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Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

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Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

#211

Post by perl4ever »

catalogia wrote: post #208
mullingitover wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, I have never been surprised by overly cautious drivers, only drivers who have an excess of confidence. How do you define 'excess caution'?

As a frequent pedestrian in Seattle, overly cautious/"courteous" drivers are a big nuance. Particularly drivers who are over-eager to stop at crosswalks, sometimes parking in the middle of the intersection to wait for the cross walk on the other side. Some drivers around here have a habit of stopping prematurely too, waiting for me to cross before I've even gotten to the intersection. Sometimes it gets truly absurd.…

In some states, you can and will be ticketed if you don't stop whenever someone steps off the curb. I seem to remember hearing or reading that is the case in Massachusetts, so you may see drivers from out of state being very cautious even elsewhere.

Also, the other day, I was making a left from a one-way street, from the left side of it, and someone tried to drive around me on the shoulder to the left, because they were unaware I was waiting for a jogger pushing a stroller to cross in front of me.

Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

#212

Post by salawat »

nomel wrote: post #174
salawat wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah. You need to have an ALRU and vehicle to vehicle comm net whereby all the self-driving AI's distribute amongst themselves information on jerk behavior so the entire macropopulation of AI cars can wolfpack these drivers. Now please laugh, put down the phone and don't even think about implementing this. It's a terrible idea.

I assume, by then, you'll see massive insurance discounts if you provide the feeds to your insurance company. They'll use these feeds to evaluate your risk and the risk of every car around you. Cars, especially those with manual drivers, who are seen causing unsafe conditions will receive an eventual, or maybe immediate, notice: "Your premium has been increased for aggressive driving".

See, I come up with a tongue-in-cheek idea that with a creative could make for a great set of movies.

HighwAI or HAIghway or AI-95 or Night on the Interstate where the plucky action hero has to save the day with the help of an old car, a grizzled mechanic, and his sweetheart from a malignant swarm of AI controlled cars that have terrorized and paralyzed the country by killing any humans they sense near the roadway. Or a small town is terrorized by a swarm of autonomous vehicles that lurk the stretch of highway between them and the next town, and some disaster necessitates a massive human piloted convoy protected by the town sheriff and traffic cops as best they can until they can eventually make their way to a rendezvous with the State Patrol. Or teenagers having to avoid a gruesome death at the whims of autonomous vehicles on the way to Grandma's house.

Then you all have to bring insurance into it.

Seriously HN. Keep this up, and I don't think we can be friends anymore.

Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

#213

Post by fingerlocks »

catalogia wrote: post #208
mullingitover wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, I have never been surprised by overly cautious drivers, only drivers who have an excess of confidence. How do you define 'excess caution'?

As a frequent pedestrian in Seattle, overly cautious/"courteous" drivers are a big nuance. Particularly drivers who are over-eager to stop at crosswalks, sometimes parking in the middle of the intersection to wait for the cross walk on the other side. Some drivers around here have a habit of stopping prematurely too, waiting for me to cross before I've even gotten to the intersection. Sometimes it gets truly absurd.…

In Seattle all unmarked intersections are considered pedestrian right-of-ways, by law. There have been campaigns to promote this. Ten to twenty years ago it was not uncommon for pedestrians to throw tantrums and shame drivers for not stopping them, usually in Fremont and Capitol Hill. That may explain some of the behavior; possibly the drivers you encountered were native Seattlites with intersection PTSD.

But I generally agree with you. it’s a often egregious and can be extremely dangerous for both the pedestrian and other vehicles when a lone driver stops unexpectedly on a >2 lane road.

Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

#214

Post by perl4ever »

SilasX wrote: post #108
cletus wrote: post #33

Alternate headline: Some people overstated how simple this problem was because they didn't know what they were talking about, could promote themselves as experts, could get funding for a self-driving startup or some combination of the above. I guess that isn't as pithy but it's closer to the truth. When it became clear that Uber's strategy (under Kalanick anyway) was premised on replacing drivers with AIs before the…

>When it became clear that Uber's strategy (under Kalanick anyway) was premised on replacing drivers with AIs before the cash ran out I couldn't see general self-driving vehicles coming within 20 years. I still say that's true. Even so, this never made sense as a business strategy , unless Uber somehow has a comparative advantage in achieving self-driving cars and then can get a long monopoly on them. If they don't -…

I think you mean competitive advantage, not comparative.

