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Cruise's 3rd generation self-driving car

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Re: Cruise's 3rd generation self-driving car

#181
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've got some damn impressive videos on YouTube. I think they're either neck and neck with, or possibly ahead of, Tesla.

Evaluating technical capabilities in autonomy based on youtube demo videos is like evaluating the military potential by watching army parades on holiday. The truth is, none of these companies is any close to full autonomy. Full autonomy _testing_ will begin once they deploy cars without backup drivers, to actually see how bad can things go without watchful human supervision.

Waymo had <100 situations where they required human involvement in tens of million miles they drove so far. They are probably already safer than human drivers and would likely cause fewer accidents. The issue there is a legal one - who is going to be responsible for a crash? The company that produced the driving software/hardware, or the owner of the car? Or even the passengers in case there will be city-wide car pools one could call when needed?

Re: Cruise's 3rd generation self-driving car

#182

>Electric self-driving cars will save millions of lives and significantly accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy, but only when they’re deployed in large numbers. Just like cars that we drive, self driving cars enable sprawl. Sprawl will never be environmentally sustainable. We need cities that you move through by foot, bike, and public transit.

> Sprawl will never be environmentally sustainable. We need cities that you move through by foot, bike, and public transit. And yet https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/01/opinion/cities-suburbs-ho... "Despite the hype around “micro-apartments” and other innovations intended to cram more people into less room, many Americans still want space. They want to live in detached suburban homes, or in an apartment with enough squ…

They want something they can't afford... that the world can't afford/sustain. In my opinion the source for this want is equal parts marketing and subsidy.

We actually did decent low density non-sprawl until after WWII. Find it at the center of any city that existing before that (and wasn't bulldozed).

Re: Cruise's 3rd generation self-driving car

#183
post #72

Whether or not this car drives itself it's still damn ugly. Tesla is going about making electric cars sexy. So you won't find me interested even if it sings too. Never-the-less, for all the folks the that don't mind ugly cars it's good to have competition to gather all the data to prove that driverless cars are safer.

This is more important than one might think. At the end of the day, the mass market does not really care whether a car is gas or electric. The average Joe/Jane just has X dollars budgeted for a car and a mental model of what kind of amenities they ought to be able to get for X dollars. Most of the "mass-market" electric cars I've seen in the $35,000 range (i3, Leaf, Bolt) look like $18,000 subcompacts. They just have…

>the mass market does not really care whether a car is gas or electric

Which is why gov'ts need to ban ICE sooner rather than later, to save summers and stave off species suicide.

Re: Cruise's 3rd generation self-driving car

#184
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no ethical question here. You either see that it's a gnome, or you see that it's a child. Humans may or may not be less situationally aware overall, but we have the gnome question down cold. Cars don't. They see "obstacle in front of bumper radar." The OPs point is well-taken because it illustrates a technical risk that few are discussing: the "last 1%" of self-driving software may be equivalent to solving AG…

>the "last 1%" of self-driving software may be equivalent to solving AGI. Exactly right. You need a semantic world model, reasoning and prediction. AGI bottlenecks self-driving, assistants, text understanding…

I think we are overestimating amount of intelligence we humans need while driving...

Re: Cruise's 3rd generation self-driving car

#185
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The safest thing might be for the car to pull over, put on hazard lights, and tell you to wait or call for assistance. Humans deciding to go continue driving in such conditions is a mistake, leading to more collisions. Perhaps there will be a manual override, like "Unsafe conditions, voice password and waiver required to continue in manual mode; you might die or kill someone else."

Once you get into bad snow conditions pulling over is a really bad option. That said, this is a corner case I care less about than crossing Manhattan in rain at rush hour. Or really lots of tricky busy off-highway situations.

Self-driving car can go slower in those cases. It depends entirely on how beefy its CPU/GPU is to process a lot of sensor data realtime. The more messy situation is, the more time it needs, the slower it needs to drive.

Re: Cruise's 3rd generation self-driving car

#186
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the "last 1%" of self-driving software may be equivalent to solving AGI. Exactly right. You need a semantic world model, reasoning and prediction. AGI bottlenecks self-driving, assistants, text understanding…

I think we are overestimating amount of intelligence we humans need while driving...

The edge cases are unclear: construction zone, heavy equipment, school kids, another car poised to enter the road.

Re: Cruise's 3rd generation self-driving car

#187
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we are overestimating amount of intelligence we humans need while driving...

The edge cases are unclear: construction zone, heavy equipment, school kids, another car poised to enter the road.

They are probabilistically modeled already. You keep tracking other objects and compute various possibilities for their movement and depending on the past and present behavior pick the most probable one. If car encounters lower-than-threshold probability, it can always slow down or stop, like what non-reckless humans would do. Even end-to-end deep learning can recognize construction zones and learn to drive around traffic cones.

Re: Cruise's 3rd generation self-driving car

#188
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Evaluating technical capabilities in autonomy based on youtube demo videos is like evaluating the military potential by watching army parades on holiday. The truth is, none of these companies is any close to full autonomy. Full autonomy _testing_ will begin once they deploy cars without backup drivers, to actually see how bad can things go without watchful human supervision.

Waymo had <100 situations where they required human involvement in tens of million miles they drove so far. They are probably already safer than human drivers and would likely cause fewer accidents. The issue there is a legal one - who is going to be responsible for a crash? The company that produced the driving software/hardware, or the owner of the car? Or even the passengers in case there will be city-wide car poo…

No. They had plenty more. Approximately 100 cases over 600k miles last year (their own data from California) which would have lead to a dangerous situation, and 9 cases which by their own admission would have resulted with a collision. Now it is hard to compare crashes of different magnitude, people often are engaged in fender benders, but only on average after 100 million miles driven there is a fatal accident, who knows how many of these 9 cases would have ended up in a fatality. But nevertheless, this is only 600k miles not 100m. Stop spreading misinformation.

Re: Cruise's 3rd generation self-driving car

#190
post #165
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My feeling is that under special situations 1 degradates to 5, so to have good security anyway you have to solve problem 5.

What are the special situations where 1 gives way to 5? The well-regulated part would imply to me that the possibility of slipping to another situation are eliminated or not allowed.

Blizzard. Heavy rainfall or wind. Sudden crowd / riot / chaotic event.

Pretty sure you can't legislate those out of existence. And sadly I think the fact that these vehicles are being developed and tested in Silicon Valley is either a cause or an symptom of their probably inability to deal with those kinds of conditions.

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