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An autonomous car in SF blocked a fire truck responding to an emergency

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Re: An autonomous car in SF blocked a fire truck responding to an emergency

#201

Post by Volundr »

tadfisher wrote: post #74
Volundr wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Personal opinion here, but I think defaulting to "stop and contact support staff" is as good of a "fix" as we will have for a long time. I both agree, and see this as yet another reason driverless cars are on the road WAY too early.

Then there will never be driverless cars on the road, because that's kind of a requirement to gather knowledge to build capable driverless vehicles.

This outcome is acceptable to me, though I doubt the assertion. I don't think we are good enough at AI yet to put cars on the road with any amount of data. When we are I think we'll be capable of training them without having to put vehicles with dangerous behaviors on the road to gather data.

Re: An autonomous car in SF blocked a fire truck responding to an emergency

#202

Post by Volundr »

sroussey wrote: post #78
Volundr wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Personal opinion here, but I think defaulting to "stop and contact support staff" is as good of a "fix" as we will have for a long time. I both agree, and see this as yet another reason driverless cars are on the road WAY too early.

I mean, not backing up into cross traffic at the intersection is also a good thing. I’ve seen accidents where cars got out of the way of an emergency vehicle only to crash into another.

Sure, but did this car have traffic or an intersection behind it? If so it's a non-story. Given the double parked garbage truck I think it's safe to say they weren't near an intersection, so cross traffic is unlikely. The car should have been able to look behind it, see the clear path, and move out of the way. Heck the whole supposed advantage of self-driving is it can watch in all directions at once.

Re: An autonomous car in SF blocked a fire truck responding to an emergency

#203

Post by calciphus »

rimunroe wrote: post #190
krisoft wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> for example, swerving into an unmanned fruit stand without being able to brake is much better than swerving into an unmanned gas pump. This is just ridiculous. If you believe that humans are making rational decisions in split seconds then you are delusional. A swerving, breakless human driven car will hit whatever happens to be where physics takes it. The scared monkey descendant holding on to the controls will as…

> If you believe that humans are making rational decisions in split seconds then you are delusional. A swerving, breakless human driven car will hit whatever happens to be where physics takes it. I was in a car accident a few years ago where someone left a stop sign without realizing that there was traffic (me) in a lane they couldn't see. I wouldn't describe having felt like time slowed down, but that isn't an absur…

Some really fascinating studies have shown that your perception of time doesn't actually slow down in moments of heightened intensity, however the detail of the memory (when reflected on later) is higher than for a non-traumatic experience.

An interesting summary of how they studied this if you're curious:

https://www.livescience.com/2117-time-slow-emergencies.html

Re: An autonomous car in SF blocked a fire truck responding to an emergency

#204

Post by sokoloff »

rglullis wrote: post #198
sokoloff wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that’s what the people who live in an area want, that’s a democratic outcome. Democratic outcomes are something that I’m inclined to support absent compelling evidence why they should be thrown out.

Except it is not what people want: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6... and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajSEIdjkU8E should help you in understanding what is the problem with current zoning laws on the US

If a majority of people want something else, it seems like there’s a straightforward path for them to take. Do you see it differently?

Re: An autonomous car in SF blocked a fire truck responding to an emergency

#205

Post by mbreese »

mr_toad wrote: post #186
anyfoo wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that there are literally uncountably many situations that a human with "general intelligence" will understand and react to accordingly. Sometimes smoothly, sometimes less so. But a non-conscious automatic entity needs to have the required behavior programmed in explicitly. So yes, you might argue that for this particular situation, you "just" need to put in the proper programming and AI/ML training and…

> But it does not change that the autonomous machine does not understand the complex world it is driving in in the slightest It only needs to understand when to ask for help: the driverless car had correctly yielded to the oncoming fire truck in the opposing lane and contacted the company’s remote assistance workers, who are able to operate vehicles in trouble from afar. According to Cruise, which collects camera and…

> It only needs

This phrase is doing a lot of work here. It's one of my least favorite phrases (in a close race with "just do this") and is often associated with unrealistic feature requests.

