Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen' • Hacker News Board

Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'

#291

Post by bpye » Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 10:05 PM UTC

tripa wrote: post #276

mavhc wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the point though, the Waymo car doesn't rely on gps, it's has HD maps on board. Plus is has dead reckoning because it's touching the ground, so it knows where it's moving.

Not sure I get your point. Having atom-resolution maps doesn't help a bit it you don't know where on it you are.

I think the idea is that with a good idea of where you're starting, either by GPS or some other waypoints, you can avoid the need for GPS through dead reckoning and updating based on other known features. At least, that's my guess.

Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'

#292

Post by bpye » Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 10:06 PM UTC

rkagerer wrote: post #263

zamfi wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The counter-example to this is train tracks. (There are minimum standards for roads, too.)

Self driving trains would probably be easier. Aren't there already some airport shuttle trains and metro transit that's fully automated? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_train_syst...

SkyTrain in Vancouver, BC for example is fully automated. It works well unless there are issues with track or sensors, at which point it has to be driven manually.

Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'

#293

Post by maxbond » Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 10:07 PM UTC

robbrown451 wrote: post #3

This strikes me as weird: > "This is one of the hardest problems we have. This is like we are going to Mars," Hitzinger said in a comment. "Maybe it will never happen." First of all, it seems obvious that we are going to go to Mars, eventually. Maybe not any time soon, but never? Seriously? But the bigger thing is that there is about 1000 times more economic benefit to self driving cars than of going to Mars, at leas…

I don't mean to be rude, but I have strong feelings about this attitude.

Let's take going to Mars. We can't reliably go to the moon. We can't even go everywhere on the Earth, where we have every possible advantage. Spend a year on the ISS and you'll develop all sorts of health issues. Spending time on Mars isn't likely to be less hazardous. We may send humans to Mars but it is by no means guaranteed. (And I would also ask, what reason do we have to go to Mars? Probes do a better job of exploring, and I doubt we could colonize it.)

Until someone builds a real self-driving car it is just an idea. On today's roads, it is probably not possible to safely implement a fully self driving car. Driving is not only a technical exercise but a social activity that involves communicating your intentions to other humans, and interpreting the intentions of others. That is something that humans do far better than machines. (Edit: To clarify, humans are better at communicating with other humans. Machines do a great job of communicating with each other, but have mixed results communicating with humans.)

If every car was self-driving and the roads were remade from first principles, then sure, that seems feasible. The degenerate case here would be a self-driving train, which seems perfectly reasonable. But the technical challenges are the easy part of that endeavor. Funding such a project, developing the political will to see it through, and organizing the logistics are far more difficult. Consider for instance; what will happen to the legacy vehicles? Will it be illegal to drive them? Will there be a massive government buyback? Who will fund that? Where will the cars go? How will we organize the logistics of moving hundreds of millions of vehicles? How long will that take? What other matters will we need to turn our attention away from to accomplish that task?

A much more likely scenario is that companies continue to come up with partial, ad-hoc solutions, driving gets more automated, ride sharing becomes more popular and car ownership less so, but that humans remain in the loop for the foreseeable future. What happens outside the foreseeable future is something we can't and shouldn't pretend to know with any degree of certainty.

There are a million ways in which we could never go to Mars or build a self-driving car. We could get a better idea for how transit should work, making self driving cars superfluous. We could discover life on Mars, and make the decision that it would be too dangerous for us to visit. The superpowers of the world could go to war with each other, and our infrastructure could be devastated to the point where space travel is impossible. Climate change could drive us to extinction. Something could happen that we cannot predict or imagine, that we have no precedent for, that completely changes our situation and outlook.

Some of these are more likely than others, but the point is that it would be folly to take the future as read. And frankly, a couple of them are more likely than us ever going to Mars.

Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'

#294

Post by dmix » Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 10:08 PM UTC

Sharlin wrote: post #236

rdiddly wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if I told you I could offer you a 99% automated intercity solution? That's right, a solution where 99% of the people involved have no obligation whatsoever to engage with piloting the vehicle... EVER! Where the vehicle just sort of seems to... drive itself? Is this some futuristic sci-fi fantasy? Well hold onto your hat, because the future is NOW! Behold! https://c1.staticflickr.com/8/7177/6894934663_0619c8bea3.…

Yep. Intercity traffic is a problem we solved in the 1800s.

