San Francisco cops pull over a Cruise driverless car for no lights on • Hacker News Board

Re: San Francisco cops pull over a Cruise driverless car for no lights on

#151

Post by CogitoCogito » Mon, Apr 11, 2022, 12:59 PM UTC

AmericanChopper wrote: post #103

jwr wrote: post #72

I am really worried by the fact that I am the unwilling tester in the Great Driverless Car Experiment. Tradition has it that when you load-test a new bridge, you put the architect underneath. I feel like this, except I didn't design those driverless cars, somebody else did. Being an experienced software engineer, my trust in the software in these cars is pretty low. And yet they are testing them on me, because I can…

> I am really worried by the fact that I am the unwilling tester in the Great Driverless Car Experiment. You’re basically an non-consenting tester for every piece of innovation that society every has/ever will come up with, in one way or another. It’s an unavoidable feature of living on the same planet as 8 billion other people. Perhaps the safety of this technology does need to improve, or perhaps not. But there’s n…

> You’re basically an non-consenting tester for every piece of innovation that society every has/ever will come up with, in one way or another. It’s an unavoidable feature of living on the same planet as 8 billion other people. Perhaps the safety of this technology does need to improve, or perhaps not. But there’s no level of improvement that would ever be able to satisfy this outrage you’ve expressed at something new existing in the same place as you.

Why do you say it's unavoidable? Regulations could certainly keep these tests off of public roads.

Re: San Francisco cops pull over a Cruise driverless car for no lights on

#152

Post by NovemberWhiskey » Mon, Apr 11, 2022, 1:00 PM UTC

hakuseki wrote: post #83

logifail wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Did they pass a driver's license check? Thought experiment: imagine a particular self-driving algo were to do something that would warrant a human driver getting their driving licence suspended, would that mean all the cars with that same algo would be simultanously suspended, or just that one car?

It does sound silly at first, but I think suspending the one car is actually a rather elegant solution on several counts. 1. Easy to implement 2. Doesn't punish fleet scale (compare: suspending the whole fleet means a fleet that's twice as large would be suspended twice as often) 3. Punishes the fleet owner in proportion to the frequency of the error 4. Is exactly correct when the cause is really a hardware problem s…

Why would you treat a software problem that's specific to the car (and, by extension, specific to all cars running the same software version) differently from a hardware problem that's specific to the car?

Re: San Francisco cops pull over a Cruise driverless car for no lights on

#153

Post by MathCodeLove » Mon, Apr 11, 2022, 1:00 PM UTC

sseagull wrote: post #131

MathCodeLove wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remove "most of the time". This narrative that police are boogeymen who will subject you to their emotional whims is so overplayed its not even funny any more. There may be 1 in 100 truly awful police men and women out there, just as their are truly awful people in every known profession. People share a viral, highly edited video on tiktok to make themselves look like the victim only for the entire world to pile on a…

I generally am in agreement. However there's a complication in my mind. My dad was a police officer and I grew up around police. It's there's one thing to know about police, it is that they are human, and subject to all the emotions, inconsistencies, and foibles as other humans. However, they are given an extraordinary amount of power, with very little accountability. Think about what it would take for a regular pers…

Alright but again, the anecdote of "This one time in Arkansas" can't reasonably be used as a justification for stating "All police are bad and out of control all over the country"

Re: San Francisco cops pull over a Cruise driverless car for no lights on

#154

Post by bee_rider » Mon, Apr 11, 2022, 1:00 PM UTC

hakuseki wrote: post #83

logifail wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Did they pass a driver's license check? Thought experiment: imagine a particular self-driving algo were to do something that would warrant a human driver getting their driving licence suspended, would that mean all the cars with that same algo would be simultanously suspended, or just that one car?

It does sound silly at first, but I think suspending the one car is actually a rather elegant solution on several counts. 1. Easy to implement 2. Doesn't punish fleet scale (compare: suspending the whole fleet means a fleet that's twice as large would be suspended twice as often) 3. Punishes the fleet owner in proportion to the frequency of the error 4. Is exactly correct when the cause is really a hardware problem s…

The whole fleet should be grounded until the issue is debugged. Without debugging the issue

* It might be a software issue (maybe the cars self-destruct when they encounter a solar eclipse -- silly example, but if the cars malfunction on events which are rare but wide-spread and correlated this could cause an emergency).

* If it is a hardware issue, it must be understood how a hardware failure can put the device in a dangerous, still semi-functional state. If one car was able to get itself pulled over for driving dangerously, then there'd be an unknown number of cars driving themselves dangerously.

* It is good that the fleet is punished disproportionately to the frequency of errors. We shouldn't accept a linear disincentive for putting dangerous vehicles on the road.

Re: San Francisco cops pull over a Cruise driverless car for no lights on

#155

Post by jcranmer » Mon, Apr 11, 2022, 1:01 PM UTC

MathCodeLove wrote: post #126

jeromegv wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history The forgotten history of how automakers invented the crime of "jaywalking" (books and more sources are quoted in that article) 2. Roads existed before cars. This is an extremely American view to think that roads should be exclusively for cars. Roads should be for PEOPLE, regardless of which mode of transport they are using.

As for point 2. Okay, but now cars do exist. Do you think it's reasonable for cars capable of traveling 40mph should be stuck behind pedestrians at walking speed? Our modern transportation infrastructure exists for a reason, and that reason is speed/effeciency. Most areas with heavy pedestrian traffic have sidewalks. If I'm going 60mph down the highway then the presumption that I should be subjected to pedestrians ca…

Already today, cars do not travel at 40mph in those areas with heavy pedestrian traffic--the typical speed limit on a city street is 25mph, and even that is probably above typical speeds. If you want cars to travel more quickly, you need to resort to highways that completely cut off pedestrian access, which has seriously deleterious effects on the neighborhoods it travels through.

