Let’s Talk About Self-Driving Cars • Hacker News Board

Re: Let’s Talk About Self-Driving Cars

#231

Post by sib » Tue, Jan 10, 2017, 9:28 PM UTC

Gargoyle wrote: post #205

rsync wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"For example, nearly 1/3 of fatal collisions in the US involve a driver with a BAC of 0.08 or higher." This is a flawed comparison because failing to update your software or keep your tires inflated or clean off your sensors would also be human decisions that could lead to adverse outcomes with self-driving cars. Non-driving-operation decisions like that are applicable to both regular and self-driving cars.

>This is a flawed comparison because failing to update your software or keep your tires inflated or clean off your sensors would also be human decisions that could lead to adverse outcomes with self-driving cars. It's incredibly simple to remove humans from those decisions. Just have the self-driving code refuse to engage until the issue is resolved.

And then Grandma dies of her heart attack because you can't rush her to the hospital because one tire is 3psi underinflated? Most of these issues aren't binary.

Re: Let’s Talk About Self-Driving Cars

#232

Post by jcranmer » Tue, Jan 10, 2017, 9:28 PM UTC

3chelon wrote: post #129

greedo wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Autonomous vehicles can't rely upon V2V comms. There are far too many ways for such comms to degrade.

This kind of problem has long been solved in the mobile comms world by strong ECC codes and robust modems and channel coding algorithms. We routinely send autonomous vehicles into interplanetary space so I can't see that linking vehicles on a road is going to be a major blocker. Especially if they're on a redundant mesh network, or a smart highway.

Except the cases where you're likely to meet a large vehicle on a one-way road are most likely to be in extreme rural situations, where cell-phone coverage is far from guaranteed.

And if you expect you can force non-connected cars to not exist on rural roads sometime this century, you are delusional.

Re: Let’s Talk About Self-Driving Cars

#233

Post by Tiktaalik » Tue, Jan 10, 2017, 9:29 PM UTC

potatolicious wrote: post #184

Tiktaalik wrote: post #125

No mention of pedestrians, cyclists, or how cars (self driving or otherwise) affect the urban realm. So much of the self driving discussion seems to be wholly about the automobile technology in a bubble, with near zero thought put into the impacts on people, cities and society. The fact that the idea of signal less intersections, a concept that ignores the existence of pedestrians and cyclists entirely, is even a poi…

I agree with your point - though I'd also say that people who actually working in the field generally are considering these sorts of issues and are not blind to them. The "OMG only cars will exist and everything will be amazing because pedestrians are a fictional concept" crowd overwhelmingly seem to be wide-eyed futurists who don't actually have professional first-hand exposure to the field.

There are people that are considering these issues, but I'm a bit concerned that I've only read insightful commentary on this issue from urban planners, which aren't going to be the ones creating self driving vehicles and advancing that tech forward. In contrast on the Silicon Valley side, I am disturbed by how many tweets and breezy blog posts I read from people that don't seem to know what Induced Demand is and don't seem to understand how cities work.

Re: Let’s Talk About Self-Driving Cars

#234

Post by knz » Tue, Jan 10, 2017, 9:30 PM UTC

endentru wrote: post #187

knz wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a false comparison though. 1) Society tolerates a small amount of alcohol for most drivers. 2) Driving while drunk impairs your physical and mental ability to drive safely and only gets worse as you drink more. Obviously a manual driver has slower reaction times than an autonomous system but they are within a level that society tolerates and far better than someone who is drunk. There are also risks with autonom…

> easy to become reliant on the technology and have a serious accident when a sensor fails (particularly for blind spot detection) Recently realized this myself when the blind spot detector light went out in our SUV. It's gotten me thinking about how manufacturers would approach a situation like that without forcing the user to undergo (or more accurately ignore) safety tests like a walk-around prior to driving or so…

The dealer was very specific that they are supplementary sensors.

The only practical solution is probably sensor redundancy. Of course that doesn't mitigate all of the risks.

Re: Let’s Talk About Self-Driving Cars

#235

Post by nradov » Tue, Jan 10, 2017, 9:34 PM UTC

shuntress wrote: post #194

ghaff wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>if the automation can reliably discover when the environment changes. That sounds about right. The ability to read/write/etc. while driving on the highway would actually be a huge win for a lot of people. And, equally important, it seems achievable in, perhaps, a single digit number of years. But there would need to be an unambiguous mode change from "you can do Facebook now" to "you're driving" with plenty of time…

On the highway on-ramp you engage auto pilot. When you are 5,2, and 1/4 mile away from the off ramp you get a warning that auto pilot is preparing to disengage. If you do not accept and manually turn off auto-pilot, it slows down safely to a stop in the break-down lane.

That's exactly how Volvo's Drive Me project is supposed to work.

http://www.volvocars.com/intl/about/our-innovation-brands/in...

