Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’ • Hacker News Board

Re: Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’

#361

Post by YeGoblynQueenne » Wed, Jul 17, 2019, 9:36 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #352

The state of the art is discouraging for the money and years poured into it. Recognizing solid obstacles is still unreliable. On the one side, there's Tesla running into stationary objects multiple times, and Uber running down a pedestrian. On the other side, there's a false alarm rate which causes sudden stops. Low-speed self-driving vehicles ought to work reliably by now, but don't. Google's cute little bubble car,…

The Uber did recognise Elaine Herzberg as a pedestrian in the last 2 seconds before hitting her, after failing to do so for the 4 previous seconds [1]. It could have activated its breaks and she may have had a chance to survive (though probably not unscathed).

However, the car's auto-breaking decision had been disabled because it was considered too conservative. So the only agent who could have reacted in time was the woman driving the car, who, as we know, was on her phone.

Much as I find the hype around self-driving cars brain-dead, in this case, the car's AI was not at fault. Even if it could have made the decision to stop in time, the agency to act upon this decision was removed from it.

_____________

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg#Cause...

Re: Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’

#362

Post by jonplackett » Wed, Jul 17, 2019, 9:37 PM UTC

The problem is that the mistakes even a much-better-statistically-than-human driverless car will make are going to be different types of mistakes than a human would make.

A driverless car that kills half as many people per mile as normal driver BUT the ones it does kill are in ways that people feel sure that a human driver would not have been killed then it’ll still be a problem.

Re: Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’

#363

Post by seibelj » Wed, Jul 17, 2019, 9:38 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #352

The state of the art is discouraging for the money and years poured into it. Recognizing solid obstacles is still unreliable. On the one side, there's Tesla running into stationary objects multiple times, and Uber running down a pedestrian. On the other side, there's a false alarm rate which causes sudden stops. Low-speed self-driving vehicles ought to work reliably by now, but don't. Google's cute little bubble car,…

It's been the same conversation for 10 years! Here's a comment I made 4 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10133049

It still takes a team of highly paid engineers to build and maintain an authentication page. Seriously - I guarantee you there is a 100+ person team at Google that handles login. Self driving cars are a very, very long way away. The problem space has unquantifiable and insurmountable complexity.

Re: Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’

#364

Post by jakeogh » Wed, Jul 17, 2019, 9:41 PM UTC

pedrocr wrote: post #345

jakeogh wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't asking if the (unmentioned) rule existed, I'm asking how do you propose to enforce it?

By writing tickets to offenders in the cases where an officer witnessed the ofence? I thought that part was implicit. These are not cases where we need more policing or resources. Just rules that have been chosen to not be enforced and a few others that should be written. You don't need a police state to have better rule following. Just actually enforce the rules in the cases you catch and behavior changes much more…

Right. Except we are talking about corner cases where pre-programmed computers on wheels kill people. Merely better rule following does next to nothing, and that's expected. The idea that we can follow rules to make computers on wheels "work" is false, unless one wants to go the China route where near-everything is monitored and punishment is extracted automatically (and even then... it still wont work).

Re: Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’

#365

Post by rurp » Wed, Jul 17, 2019, 9:44 PM UTC

paganel wrote: post #194

leetcrew wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When your stopping distance (including reaction time) exceeds your visibility there's no way to drive safely, but humans do it anyways. this is bad, but not quite as bad as it sounds. most of the time, you only need to stop as fast as the car in front of you. it's pretty uncommon to encounter a stationary object in the middle of the travel lane. in fact, outside of driving on surface streets in the city, I can't re…

Step outside of the US and Western Europe and things can become quite interesting pretty damn fast, for example I had to avoid cows nonchalantly walking down the road like in this YT video [1] at least once every year for the last 3 or 4 years (mostly when I visit my brother in the countryside). Horse-driven carts are also still a thing in these parts of Europe, and they’re basically stationary objects (fun thing whe…

I've had a similar experience driving around rural Mexico. The laws are far more lax and you run into all kinds of unexpected obstacles, but as a whole it actually works out pretty well because people understand and adapt to the situations.

One example is that there are a number of small towns with two way streets that are parked on but only the width of two cars. That creates bottlenecks where cars can only travel in one direction at a time. This might seem like a disaster and it certainly wouldn't work on a busy city street, but in these locations everyone adjusts and when two cars approach a choke point from opposite directions drivers are really good about being cautious and pulling to the side to allow the other party to pass.

There are probably thousands of these local quirks around the world. Handling all of these situations effectively in a fully self-driving car will take an advanced AGI.

Re: Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’

#366

Post by 0xffff2 » Wed, Jul 17, 2019, 9:46 PM UTC

Faark wrote: post #323

treespace8 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this is far out there. But I believe the problem of fully autonomous anything via software is fundamentally impossible. The divide between analog and digital is just too big. Humans are underrated.

