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

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#71

Post by ghaff » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 2:52 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…

>when you consider how high road mortality is

Except, depending upon your perspective, it really isn't most places. In the US it's about one fatality per 100 million miles driven and that includes driving under difficult conditions like snowstorms. People drive a lot so that still adds up to a lot of deaths per year. But the rate is not really all that high.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#72

Post by wil421 » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 2:54 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)

The BLS doesn’t even list a double digit increase for “food away from home” at all this year. “Food at home” has been decreasing the past few months but remains up by almost 5%.

CPI is not the best measure and isn’t always 100% accurate but it’s not going to be off by double digits.

> The index for food away from home continued to rise, increasing 0.6 percent in September. The index for limited service meals rose 0.9 percent in September, the largest increase in the history of the index, which dates to 1997.

> Despite the September decline, the food at home index increased 4.1 percent over the last 12 months. All six major grocery store food group indexes rose over that span, with increases ranging from 2.6 percent (cereals and bakery products) to 6.3 percent (meats, poultry, fish, and eggs). The index for food away from home rose 3.8 percent over the last year. The index for limited service meals increased 5.5 percent and the index for full service meals rose 2.8 percent over the last 12 months.

Of note:

> The index for used cars and trucks rose 6.7 percent in September, its largest monthly increase since February 1969.

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#73

Post by Gravityloss » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 2:54 PM UTC

Maybe it will be like music or video sharing. It's illegal and "can't be done" - until someone big enough does it and then it just becomes trivial.

So maybe all new vehicles will have and old ones will be retrofitted with corner reflectors and infrared beacons or some such, and roads will have markers for AI cars, regularly checked and maintained too (by robots). Digital maps will be public domain. Clothes and bikes etc will get AI visibility signs integrated too.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#74

Post by ghaff » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 2:57 PM UTC

ImprobableTruth wrote: post #51

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 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.

There's (arguably) the limited exception of pharmaceuticals--and, even there, there's a government fund to handle people who get sick or die because of vaccines. But it's hard to otherwise identify products used by consumers that, when maintained and used properly, sometimes randomly kill people and we shrug our shoulders and say "Stuff happens. Still a net benefit to society." We certainly don't do it today in the case of manufacturing or design defects in vehicles.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#75

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 3:02 PM UTC

ImprobableTruth wrote: post #51

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 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.

[deleted]

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#76

Post by srtjstjsj » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 3:03 PM UTC

ImprobableTruth wrote: post #51

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 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.

Responsibility for accidents is concentrated in insurance companies. Nothing substantial will change.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#77

Post by Pet_Ant » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 3:03 PM UTC

pedrocr wrote: post #59

barnacled wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In many parts of North America you cannot function in society without a license. Therefore, we have sympathy for people because are we going to ask people who aren't good drivers to put their lives on hold on the off chance they kill someone? Better to let them all drive and vilify the unfortunate ones that do. However, with machines they have no personal lives so they are afforded no slack. Humans get to make mistakes because they are only human, but machines get no such affordances... even if the net benefit is there.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#78

Post by qz2 » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 3:06 PM UTC

itsoktocry wrote: post #53

ianai wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Agree. Personal rapid transit system might work but cars, nope!

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#79

Post by srtjstjsj » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 3:10 PM UTC

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…

flying cars and jet packs have VC funding.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#80

Post by srtjstjsj » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 3:11 PM UTC

itsoktocry wrote: post #43

reader_mode wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

> a self driving car that knows when it can't drive is perfectly acceptable I don't agree, because of the grey area between the car knowing it can't drive and believing it can, but in practice doing so poorly.

So, like a human?