Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected • Hacker News Board

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

#241

Post by TomMarius » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 12:05 PM UTC

__m wrote: post #232

mikepurvis wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wear a helmet cam, and yes, as an individual it's basically impossible to get traction, even when you have a clear plate and face shot. But when the self-driving car company has thousands or millions of these incidents on record, they'll quickly find themselves wielding enormous power. They'll be able to correlate across time and space, similar to how phones running Google Maps are reporting their position and velo…

Why would they do that? That footage might include their own customers.

They would simply report their customers just as well. Covering them up is a liability, they would probably have another way to tell anyways. I got an automated parking fine from a shared car a few weeks ago - it's real.

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

#242

Post by ghaff » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 12:52 PM UTC

AlotOfReading wrote: post #231

ghaff wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that part of it is that a lot of people in the tech and tech journalism space live in and around cities. Many of them are mostly focused on being driven around and not owning a car. Long highway drives may be something they don't do that often. So the ability to own a car that can automate that subset of their driving probably doesn't strike them as all that interesting. Personally, as I've said elsewhere,…

It's way more difficult from a fleet operational perspective and more importantly, way less profitable. Take LA SF as an example. That's about 6h driving, and buses do it for $25-50. That's a measly 7-14 cents per minute. Once you've made the trip, the company has to find someone going the other way. If there's any directional or temporal imbalance, the fleet ends up with a lot of cars sitting idle or driving hours t…

I'm assuming individuals still own cars with autonomous features (or rent them like they do today). Which is sort of my point. This capability doesn't really help those who want (or need) to be driven everywhere. It's a convenience (and safety) feature for car owners. It would be a very nice one. But it doesn't really help eliminate car ownership or the need to drive.

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

#243

Post by Piskvorrr » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 1:17 PM UTC

Qwertious wrote: post #240

Piskvorrr wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am not, but your point has merit, if you mean a networked system without physical rails. As a drop-in replacement - I don't see how a human vs. robot driver, on the same vehicle footprint, helps congestion.

Imagine 10 cars all in a line. Each car can only see the car in front of it, and has a delay of 3 seconds between seeing the car in front of it move and accelerating. Given these numbers, we would expect car #10 to have to wait 30 seconds or so before they start moving. As congestion is a feedback loop (lack of car movement results in other cars being unable to move), self-driving cars with a coordination mechanism a…

Ignoring control issues, this assumes infinite space at destination: you are still blanketing the road with cars, just in a coordinated manner.

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

#244

Post by SilasX » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 1:47 PM UTC

perl4ever wrote: post #214

SilasX wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

If you’re going to insist on proper jargon, you might want to refresh first. Comparative advantage [1] in X means you suffer a lower opportunity cost (forgone profit from what you could have done) to produce X than others.

A canonical example would be the doctor who is a better secretary than their secretary (produces more value per hour, looking only at secretarial value). The secretary still has a comparative advantage in secretarial labor because they forgo $0 of doctor income to work that job, while the doctor would forgo $100/hour they could be earning as a doctor in order to work as a secretary.

This is true even though the doctor has an absolute (or competitive) advantage in secretarial work.

The real test for whether something is financially optimal is if you have a comparative, not absolute advantage.

Uber not having a competitive/absolute advantage in SDCs would also be a reason not to do it, because of the details of this case, but comparative advantage is correct as well, though perhaps an unnecessarily strong criterion for the point I needed to make.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage

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

#245

Post by KaoruAoiShiho » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 1:56 PM UTC

Mattasher wrote: post #4

You have to wonder, when you see these stories, whether the engineers in charge of these programs spent much time driving around, trying to see the road like an AI might. In my experience, driving in the city, it's rare that I can go more than a few miles before some exception comes up that requires human judgment. Here's a few of the things I saw just last week: * Car double parked. Do I cross the center line to go…

I think you can reasonably expect a FSD to perform on the level of a human. Asking it to go above and beyond that is too much. When it comes to situations that give humans trouble you would rely on the same extra tools and processes that humans use.

* Car double parked. Do I cross the center line to go around them?

* Semi with its hazards on in a left turn lane. Do I make a left turn around it?

You would err on the side of caution, but ultimately you would go with the help of 5G remote assistance so that the passenger can stay napping.

* Stop sign that's been bent and it's no longer obvious which street it refers to.

How would humans handle this? They would rely on previous knowledge of the area, aka maps could help.

* Cop directing traffic by hand at an intersection.

Not challenging at all imo, this should be trainable.

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

#246

Post by frosted-flakes » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 2:03 PM UTC

msoad wrote: post #100

The more self driving advances in lab, the more safety features for regular cars are invented which in turn makes it harder for fully self driving systems to computer with human+safety features and justify their value...

That's an excellent point. Why hand over complete control to a computer when we can have both? Each has different strengths, so an almost-SDC with a human at the wheel will surely be better than a true SDC. I think that's a much more likely future.

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

#247

Post by setr » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 2:51 PM UTC

mLuby wrote: post #205

lacker wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it became clear that Uber's strategy (under Kalanick anyway) was premised on replacing drivers with AIs before the cash ran out This is kind of nitpicking, but this has always been a backup plan at best for Uber. Look at their expenditures and it is clear that their strategy has never been "all in" on self-driving. Their main plan was and basically still is a combination of driving competitors out of the market, incr…

> driving competitors out of the market,… raising prices, and lowering payments to drivers So, textbook monopoly behavior.

Afaict, that's just textbook corporate behavior. It only becomes monopoly behavior if they succeed in driving every competitor out of the market

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

#248

Post by gvhst » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 2:58 PM UTC

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…

Aggressive driving will be captured and recorded by multiple cameras (potentially by multiple vehicles), making most court cases open-and-shut. I think that serves to put the fear in people.

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

#249

Post by beamatronic » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 3:25 PM UTC

lacker wrote: post #138

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…

it became clear that Uber's strategy (under Kalanick anyway) was premised on replacing drivers with AIs before the cash ran out This is kind of nitpicking, but this has always been a backup plan at best for Uber. Look at their expenditures and it is clear that their strategy has never been "all in" on self-driving. Their main plan was and basically still is a combination of driving competitors out of the market, incr…

Those at the top, early, get rich either way.

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

#250

Post by vgaldikas » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 4:20 PM UTC

>One study attempting to estimate the effects of self-driving cars on car use behavior simulated a family having a self-driving car by paying for them to have a chauffeur for a week, and telling them to treat the chauffeur service the way they’d treat having a car that could drive itself.

>The result? They went on a lot more car trips.

That's kind of pointless 'study'. Of course I will take a lot more trips for some time after getting chaffeur/self driving car, just for the novelty of it. One family for one week does not really tell anything