Live data from Hacker News

The Human Driving Manifesto

thedrive.com

21–30 of 37 posts

Re: The Human Driving Manifesto

#21
post #2

This entire article is clickbait, where the author wants you to believe he is being persecuted or something. > Despite a storm of clickbait media reports, there is still little evidence that self-driving cars are safer than humans. This is the central thesis, but the author made up the idea that we are supposed to already have these cars that are safer than humans. Nobody thinks this. Nobody. These cars will hopefull…

> You still have to stay on the roads and use a seatbelt and use your turn signals 100% of the time, etc. No, you don't. If you're not on a road, there's no need for any of those. You don't even need a license. Should those usecases be taken away? > They would be building self driving cars if they cared about safety. Imagine, for a moment, a car with all of that data that it collects distilled down into a HUD for the…

> No, you don't. If you're not on a road, there's no need for any of those. You don't even need a license.

I've never heard of any of this and I think you must be oversimplifying. You certainly need a driver's license even if you're going to drive on your lawn or in a parking lot or off the road somewhere, surely? I'll go do my research but there's just no way you can drive a car around private property or something without a license.

> Imagine, for a moment, a car with all of that data that it collects distilled down into a HUD for the driver. Can you honestly tell me that it wouldn't be better than the status quo?

I don't know, it sounds worse. HUDs are distracting and I would certainly be a worse driver personally if I had that in my car. I'm not sure that solution is an automatic improvement in safety.

> There will never be a 100% safe automatic pilot - putting off adding safety features to cars today until we get that perfect system is, to me, really quite silly.

Of course we shouldn't put off features for safety! No way should we do that. But if you have $50 billion to spend on the project, then no way should you not try to build a self-driving car with it. Obviously you can get a safer car with that much R&D capability if directed towards autonomy instead of just adding HUDs and better seatbelts or something.

Re: The Human Driving Manifesto

#22
post #2

This entire article is clickbait, where the author wants you to believe he is being persecuted or something. > Despite a storm of clickbait media reports, there is still little evidence that self-driving cars are safer than humans. This is the central thesis, but the author made up the idea that we are supposed to already have these cars that are safer than humans. Nobody thinks this. Nobody. These cars will hopefull…

Sorry, I disagree. If you want to stop 30,000 people from dying on the roads every year, don't allow multi-ton vehicles on the road. If everyone was using motorized bikes, you would have almost no road deaths. Furthermore, people die choking on food every year. Please don't mandate us to use self-chewing teeth.

Yeah, but your chewing doesn't smash into my chewing because your texting.

Re: The Human Driving Manifesto

#23
The thing that scares me about self driving cars is that you won't be able to own one. You will have to buy a "plan"/"subscription" or some such nonsense. Then under the guise of safety they will out-law manual driven cars in order to increase their market share.

Re: The Human Driving Manifesto

#24

"Manifesto" talk aside, this is the same discussion about automation styles: Ironman vs. Ultron. I'm a huge fan of Ironman automation method - augment, not replace the humans - since it takes the boring and error prone parts away, and utilizes humans for the edge cases. There's a lot of potential for huge wins for low costs. And, absolutes aside, that's in line with this article. The alternative Ultron method - take…

Where does the Vision fit into it all?

Probably somewhere around the time we can directly connect our brains to computers, Ghost in the Shell style.

Which, by the way, I'm all for. Keyboards, steering wheels, touch screens... they are all just too limited for proper human-computer interaction.

Re: The Human Driving Manifesto

#25
Ugh, no. Human drivers kill about 1.3 million people per year. Since the second world war, human drivers have killed more people than all wars and genocides put together. This is personal for me: human drivers have murdered far too many of my friends. I can't wait for the world to be rid of them.

Oh, wait, at the bottom of the article, now we're saying that we need an NRA-style lobby for human driving? As in: an ideologically blinkered death cult beholden to narrow corporate interests (in this case, rather than gun manufacturers, car manufacturers dependent on personal ownership of vehicles for their business model) with zero scruples about what sort of body count it facilitates? Is this a parody then?

Re: The Human Driving Manifesto

#26
post #2

This entire article is clickbait, where the author wants you to believe he is being persecuted or something. > Despite a storm of clickbait media reports, there is still little evidence that self-driving cars are safer than humans. This is the central thesis, but the author made up the idea that we are supposed to already have these cars that are safer than humans. Nobody thinks this. Nobody. These cars will hopefull…

> You still have to stay on the roads and use a seatbelt and use your turn signals 100% of the time, etc. No, you don't. If you're not on a road, there's no need for any of those. You don't even need a license. Should those usecases be taken away? > They would be building self driving cars if they cared about safety. Imagine, for a moment, a car with all of that data that it collects distilled down into a HUD for the…

Most people in the self-driving cars world are not talking about "taking away" other use cases for wheeled vehicles. It's a strawman.

