Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The View from the Front Seat of the Google Self-Driving Car

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 286 posts

Re: The View from the Front Seat of the Google Self-Driving Car

#211

Post by phaemon »

vlunkr wrote: post #66
comrade1 wrote: post #4

One thing I'm looking forward to with self-driving cars is to be able to step into a street anywhere and have all the traffic stop automatically. Every inch of street now becomes a crosswalk. Even highways. (This is an ironic statement)

In all seriousness though, what would happen in this case? Do self-driving cars have emergency stop procedures? And how safe are they? This is still a serious concern about self-driving cars for me. Especially since digital image recognition still isn't that great. What if the car sees a tumbleweed that it mistakes for a boulder and puts it into emergency stop mode?

> Especially since digital image recognition still isn't that great.

I believe digital image recognition is better than human, and a lot faster to boot (hah!).

Re: The View from the Front Seat of the Google Self-Driving Car

#212

Post by upofadown »

Steuard wrote: post #177
rhino369 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some areas just give a "brief" period where both lights are red. I'm surprised not everywhere does, or that is isn't increased.

It doesn't work, or so I've heard. Drivers in those cities learn to expect the safety margin of the delay, and statistically they become more willing to run a red light right after it changes.

Back in the day they tried the overlapping red thing in my city. Once everyone got used to the new way of doing things the time when both light were red became a sort of anarchy zone. Everyone assumed that everyone else would strictly observe the red so they didn't have to.

We don't do that anymore...

Re: The View from the Front Seat of the Google Self-Driving Car

#213

Post by TOMDM »

_dark_matter_ wrote: post #134
jcoffland wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it that we feel this strong urge to mess with robots? They may exact their revenge one day.

You are already too late... http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk

So who's working on the AI that will punish anyone for creating Roko's basilisk, removing the motivation for creating Roko's basilisk in the first place?

Re: The View from the Front Seat of the Google Self-Driving Car

#214

Post by phaemon »

mildbow wrote: post #115
scott_karana wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like how in your examples, "Google" is just algorithms, not the humans behind them, but for the police, you allow for humanity. You may as well say, "the most police cameras can do: send you an automated speeding ticket", which is of course painfully naïve. Google could do plenty of evil with your data.

Can you give me some examples of what google might reasonably do with my data that can negatively affect my life to the same magnitude as what the police/government might reasonably do? Ideally, maybe no one should track my every move. But to talk about police and google in the same sentence in terms of ramifications is so far off I can't be anything but incredulous :)

Police and Government should be two different entities, but if you're living in a police state then you're probably right.

Otherwise, what Google could do is, say, record your dangerous driving (maybe that one time you were rushing a friend to hospital and ignored some speed limits). And then, every time a potential employer googled your name, they would see this "dangerous driver" notification. And you have no way of removing this, there's no statute of limitations, there's no way to correct it. For the rest of your life, that's the first result anyone sees when looking up who you are.

That's what Google could do.

Re: The View from the Front Seat of the Google Self-Driving Car

#215

Post by astrocat »

koenigdavidmj wrote: post #100
Zirro wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can already imagine intense debates about whether to outlaw human-driven cars in a (perhaps not so) distant future.

I've been thinking a bit about good places to adopt this early. Lānaʻi might be a good candidate: absolute isolation from other road systems, a small population (3000 people), and a single owner (Larry Ellison) who's just the sort of filthy rich technophile who might be willing to replace an entire island's cars. Singapore could be the first major city to make the move, due to its authoritarian government (hey, I don…

I'm not entirely sure just how much Larry can do - it's really the 2% of the island that's state owned that includes the public roads.

Hawaii in general seems like a great place to start a lot of "infrastructure 2.0" (if I may carelessly make up a term) projects geographically, but the logistics are tough because so much of the population is desperately poor, there's already a lot of class/ethnic tension and to top it all off, local government is a mess.

Re: The View from the Front Seat of the Google Self-Driving Car

#216

Post by gwern »

ams6110 wrote: post #27

Considering that the number of vehicle-miles driven annually is in the trillions, that is still a pretty small sample size. Do we know whether it's statistically significant?

The number that people drive isn't important, what's important is the accident rate: do humans get into enough minor accidents over 1.7m vehicle-miles that 14 is clearly bigger or smaller? Your answer is going to be driven almost entirely by what human-rate you select.

For example, if I use https://www.dot.ny.gov/divisions/operating/osss/highway/acci... , then I see that most of the quoted accident-rates are 1.8-3.29 per million miles. If I use a rate of 2.2/1m and use the simple binomial approach of x events per million miles, then the self-driving cars are statistically-significantly higher accident rates (since 14>3.74, and `binom.test(14, 1700000, p=(2.2/1000000)) ~> _p_=3.778543e-05`).

But what kinds of accidents are those? If I instead look at https://www.dot.ny.gov/divisions/operating/osss/highway/acci... and look at "Property Damage Only" accident-rates, it seems the human rate per million mile is more like 65-85. Now, unsurprisingly, the robots look superior (14 _p_=2.2204e-16`).

And if you try to argue apples and apples and use fatal accidents from the same source, noting a range of 0-1.33 fatal accidents per million miles, and 0 fatalities due to the robots' 1.7m so far then the difference is unclear (0 _p_=1`) because the usual tests don't like 0-counts and the robots have not driven enough to clearly distinguish themselves from normal human rates.

Re: The View from the Front Seat of the Google Self-Driving Car

#217

Post by _lce0 »

NeutronBoy wrote: post #195
_lce0 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

two self-driving cars, from different owners, crash: who is going to pay for that ?

The one at fault in the accident

that's the point!

currently there are only two sides, but with self-driving cars both sides could try to blame the other OR any other related entity (even from their own side) --what if both sides agrees to go after a 3rd one?

Re: The View from the Front Seat of the Google Self-Driving Car

#218

Post by JshWright »

kuschku wrote: post #210
JshWright wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Less ironically, I'm looking forward to pushing a button on the dashboard of my ambulance that automatically preempts the road ahead.

You could just go to Germany ;P https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02Ak1eIyj3M

While it is impressive that they stayed out of the way, I suspect the vehicle that blazed that trail had a slightly slower go of it...

Re: The View from the Front Seat of the Google Self-Driving Car

#219

Post by JshWright »

devsquid wrote: post #98
JshWright wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Less ironically, I'm looking forward to pushing a button on the dashboard of my ambulance that automatically preempts the road ahead.

Srsly, it amazes me when ppl don't get out of the way for emergency vehicles. IMHO one random day out of the year, you should be equipped with heavy machine guns and allowed to blast anyone in your way. A simple solution for a simple problem.

Yeah, but then we just need more ambulances to deal with those folks, and so on... I suspect it would ramp up in polynomial fashion...

Re: The View from the Front Seat of the Google Self-Driving Car

#220

Post by branchan »

kuschku wrote: post #193
branchan wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think having to pay for a human bus driver is the primary obstacle preventing us from having cheap and efficient public transportation.

Source: Most of Europe. The issues with public transports are the same as with biking in the US: It works better when cities are really dense. Suburbs destroy the efficiency of public transport, biking, walking, inline skating, and any other non-car transportation.

Europe is very different from the US. People will drive 1-2 hours to get to work, which is not really done as much in Europe.
Post reply on HN