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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

#131

Post by ghaff »

deepspace wrote: post #123
glenra wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> throws control to a remote driver Throwing a remote driver into a dangerous situation with no context sounds like a terrible solution to me. See also: Cpt Dubois from AF447. Doing that deliberately and repeatedly just multiplies the chances of catastrophic error. And the VR driver job would be so stressful that there may not be many takers. Who would take responsibility if they made a bad call and caused a crash?

I can possibly see an On-Star-like backup VR driver role at some point when there's full self-driving and there needs to be some sort of backup of last resort when a car with no human in it freaks out. (Or if there's just a child, etc.)

But there has to be an assumption that this is a rare event and that it takes place in a context where a VR driver has time to establish some situational awareness. (Oh, and in a lot of situations, there is no "just pull over option." I've gotten into some bad weather situations but there are often only sub-optimal options at that point. Pulling over can also be dangerous or may not even be an option.

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

#132

Post by PeterisP »

dstroot wrote: post #6
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…

> Cop directing traffic by hand at an intersection. That’s going to be really challenging. Good one!

It should be possible for current technology to (a) detect a cop in the middle of intersaction; (b) stop safely before the intersection and (c) delegate control to a human - possibly someone in the car, possibly a remote one.

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

#134

Post by yread »

bdamm wrote: post #96
slavik81 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried out a relative's Subaru on a 6h drive over the holidays. I really liked the adaptive cruise control for following behind folks who were not keeping a consistent speed. I just set it to a reasonable value at the maximum following distance and stopped worrying about my speedometer. However, at one point the guy in front of me turned off onto a small side road. It was at night, and I don't think the car realized…

Yeah this is interesting. My Tesla M3 does similar behavior, and so I often am ready to punch the accelerator. In the Tesla, this is how you solve that problem. The driver's push on the accelerator contraindicates the AI's decision to slow down, and so the car follows the driver's direction. Where it gets dicey is the scenario where the "imminent collision" (hazards on, seatbelts tightened) detection is triggered, an…

I'm amazed by people like you. You're a programmer, you know how your code looks like. Worse still, you have seen other people's code, how they fail to account for corner cases, you've seen so many articles on HN's front page about security bugs found by fuzzing. Yet, you trust your LIFE to "heuristics"? Do you really trust that when the proverbial black swan flies in front of your car the software won't swerve you into the oncoming traffic?

Why don't you just drive yourself or take a taxi?

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

#135

Post by Piskvorrr »

eckza wrote: post #124
bsder wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you program around humans changing their behaviour to take advantage of there being no driver in your car? The AI car will have sufficient cameras to record your actions and report them directly to your insurance company if not the police. This will be MORE effective at deterring stupid driving, not less.

That sounds... Orwellian.

Welcome to the new millennium, this is your 2010 wake up call.

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

#136

Post by mullingitover »

falcolas wrote: post #104
mullingitover wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Being excessively cautious makes you an unpredictable driver as well. Unpredictability is the antithesis of safe driving.

In my experience, I have never been surprised by overly cautious drivers, only drivers who have an excess of confidence. How do you define 'excess caution'?

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

#137

Post by vardump »

pasttense01 wrote: post #86
dstroot wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cop directing traffic by hand at an intersection. That’s going to be really challenging. Good one!

The cop can carry a transmitting device which will communicate with cars telling them what to do.

What could go wrong...

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

#138

Post by lacker »

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…

it became clear that Uber's strategy (under Kalanick anyway) was premised on replacing drivers with AIs before the cash ran out

This is kind of nitpicking, but this has always been a backup plan at best for Uber. Look at their expenditures and it is clear that their strategy has never been "all in" on self-driving.

Their main plan was and basically still is a combination of driving competitors out of the market, increasing their efficiency, raising prices, and lowering payments to drivers, before the money runs out. If self-driving cars happen, it will be a tremendous boon to Uber's bottom line, but it is not a necessity.

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

#139

Post by xiaolingxiao »

takk309 wrote: post #15

I am a traffic engineer and one of the things that I do regularly is write 10 year traffic plans for small to medium sized cities, think 60,000 people max. When a lot of the self driving hype was really kicking off, I was told to make sure to incorporate them into the plans. This mostly consisted of a few sentences about self driving and that was it. When modeling future traffic growth, the client would always say, "…

hey Takk309 could I reach out to you to ask a few question? I am researching what it takes to validate the safety of these cars on the street in relation to other cars, and pedestrians, and your background would be immensely helpful! Feel free to email me at lingxiao@seas.upenn.edu

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

#140

Post by kaesar14 »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #62
ghaff wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go back a couple of years and look on just about any thread about self-driving on a forum such as this one and you'll find no shortage of people arguing that they're just around the corner. Because, after all, that's what the SV hypesters were saying and they'd never lie.

> you'll find no shortage of people arguing that they're just around the corner Ya, but around the corner no one thought that would be 2020. The strawman is always to place around the corner as tomorrow, but many people just mean in a decade or two.

The article posted quite literally posts examples to the contrary of what you're saying.

The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/13/self-driv...

Business Insider: https://www.businessinsider.com/report-10-million-self-drivi...

GM/Cruise: https://www.wired.com/story/gms-cruise-rolls-back-target-sel...

Waymo: https://www.wired.com/story/gms-cruise-rolls-back-target-sel...

Toyota: https://www.wsj.com/articles/toyota-aims-to-make-self-drivin...

Honda: https://www.autotrader.com/car-shopping/self-driving-cars-ho...

Tesla: https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/22/18510828/tesla-elon-musk-...

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