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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

#111

Post by pedrocr »

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…

Something here is unrealistic, that's the point. I'm not so sure it's the reliability threshold for self-driving cars though. I'm more amazed at our continuing acceptance of the risks in driving. Having two pilots, air traffic control, maintenance standards, etc, are all regulation driven. Why do we have all those regulations if we're willing to accept 1000x worse in cars with much more lax regulation?

> 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.)

I'd expect the opposite actually. Humans are incredibly slow reacting in the best of circumstances and they often drive distracted. They also suck at reacting even when they do which is why we now have automatic systems to reinforce braking in presumed emergencies as humans don't consistently apply full brakes in emergency situations. Collision avoidance in a few milliseconds with reliable reactions should make quite a few of those scenarios much better.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#112

Post by abainbridge »

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…

Agreed, but self-driving cars would enable self driving buses and they could be great.

One problem with buses is that paying the drivers is expensive. As a result buses need to be big to amortize the cost of the driver across lots of users. But big buses don't work well in low demand times of the day. The only option is to run them less frequently, which sucks for users. And big buses don't fit down small streets. And fewer larger buses means fewer routes. Self driving buses could solve all these problems.

I'd still prefer to walk or cycle, but I'm probably biased because I live in a warm, dry and flat part of the UK and don't have kids.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#113

Post by siavosh »

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…

Twenty years ago I interned in a small robotics company, and one of scientists there was a Phd from Berkeley. He had done his thesis on dynamic controls for autonomous vehicles. I was asking him a bunch of questions, and at the end he just said that it's a moral question, and that they've already solved all these problems -- "you just connect the cars together physically, and it's called a train". I thought it was pretty funny and insightful.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#114

Post by shadowgovt »

goodcanadian wrote: post #68
clows wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Is "Linux on the Desktop next year" still a thing? I'm really sick of this trope. I have been using Linux on the desktop almost exclusively for 15 years. Yes, I still have to fix weird issues on occasion . . . about as frequently as I have to fix weird issues on my wife's Windows machine.

You have, but general adoption of Linux-lineage OS's is focused in the mobile tech space. Desktop adoption is still exceedingly low.

Statscounter shows Linux installs about on par with ChromeOS installs [https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide]. Both are beaten out by the "Unknown" category; there are literally more people running we-can't-tell-what OS than a Linux-derivative OS.

I think these days, the roadblock isn't reliability; it's Linux being off-mainstream. Network effect, essentially. Most of the (non-Internet) stuff the average person hears about in tech media and by word-of-mouth is not guaranteed to be available on Linux and is basically always guaranteed to be available on Windows, MacOSX, or both. Linux archs have done a decent job of solving the "Can I see my screen with the latest graphics card" problem but are still behind the curve on the "Can I buy Photoshop off the shelf at Best Buy and run it on my computer" curve.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#116

Post by sirsar »

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…

LA has an order of magnitude more population than is required for functioning public transit. But you're right they don't have the density.

The key is to realize the cars themselves killed density.

Parking lots, parking spaces, and extra lanes all conspire to push humans and human spaces further apart. This then makes walking less feasible, cars more required, and more space required to accommodate those cars in a feedback loop.

Taller buildings are not required for density, far from it. Look at Somerville, MA, where just about nothing is higher than 3 stories, yet they fit almost 20,000 people into a square mile -- and they like it. What they don't fit is 20,000 parking spaces, and that makes all the difference.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#117

Post by Sebb767 »

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.

Another point might be attribution. It's horrible when a driver is tired, drunk or simply misses something - but on a human level, you can understand what's going on. Also, you know the guy at fault and that he will be punished (at least, somewhat).

An autonomous vehicle, in comparison, is not relatable at all. Some equation delivered some wrong result, maybe it was something in the training set, so that's why the car suddenly drove into you. Bad luck. If you're lucky, you get some damage payments from the car company, if you happen to have enough money for a very good lawyer.

Sure, as a technical person, I understand some of the possible errors, but it still feels like a complex system that one cannot relate too with hardly understandable edge case behaviour. That's probably why we're so much more lenient with humans.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#118

Post by jhardy54 »

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 fundamental prerequisite for functional mass transit is a high population density.

What does "high" mean? I think this should be quantified, preferably by someone qualified.

Unqualified opinion: It seems to me that if we took all of the money spent on personal vehicles, time spent driving, fuel and emission costs, infrastructure maintenance, and costs to human happiness + safety, we would be able to provide a better transportation system.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#119

Post by atharris »

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.

It's been stated elsewhere in this thread, but there really are a lot of practical, well-understood engineering issues with Elon's proposals that he refuses to admit or deal with. Here's a somewhat humorous review of his claims / what's wrong with them and how they stack up to actual civil engineering projects:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dn6ZVpJLxs

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#120

Post by leetcrew »

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.

you and rootusrootus have parsed this phrase incorrectly:

> more reliable than a human driver that's not drunk or sleep deprived

emphasis mine.

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