> fundamentally impossible You are basically saying AI is fundamentally impossible. Could you explain what kind of magic in humans beside our simulateable physics is fundamentally impossible to imitate? I understand we might be a long way off of understanding how our minds work and there is no guarantee we can massively simplify those processes. But even an inefficient imitation of a human mind as seen in earlier sci…

Rephrasing it as "fundamentally impractical with Silicon transistor-based computers" might make the statement quite a bit easier to defend without substantially changing the meaning. There's no magic in the human brain, but we're nowhere near capable of building one in the lab and certainly not simulating one in a computer. We're so far away from doing either of those things, that we really have no frame of reference to even talk about whether AGI is possible or practical.

Re: Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’

#367

Post by chiefalchemist » Wed, Jul 17, 2019, 9:47 PM UTC

casefields wrote: post #2

Nothing makes a huge group of us cringe more, than people saying it's just around the corner. The worst part is it also comes from people who should know better. >Waymo’s CEO, John Krafcik, has admitted that a self-driving car that can drive in any condition, on any road, without ever needing a human to take control—usually called a “level five” autonomous vehicle—will basically never exist. At the Wall Street Journa…

Perhaps. But how often are such conditions an issue? Heck, humans, if they venture out, don't do well in snow. Accidents also increase in rain.

To move the needle - towards a true tipping point? - autonomous vehicles don't have to be everything to all people all the time. Certainly for a significant number of driver miles it's moderate distances at moderate speeds.

Finally. Something as simple as a vehicle being able to deliver itself (from some central hub) to your door and you drive it (non-autonomously) from there would be significant. That changes the ownership model. It changes parking requirements, etc.

Yeah, the holy grail might be a ways off. But there's plenty of (pardon me) disruption between now and level five.

Re: Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’

#368

Post by mntmoss » Wed, Jul 17, 2019, 9:47 PM UTC

eslaught wrote: post #321

TeMPOraL wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think what needs to happen is that you need programs tailored to specific routes/roads. As you drive any distance, you download/cache the programs for the routes and execute them. Wow. That's so obvious in retrospect. I wonder why I haven't considered it before, nor why I haven't read of it before either. I imagine having stationary "traffic controllers", semi- or completely automated, that keep real-time informa…

Am I the only one who's terrified of the security implications of such a system? You're talking about running (from the car's perspective) untrusted code on a fleet of cars, dynamically and in real time. Even if it's cryptographically signed or whatever, you're one or a handful of exploits away from remote attackers having the capability to crash every autonomous car, simultaneously, at least in a geographical region…

I read the other day about geofencing being used to enforce speed limits for rental ebikes and scooters in some jurisdictions. It's not hard to imagine it progressing from speed limits to top-down traffic control programs. This probably is the future we're hurtling towards, as unprepared as ever.

Re: Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’

#369

Post by leoh » Wed, Jul 17, 2019, 9:58 PM UTC

casefields wrote: post #2

Nothing makes a huge group of us cringe more, than people saying it's just around the corner. The worst part is it also comes from people who should know better. >Waymo’s CEO, John Krafcik, has admitted that a self-driving car that can drive in any condition, on any road, without ever needing a human to take control—usually called a “level five” autonomous vehicle—will basically never exist. At the Wall Street Journa…

>Nothing makes a huge group of us cringe more, than people saying it's just around the corner.

I thought you referencing the media here. Build it up, tear it down. They quoted and amplified so many people who suggested it was possible only to print articles later that point out the it just ain't possible.

Re: Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’

#370

Post by safog » Wed, Jul 17, 2019, 10:08 PM UTC

HALtheWise wrote: post #166

When read literally, there is no way that any system ever, human or automatic, will be able to drive on "any road" with "perfect safety". Crazy freak accidents happen, and human drivers regularly aren't able to handle them. On top of that, most people just can't safely drive in thick fog, icy conditions, or pouring rain. No amount of intelligence will allow a car to drive through a sufficiently flooded street. Just l…

This is the key thing here - Uber for instance doesn't need to solve L5 self driving. They need to figure out what routes are frequent in their network and what routes can be driven by their self driving car and route a ride appropriately.

It will never be Uber flicked a switch and replaced all their human drivers. It will be a very gradual transition over to self driving that may never reach more than 25-30% of all trips.

Is that worth the billions of dollars they're pouring into self driving? https://www.uber.com/newsroom/company-info/ says they complete 14 million trips a day. That is 5.1 billion trips a year (and growing). 10% of that is a 500 million trips a year. Assuming the average trip is 13$, that would be $6.5 billion per year in revenue, I think that's more than enough to turn a significant profit even accounting for R&D, Capital expenses to maintain the fleet etc.

The reason self driving will be a reality is purely economic. Noone's developing it to change the world or reduce the number of people dying in accidents or whatever shpiel they cook up.