Riding trains is great, getting to the train station(s) in a busy city, worrying about the schedule and being in the right spot for the right train, etc, is not at all fun.

But otherwise agreed a ton of this stuff could be solved with modern trains.

But appeasing all of the special interest groups in between has made infrastructure development impossibly expensive or takes a decade. So we keep driving cars even long distances between cities.

Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'

#295

Post by spookthesunset » Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 10:08 PM UTC

Reason077 wrote: post #253

sverhagen wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To give access to a very lucrative business endeavor? Someone would come up with the investment. We put a nice canape of cell towers too, or wired up every home for internet, after doing it for cable TV, after doing it for electricity. No one really frowns much at those economics anymore (in big parts of the world at least).

Those who think FSD can be solved by building special road infrastructure for self driving cars misunderstand the problem. Cars are already equipped with suites of sensors giving them far more complete information than any human can process. Cars can already react faster and hold lanes with more precision than humans can. What’s lacking is general intelligence. The ability to creatively respond to unexpected situatio…

And those unexpected situations are not edge cases either. Virtually every time you drive you’ll encounter a novel case that has never been seen before. Your human brain is good at improvising. Computers? Not so much...

Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'

#296

Post by mprev » Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 10:08 PM UTC

jakeogh wrote: post #245

A car that has "self" is equiv to a living being, and it wouldn't be ethical to lock it inside a box. It's not going to happen any time soon and it will never happen with conventional binary computing; a non-wetware system capiable of emulating a mouse would melt itself through the road. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22061718 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21250424

Your framing of the issues seems so far removed from the rest of the discussion that I can only assume I’m misunderstanding your point. Could you elaborate?

Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'

#297

Post by kazen44 » Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 10:09 PM UTC

ethbro wrote: post #231

SECProto wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paint is a wear item, the example of beacons would not be a wear item. If original commenter is correct that infrastructure meets halfway, I wouldn't expect self driving cars transition to happen fast at all - maybe on highways first, and busy city streets, later secondary roads. But that kind of thing would result in a decades long transition, and I would estimate it as never being fully autonomous (if beacons die,…

The primary deployment potential for self-driving cars is long haul freight, which could be done exclusively via the interstate system. If we're going to beacon up a road, they easily make the most sense.

this might be true for the US, but in many parts of europe, roads are far more crowded. not to mention this doesn't solve the last mile problem.

Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'

#298

Post by peterwwillis » Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 10:09 PM UTC

Put the cars on rails, focus on the safety and switching systems. We don't need full AI, we just need to not have an individual human be solely responsible for the operation of the vehicle at all times.

Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'

#299

Post by close04 » Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 10:09 PM UTC

AngryData wrote: post #279

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can't even bloody keep the yellow markings on the road visible, and "paint" is a technology we've had for thousands of years. Where in dog's name is the money for installing and maintaining all that smart infrastructure going to come from?

If it is on asphalt roads you can easily embed wires and electronics underneath the surface by heating it up. And an embedded wire would be both easy for a computer to track and easy to fix or replace.

We may actually discover it’s cheaper or smarter to limit the scope of what self driving cars have to do by limiting their infrastructure. If cities become more pedestrian (cyclist, public transport) centric then some of the issues disappear. It would be a hell of a lot easier if you eliminate the complexities of navigating city traffic if most of it is gone or car traffic is completely separated from the rest. Either via a reduced number of tunnels, suspended roadway, or simply by reducing the number of places where cars and pedestrians cross paths.

Between vastly reducing car traffic and separating it from pedestrians the problem of fully self driving is greatly simplified (probably not eliminated).

Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'

#300

Post by frosted-flakes » Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 10:09 PM UTC

rkagerer wrote: post #263

zamfi wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The counter-example to this is train tracks. (There are minimum standards for roads, too.)

Self driving trains would probably be easier. Aren't there already some airport shuttle trains and metro transit that's fully automated? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_train_syst...

Is self-driving the same as fully-automated? I think not.

Self-driving implies intelligence, and fully-automated trains simply follow rote rules, and apply the emergency brakes if something unexpected happens. Not intelligent.

Put another way, self-driving has unbounded complexity, while a fixed number of vehicles on a protected, grade-separated railway is not very complex at all.