Re: The Human Driving Manifesto

#27
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You still have to stay on the roads and use a seatbelt and use your turn signals 100% of the time, etc. No, you don't. If you're not on a road, there's no need for any of those. You don't even need a license. Should those usecases be taken away? > They would be building self driving cars if they cared about safety. Imagine, for a moment, a car with all of that data that it collects distilled down into a HUD for the…

> No, you don't. If you're not on a road, there's no need for any of those. You don't even need a license. I've never heard of any of this and I think you must be oversimplifying. You certainly need a driver's license even if you're going to drive on your lawn or in a parking lot or off the road somewhere, surely? I'll go do my research but there's just no way you can drive a car around private property or something…

> but there's just no way you can drive a car around private property or something without a license.

Yup, sure can. Farmers have been doing this for decades.

> HUDs are distracting and I would certainly be a worse driver personally if I had that in my car.

It's all in the implementation; consider this one: If a car is detected that is at a radically different speed from me, a red box starts to flash around it. I would certainly end up being safer, since it would let me change lanes/slow down long before my eyes and brain could detect such a speed differential. Avoidance becomes a normal maneuver, instead of an emergency maneuver.

> but if you have $50 billion to spend on the project, then no way should you not try to build a self-driving car with it.

What if you can't build a self-driving car with $50 billion? With $1 trillion? Should you just walk away while dusting your hands and going "well, we tried"?

Because that's where we are. The current efforts are still ongoing, and have been for decades. Few improvements from them are being distilled into consumer vehicles; we really need more.

Make people safer now, instead of "5 years from now".

Re: The Human Driving Manifesto

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You still have to stay on the roads and use a seatbelt and use your turn signals 100% of the time, etc. No, you don't. If you're not on a road, there's no need for any of those. You don't even need a license. Should those usecases be taken away? > They would be building self driving cars if they cared about safety. Imagine, for a moment, a car with all of that data that it collects distilled down into a HUD for the…

Most people in the self-driving cars world are not talking about "taking away" other use cases for wheeled vehicles. It's a strawman.

And by saying "most people", you make a weak man argument - since you can sideline and ignore the people who are advocating for taking away manual driving options (ironically a sibling comment).

And the sibling comment is hardly a tiny minority - you can see them popping up all over the place in the comments on such articles, not to mention the Waymos and Ubers of the world.

Re: The Human Driving Manifesto

#29

I doubt such a lobbying effort will be necessary. You can still ride around in a horse-drawn carriage on most public roads. It seems far-fetched to think human-powered driving will be made illegal, it's far more likely that most people will just opt-out of it. I also expect once autonomous vehicles are the majority of cars we'll see stricter enforcement of speeding laws. When everyone is speeding because that's the n…

>also expect once autonomous vehicles are the majority of cars we'll see stricter enforcement of speeding laws. When everyone is speeding because that's the norm, you don't stand out. When every other car is self-driving at the limit and you're going 20 over in your Corvette, you stand out like a sore thumb. The UK already uses average speed cameras. I think the only reason they aren't widespread elsewhere is simply because many people speed.

No, we'll see speed limits that reflect the speeds people actually travel and probably dynamic speed limits based on the 90th percentile rule (or whatever best practice rule we come up with to supersede that) instead of our current system by which speed limits are the max of what the various stakeholders will ok.

AITaxiCo and AIDeliveryCo are going to lobby the living hell out of reasonable (where reasonable is not a circular definition involving the current speed limit) limits because they don't want following the letter of the law to put them at a competitive disadvantage.

Re: The Human Driving Manifesto

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should give it a try - it's a lot of fun. To generalize: your lack of interest in an activity is not a good reason to remove that activity opportunity from everybody. I'm sure you have a lot of freedoms that you don't take advantage of - should they be removed as well?

If I tried it, I wouldn't try it with the same car I drive to work with every day. I'd use a car built to drive over riverbeds. Most people aren't saying that self-driving cars should take over every kind of vehicle with wheels. I think the main purpose is to give commuters and truck drivers another option, not to remove options from people.

> I wouldn't try it with the same car I drive to work with every day.

Most people who do this do indeed use their daily drivers. Most people can't afford to own a second $30,000 vehicle they can take out only on the weekends.

> I think the main purpose is [...] not to remove options from people.

And I quote: "Google had long distinguished itself from other companies for committing to the development of a true robot car without a steering wheel or pedals."

http://www.businessinsider.com/waymo-ceo-john-krafcik-self-d...

Post reply on HN