Re: Let’s Talk About Self-Driving Cars

#236

Post by knz » Tue, Jan 10, 2017, 9:34 PM UTC

lg wrote: post #109

knz wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a false comparison though. 1) Society tolerates a small amount of alcohol for most drivers. 2) Driving while drunk impairs your physical and mental ability to drive safely and only gets worse as you drink more. Obviously a manual driver has slower reaction times than an autonomous system but they are within a level that society tolerates and far better than someone who is drunk. There are also risks with autonom…

> they are within a level that society tolerates For now, because there are no alternatives so we've all gotten used to ~31,000 annual US motor vehicle deaths. If self-driving tech drastically cuts down on that, society's tolerance will change.

How many of those are attributable to factors that could be mitigated through augmented systems (a cap on how fast a vehicle could travel, collision avoidance systems, HUD's etc) though? Those could probably be implemented much more easily and affordably. To me the appeal of truly autonomous vehicles (in additional to some safety improvements) is being able to reclaim my commute time.

Re: Let’s Talk About Self-Driving Cars

#237

Post by jcranmer » Tue, Jan 10, 2017, 9:35 PM UTC

knz wrote: post #29

lg wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if self-driving cars will be as safe as people say, manual driving should have the same legal status as drunk driving due to the unnecessary danger it creates.

It's a false comparison though. 1) Society tolerates a small amount of alcohol for most drivers. 2) Driving while drunk impairs your physical and mental ability to drive safely and only gets worse as you drink more. Obviously a manual driver has slower reaction times than an autonomous system but they are within a level that society tolerates and far better than someone who is drunk. There are also risks with autonom…

> One of my first thoughts was that it would be easy to become reliant on the technology and have a serious accident when a sensor fails (particularly for blind spot detection).

I fear that we are presently in an unfortunate middle ground where driver-assist functionality is good enough to train most people to pay less attention to the road but not good enough to actually let them pay less attention.

Re: Let’s Talk About Self-Driving Cars

#238

Post by sjwright » Tue, Jan 10, 2017, 9:35 PM UTC

random_upvoter wrote: post #66

aetherson wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you get into a self-driving car that you knew had fewer fatalities per mile than the overall human average, but more fatalities per mile than the average of non-drunk, non-sleepy human drivers below the age of 70 and above the age of 20 with more than 5 years of driving experience? Serious question.

When a piece of software crashes out of its model space, it becomes infinitely stupid. A drunk driver, while impaired, retains a level of understanding of the situation but a program has nothing to fall back on. I suspect that accidents with automated driving, while rare, will tend to be more severe. Think train wrecks.

One hopes the typical self-driving car isn't relying on just one model space in one software process. Surely these systems would have some mechanism for a robust, simple, safety-oriented software process that is continuously running and can take over at any moment, with the singular task of ensuring a safe stop.

It should be continuously preparing and revising a stopping strategy. It should even be able to do this with any half its sensors returning spurious or misleading data. Or even if all sensors are suddenly jammed, it should be able to blindly execute the stopping strategy prepared moments prior.

Re: Let’s Talk About Self-Driving Cars

#239

Post by smogcutter » Tue, Jan 10, 2017, 9:37 PM UTC

Fricken wrote: post #83

valine wrote: post #35

I dislike the idea of transportation as a service. I would much rather own a self driving car and use it as a mobile office. Being able to get work done during my commute would be a major benefit. I imagine having a full size monitor with a nice keyboard and mouse that I would leave in the car. That simply wouldn't be possible with a service like Uber.

I would much rather you didn't place so emphasis on the control premium. The cumulative effect of everybody pursuing their self interest with no regard for the sanctity of our shared spaces has been resoundingly bad. It's the tragedy of the commons in a nutshell. With personal automobiles we've already completely jumped the shark. People travel from all over the world to visit cities like Paris, but I can't think of…

Right, but the catch is the only real way out of the tragedy of the commons is regulation (or perhaps rewarding cooperative behavior in another way, but then you need to be very careful that you're incentivizing the things you actually mean to).

Re: Let’s Talk About Self-Driving Cars

#240

Post by maxerickson » Tue, Jan 10, 2017, 9:42 PM UTC

sib wrote: post #231

Gargoyle wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is a flawed comparison because failing to update your software or keep your tires inflated or clean off your sensors would also be human decisions that could lead to adverse outcomes with self-driving cars. It's incredibly simple to remove humans from those decisions. Just have the self-driving code refuse to engage until the issue is resolved.

And then Grandma dies of her heart attack because you can't rush her to the hospital because one tire is 3psi underinflated? Most of these issues aren't binary.

Call 911.

Calling an ambulance is currently the recommended thing to do in severe medical emergencies anyway.

For other concerns about availability, adjust maintenance inspections and routines as necessary. For example, if you live somewhere there is no ambulance service and someone is of uncertain health, maybe inspect the tires every day (this sounds tedious but look at the alternative you are proposing, having a tire blow out while delivering dying Grandma to the ER).