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Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’

nytimes.com

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Re: Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’

#191

Post by mattnewton »

nradov wrote: post #180
pedrocr wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> much less be able to replicate human cognition that goes into operating heavy machinery in a busy multi-agent social context This holds if you expect self-driving cars to be able to work like humans in picking up "body-language" cues around other drivers. But we can also approach the problem the other way around and set better fixed rules for how driving needs to be done and adjust the road and car infrastructure t…

That's a stereotypical engineering solution and fails to account for how humans actually act in the real world. Humans will always break some rules. As a taxpayer I don't think huge infrastructure changes or lots of increased traffic enforcement are a good use of limited public resources.

I can think of far worse uses for that money than trying to make our roads safer. The current system costs us 40k in lives and millions of serious injuries per year - there is a lot of headroom for improvements. https://www.nsc.org/road-safety/safety-topics/fatality-estim...

Re: Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’

#192

Post by notahacker »

HALtheWise wrote: post #166

When read literally, there is no way that any system ever, human or automatic, will be able to drive on "any road" with "perfect safety". Crazy freak accidents happen, and human drivers regularly aren't able to handle them. On top of that, most people just can't safely drive in thick fog, icy conditions, or pouring rain. No amount of intelligence will allow a car to drive through a sufficiently flooded street. Just l…

Faster reaction times are "low-hanging fruit" until the reaction is wrong...

Even taking Alaskan fog banks out of the equation, a machine need to be pretty near AI-complete to not be fatally wrong about how to react more often than every few hundred 100 million miles, which is the human benchmark (including inexperienced, tired, drunk and stupid drivers) if it's driving in normal road conditions without a human failsafe. Or for the road environments to be very different, or for the 360 sensing and autobraking to be primarily driver aids, which are the real low hanging fruit for all that investment in AI processes to understand roads and control vehicles.

Re: Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’

#193

Post by Retric »

nradov wrote: post #180
pedrocr wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> much less be able to replicate human cognition that goes into operating heavy machinery in a busy multi-agent social context This holds if you expect self-driving cars to be able to work like humans in picking up "body-language" cues around other drivers. But we can also approach the problem the other way around and set better fixed rules for how driving needs to be done and adjust the road and car infrastructure t…

That's a stereotypical engineering solution and fails to account for how humans actually act in the real world. Humans will always break some rules. As a taxpayer I don't think huge infrastructure changes or lots of increased traffic enforcement are a good use of limited public resources.

With unspoken assumptions about how much an increase is needed things become arbitrary.

IMO, if allowing self driving cars on highways costs less than 100k per mile it’s a rather trivial expensive at 16 Billion in the US. Extending that to every road would be much harder to justify. Similarly, developing something like a set of more clear hand gestures for directing traffic would not be a major issue.

Honestly, the need for expensive changes seems unlikely, though some changes such as paint choices for lane markings would probably increase safety or efficiency.

Re: Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’

#194

Post by paganel »

leetcrew wrote: post #74
bryanlarsen wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans can't do it. When your stopping distance (including reaction time) exceeds your visibility there's no way to drive safely, but humans do it anyways.

> When your stopping distance (including reaction time) exceeds your visibility there's no way to drive safely, but humans do it anyways. this is bad, but not quite as bad as it sounds. most of the time, you only need to stop as fast as the car in front of you. it's pretty uncommon to encounter a stationary object in the middle of the travel lane. in fact, outside of driving on surface streets in the city, I can't re…

Step outside of the US and Western Europe and things can become quite interesting pretty damn fast, for example I had to avoid cows nonchalantly walking down the road like in this YT video [1] at least once every year for the last 3 or 4 years (mostly when I visit my brother in the countryside). Horse-driven carts are also still a thing in these parts of Europe, and they’re basically stationary objects (fun thing when you end up behind one just before a blind curb, preferably with a lorry driving up just behind you). Just like other people have mentioned in here, driving is a AI-complete problem.

[1] https://youtu.be/9vzV7tY8r54

Re: Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’

#195

Post by leetcrew »

mordymoop wrote: post #116
gamblor956 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A million miles is not a lot. For comparison, the people of LA drove a million miles by 5a this morning. The drivers in SoCal will drive over 100 million miles just today. The fact that many accidents involving human drivers still make the news is telling. It's not commonplace.

This is a weird hill to want to die on. Self-driving is currently statistically safer than human driving. Yes, caveats, for only the domains on which self-driving has been well-trained.

it's my understanding that these cars can only drive without any human intervention in certain, somewhat ideal scenarios. I've never seen a direct comparison to humans driving in the same limited set of conditions. are the AVs still statistically safer in these circumstances?

