Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere • Hacker News Board

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#91

Post by yreg » Sat, Oct 15, 2022, 11:17 AM UTC

zinekeller wrote: post #67

Keyframe wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- 1.3 million deaths worldwide, annually (94% cause by human error) - existing infrastructure (roads) isn't going anywhere (no need to build anything) - reduced traffic congestion (autonomous vehicles can better react/drive) - improved supply chains (autonomous trucks) (can work 0-24) just to name a few off top of my head

> existing infrastructure (roads) isn't going anywhere (no need to build anything) I think that this is a sunk-cost fallacy. Sure, you would need to build infrastructure for trains, but after that trains are now reasonably automated, can carry cargo, and do other things with the exception of stopping at the exact destination you wanted to (in other words, it requires predetermined stops which people outside the US sh…

Trains won't do last mile delivery.

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#92

Post by subroutine » Sat, Oct 15, 2022, 11:19 AM UTC

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #77

subroutine wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think computers will become superhuman at driving under the right conditions . However, there will inevitably be conditions that require the use of general intelligence (rather than driving heuristics), and in those situations all you can do is pray the computer acts rationally despite not having GI. I think self driving cars have already passed the test of "number of crashes" or "number of fatalities" per mile dri…

>I think self driving cars have already passed the test of "number of crashes" or "number of fatalities" per mile driven. This is not definitively known. The distribution of conditions under which self driving cars operate is very different from the distribution of human driving. Self driving car miles are disproportionately on the highway, with little traffic, in perfect weather (i.e. by far the safest driving condi…

True, true. However, if I had to bet... I'd bet in a fully self driving world (using today's tech) there'd be overall far fewer fatal accidents. However there'd also be a lot of bullshit we are simply unwilling to deal with (e.g. cars going 10mph in the rain; slow motion fender benders; car unwilling to turn left; gridlock at intersections; lots of random oddities). I guess my point is that safety metrics are certainly important stats to gauge self driving progress, but certainly not the only metrics that matter, and perhaps not even the most important.

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#93

Post by andrepd » Sat, Oct 15, 2022, 11:19 AM UTC

sgtfrankieboy wrote: post #62

batmanturkey wrote: post #32

WHY is a fully autonomous vehicle even interesting to pursue, given that wheeled vehicles and their infrastructural requirements are such a large expense and social and environmental problem relative to the benefits provided? I mean, out of all the moonshots, why die on this particular hill? I consider an actual hyperloop to be a much more compelling vision for the future: those pneumatic tubes the banks use in subur…

Hyperloop is crap, just go with highspeed trains. They get the job done in city corridors. But you can't have a train stop in front of your house... Nor can you build massive tubes everywhere in place of cheap roads. Walking, Bikes, Busses, Metros, Trains, Cars, Planes. They all have a place in how we transport, right now the distribution between them is just out of whack.

For anything except sparsely populated rural areas, a train gets you to the city/town, and a mix of public transport + e-bike/e-scooter gets you to your final destination. This is potentially quicker, and much much more efficient than lugging 2-ton capsules around and needing hundreds of thousands of square km of land to keep the things parked 95% of the time.

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#94

Post by helsinkiandrew » Sat, Oct 15, 2022, 11:20 AM UTC

mg wrote: post #14

$100B is not that much when you compare it to the value self-driving cars will create. There are over 1 billion cars on the road which need humans to drive them. How much are they used? I don't know. Let's say one ride per day. When cars turn into a service business, the "driver" will be software. What will be paid to the driver? Let's say $1 per ride. That is 1B * $1 * 365 = $365B per year. Give that a p/e ratio of…

I'm not sure I get your valuation model. "we're" not investing in self driving it's the car companies, because (presumably) they believe that self driving will make their cars more sellable compared with other brands.

If after another $50B or $100B spent some companies start to pull back on funding because they think diverting funds to other areas will give a better return (better batteries, cheaper manufacturing etc), it's likely others will too.

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#95

Post by wil421 » Sat, Oct 15, 2022, 11:21 AM UTC

forgotusername6 wrote: post #81

sgtfrankieboy wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hyperloop is crap, just go with highspeed trains. They get the job done in city corridors. But you can't have a train stop in front of your house... Nor can you build massive tubes everywhere in place of cheap roads. Walking, Bikes, Busses, Metros, Trains, Cars, Planes. They all have a place in how we transport, right now the distribution between them is just out of whack.

