I have a feeling I'll be down voted to hell for this, but self driving cars always felt like going the complete wrong direction for me. Aside from small personal satisfaction to the few that will be able to afford them, how is revolving our infrastructure and culture around them any better than simply investing in public transportation by making it a more feasible option for people?
I'm not in the US, and while the public transportation system here is far from perfect, I've managed to get by this far without a car and don't plan on buying one anytime soon. I much prefer a future where this is improved compared to one I have to fork tens of thousands of USD for a chromatic death machine.
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.
That rate is on the order of 1000x worse than airliners which was the comparison as that's the level of reliability people are expecting from self-driving cars. A self-driving car that's 100x worse than the airliner standard would still save 90% of all road fatalities. And yet saving 30k lives might still not be enough for people to accept such a lower standard compared to an airliner.
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.
I'll play.
It will be possible to buy large amounts of crude oil without owning USDs by 2026.
I have a feeling I'll be down voted to hell for this, but self driving cars always felt like going the complete wrong direction for me. Aside from small personal satisfaction to the few that will be able to afford them, how is revolving our infrastructure and culture around them any better than simply investing in public transportation by making it a more feasible option for people? I'm not in the US, and while the p…
I completely agree. I see the benefit for things like trucking. For cities though, I would much rather live in a place like Amsterdam or New York than one that's completely car-centric, even if the cars drive themselves.
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 think the best way to reduce those outlier cases in this phase is to just focus on self driving on the freeway. That's where it has the most value for me, taking over for the long boring hauls.
On the freeway you minimize a lot of those wildcards like bikes and pedestrians, everyone is going about the same speed, and there are only a few places you can enter and exit.
We don't need to jump all the way to self driving in SF, and have people point out all the things that can go wrong, since theres a huge gain just from being able to do it on the freeway.
I have a feeling I'll be down voted to hell for this, but self driving cars always felt like going the complete wrong direction for me. Aside from small personal satisfaction to the few that will be able to afford them, how is revolving our infrastructure and culture around them any better than simply investing in public transportation by making it a more feasible option for people? I'm not in the US, and while the p…
It is a large and very heterogeneous world. There are plenty of places where public transport will work best and plenty of others where a car (self driving or otherwise) is much more useful.
>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.
That rate is on the order of 1000x worse than airliners which was the comparison as that's the level of reliability people are expecting from self-driving cars. A self-driving car that's 100x worse than the airliner standard would still save 90% of all road fatalities. And yet saving 30k lives might still not be enough for people to accept such a lower standard compared to an airliner. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T…
That seems an unrealistic bar especially as a hypothetical self-driving vehicle will be co-existing with human-driven cars even on main roads for the foreseeable future. Furthermore, airliners are flown by a pair of trained professionals, within an air traffic control system that minimizes their exposure to most serious threats, and are mostly (some bird strikes, sensor failures, etc. notwithstanding) flying under conditions that are fairly predictable. OTOH, I doubt a self-driving vehicle will be all that better at dealing with a deer jumping out in front of a car, unexpected road debris, or black ice all that much better than an alert human driver. (And possibly worse given that a human driver may pick up on certain cues that an automated system might not.)
So what if we eliminate some of the hard problems, like steering, traffic, pedestrians, and setup guided routes specifically for automated vehicles? All you would need to control is signaling and the throttle/brakes. You could even couple multiple vehicles together for more capacity! Seems like an idea ripe for implementation. /s
Hey, we could also make them more efficient by using steel for the wheels and rolling surface!
I have a feeling I'll be down voted to hell for this, but self driving cars always felt like going the complete wrong direction for me. Aside from small personal satisfaction to the few that will be able to afford them, how is revolving our infrastructure and culture around them any better than simply investing in public transportation by making it a more feasible option for people? I'm not in the US, and while the p…
There's also what's known as the "geometry" problem - 1 self driving car takes up as much space as 1 human driven car.
Part of the problem is the general incompetency and mismanagement of US public transit construction -- the costs are insane, even when compared to "socialist" "high-cost" union-heavy Europe.
This was a great read on why we get so little for our money: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-... - and it busts the common misconception that it's 100% because unions. (tldr: it's because politicians get rewarded for creating jobs (votes) and spending money on contractors (lobbying), and because we outsourced everything)
> And even if we do, spreading the technology beyond the Arizona suburbs will require costly retrofits to add navigational hardware to existing roads. No it won't? Why would it? Plenty of companies are testing in other areas, and I haven't heard any suggest that they need special hardware on the roads themselves. Yes, the Phoenix suburbs are the easiest place to start, but that doesn't mean you need special infrastru…
I'd love to know how you expect a computer to navigate a blizzard on an unpainted country road when even adaptive cruise control systems can't handle a bit of snow on the sensors.
Sure this stuff works fine in Arizona where there is no inclement weather most of the time, and the roads are in perfect condition because freeze/thaw cycles don't cause excessive wear, but what about the rest of the country and the world?