Re: Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’

#196

Post by joefourier »

michaelt wrote: post #186
suprfnk wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a human can do it, I see no reason why an autonomous system can't, eventually, do it. It might take a very long time, but "never" seems short-sighted.

Imagine you're driving down a street when a kid playing on the sidewalk runs behind a truck and disappears from your view. If the kid appears in the road from behind the truck, the computer can handle slamming on the brakes very easily - probably faster than a human can - without understanding the kid any better than a group of LIDAR points or a rectangle of pixels labelled 'obstacle' by a neural network. But if you…

There's no need for a theory of mind - the self driving car can identify the kid as a pedestrian, recognize that it started moving in a possible collision course, then disappeared, thus prompting either slowing down to a non-fatal speed until the truck has been passed.

Children playing in the street are a common occurrence in residential areas, I see no reason why you would not develop a set of rules and heuristics to handle them. Identifying a pedestrian as child, and knowing whether it is running or playing, is well within the capabilities of modern computer vision.

Re: Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’

#197

Post by ghaff »

untog wrote: post #179
rwmj wrote: post #8

We don't need self-driving cars that can go anywhere (ie. level 5) for them to be widely useful. A car that only worked in bright sunshine on a preprogrammed set of roads would be immediately useful to me.

But it's a far cry from the initial promise. For instance, Uber can't replace their drivers with self-driving cars if they need to bring all their drivers back when it rains.

At that point, autonomous driving is a convenience/safety features for autos/trucks that are more or less as we know them today. You can't build transportation systems and ownership models around vehicles that only work in some places in some conditions. (With some exceptions, but they're relatively narrow.)

Re: Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’

#198

Post by dzader »

gamblor956 wrote: post #104
saiya-jin wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tesla which is run by a delusional snake oil salesman Dude, you may not like Musk personally (which is glaringly obvious), but at least stick to the facts - he triggered much needed car industry transformation more than anybody else in recent times. industry itself wouldn't change itself so rapidly even if planet would be burning, that's obvious. And mankind gravely needs it now. Plus small detail about revolutioni…

Ah yes, because it's not like the Prius demonstrated that there was a market for green car, or the CA or federal green car credits and HOV access provided incentives to people to buy said green cars, or federal regulations regarding fleet emissions standards created the market for trading emissions credits that has singlehandedly kept Tesla afloat everytime it's come closer to running out of money. No, apparently Tes…

correct, thank you for acknowledging that.

Re: Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’

#199

Post by chipotle_coyote »

pedrocr wrote: post #153
compiler-guy wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone should redo the old "Spam Solutions" form except for self-driving cars. Found it: https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt The parent response would have these ideas checked: (X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ... (X) Asshats (X) Jurisdictional problems ... (X) Technically illiterate politicians ... (X) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually

>Someone should redo the old "Spam Solutions" form except for self-driving cars. Automating being dismissive of discussion does sound like a great idea... > Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once It requires setting stricter traffic rules and having them be followed. Something that's done everywhere in the world every year. It can be done as gradually and as locally-specific as needed. > Asshats…

>> Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once

> It requires setting stricter traffic rules and having them be followed. Something that's done everywhere in the world every year.

But you mentioned two somethings: "Setting stricter traffic rules" and "having them be followed." The very first examples in the TFA were from Argo's testing i Pittsburgh:

Recently, one of the company’s cars encountered a bicyclist riding the wrong way down a busy street between other vehicles. Another Argo test car came across a street sweeper that suddenly turned a giant circle in an intersection, touching all four corners and crossing lanes of traffic that had the green light.

Setting stricter traffic rules is certainly done everywhere in the world every year. People failing to follow traffic rules is also done everywhere in the world every day, and that's the big problem. Fully autonomous driving requires the ability to make snap decisions that may have little to no precedence in your past experience. This may be a solvable problem for AI, but it's a really, really hard problem that self-driving aficionados seem to consistently underestimate.

Re: Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’

#200

Post by lazyasciiart »

pedrocr wrote: post #120
60654 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well said. Autonomous navigation is still a huge open research problem, in the sense that we don't even know how it _could_ work, there is no AI work capable of integrating all of the necessary pieces. Heck, we don't even know how simple bird or lizard intelligence works, much less be able to replicate human cognition that goes into operating heavy machinery in a busy multi-agent social context. So promising that it…

> much less be able to replicate human cognition that goes into operating heavy machinery in a busy multi-agent social context This holds if you expect self-driving cars to be able to work like humans in picking up "body-language" cues around other drivers. But we can also approach the problem the other way around and set better fixed rules for how driving needs to be done and adjust the road and car infrastructure t…

We've done that for ages. They're called trains.
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