Hyperloop is still cool because you could have really fast transit over large areas. Mass transit across cities is still quite slow. High speed trains are fine but just not fast enough. Imagine a large city where you could get from one side to the other in only a few minutes.

Musk coined Hyperloop as a distraction to high speed rail. He wanted people to buy Teslas instead of thinking about high speed rail in California. A lot of people fell for his con.

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#96

Post by lozenge » Sat, Oct 15, 2022, 11:22 AM UTC

forgotusername6 wrote: post #81

sgtfrankieboy wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hyperloop is crap, just go with highspeed trains. They get the job done in city corridors. But you can't have a train stop in front of your house... Nor can you build massive tubes everywhere in place of cheap roads. Walking, Bikes, Busses, Metros, Trains, Cars, Planes. They all have a place in how we transport, right now the distribution between them is just out of whack.

Hyperloop is still cool because you could have really fast transit over large areas. Mass transit across cities is still quite slow. High speed trains are fine but just not fast enough. Imagine a large city where you could get from one side to the other in only a few minutes.

If you chose to build a train with only two stops, yes you could get from one side to the other in only a few minutes. That would have its downsides, like the station not being near your destination, which is why it's rarely done. You would also need a very straight track, which means lots of space for points (places where trains separate from the route onto platforms). This constraint is also shared by Hyperloop.

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#97

Post by almost_usual » Sat, Oct 15, 2022, 11:22 AM UTC

andrepd wrote: post #79

case0x00 wrote: post #4

This article is kind of a wrapper for the linked bloomberg article, which is more interesting IMO. Driving of cars is a massive cooperative game with high stakes, and autonomous cars essentially need AGI in order to play to a degree that is safer than a human with other humans. Fully autonomous cars would be sick, but IMO you'd need massive infrastructure changes (realistically restricted to cities/urbanized areas) i…

Cars are bad. Electric cars are a bit better than ICE cars, and self-driving cars might one day be better than human-driven cars. But they're still terrible: they're still big, inefficient, polluting, loud, dangerous, and take up precious space. Cars are completely unsuited to cities, and cities which are designed around cars are terrible . This to say: the future is having cars removed from cities entirely . Focusin…

This is the logical answer but companies need to profit off something and EVs are what “save the world” right now.

Everyone is committed to being green as long as their lifestyle isn’t inconvenienced and they have the funds to buy the green equivalent technology.

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#98

Post by roenxi » Sat, Oct 15, 2022, 11:23 AM UTC

gambiting wrote: post #44

roenxi wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to nit-pick and say you're estimating some novel metric. The value add would be somewhat higher than that because the alternative is a human driver, so the value-add of the software is approximately ($/h value of driver x hours) that it frees up to do something else. Plus all the evidence I see suggests that whatever the current state, sooner rather than later computers are going to be superhuman at driv…

>>Plus all the evidence I see suggests that whatever the current state, sooner rather than later computers are going to be superhuman at driving (like they are at most other discrete tasks) and save a lot of lives. What is that evidence, exactly? I agree that we might eventually get there, but the scale seems to be 50-100 years at this point. We are as arrogant as the researchers in the 60s who famously announced tha…

Typically from what I've seen computers go a long period being hopeless at a task, then slightly subhuman-par-superhuman very quickly. It seems to me that as far as algorithm-and-Hz cares human intelligence lives in a very narrow window and once computers get close to it they tend to jump over it.

I'd judge self driving to be slightly subhuman right now - there are definitely worse drivers on the road (typically impaired - drunk, near-blind or high). I'd expect superhuman performance this decade just based on that and the rate of improvement in anything AI related right now.

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#99

Post by nier » Sat, Oct 15, 2022, 11:23 AM UTC

case0x00 wrote: post #4

This article is kind of a wrapper for the linked bloomberg article, which is more interesting IMO. Driving of cars is a massive cooperative game with high stakes, and autonomous cars essentially need AGI in order to play to a degree that is safer than a human with other humans. Fully autonomous cars would be sick, but IMO you'd need massive infrastructure changes (realistically restricted to cities/urbanized areas) i…

Where is this kind-of-a-wrapper-article you write about? What am I missing?

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#100

Post by lozenge » Sat, Oct 15, 2022, 11:27 AM UTC

concordDance wrote: post #50

bwilli123 wrote: post #39

We already have self driving cars. We call it public transport.

Doesn't allow point to point. I lose about 5 hours a week due to cycling and using public transport.

Yet remove all the cycling and public transport and everybody's journey would be slower due to the road filling up with traffic.