I'm sure there is a disagreement between SFFD and Cruise as to exactly what happened, but the article implies that the Cruise vehicle isn't the one that moved to fix the problem.

> The fire truck only passed the blockage when the garbage truck driver ran from their work to move their vehicle.

Even if the Cruise vehicle was able to call for help, the car not only needs to call for help, but also wait for a response (at 4am), and give a remote human enough information to control a car remotely in a safe manner. None of these things are easy... not impossible, but not "only needs" easy.

> driverless cars need to deal with every one in a million scenario

Of course driverless cars need to deal with one in a million scenarios. Human drivers deal with one in a million scenarios every day. Nothing is ever the same when driving, so there are always subtle changes. But even if there is an unusual situation, there must be some kind of response. Even if that response is to move to the side of the road and put on hazard lights to indicate that it doesn't know what to do (which it may have done)... that would have been a better response than to do nothing and sit to wait for a human. There should be a default "unknown input" failure mode. The disagreement here is that SFFD didn't like how the Cruise vehicle failed. Maybe there is a better approach.

We are expecting these vehicles to move us around 24/7. That's a lot of trips. At this rate, one in a million scenarios will happen every day. That's the problem with large numbers -- even rare events are to be expected when N is high enough.

Re: An autonomous car in SF blocked a fire truck responding to an emergency

#206

Post by rglullis »

sokoloff wrote: post #204
rglullis wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except it is not what people want: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6... and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajSEIdjkU8E should help you in understanding what is the problem with current zoning laws on the US

If a majority of people want something else, it seems like there’s a straightforward path for them to take. Do you see it differently?

Was the majority of people that pushed for zoning laws that discriminated against minorities (it's mentioned in the videos if you don't know what I am talking about), or was it a systemic issue that needs to be corrected?

Do watch the videos, especially the "Strong Towns" series about the issue of how the rich suburbs are actually subsidized by poorer people living in bankrupt city centers. The only "straightforward" path for this to change is by getting younger people to participate a lot more on town hall meetings and to get their city councils on board with change. The status quo benefits and has no interest in doing that.

Re: An autonomous car in SF blocked a fire truck responding to an emergency

#207

Post by syntheweave »

rglullis wrote: post #199
aetherson wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I have a few responses: 1. If fully self-driving cars come along at some point in the recognizable future, I would bet pretty large amounts of money that they'll be extremely popular in Europe or whatever else you're thinking of as not "car-dependent." 2. The amount of money, time, and intellectual capital put into building driverless cars is an infinitesimal drop in the bucket compared to the money, time, an…

1. "Extremely popular" compared to what ? Non-autonomous cars? Taxis? Bikes? Buses? Trains? Yeah, I could see people thinking it would be cool to get a self-driving car as a replacement for the occasional taxi, but why would people stop using the existing public transit alternatives that already work ? 2 and 3. The American way for city growth is the cause of financial troubles for most cities. And I cited Amsterdam…

There is no world in which robotaxis exist that would inhibit robobuses and robobikes from also existing and being integrated into one coherent transportation network. The existing toolkit of pricing controls makes it easy to pull a lever to get more people onto the smaller or shared vehicles as needed, and with roughly linear ability to expand the fleet in any of these axes, the roads they're running on already built and paid for, and the cost of deployment rapidly dropping, nothing will stop them from taking over in a span of 5-10 years.

It'll be the biggest boon to urban transit we've ever seen, because what self-driving actually does is make modality, routing and scheduling less important to individual trip planning.

Re: An autonomous car in SF blocked a fire truck responding to an emergency

#208

Post by aetherson »

rglullis wrote: post #199
aetherson wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I have a few responses: 1. If fully self-driving cars come along at some point in the recognizable future, I would bet pretty large amounts of money that they'll be extremely popular in Europe or whatever else you're thinking of as not "car-dependent." 2. The amount of money, time, and intellectual capital put into building driverless cars is an infinitesimal drop in the bucket compared to the money, time, an…

