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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

#181

Post by erobbins »

woodandsteel wrote: post #120
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 wh…

We've already seen this in aviation actually. AF447 is a good example of flying a plane into the ground because of reliance on automation and lack of experience hand flying.

There's a really great YouTube video called "Children of the magenta" that's part of a lecture the chief training pilot for AA gave about 20 years ago or so as part of their continuing education. He goes over incidents and situations and the essential conclusion is that pilots are getting too used to turning dials and flipping switches when in many situations they need to just take control and fly the plane.

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

#182

Post by schrodinger »

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…

Also, IIRC, most drivers are actually really good. A majority of accidents are caused by a small number of drivers. In other words, the median is far better than the average.

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

#183

Post by erobbins »

nomel wrote: post #176
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…

> The only way 100% fully self driving cars will ever happen is for the infrastructure itself to be built to accommodate them. I think we'll see 100% automation for freeways within a short time. I think the only way we'll see 100% automation for arbitrary point a to point b in 50 years, that a standard human could "safely" do, is if we get flying transport.

I agree with you. I think freeway travel can be 99% automated in the very near future. I also think that's where the MAJOR wins will come from. Long haul trucking can flow 24/7 at that point, with the drivers keeping their jobs and doing last mile delivery.

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

#184

Post by glenra »

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?

> Throwing a remote driver into a dangerous situation with no context sounds like a terrible solution to me.

We might be thinking of different situations. I'm mostly imagining a car or truck that does great on the freeway but poorly on surface streets or poorly on particular KINDS of surface streets or even particular KINDS of weather...and we KNOW this and can recognize those situations. The remote driver typically jumps in BEFORE the part that is actually dangerous.

This isn't a new problem - consider a big ship that delegates harbor navigation decisions to a harbormaster and/or tugboat, or a big plane that delegates final runway approach decisions or parking at the gate decisions to a control tower and/or local guy driving a tow vehicle or waving directional flags. You could slice the world up into "regions we can reliably navigate without help" versus "regions where we still need a little help", with the latter group shrinking over time as technology advances and maps get better and edge cases are better handled.

The initial product offering might be for long-haul truckers - the truck drives itself for hours on separated freeways and then throws to a handler when it needs to navigate unfamiliar local surface streets for a delivery. But once you've GOT that sort of infrastructure - basically a map with geofenced areas where remote drivers step in - it's a logical next step to make the help areas dynamic and mark slowdowns or detours due to an accident or a landslide or a cow on the road for similar handling.

95% of that job would not be stressful. I'd be more worried about it being boring...but then, so is normal in-person driving.

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

#185

Post by simplesleeper »

mullingitover wrote: post #136
falcolas wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'?

If you try driving in Italy like you do in the UK, people will use their horn. Then you will understand.

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

#186

Post by rootusrootus »

s5fs wrote: post #172
mullingitover wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'?

In Portland, OR we have 4-way intersections where the stop signs alternate every 2 blocks. Drivers still tend to stop at every intersection, even when they have no stop sign.

Ha, I don't come to a complete stop, but I'm guilty of slowing down at the intersections without stop signs because I've experienced enough instances of cross traffic blowing through their stop signs. In the city I think it would probably be better if all intersections were four-ways.

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

#187

Post by bsder »

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.

It is. And yet people are already doing this to themselves.

Look at the number of "Plug this in so we can track your driving continuously and we'll give you an insurance discount" apps that now exist.

People will be even happier to tattle on others.

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

#188

Post by JKCalhoun »

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…

Or simply: Self-driving cars turned out to be just as hard as we thought they would be

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

#189

Post by rootusrootus »

nomel wrote: post #174
salawat wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah. You need to have an ALRU and vehicle to vehicle comm net whereby all the self-driving AI's distribute amongst themselves information on jerk behavior so the entire macropopulation of AI cars can wolfpack these drivers. Now please laugh, put down the phone and don't even think about implementing this. It's a terrible idea.

I assume, by then, you'll see massive insurance discounts if you provide the feeds to your insurance company. They'll use these feeds to evaluate your risk and the risk of every car around you. Cars, especially those with manual drivers, who are seen causing unsafe conditions will receive an eventual, or maybe immediate, notice: "Your premium has been increased for aggressive driving".

How that works will depend on whether the insurance company cares more about how you drive, or whether you cost them money in payouts. If there are no claims related to your policy, and haven't been for years, then it doesn't really matter how you drive.

In absence of competition they might use it as a way to gouge you for more money, but there is no lack of competition in the insurance space.

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

#190

Post by rootusrootus »

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.…

Earlier today I was driving on the highway with autopilot (I have a Model 3) and came to a section where the road is angled in such a way and the pavement is old enough that there is a fair amount of standing water. Driving manually, I steer to the right or left slightly to avoid the ruts filled with an inch or two of standing water. Autopilot, on the other hand, was perfectly happy to blast right through it.

That's the kind of weird edge case that makes me think we're farther from real self-driving than most people want to admit. I'd be hard pressed to define exactly how I'd tell the computer to avoid that. Maybe the answer is that it can't deal with that until it results in hydroplaning, and then it reacts however it can.

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