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Fully driverless cars could be months away

arstechnica.com

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Re: Fully driverless cars could be months away

#11

Post by emiliobumachar »

nieksand wrote: post #7
na85 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we should push out half-baked solutions?

Depends on how half-baked. From a PR perspective it's a definite "no". Even a single self-driving fatality would lead to global news headlines and a lawyer feeding frenzy. But from a protecting people perspective? If making it "live" quicker would speed development and adoption... then maybe. E.g. the first 5 year increase fatalities net by 1.1x. After that tech is actually dialed in and fatalities drop to 0.5x. Hold…

Another plausible hypothesis is that the tech is already better-than-humans today, but not orders-of-magnitude better. Killing 30 thousand people a year instead of 40 thousand is not politically viable. So we just keep it in the lab while 10 thousand extra die because of politics.

Re: Fully driverless cars could be months away

#12

Post by Zanni »

I've always been a big proponent of self-driving cars, but only because I imagined them as fully autonomous. A fleet of self-driving cars that rely on being backed by, essentially, a call center, sounds like a nightmare.

"When Waymo tested in Phoenix earlier this year, drivers sometimes had to take over the wheel to prevent the cars from holding up traffic because it took too long for humans in the command center to answer the cars’ requests for help."

Re: Fully driverless cars could be months away

#13

Post by Spivak »

Zanni wrote: post #12

I've always been a big proponent of self-driving cars, but only because I imagined them as fully autonomous. A fleet of self-driving cars that rely on being backed by, essentially, a call center, sounds like a nightmare. "When Waymo tested in Phoenix earlier this year, drivers sometimes had to take over the wheel to prevent the cars from holding up traffic because it took too long for humans in the command center to…

I guess the ability for a single person able to essentially 'drive' an entire fleet of cars is an improvement but it's not exactly the utopia I imagined.

Re: Fully driverless cars could be months away

#14

Post by Spivak »

nieksand wrote: post #7
na85 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we should push out half-baked solutions?

Depends on how half-baked. From a PR perspective it's a definite "no". Even a single self-driving fatality would lead to global news headlines and a lawyer feeding frenzy. But from a protecting people perspective? If making it "live" quicker would speed development and adoption... then maybe. E.g. the first 5 year increase fatalities net by 1.1x. After that tech is actually dialed in and fatalities drop to 0.5x. Hold…

> Even a single self-driving fatality

It's more specific than that. It will be the first self-driving crash that would be glaringly obvious to a human driver. Like the Tesla crash where the sensors mistook a white semi for clouds and merrily plowed though it.

If the tech is adopted too soon it might face a death knell when computer assisted driving proves to be much safer than fully autonomous. It's much easier to fill a human's blind spots than replace the driver entirely.

Re: Fully driverless cars could be months away

#15

Post by txmx2000 »

Why aren’t these companies looking to make a deal with a high-congestion city? Block off downtown for regular cars. Have people park on the perimeter and use cheap self-driving taxis to travel around. Tax revenue will skyrocket when all the downtown real estate currently wasted on parking lots is replaced with office buildings, shops, and residential structures. People will be happier not wasting hours every day on congested roads.

Re: Fully driverless cars could be months away

#16

Post by vannevar »

shallot_router wrote: post #9
vannevar wrote: post #3

Fully driverless cars are here today, for that matter. But if you want want tamperproof driverless cars that perform well under adverse conditions and are thoroughly tested, then you're going to have to wait a lot longer than "months". I think this snippet is pretty telling: "Waymo chose the Phoenix area for its favorable weather, its wide, well-maintained streets, and the relative lack of pedestrians ." (Emphasis mi…

How could a driverless car ever truly be tamperproof, though? At some point we'll just have to accept it as a potential risk.

Good question. Tamperproof to me means they can't physically be spooked into doing things, as well as being secure from hacking. In theory, they just have to be as safe as human drivers, who manage to kill thousands of people each year. But as a practical matter, people will probably demand that they be much safer than humans. And it will take awhile to prove that out.
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