If you try to compromise, you end up with stroads... which turn out to be just as bad as highways for pedestrians in practice, thanks in no small part to people like you who believe that all of the compromises of street design and urban planning should be borne not by vehicular drivers but by pedestrians.

(I'll add a side note here: a lot of efficiency depends on what you're trying to make efficient. Many people--including you, apparently--define efficiency as moving cars with as high throughput as possible. If you instead want to move people with high throughput, usually step one is to ditch cars, since single-occupant vehicles occupy vastly more space than any other form of transportation.)

Re: San Francisco cops pull over a Cruise driverless car for no lights on

#156

Post by ricochet11 » Mon, Apr 11, 2022, 1:03 PM UTC

bo1024 wrote: post #123

Kye wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A teenager is worried about: getting killed, killing someone else, hurting someone, wrecking their parents' car, losing their permit. I don't trust engineers working on the models that drive these cars to teach a computer the difference between a human and an open road. A teenager can discern these with no effort. I trust a teenager to care about not hitting me and try their best, and to choose a ditch over hitting s…

To add to your point: it doesn’t bother me so much that the AI system doesn’t share these priorities. What I worry about is that the companies designing them are not incentivized to.

surely a company is absolutely incentivized to share these priorities?

every accident is a hit to their profits and pr.

Re: San Francisco cops pull over a Cruise driverless car for no lights on

#157

Post by MereInterest » Mon, Apr 11, 2022, 1:03 PM UTC

MathCodeLove wrote: post #126

jeromegv wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history The forgotten history of how automakers invented the crime of "jaywalking" (books and more sources are quoted in that article) 2. Roads existed before cars. This is an extremely American view to think that roads should be exclusively for cars. Roads should be for PEOPLE, regardless of which mode of transport they are using.

As for point 2. Okay, but now cars do exist. Do you think it's reasonable for cars capable of traveling 40mph should be stuck behind pedestrians at walking speed? Our modern transportation infrastructure exists for a reason, and that reason is speed/effeciency. Most areas with heavy pedestrian traffic have sidewalks. If I'm going 60mph down the highway then the presumption that I should be subjected to pedestrians ca…

Speed, yes, but efficiency is questionable. Efficiency depends both on how fast you're traveling, but also on how far you need to travel in order to reach a destination. With minimum parking requirements, the space required for a shop increases drastically. If there's one shop every 50 feet, you can efficiently visit them at low speeds. If there's one shop every quarter mile, walking past a row of shops is impossible. The car traveling 40 mph can go at a faster speed than a pedestrian, but it also requires the shops to be spaced out such that the car can park. Optimizing for speed reduces efficiency.

Re: San Francisco cops pull over a Cruise driverless car for no lights on

#158

Post by bee_rider » Mon, Apr 11, 2022, 1:04 PM UTC

KptMarchewa wrote: post #116

flohofwoe wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's easy and obvious: The whole fleet is "grounded" (or at least the self-driving feature disabled) until the bug has been identified and fixed. If you ask me, only a single car misbehaving is actually much more alarming than if the bug manifests in all cars of that type.

>If you ask me, only a single car misbehaving is actually much more alarming than if the bug manifests in all cars of that type. It's not if it's hardware failure.

A hardware failure that puts the vehicle in a semi-functioning, but non-safe condition needs to be investigated, it could be silently lurking in any number of cars.

Re: San Francisco cops pull over a Cruise driverless car for no lights on

#159

Post by MathCodeLove » Mon, Apr 11, 2022, 1:04 PM UTC

MereInterest wrote: post #146

MathCodeLove wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say "advertising campaign" as if it were some conspiracy by the world's big auto manufacturers 1. Do you have any sources? 2. You don't think that roads should be a car only domain? What do you think roads are for?

For 1, this is well established history that I didn't feel was necessary to provide sources for. That said, the vox article linked to by jeromegv does a good job of describing the transition. For 2, I'd make a distinction between paths built for long-distance travel (roads) and paths built for connecting to destinations (streets). The two have fundamentally different goals that cannot be safely achieved at the same t…

1. Fair enough, but sources should almost always be provided. I hadn't heard that particular piece of historical trivia and I don't think it's necessarily common knowledge.

As for the later, why is that any better than just sidewalks and crosswalks, which the majority of areas with heavy pedestrian traffic already have? It'd be incredibly eco-unfriendly, expensive, and impractical to have two different types of roads for cars and pedestrians when we already have a solution that works just fine - sidewalks.

Re: San Francisco cops pull over a Cruise driverless car for no lights on

#160

Post by MathCodeLove » Mon, Apr 11, 2022, 1:06 PM UTC

MereInterest wrote: post #157

MathCodeLove wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As for point 2. Okay, but now cars do exist. Do you think it's reasonable for cars capable of traveling 40mph should be stuck behind pedestrians at walking speed? Our modern transportation infrastructure exists for a reason, and that reason is speed/effeciency. Most areas with heavy pedestrian traffic have sidewalks. If I'm going 60mph down the highway then the presumption that I should be subjected to pedestrians ca…

Speed, yes, but efficiency is questionable. Efficiency depends both on how fast you're traveling, but also on how far you need to travel in order to reach a destination. With minimum parking requirements, the space required for a shop increases drastically. If there's one shop every 50 feet, you can efficiently visit them at low speeds. If there's one shop every quarter mile, walking past a row of shops is impossible…

Not necessarily. This assessment forgets things like sidewalks. I don't think anyone is going to visit shops on main street and every time they leave a shop drives 5 feet further down the road only to park and visit another one. In tightly clustered areas it's most common to park and then walk via a sidewalk to other destinations on the area.