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Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

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Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#161

Post by mschuster91 »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #89
mschuster91 wrote: post #47

> The trucks could also be commercially viable with only freeway driving capability, or freeways plus a short segment of surface streets needed to reach a transfer hub. The question is... isn't the problem being approached from an entirely bad premise in the first place? Why would it even make sense to develop autonomous trucks for that part of any freight's journey? Laying train tracks might incur a large initial ex…

To a pretty good approximation, everything that feasibly can get shipped by rail already is. Railroad companies operate fairly close to capacity, and they have no desire to reduce their massive profit margins building new rails en masse and handling the maintenance burden. That leaves only the shippers themselves, who are often much smaller companies that couldn't reasonably build a new rail line or buy cars for ever…

> Railroad companies operate fairly close to capacity, and they have no desire to reduce their massive profit margins building new rails en masse and handling the maintenance burden.

I'm talking from a "looking at the wide, societal picture" viewpoint. And from that, it makes so much more sense to shift as much long haul traffic to railways as possible. I'm aware that the mechanics of modern day capitalism are not aligned with what's best for society at large, long-term - mostly that railway infrastructure is orders of magnitude better regarding emissions and energy consumptions, but that it takes many more years for investments to pay off, which is why there is so few railway capacity in the US and what is there, is often enough in shabby condition.

Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#162

Post by jayd16 »

Edman274 wrote: post #26

I often see logic along the lines of "if autonomous vehicles are safer than people, then let's deploy them" and that logic straight-up does not fly in the real world. In the real world, among the techno-pessimists, that is an outrageously low bar. Most accidents and deaths that happen because of human drivers occur because the driver was doing something illegal, which means the bar that we have for even humans is hig…

> like, we wouldn't allow someone to be an Uber or Lyft or truck driver if they were candid and said "I'm going to text on my phone, and be drunk driving and sleepy and distracted as often as the average motorist".

But we do allow it. Sure its illegal but we don't put in the effort to actually prevent it. Just because we don't like it and would want it to be better doesn't mean we aren't allowing it.

Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#163

Post by seanmcdirmid »

tomrod wrote: post #150
NullHypothesist wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't operate in snow now, but everybody was like "This is great, but it doesn't work in the rain!" this time last year. I've now taken many flawless rides in outright downpours in SF. It might take a year or two, but I have no doubt snow will be something that is a non-issue in the near future.

Sensing tech has to improve to get through the noise. As far as I'm aware, you can't see a yellow line or white line on a highway if it's covered in dirty snow. We could also rework our roadways to include better sensing design and tech (passive or active!), but we are a ways out still from willingness to pay for that.

Do what humans do and drive without lines while trying to stay to one side of the road. This doesn’t seem like a major problem to self driving snow cars. More like, how do you deal with other drivers who are RWD with summer tires and are fish tailing all over the place.

Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#164

Post by kelnos »

Edman274 wrote: post #106
jdewerd wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it's OK to have more deaths so long as we can punish someone with no expectation that doing so will fix the problem? I suspect you are right, but I don't think it reflects well on us.

I think a way to think about it is that we (at a societal level) wouldn't accept a desk calculator to be sold as a consumer product if it did correct arithmetic almost all of the time but then would spit out a close but wrong answer 1 time out of 1000, even if that would be significantly better than the average person doing arithmetic. Our expectation would be that it could (and should) perform flawlessly. If our tec…

I think intuitively the desk calculator analogy makes sense, but from a technology perspective it does not. A calculator has a limited number of operations and operating modes, and you can feasibly test all of them, quickly, easily, and in an automated fashion.

An autonomous vehicle has an uncountable number of operating modes, and it is not feasible (perhaps not even possible) to test it in all possible conditions and states. Even if you could, doing so for (say) every single software change would take years each time.

Maybe that does mean that this is a fool's errand, and we just shouldn't be building autonomous cars, at least not until we have AGI that can think and act faster and with better judgment than a human.

I personally do think that "better record than a human driver" should be sufficient (perhaps with some significant, TBD margin; 0.1% better is probably not enough), but I accept and agree with your toplevel comment that sort of thing won't fly in the real world. The bar is really more like the self-driving car has to avoid making the specific kinds of mistakes and illegal/unsafe acts that a human driver would do (all while not creating new classes of mistakes that a human driver would not make), and, on top of that, be better than a human driver in situations where crash would not be deemed that human driver's fault.

Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#165

Post by jayd16 »

jampekka wrote: post #78
fallingknife wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that if you have safer than human systems but you don't deploy them it's basically killing people. If you had autonomous driving that was 90% as deadly as the average human driver, not deploying it would cause 4000 deaths every year in the US.

We have a lot safer transportation systems than private cars but don't deploy them. Is this basically killing people too? Driving is murder?

Negligence is not murder but people still die.

Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#166

Post by kelnos »

tempest_ wrote: post #109
ben_w wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll take your word for it (not being an American and only having visited NYC once), but even then most of the rules of the road are… not perfectly enforced. I suspect if the rules were perfectly enforced, the only humans allowed to drive would be those who actually don't. I suspect — no, I hope — that anyone who admits in advance that they intend to break the rules, won't get a license.

I mean just look at how popular automated enforcement like speed and red light cameras.

Not sure which side you're arguing. Does the US even have automated speed traps? Every time I hear about them, there's opposition and it doesn't happen. I think the most recent one I heard about in the US, the plan was to issue a ticket unless the speed is at least 11mph over the limit, which seems... both fine but also kinda silly?

Red light cameras were even a big fight to get implemented back when they were a new idea, though they're relatively uncontroversial these days.

To me, the difference is that the speed limit is intentionally poorly enforced, because law enforcement knows that speed limits in many places are set inconsistently and at unreasonable levels (and I believe that's also intentional; I recall reading that limits in many places are set at the 85% percentile of actual measured traffic speed, or something like that). An automated speed trap can't judge whether a particular speed is safe for the current weather and traffic conditions.

On the other hand, it's never safe to run a red light; that's just a binary "you did it"/"you didn't do it". Yes, I know, technically it is safe to run a red light when visibility is plentiful and there's no cross-traffic within sight, but I think we as a society have accepted the idea that you just shouldn't run red lights, and getting ticketed for doing so is fine under nearly any circumstances.

Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#167

Post by gnufied »

kortilla wrote: post #129
Edman274 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a way to think about it is that we (at a societal level) wouldn't accept a desk calculator to be sold as a consumer product if it did correct arithmetic almost all of the time but then would spit out a close but wrong answer 1 time out of 1000, even if that would be significantly better than the average person doing arithmetic. Our expectation would be that it could (and should) perform flawlessly. If our tec…

I have a desk calculator with a worse error rate than that because of a button that sticks. I still use it

I was thinking about this and one way of thinking is what u said. We already allow sale of spaceships which have non-zero failure rate. So we don't necessarily need zero failure rate self driving.

But a problem with cars is, usually ur malfunctioning calculator just harms u, but a malfunctioning car will affect people who don't agree with ur choice of driving non-zero failure rate self driving car.

So it is not a personal choice anymore.

Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#168

Post by weaksauce »

Edman274 wrote: post #26

I often see logic along the lines of "if autonomous vehicles are safer than people, then let's deploy them" and that logic straight-up does not fly in the real world. In the real world, among the techno-pessimists, that is an outrageously low bar. Most accidents and deaths that happen because of human drivers occur because the driver was doing something illegal, which means the bar that we have for even humans is hig…

trucking autonomous driving needs to be parity or better than the average truck driver not the average driver.

Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#170

Post by Faark »

karaterobot wrote: post #132

> No guarantee of a timely response from remote operators or backend services. > Therefore, all safety-critical decisions must be made by the onboard computer alone. Why is the requirement that all safety-critical decisions must be made on board, versus the seemingly-simplifying assumption that only some or most decisions would have to be made on board, because a remote operator or backend service could be available…

> and then taking over when necessary

Yes, and that has to be safely possible. From my reading, the article has no problems with remote operators giving command. The truck just also needs the ability to both safely execute them and come to some safe state by itself if necessary commands don't arrive [in time].

The interesting question is how complicated those safe states are to realize. Just hitting the breaks on a freeway seems hardly acceptable. Generally, this being harder than for cars in cities is a core conclusion of the article.

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