking about, could promote themselves as experts, could get funding for a self-driving startup or some combination of the above. I guess that isn't as pithy but it's closer to the truth. When it became clear that Uber's strategy (under Kalanick anyway) was premised on replacing drivers with AIs before the…

> Once a driver knows the car next to them isn't driven by a person it changes their behaviour. If the car next to me isn't driven by a person, but is bristling with high resolution cameras that will immediately upload footage of my face to the authorities if I collide with it, I would indeed change my behavior.

I can see you've never tried to actually get charges brought against someone using dashcam footage...

Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

#113

Post by ars »

I've said it multiple time on HN, and I'll say it again: Self Driving cars are impossible until we have Artificial general intelligence (and not the limited AI that exists now).

The only exception might be specially instrumented road tracks, with limited access (like train rails).

And yes, I fully expect such a thing on interstates. It will never happen inside cities.

Want to make money? Design a vehicle agnostic system, primarily aimed at long haul trucks. Install it in a ton of cars, but don't switch it on.

Then instrument some highways, and convince governments to only allows these cars on those lanes. By being vendor agnostic, anyone with a car could get this.

It will require deep pockets, and maybe you would need government to mandate this (some kind of open standard).

Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

#115

Post by jjn2009 »

close04 wrote: post #22
learc83 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Recently, I bought a newer Subaru, with EyeSight. It has adaptive cruise and lane keep assist. The LKA is fine - it'll beep if you sway outside of a lane, and automatically adjusts the steering, but it won't keep you centered. It's more of a safety thing, and it works well from that perspective. I have 2020 Subaru and it has lane centering on top of that. On the highway, with clear lane markings it comes very close…

Today saying cars have "self driving capabilities" is like saying you're fluent in 3 words of a language. They have advanced driver assists but the insistence on the "self driving" terminology tricks enthusiasts and less tech savvy people alike into a false sense of confidence in the tech. Sometimes all the way to their deaths.

the majority of the miles I drive are highway so for me "3 words" covers a large percentage of my usage. This is likely true of most people as well.

Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

#116

Post by LoSboccacc »

harder than you pundit expected. nothing in the news cycles ever warranted such optimism. been a skeptic of current tech long enough. they'll come eventually, but they haven't yet even started to define the boundaries of the domain problem, just piling heuristics and people literally died because of corner cases that weren't covered.

well unless you want to tow the line of "that wasn't true autopilot" to wich I say yeah, that's the point exactly, none of them is doing it.

Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

#117

Post by glenra »

erobbins wrote: post #47

I've been beating this drum for years (but I'm a nobody, so it's like pissing in the wind): 1. Anything less than 100% FULL automation is MORE dangerous than manual driving, because the "driver" will almost certainly lack any situational awareness. When the need for manual intervention happen, it will be at the moments where you need maximum awareness and split second reflexes. 2. There are SO many edge cases and nev…

> Anything less than 100% FULL automation is MORE dangerous than manual driving, because the "driver" will almost certainly lack any situational awareness.

With enough reliable bandwidth a decent workaround is to have the system fall back to human control by someone other than the local driver. I'm imagining a Car Traffic Control Center where your onboard robot driver sees a situation it doesn't understand and throws control to a remote driver wearing a VR rig with your car's video feeds as input. The remote human driver assesses the situation, steers you carefully past the weird obstacle/issue then returns control to your robot.

A system where robots drive automatically, say, 95% of the time while human remote drivers handle special cases 5% of the time still seems like a big improvement over the status quo - there's a market for that.

Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

#118

Post by taco_emoji »

Mattasher wrote: post #4

You have to wonder, when you see these stories, whether the engineers in charge of these programs spent much time driving around, trying to see the road like an AI might. In my experience, driving in the city, it's rare that I can go more than a few miles before some exception comes up that requires human judgment. Here's a few of the things I saw just last week: * Car double parked. Do I cross the center line to go…

I honestly can't picture a self-driving AI that doesn't just amount to straight-up General Intelligence. Not only does driving involve predicting the trajectory of various moving objects (already very hard), it involves predicting the behavior of various other intelligent agents as well as communicating with them.

Especially that last one -- nobody seems to consider how much we communicate while driving. Several types of communication require having a body: flagging someone on, waving "thank you", eye contact, LACK of eye contact ("they don't see me, I better [prepare to] brake/swerve"). Some involve subtle movements of the car: rolling forward after a stop sign ("I intend to go next"), or hugging one side of lane. Even something as apparently binary as beeping the horn can indicate probably a dozen or more different things depending on physical context and length of the beep, not to mention local culture.

Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

#119

Post by LoSboccacc »

heynk wrote: post #3

When I was starting my engineering career, it was right around when the first DARPA challenges had started. The hype was beginning, and my optimism towards technology was strong. I thought the predictions and timelines would be correct, and I still feel strongly that self-driving will be safer than humans in the long term. Recently, I bought a newer Subaru, with EyeSight. It has adaptive cruise and lane keep assist.…

you haven't had a issue with it. multiple people died already.

Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

#120

Post by woodandsteel »

erobbins wrote: post #47

I've been beating this drum for years (but I'm a nobody, so it's like pissing in the wind): 1. Anything less than 100% FULL automation is MORE dangerous than manual driving, because the "driver" will almost certainly lack any situational awareness. When the need for manual intervention happen, it will be at the moments where you need maximum awareness and split second reflexes. 2. There are SO many edge cases and nev…

>Anything less than 100% FULL automation is MORE dangerous than manual driving, because the "driver" will almost certainly lack any situational awareness.

Something I worry about is that if SD became normal, then people would never get the experience of thousands of hours of driving a car in countless situations that is needed to develop good judgement, much less quick reflexes. And so when a rare situation arises when they need to take over, they won't be able to do it well.

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