The self-driving car is a red herring • Hacker News Board

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#51

Post by ImprobableTruth » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 12:45 PM UTC

pedrocr wrote: post #42

barnacled wrote: post #18

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 sampl…

I can see it being possible to "average out" the mortality of self-driving cars when you consider how high road mortality is. But they won't be the same deaths, some would be things a human driver would avoid. We generally define the safety requirements of self-driving cars as being close to airliner reliability but also generally accept that roads, cars and drivers have much lower standards than that right now. So i…

I think what further compounds this is that normally responsibility for accidents is 'distributed' across the population. whereas with autonomous driving it's going to be a single/a few companies shouldering it all. Being even responsible even just for 10% of total road fatalities (~4000 deaths per year) would be absolutely ruinous if they're held liable for them.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#52

Post by agumonkey » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 12:45 PM UTC

barnacled wrote: post #18

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 sampl…

It's actually very interesting .. humans/lifeforms are wired to deal with critical irreversible errors.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#53

Post by itsoktocry » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 12:45 PM UTC

ianai wrote: post #24

barnacled wrote: post #18

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 sampl…

Right. We’d probably be better as a society if we were interested and willing to do some infrastructure projects to alleviate the burden of driving cars. I really wish Elon’s boring company were further along and getting much more headwind for this reason.

>I really wish Elon’s boring company were further along

It's unfathomable to me that people believe car tunnels are the future of anything.

Right now The Boring Company is trying to recreate an underground train in Las Vegas, and is already behind schedule and running into issues people predicted before this started:

https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/16/21519692/elon-musk-borin...

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#54

Post by falcolas » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 12:46 PM UTC

bob33212 wrote: post #30

echelon wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Cars will never be safe. At any point if you are moving 50 miles an hour and an animal runs out in front of an oncoming car they may swerve and hit you head on. Or if your tire pops you may swerve into a tree. When cars have accidents 10x less frequently than humans it will be stupid not to switch over.

That “when” is nowhere on the horizon, is what this article and other commenters are saying.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#55

Post by barnacled » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 12:46 PM UTC

pedrocr wrote: post #42

barnacled wrote: post #18

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 sampl…

I can see it being possible to "average out" the mortality of self-driving cars when you consider how high road mortality is. But they won't be the same deaths, some would be things a human driver would avoid. We generally define the safety requirements of self-driving cars as being close to airliner reliability but also generally accept that roads, cars and drivers have much lower standards than that right now. So i…

I think firstly it's going to be tough with long-tail edge case deaths to really be sure the numbers will be less than human drivers until self-driving cars are unleashed in sufficient numbers.

Secondly, even if you're right (and you may well be) - imagine that a common edge case was a small child jumping out in front of the car. Would we want to accept a vehicle that consistently ran them over? The raw numbers might be better but that doesn't fully paint a picture of what those numbers would look like.

I also think the 'will randomly kill people, but rarely' aspect of self-driving cars will be majorly off-putting on a very human level.

And finally there's a perception issue here - the self-driving hype is around the idea that the car is effectively being driven by a far better driver than a human, the second it turns out it does really crazy things sometimes (doesn't even have to involve fatalities necessarily) is also going to put people off I think.

I personally prefer the idea of driver assists (responsibly developed so drivers aren't just distracted) aiding driver safety while we work on a supplemental self-driving solution, or perhaps as discussed in the article create some infrastructure along roads to make things more certain.

I am far from being against self-driving cars, I just feel the timeline is longer than currently hyped.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#56

Post by rootusrootus » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 12:48 PM UTC

smitty1e wrote: post #4

The idea of a spectrum of roads, ranging from "no drivers" to "no robots" seems near-fetched.

It seems expensive and I don't see how we get from here to there. Roads are fairly expensive and require a lot of planning, so how do we go from no-robots to a dedicated road with limited human drivers without having a lot of wasted very expensive infrastructure for a length of time?

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#57

Post by ImprobableTruth » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 12:50 PM UTC

digital-cygnet wrote: post #23

I think this article actually makes quite a fresh and interesting point, after the first few paragraphs that sound like stock self-driving skepticism. The author is pointing out that imagining self-driving cars of the same form-factor and niche as the human-driven cars today is a fallacy on par with a 1990s futurist imagining the internet as simply a way to send letters faster. The point is that changes to the techno…

>"software trains" face basically all of the same challenges as a self-driving sedan would.

How so? It seems pretty evident to me that having separate, dedicated lanes should make it a lot easier. What I'd say is by far the biggest concern, human-driven traffic, is just completely eliminated with that.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#58

Post by question000 » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 12:58 PM UTC

marketingPro wrote: post #45

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.

The federal reserve won't collapse, they have the ability to create money. The currency the federal reserve multiplies? That could collapse. Since 2020, the dollar menu is gone, home and stock prices skyrocketed. In a year I've seen ~30% inflation. There's no reason for the inflation to stop there. (Note, I have lots of investment, inflation may help me)

Ok make any kind of verifiable prediction about this and we will see if it happens or not.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#59

Post by pedrocr » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 1:03 PM UTC

barnacled wrote: post #55

pedrocr wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see it being possible to "average out" the mortality of self-driving cars when you consider how high road mortality is. But they won't be the same deaths, some would be things a human driver would avoid. We generally define the safety requirements of self-driving cars as being close to airliner reliability but also generally accept that roads, cars and drivers have much lower standards than that right now. So i…

I think firstly it's going to be tough with long-tail edge case deaths to really be sure the numbers will be less than human drivers until self-driving cars are unleashed in sufficient numbers. Secondly, even if you're right (and you may well be) - imagine that a common edge case was a small child jumping out in front of the car. Would we want to accept a vehicle that consistently ran them over? The raw numbers might…

I agree completely. My take from the situation is much more that we are far far too lenient with our standards for cars, roads, and particularly drivers. We've set the bar so low that the technology has a good chance of clearing it soon but only serve to reveal how actually uncomfortable we are with such a low bar that we've normalized over time.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#60

Post by ianai » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 1:08 PM UTC

AstralStorm wrote: post #29

barnacled wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am extremely skeptical of the boring project. The claimed money saving (a 10x improvement vs. every single tunnel digger in the world without any evidence to back it up?) the safety issues of a car breaking down in a tunnel or being brought up and down, the enormous cost with digging deeper tunnels, etc. etc. Road tunnels exist and have been built all around the world, these kinds of ideas have been tried and ultim…

Why tunnels instead of the Japanese/German solution of ramps/viaducts? In the same vein, why underground instead of light rail? See, open air systems like those are much easier to service. Removing a crashed car from that requires just a big crane.

Underground doesn’t get affected by weather. I wonder whether simply having more tunnels side by side would help for servicing issues. Small, numerous tunnels instead of large tunnels.