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Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere
191–200 of 501 posts
Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere
#192In the short run, technological progress is much slower than anyone hopes, but in the long run it is much faster than anyone expects. My favorite example is that in 1987, the scientific consensus was that it would take "at least 100 years" and likely much longer to sequence the entire human gnome.[a] But the vast majority of it was sequenced by 2000, only 13 years later. Moreover, just two decades later, anyone could…
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Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere
#193Huge waste of money that could have been poured into public transport to actually solve our problems and improve our lives. What a tragedy.
The budget for just the MTA in NYC is 18 billion / year and that’s really only for the ongoing costs. A 100 billion investment in public transportation over the entire US over 10 years once wouldn’t have done shit. A fleet of self driving cars are realistically the only scalable public transportation because the costs increase with the number of people not the area to be served. Do people just forget how unbelievably…
This pretty much. Building public infrastructure is insanely expensive and there are capacity limits that can't easily be solved. We need to add public transport to the mix that 1) doesn't require heavy additional investment in infrastructure and 2) solves convenience concerns that make buses unappealing and 3) can reliably replace privately owned vehicles.
Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having been the victim of public transport for the first 30 years of my life: nope. You just can’t polish a turd. (Maybe other countries can but here in Germany it’s a lost cause and you can’t make individual mobility expensive enough for me to ever take public transport again).
As a counter-anecdote, I’ve been using public transport exclusively for 35 years (since first grade) in Helsinki, London and New York, and never felt like I’m a “victim” of anything. I only ever take a car for trips outside the city.
Indeed, and I think you’re quietly pointing at the nub of the problem: if you like in a major city or sufficiently close to one of its public transport ‘spokes’, and you want to travel to somewhere also covered in a similar manner (be that short- or long-distance) public transport is usually somewhere between great and acceptable. As soon as you fall outside that usability window, it often becomes close to unusable.
(One exception: local countryside bud services can sometimes be really valuable for local travel; but they often don’t link well with other public transport modalities, IME.)
Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those infrastructure requirements are already satisfied - and ~3000 people died on US roads last year.
30,000+ fatal vehicle accidents annually, not 3000
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has released its early estimate of traffic fatalities for 2021. NHTSA projects that an estimated 42,915 people died in motor vehicle traffic crashes last year, a 10.5% increase from the 38,824 fatalities in 2020. The projection is the highest number of fatalities since 2005 and the largest annual percentage increase in the Fatality Analysis Reporting System’s history. Behind each of these numbers is a life tragically lost, and a family left behind.
https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/early-estimate-2021-tra...
Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere
#196This 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…
Are there even any racing/sim games with solved driving AI? All the ones I can think of cheat, replay hardcoded paths, and/or are terrible. And thats with perfect information about the world and other cars.
Those games ai systems get substantially less budget and time than the automakers. There's also been a lot of talks about players not really having fun with ai that is too good, the players will always assume the ai is cheating whenever it out maneuvers them if you make it too well done
Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere
#197It's really bizarre that people are treating autonomous EVs as somehow pitted against transit.
The core of public transit is having a monopoly on local service and using profitable routes to subsidize unprofitable ones for the benefit of the public.
Transit agencies don't build their own vehicles, they buy them and operate them. Having the option to buy autonomous EVs does not change the core of public transit, but it does give them the ability to save on operations, run more routes, more frequent service, use a different mix of vehicles for their fleet, etc.
Replacing one 50 seat $500,000 bus with 5 $100,000 10 seat vans that cost a fraction to operate will make public transit far better than it is today.
Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere
#198In the short run, technological progress is much slower than anyone hopes, but in the long run it is much faster than anyone expects. My favorite example is that in 1987, the scientific consensus was that it would take "at least 100 years" and likely much longer to sequence the entire human gnome.[a] But the vast majority of it was sequenced by 2000, only 13 years later. Moreover, just two decades later, anyone could…
I'm genuinely curious why you think Tesla is ahead compared to Waymo and Cruise. Autopilot struggles in my car on some fairly boring roads, while Waymo and Cruise are both operating real taxi services in vehicles without drivers. I can understand the argument that Tesla has lots of data from real world driving. But Google also has fleets of cars mapping out every road in the world.
Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere
#199This 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…
Statements about X specialized task requiring AGI are questionable now, just like they were questionable when they were said about Chess, Go and Video Games.
Show me a chess engine that can deal with a chess peice that has been mangled so you can only tell what it is with context clues. Also a plastic bag occasionally obscures one of the other pieces. There's also construction on one side of the board every few turns that it has to route around using lanes that arnt normally legal. It has to do this while a drunk human is also moving the pieces, sometimes in ways that arnt legal, and if it takes too long it can hit a wall and die
Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere
#200Huge waste of money that could have been poured into public transport to actually solve our problems and improve our lives. What a tragedy.
I'll be blunt about this. Most of this research is funded in the US and the hyper individualistic Americans as a group don't believe in public transport.
That’s really not true. Americans love good public transportation where it’s available and works well. Most US cities have lots of buses, and many have light rail. But in a big country with a spread-out population, public transportation is tough.
American corporations perhaps aren’t as interested in public transportation, because there is no money to be made. And that is who is largely funding this self-driving vehicle research.