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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

#101

Post by the_gastropod »

twox2 wrote: post #92
kindatrue wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-y…

Presumably if all cars were self driving, or say 90% were. Then that would become the next "public transportation". And if they were all electric, the footprint would be less harsh as well.

Personal cars will never be the "next public transportation". The density just doesn't work. Personal vehicles are the least space-efficient (to say nothing of energy efficiency) means of transportation among buses, trains, bicycles, and walking. You can't solve congestion issues by replacing a more-dense option with a less-dense one. The only thing self-driving cars solve for is freeing up a person to read or do something else during their commute.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#102

Post by shadowgovt »

Kaze404 wrote: post #81

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…

A lot of self-driving is likely to replace taxi service, not make its way to private ownership.

The advantages of individual vehicles for motion around a city are diminished wait times and arbitrary point-to-point linkage. One is not constrained to traveling only on the public transit arteries plus foot-travel distance.

(The tradeoff of fossil fuel consumption is huge and should not be ignored, however).

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#103

Post by pessimizer »

marketingPro wrote: post #47
dhruvmittal wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we called it a win on "The year of desktop linux" when it was clear that Linux was mainstream enough for Microsoft to tie it up with a bow and offer in their app store. Jokes aside, we're at the point where everyone who wants linux on the desktop can get linux on the desktop without having to struggle. Big, known enterprise-friendly companies like Dell and Lenovo will sell you their flagship and business lapt…

It was never hard to run Linux. It was always hard to make Linux perform at the same expectations as Windows. Messing around with chromium versions and netflix's plugin was not fun when you just wanted to watch a show. It's not polished, any distro. But Linux server is GOAT.

It's often been hard to run Linux, and the expectations of Windows are very low. When I was being pressured to switch to Linux by peers, it was because of the crappiness and instability of Windows, not any particular merit to Linux (other than not crashing constantly and not having to be restarted after every update.)

edit: I have to say that I don't use netflix or play video games.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#104

Post by pedrocr »

mandelbrotwurst wrote: post #93
pedrocr wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> as that's the level of reliability people are expecting from self-driving cars Why do you think this? It makes sense to me intuitively that people would be willing to accept more death causes by other people than more opaque and unfamiliar autonomous systems, but I haven't seen any hard data on this and am curious. Is this mentioned somewhere in the Wikipedia article that you linked or did you just share that to de…

The Wikipedia article is just for the fatality statistics. The expectation of airliner reliability for self-driving cars is what I get from the discussions around this. Here on HN and in other places. Maybe it will be lower and the uncanny valley will be smaller but I wouldn't bet on it. People are much more afraid of flying than of driving even though driving is much riskier. And that's because you're much more willing to accept risks when you think you're in control of them. Self-driving cars will take that illusion of personal control away.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#105

Post by shadowgovt »

kindatrue wrote: post #89
Kaze404 wrote: post #81

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-y…

One SDC takes up slightly less space when we factor in the necessary buffer around human-driven vehicles to account for human reaction times and safety perception.

A fleet of SDCs snaking down a road can "tuck in" tighter to each other because computer reaction times are better (especially if they're networked and sharing decisionmaking signals).

Of course, it's still not as space-efficient as a bus. But the bus infrastructure as a solution has been challenged by COVID-19.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#106

Post by matz1 »

itsoktocry wrote: post #38
audunw wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> I think most of us just wants it to be more reliable than a human driver that's not drunk or sleep deprived That is a seriously low bar, and in no way do I think the majority of people feel that driving "better than a drunk" is good enough. In fact, I think it will be the opposite: people will want it to be almost flawless before it's accepted.

For me, "better than a drunk" is good enough

>and in no way do I think the majority of people feel that driving "better than a drunk" is good enough

If that the case something can be done such as smart marketing/social media campaign or something like that to change people perception.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#107

Post by atharris »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #97
Kaze404 wrote: post #81

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…

The fundamental prerequisite for functional mass transit is a high population density. That's why it works in NYC and doesn't work in Los Angeles. But that means it's not just a matter of building mass transit. First you have to build taller buildings. And even then there are going to be places where it's just not happening. It doesn't matter how you change the zoning, nobody is going to build skyscrapers in Pine Blu…

The rest of the world is rife with small, rural towns that nevertheless have great public transit systems, or at least ones that are more effective than what we see in the US. The major difference is that these places are willing to invest in the public sphere, and they're by and large willing to permit construction that is not car-centric (i.e., no parking minima to subsidize drivers).

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#108

Post by shadowgovt »

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…

SDCs will never be 100% safe because at the end of the day, the underlying task is still to push around a couple tons of metal on heterogeneous roads at speeds requiring dozens of feet of stopping distance.

But if it can get to half the fatality rate of human drivers, that'd be a huge win. And unlike human drivers, every fatality involving an SDC can become a fleet-wide software improvement to, ideally, prevent that failure from ever happening again. That's not something we can do with people; nobody but traffic engineers and wonks read NHTSA reports to find out how accidents could have been avoided.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#109

Post by jcranmer »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #97
Kaze404 wrote: post #81

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…

The fundamental prerequisite for functional mass transit is a high population density. That's why it works in NYC and doesn't work in Los Angeles. But that means it's not just a matter of building mass transit. First you have to build taller buildings. And even then there are going to be places where it's just not happening. It doesn't matter how you change the zoning, nobody is going to build skyscrapers in Pine Blu…

That's not exactly true. Bus systems are viable for low-density urban areas. Indeed, prior to the mass adoption of the automobile, buses and streetcars were fairly ubiquitous, even in such heavily urbanized areas as Peoria (population at the time: 70k).

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#110

Post by atharris »

ghaff wrote: post #87
pedrocr wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

I agree with most of this, except for the unexpected rapid-response examples you list - I would expect an autonomous collision-avoidance system to react faster than a human being when faced with a deer in the road or someone running a light (otherwise - it's not a very good collision avoidance system!)
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