1. "Extremely popular" compared to what ? Non-autonomous cars? Taxis? Bikes? Buses? Trains? Yeah, I could see people thinking it would be cool to get a self-driving car as a replacement for the occasional taxi, but why would people stop using the existing public transit alternatives that already work ? 2 and 3. The American way for city growth is the cause of financial troubles for most cities. And I cited Amsterdam…

1. You seem to think that driverless cars are unimportant for places like Europe. I think you're deeply wrong. If cars that can equal or exceed the performance of median humans come to the market without adding more than a few tens of thousands of dollars to the cost of the vehicle, I expect that they will rapidly become more popular than current automobiles in Europe (and Europe is far from car-averse -- the Netherlands has about one car per two people), and that they will on the margin significantly (but not catastrophically) reduce usage of public transport. (EDIT: If the pattern of driverless cars is dominantly one of rides-for-hire rather than ownership, the total unit sales of driverless cars might be significantly lower than current unit sales of normal cars, but I would expect driverless cars to rapidly eat most of the passenger-miles of automobiles plus a significant share of the passenger-miles of public transit).

2 and 3: You didn't even remotely address anything I said.

Re: An autonomous car in SF blocked a fire truck responding to an emergency

#209

Post by rglullis »

syntheweave wrote: post #207
rglullis wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. "Extremely popular" compared to what ? Non-autonomous cars? Taxis? Bikes? Buses? Trains? Yeah, I could see people thinking it would be cool to get a self-driving car as a replacement for the occasional taxi, but why would people stop using the existing public transit alternatives that already work ? 2 and 3. The American way for city growth is the cause of financial troubles for most cities. And I cited Amsterdam…

There is no world in which robotaxis exist that would inhibit robobuses and robobikes from also existing and being integrated into one coherent transportation network. The existing toolkit of pricing controls makes it easy to pull a lever to get more people onto the smaller or shared vehicles as needed, and with roughly linear ability to expand the fleet in any of these axes, the roads they're running on already buil…

> the roads they're running on already built and paid for

Roads still require maintenance, and without a profound change in how cities are organized, these costs are always going to be overwhelmingly large compared with the cost of everything else.

> self-driving actually does is make modality, routing and scheduling less important to individual trip planning.

That is the worst type of optimization. It still keeps people in desolate suburbia and makes millions of people across America with the sensation that "commute time" is a constant that can not be avoided, so it should be at least made comfortable.

Investing to make the transportation systems smarter without even looking at how the urban spaces could be changed to get rid of cars is like the (myth) story of NASA putting millions of dollars to make a space pen, instead of using a pencil.

Re: An autonomous car in SF blocked a fire truck responding to an emergency

#210

Post by rglullis »

aetherson wrote: post #208
rglullis wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. "Extremely popular" compared to what ? Non-autonomous cars? Taxis? Bikes? Buses? Trains? Yeah, I could see people thinking it would be cool to get a self-driving car as a replacement for the occasional taxi, but why would people stop using the existing public transit alternatives that already work ? 2 and 3. The American way for city growth is the cause of financial troubles for most cities. And I cited Amsterdam…

1. You seem to think that driverless cars are unimportant for places like Europe. I think you're deeply wrong. If cars that can equal or exceed the performance of median humans come to the market without adding more than a few tens of thousands of dollars to the cost of the vehicle, I expect that they will rapidly become more popular than current automobiles in Europe (and Europe is far from car-averse -- the Netherl…

> The Netherlands has about one car per two people

That is not the relevant metric. The important metric is how many trips does the average dutch take by car that could be taken by some more efficient mode?

Lots of people in European cities have cars but use them only on the weekend. Or they use the car to go to work on the outskirts of the city, but manage to use public transportation when going to a football match for a night out. Lots of families have only one car when in the US it would be only possible to live if each adult had their own car, etc.

> You didn't even remotely address anything I said.

You are right, I didn't. Because to me holding self-driving cars as the panacea that is going to solve the issues in the US is ridiculously naive. It is an illusion created by the corporations that are not interested in actually solving the problem and just want to push out more cars, keep people addicted to broken lifestyles and over-consumption. And is backed by short-sighted technologists that see the world through their nerd lenses and don't stop to think if there are better, lower-tech ways to improve everyone's lives.

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