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The self-driving car is a red herring

nautil.us

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Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#11

Post by reader_mode »

echelon wrote: post #3
asah wrote: post #2

Classic anti hype cycle. Won't age well.

How many nines of reliability do self driving cars need before they're safe? They have to operate in weather. Rain, snow, dark. They have to adapt to novel conditions. I put the self-driving car in the same category as the flying car and jet pack. This one just happens to have VC funding. I don't think we'll see these things for another decade, and when that next decade arrives we'll be saying the same. Another decad…

>They have to operate in weather. Rain, snow, dark.

No they don't - a self driving car that knows when it can't drive is perfectly acceptable - not everyone can drive in extreme conditions reliably - doesn't mean they can't drive.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#12

Post by [deleted] »

echelon wrote: post #3
asah wrote: post #2

Classic anti hype cycle. Won't age well.

How many nines of reliability do self driving cars need before they're safe? They have to operate in weather. Rain, snow, dark. They have to adapt to novel conditions. I put the self-driving car in the same category as the flying car and jet pack. This one just happens to have VC funding. I don't think we'll see these things for another decade, and when that next decade arrives we'll be saying the same. Another decad…

[deleted]

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#15

Post by audunw »

echelon wrote: post #3
asah wrote: post #2

Classic anti hype cycle. Won't age well.

How many nines of reliability do self driving cars need before they're safe? They have to operate in weather. Rain, snow, dark. They have to adapt to novel conditions. I put the self-driving car in the same category as the flying car and jet pack. This one just happens to have VC funding. I don't think we'll see these things for another decade, and when that next decade arrives we'll be saying the same. Another decad…

> How many nines of reliability do self driving cars need before they're safe?

That depends on your perspective. I think most of us just wants it to be more reliable than a human driver that's not drunk or sleep deprived. But the liability challenges could mean you'll want more "perfect" reliability.

> They have to operate in weather. Rain, snow, dark. They have to adapt to novel conditions.

Seems like the solutions out there are already getting pretty good at handling the kind of rain, snow and darkness you'd see in most urban/suburban areas. Maybe you'll "never" be able to drive autonomously to your cabin in the woods, but so what?

> I don't think we'll see these things for another decade, and when that next decade arrives we'll be saying the same. Another decade.

What exactly do you mean by "seeing these things"? By some measures they're already here. The ones that are truly self driving are slow, and mostly on static routes. The ones that drive on highways need to be monitored by a human, but they're doing pretty well. I think you'll see these different solutions just slowly become better and better. I'd be very surprised if you couldn't hail a fully autonomous robotaxi in many urban areas in a decade. Maybe it can't drive it anywhere, maybe you can't use it in a snowstorm, but it'll be a case of "good enough".

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#17

Post by tim333 »

clows wrote: post #13
question000 wrote: post #9

Self-driving cars, computer speech recognition and the collapse of the federal reserve system. Things that are going to perpetually happen next year since the inception of Hacker News.

Is "Linux on the Desktop next year" still a thing?

I haven't seen that for a while. It seemed to drop off a bit with Chromebooks which are kind of desktop linux.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#18

Post by barnacled »

I like Filip Piekniewski's take on this [0] - deep learning is appropriate for environments where the cost of mistakes is low (or the errors are reversible) and you're able to 'average them out'. Self-driving cars are absolutely not in that category.

"If your errors are irreversible and you can't average them out, and your application is in open domain where there will never be a shortage of out of distribution samples, you are royally screwed. That is why I'm so skeptical of self driving cars, since that is exactly the application described."

For me it's obvious the real issue are the edge cases - of course a self-driving car does fine in 99%+ of cases, but those small % of outlier cases are the ones where people potentially die. I suspect an entirely different approach is required to supplement/supplant the deep learning one and fully autonomous vehicles are still quite some way off.

I do like all of the driver assist advantages coming out of this work however! I don't think you can underestimate the value of having technology that works _with_ a driver until the point where self-driving cars become viable.

[0]:https://blog.piekniewski.info/2020/06/08/ai-the-no-bullshit-...

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#19

Post by jeltz »

clows wrote: post #13
question000 wrote: post #9

Self-driving cars, computer speech recognition and the collapse of the federal reserve system. Things that are going to perpetually happen next year since the inception of Hacker News.

Is "Linux on the Desktop next year" still a thing?

No, it has not been used seriously for about 5 years. The last time was probably when SteamOS was released.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#20

Post by taneq »

echelon wrote: post #3
asah wrote: post #2

Classic anti hype cycle. Won't age well.

How many nines of reliability do self driving cars need before they're safe? They have to operate in weather. Rain, snow, dark. They have to adapt to novel conditions. I put the self-driving car in the same category as the flying car and jet pack. This one just happens to have VC funding. I don't think we'll see these things for another decade, and when that next decade arrives we'll be saying the same. Another decad…

The goalposts are attached to the front of the car, so we'll never reach them.
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