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The self-driving car is a red herring

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Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#121

Post by vorpalhex »

tim333 wrote: post #37
FactolSarin wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Elon says it's happening next year!

He's raised it to this year! >“It’s almost getting to a point where I can go from my house to work with no interventions, despite going through construction and widely varying situations,” he said. >“So this is why I’m very confident about full self-driving functionality being complete by the end of this year. It’s because I’m literally driving it.” Though reading that it sounds more like the car can drive from A to…

I think there's a conflict in what "self driving car" means.

I think many users imagine being chauffered around while they read a tablet, potentially not even needing a drivers license.

Meanwhile I think realists and Elon Musk expect a car that is doing most of the menial parts of driving while a licensed human driver is still hands on but not doing much work.

We're close to that realist scenario in many ways for some areas - though I'm sure we'll see a spike in tragedies once it first goes out and people attempt to treat it like scenario one.

Scenario one is a very long ways away from being universal.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#122

Post by claudeganon »

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.

The Chinese and Japanese rail networks would like a word.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#123

Post by shadowgovt »

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)

This is essentially correct mechanically, though I don't share this author's prediction that we're sliding towards a collapse. We're in a pandemic; pandemics push the market around. But they also end.

But mechanically, yes. The Fed can't collapse while it's the controlling institution of the dollar. The dollar is the world's reserve currency. It's the denomination unit for paying IMF loans. It's the unit of money other countries shove under a big ol' mattress (with scary-looking guards around it) to backstop a collapse of their national currency. The dollar is so deeply baked into international economics that only global shocks can fundamentally shake its value as a currency.

If that changes, the Fed's power base becomes heavily disrupted, but most of us in the US won't notice because we'll be too busy riding in gangs with our fellow War Boyz hunting down the last reserves of Go Juice for our Death Rigz under a burning sky. ;)

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#124

Post by specialist »

ip26 wrote: post #99
specialist wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree with your positive response. Missing from this conjecture is a synthesis with car and bike sharing. There will also be massive land use, zoning changes when there's 90% fewer personal cars. Unused capacity (parking, roads) freed up and repurposed. The role for autonomous driving for moving people (vs turking cargo) will look very different when our cities look more like medieval villas and college campuses. I s…

90% fewer? To me this would seem to ignore that everyone tends to want to go to the same place at the same time. Demand for automobiles (and parking, and roads) is peaky.

90% is my optimistic guess. I'd wager today's style (cars, SUVs) will downsize even more. It'd be interesting to learn the automobile industry's own market size projections.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#125

Post by thescriptkiddie »

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…

You don't have to build skyscrapers to achieve high population density, you just have to build 3-6 story buildings close together. See Paris for an example. And you can have functional public transport at modest population density as long as the road network is a well connected grid and not a maze of cul-de-sacs. See Toronto for an example.

I agree that most of the US has been designed explicitly around the car, but there is no need to be fatalistic about it. Most US cities (including LA) had good public transportation before WW2, and they could have it again if they wanted.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#126

Post by Kalium »

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…

> 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?

Public transit can't haul freight cross-country. Self-driving vehicles can.

As others have pointed out, self-driving vehicles could significantly cut the operating costs of public transit. This also seems like a major win for investing in public transit.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#127

Post by JamesBarney »

the_gastropod wrote: post #101
twox2 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 som…

Congestion itself isn't the issue. Wasted time and fossil fuels is. And most of my friends who take public transportation to work have a commute that is longer than my friends who drive to work.

Right now there is a difference in quality of that time in that your attention is more free when taking public transit but self driving cars fix this issue.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#128

Post by ghaff »

atharris wrote: post #110
ghaff wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!)

It can react faster to an object. But, under at least some circumstances, a human might recognize potentially questionable road conditions in a way that an autonomous vehicle would not. (Of course, presumably the human could also tell the autonomous vehicle to slow down.) And I've definitely seen animals at the side of the road looking they may be inclined to run out.

Overall, I don't really disagree on net though.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#129

Post by ggoo »

abainbridge wrote: post #112
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. An…

Couldn't we already have self driving buses if we just put them on tracks? They go a predefined route anyway :)

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#130

Post by shadowgovt »

ckastner wrote: post #5

> Some experts now predict that we may never achieve the original dream of a reliable fully self-driving car. And even if we do, spreading the technology beyond the Arizona suburbs will require costly retrofits to add navigational hardware to existing roads. This is a non-starter in the post-pandemic age of austerity. Most state and local governments now struggle to merely maintain a much simpler, yet more fundamenta…

I doubt retrofitting will be necessary because it isn't necessary for human drivers. I think the author underestimates how good the technology is for LIDAR-aided visual navigation (and how quickly the technology is growing).
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