I got a D in my only economics class, but I think that I've seen comparative advantage used to mean that "X is better at doing Y than doing Z", whereas competitive advantage is "X is better at doing Y than Z is at doing Y".

If you're not using it as jargon, then the fact that it is jargon might be confusing.

Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

#215

Post by Piskvorrr »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #196
Piskvorrr wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. It's been juuust beyond reach, but within five years to mass adoption, for a century now.

I don’t think anyone was hyping self driving cars in the 1920s. If they were, they already had horses that could do that anyways.

Nope. Horses obsolete, slow, hungry, disobedient. Future was in machines.

https://io9.gizmodo.com/when-people-in-the-1920s-and-1930s-i...

Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

#216

Post by perl4ever »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #76
cletus wrote: post #33

Alternate headline: Some people overstated how simple this problem was because they didn't know what they were talking about, could promote themselves as experts, could get funding for a self-driving startup or some combination of the above. I guess that isn't as pithy but it's closer to the truth. When it became clear that Uber's strategy (under Kalanick anyway) was premised on replacing drivers with AIs before the…

As usual the article conflates the (very difficult problem) of self-driving everywhere with various other sub-problems. The self-driving problem on highways is much more solvable, and can further be improved by convergent infrastructure evolution (forewarning of traffic jams from central control, embedded rfid to aid pathfinding in bad weather, weather reports, wildlife nets/barriers, highly standardized signage, int…

"I don't really care if my trip to Taco bell is automated."

Well, it would probably be a significant benefit to someone who is blind to be able to commute to work by themselves.

Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

#217

Post by catalogia »

Piskvorrr wrote: post #149
andrei_says_ wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This one? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GarvfAPSWwo ...How do you write the code for "Always stop at a red light unless you see a police officer waving you through?"

There's a standardized way for an officer to do this...alas, it will likely vary between states, and half of the officers will use some ad-hoc method anyway. A civilian trying to direct traffic around their broken down car...now that would be harder.

> and half of the officers will use some ad-hoc method anyway.

A quick tilt/shake of the head is one I've seen often. Easy enough for humans to read that sort of body language, but probably a harder problem for computers.

Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

#218

Post by perl4ever »

bdamm wrote: post #145
yread wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm amazed by people like you. You're a programmer, you know how your code looks like. Worse still, you have seen other people's code, how they fail to account for corner cases, you've seen so many articles on HN's front page about security bugs found by fuzzing. Yet, you trust your LIFE to "heuristics"? Do you really trust that when the proverbial black swan flies in front of your car the software won't swerve you i…

The "collision imminent" scenario would occur whether or not the car is in self-driving. If the car manages to avoid a collision that is the amazing part to me. And there's plenty of evidence that the Teslas do, in fact, avoid quite a lot of collisions. It would be foolish, however, to drive like it's going to resolve all your collisions for you. I view these as assistance to driving. It's a comfort that the steering…

If the car avoids 99% of crashes, but crashes happen 1% of the time, and it causes crashes 1% of the time, then it's making you less safe.

Those are just arbitrary numbers and a simplistic framework, but the point is, you can have a huge increase in safety by the numbers, and a very small increase in problems due to the safety system that cancel it out, because the prior underlying rate of crashes was pretty small.

I think this is an abstract pattern that comes up in other contexts and it doesn't seem to be intuitive.

Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

#219

Post by Johnny555 »

hindsightbias wrote: post #146
cletus wrote: post #33

Alternate headline: Some people overstated how simple this problem was because they didn't know what they were talking about, could promote themselves as experts, could get funding for a self-driving startup or some combination of the above. I guess that isn't as pithy but it's closer to the truth. When it became clear that Uber's strategy (under Kalanick anyway) was premised on replacing drivers with AIs before the…

Troll driving. Imagine testing/probing AI cars with the intent of getting them into an accident with you so you can sue for uber-millions and AI hysteria social media points.

Self driving cars tend to have enough cameras that it might be hard to do that without it being caught on camera.

Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

#220

Post by mdonahoe »

fnord77 wrote: post #206

near human levels of AGI will be needed to achieve Level 5 AVs- change my mind.

It depends on your definition of vehicle.

I bet we see a few Level 5 flying cars before we see Level 5 ground vehicles. Roads are more complicated than the airspace.

Flying cars are unlikely to be as mainstream as cars due to energy requirements though.

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