The dream of driverless cars is dying • Hacker News Board

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#121

Post by Shorel » Mon, Jul 16, 2018, 7:20 PM UTC

nradov wrote: post #90

netfire wrote: post #38

Personally, I’d be happy with just automated freeway driving. That seems like an easier problem to solve (no pedestrians, complex traffic controls, cars going the other way or turning across your path, and visibility is usually pretty good). Why not focus on and perfect that first?

While driving on California freeways I have seen: pedestrians, complex traffic controls (law enforcement rerouting traffic or running moving breaks due to incidents), cars going the other way (drunk or confused), and terrible visibility (fog, snow, dust, heavy rain). It's going to take decades before automated freeway driving is perfected. Those edge cases can't just be ignored.

> Those edge cases can't just be ignored.

A general enough system would have no edge cases. It is IMO the required solution, and a driver always on the defensive is what we all are, at lease here in South America.

Just following the rules would have killed me years ago. Other drivers are reckless.

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#122

Post by bachbach » Mon, Jul 16, 2018, 11:35 PM UTC

bigpicture wrote: post #112

bachbach wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always wanted a world in which pneumatic tubes played a bigger role - as they used to with mail in London and Paris. It used to be possible to get a letter in 4 hours. I was walking down a street the other day, early morning, and it stank with food scraps, garbage - it was one of those maintenance streets you find at the back or sometimes even the front of fast food outlets, delis and cafes. The backend of that…

What you are asking for existed 100 years ago. Cheap oil killed it. Oil isn't so cheap anymore, maybe it would be viable again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Tunnel_Company

We must go back to the future!

Seems like a recurring theme. It's near a half century for the moon landings. Should revisit the concept of batteries too. I'm reading a book called This Victorian Life and am constantly impressed by lots of little innovations now forgotten. Two concepts I think we'll have to revisit: heliostats for indoor natural lighting and terrariums aka self contained biospheres for space/underground.

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#123

Post by tabtab » Tue, Jul 17, 2018, 12:35 AM UTC

paganel wrote: post #17

maxharris wrote: post #3

Reminds me of this famously wrong column dismissing the Internet back in 1995: https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirv... > How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, pr…

We still don’t have flying cars nor self-conscious robots, things that have been prophetized 100 to 50 years ago. Going back more in time we still don’t have a philosophical stone. The idea is that some technological prophecies are indeed wrong.

Re: We still don’t have flying cars nor self-conscious robots

But the proof of concept of auto-cars generally works. The kinks don't seem insurmountable, just a series of incremental improvements and economies of scale.

Flying cars on the other hand have some really big problems to tackle, such as noise pollution. And robots with "common sense" still seem a long ways off. There is no proof of concept that's even close.

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#124

Post by mannykannot » Tue, Jul 17, 2018, 1:55 PM UTC

freehunter wrote: post #119

mannykannot wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is plenty of incentive to make helicopters cheaper to own and operate, have simpler and less frequent maintenance requirements, to be easier to fly, require less space to take off and land, be quieter and safer. It hasn't happened so far because these are genuinely difficult problems, not because of lack of incentive. No one in NYC, not even Bloomberg, is landing, let alone parking, his helicopter at his office…

I like your point about the number of people in the Lincoln Tunnel and people dying in crashes. I agree it's a genuinely difficult problem, but we might agree for different reasons. I think it's a genuinely difficult problem because there is no way to make a flying car as safe as a car that is stuck to the ground. There's just not. Normal cars break down, they run out of gas, they stop working all the time. You coast…

Flying cars are a bad idea, but that hasn't stopped a lot of people wanting them. The vast majority don't give it any thought beyond 'that would be cool', but a few are putting a lot of time and money into trying to make one. It's my opinion that the hardest of all the hard problems is noise, because there aren't many things that can be changed in how lift is generated, and rotors/propellers are intrinsically noise-generating.

I think you may be misinterpreting my last sentence. What I mean is that, just because medical science has not delivered immortality, it doesn't mean that there aren't lots of people who would prefer not to die. You could substitute specific causes of death, such as cancer or alzheimer's, into that argument, if you think that most people have come to terms with their mortality.