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The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

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Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#381

Post by jrockway »

jfoster wrote: post #342
pyre wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UPS employees are unionized, and driving routes (vs. working in the warehouses) is a sought-after position that is one of the benefits of seniority (as I understand it). I expect that they might have issues rolling out a computerized delivery fleet.

So they'll just get replaced. Amazon and Google do seem keen to get into that space.

Also why the airlines go bankrupt approximately once per career. The gross revenue per flight is the same as time increases, but pay raises for seniority decrease the profit as the workforce ages.

(Not making a value judgement here. Airline pilots have a tough job and do it well, and deserve to be well-paid. But the industry is not as nice as me.)

Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#382

Post by omarhegazy »

scarmig wrote: post #228
ignostic wrote: post #209

Everyone seems really concerned with the edge cases right now. What about insurance and liability? What about when X happens and it's raining? These are (usually pretty minor) technical challenges, and I haven't heard one yet that we won't be able to overcome with today's technology. Under given circumstances the car will be safer than a human or it isn't. The moment it crosses that threshold (for most conditions) th…

I agree with your overall vision. But there's a lot being swept under the rug in saying, "These are (usually pretty minor) technical challenges, and I haven't heard one yet that we won't be able to overcome with today's technology." It comes close to a "sufficiently advanced compiler" or "just an implementation question." Autocars are going to be held to a much higher standard than human drivers. This sucks, is irrat…

Autocars are going to be held to a much higher standard because they should be held to a higher standard.

On one end, autocars will be held to a higher standard because of cultural fear of incredibly rapid technological progression. That fear is entirely rational; the bigger the change, the more potential failures, the bigger the risk that there are some hidden faults that no one predicted. Big changes require more prediction than incremental changes, and more prediction = higher risk that you're wrong. Saying you're 95% sure of just one thing isn't scary, saying that the all of these new, undealt-with-before elements all each have 95% chance of being fine is a much scarier combination, and the chance that just one prediction goes wrong that fucks up the rest of the sequence of predictions, messing up the system as a whole, that chance gets higher.

On another end, a fatally incorrect judgment by a Google Car goes into the database of encountered events that they have. The database that other Google Cars learn from. Which means the error could potentially compound. And other Google Cars will make the same mistakes, in higher frequencies. So there has to be some high standard to make sure false positives don't set about a positive feedback loop in the way the Cars perceive database history.

Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#383

Post by couchand »

jameshart wrote: post #343
ignostic wrote: post #209

Everyone seems really concerned with the edge cases right now. What about insurance and liability? What about when X happens and it's raining? These are (usually pretty minor) technical challenges, and I haven't heard one yet that we won't be able to overcome with today's technology. Under given circumstances the car will be safer than a human or it isn't. The moment it crosses that threshold (for most conditions) th…

"a full network of communicating cars and fail-safes" is a long way away, though. And to get there you have to go through a long period of some self-driving cars, sharing the road with old-fashioned human piloted ones. As a human driver, I spend a lot of my time anticipating the behavior of my fellow road-users. That car coming up from the side street - did they see me? They're on their phone, maybe they didn't see m…

I don't know, it seems to me that a computer is particularly suited to this problem. I think a computer would be much more accurate in judging the speed of the approaching bike or the car coming up the side street or in the left lane. The essentially negligible reaction time compared with a human would give significant power to a defensive driving algorithm. And I'd guess probabalistic models are a better predictor of behavior than most people's intuition.

Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#384

Post by solomatov »

jameshk wrote: post #2

The next step is highways!

Many cars already have dynamic cruise controls, which is basically auto pilot for highway driving. The one which are installed on BMW, brakes when the car in front of you brakes and decreases speed on curves.

Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#385

Post by prawn »

pinaceae wrote: post #213
bertil wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, with self-driving cars, it’s likely that those four activity could be handled by different vehicles that you would only rent for the time you need them. If the law allows them to drive empty, they could go to the next user on their own, and reduce both waste parking, and inefficiencies like the ones you describe. Such plans are however more likely to happen in areas where those issues are more dire (concent…

sure, but this why ownership as a concept is actually quite nice - i can decide right now to do something with my car. i don't need to plan ahead. i am not dependent on anybody else. i gladly pay for that luxury.

When you travel abroad, does it trouble you that it's not your plane? Eventually, the majority of people won't care. Some will pay a premium to have a dedicated car or service level, but I would happily be rid of mine.

The ability to book the type of car I need (van to move something large, ute to deliver dirt/gravel, tiny car to commute, 4WD for a family camping trip) as the default way of thinking can't come soon enough for me.

Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#387

Post by tomkarlo »

pyre wrote: post #335
andrewfong wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect the higher standard question will be resolved in a couple of ways: * NTSB review: Airplanes face higher scrutiny than automobiles (despite the lower overall casualty rate). Part of the reason people have grown comfortable with air travel nonetheless is because the NTSB analyzes what went wrong after each crash and recommends (mandates) certain changes. Moreover, as far as government agencies go, the NTSB do…

UPS employees are unionized, and driving routes (vs. working in the warehouses) is a sought-after position that is one of the benefits of seniority (as I understand it). I expect that they might have issues rolling out a computerized delivery fleet.

Fedex drivers aren't. That doesn't matter as much when there aren't real alternatives, but it can become critical if technology starts to drastically reduce the need for labor. That's part of what happened to the American auto industry during the 80's.

Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#388

Post by tomkarlo »

gbog wrote: post #120

In this discussion I very rarely see mentioned how heavy are cars. Since when do we need multi tons machine to move a being that is usually below 100kg from a to b? Here in northern China, many people have very small egg-cars, which are nothing more than an electric bike with a thin shell for the cold, and this is much less likely to kill someone by accident. I think we have been under a very strong brain washing so…

Great and all (and I'm a big fan of smaller, lighter passenger cars) but it only works to a point - a tiny car might not kill a pedestrian or someone else in a tiny car, but it's unlikely to do well in an accident with a semi truck, or a large fixed barrier. (And people buy cars based on how well they protect the passengers, not others.) We should have smaller cars, but with reasonable safety features.

Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#389

Post by prawn »

scarmig wrote: post #204
thrownaway2424 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans have a tendency to focus on the bizarre while dismissing the average. Perhaps a self-driving car will not see this debris, although I would be surprised if that was true. The robot car has far superior sensors, compared to yours, and it never looks at anything else. Probably the consequences of hitting the debris would have been minor anyway. On the other hand, meat-drivers are constantly murdering hundreds of…

I hate cars as much as anyone, but I'm a stickler for real numbers: In 2012, the average number of deaths per day in the USA by motor vehicle was a touch under 100, not even close to "hundreds." And talking worldwide, it'd be much more accurate to say thousands--about 3k per day. To your broader point, I'd be curious about how many accidents occur because of exceptional or long tail situations versus the everyday. Lo…

100/day is lower than I thought but it does make me shake my head to think about the media and public uproar that would exist if robotic cars were responsible for 100 deaths each and every day!

Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#390

Post by ollysb »

chillingeffect wrote: post #256
TheEzEzz wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There must be at least 50 million residential garages in the US alone. If we automate all cars and switch to a Cars-as-a-Service model that is 50 million large rooms suddenly available. That's a lot of reclaimed real estate. Edit: If the average garage is 250 sq ft (pretty small), average cost of real estate is $100/sq ft (pretty low), then this is a $1.25 trillion windfall. Not bad for a small side-effect of autonom…

Way to only see everything with rose-colored glasses. Has it even occurred to you there might be any possible cons to your scenario? First of all, the lot the cars come from is going to require real estate, so subtract that from your windfall. Where will they be at night or other low-use times? Second, subtract the additional resources in gas/electricity it takes to get to my house from god-knows-where it came from.…

Maybe the store will drive to you ;)
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