Winner-take-all effects in autonomous cars • Hacker News Board

Re: Winner-take-all effects in autonomous cars

#51

Post by sien » Wed, Aug 23, 2017, 6:30 AM UTC

Animats wrote: post #47

sien wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think about these slow electric busses that are all over the world on serious trials with real passengers. For examples: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/18/self-driv... . They have also been used in DC, Vegas, Perth, the Netherlands and other places. It might not be a total replacement for cars but they are self-driving vehicles that are moving passengers now. If I had access to these runn…

There are several of those, none of which seem to be beyond the demo level. Navya is really slow, about walking speed. EasyMile is so slow they have to show sped-up videos. Proterra, which makes electric buses, is just talking about self-driving. Olli, from Local Motors, is starting out at 5MPH and doesn't seem to have any units installed. None of these systems seem capable of an ordinary airport parking shuttle rout…

EasyMile claim 40 km/h on their website, but it doesn't say if they can do this autonomously

http://easymile.com/mobility-solution/

Re: Winner-take-all effects in autonomous cars

#52

Post by nostrademons » Wed, Aug 23, 2017, 6:33 AM UTC

Planet Labs is the big wildcard in mapping. When Google first mapped the world, they had to hire thousands of contractors to drive cars down every street, and even pretty metropolitan areas would be updated once or twice a year. Now, there's a company with a fleet of a couple hundred satellites that's imaging the whole world every day, with a resolution of about 10 feet. Not sure on their pricing - I think it's a lot - but the capital cost of building an accurate physical map has gone down dramatically.

Re: Winner-take-all effects in autonomous cars

#53

Post by 0xbear » Wed, Aug 23, 2017, 6:41 AM UTC

joewadcan wrote: post #19

djyaz1200 wrote: post #7

Autonomous cars are going to kill people, lots of people. They are going to kill passengers, bicyclists, pedestrians etc. It has already happened and will continue. Even though autonomous cars will be (and Tesla argues already are) safer than human drivers the fact that these deaths will be at the hands of machines rather than people will outrage the public. The industry will become even more heavily regulated, and t…

> Autonomous cars are going to kill people, lots of people. They are going to kill passengers, bicyclists, pedestrians etc. It has already happened and will continue. I wouldn't be surprised if Tesla (and other autonomous driving providers) directly offer customers their own insurance and liability coverage. The auto insurance companies of the world see the writing on the wall, yet have no data to accurately model or…

I would be absolutely stunned if they do. They'd be always one software bug away from bankruptcy then.

Re: Winner-take-all effects in autonomous cars

#54

Post by sah2ed » Wed, Aug 23, 2017, 7:14 AM UTC

colejohnson66 wrote: post #45

tomsthumb wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do the cars not communicate their speed, so your car can adjust speed to maintain a safe distance? How do you deal with spoofing info for/from another vehicle? What happens when someone decides to see what happens when they `inter_car_radio.broadcast(myspeed=0)` or `inter_car_radio.broadcast(myspeed=120)` when the speed limit is 80?

The naive solution would be to make it illegal to modify the communication system of your car, but wouldn't just making it illegal to broadcast false data be enough? And then if an accident is caused because of that, you can tack on some other charge like an autonomous version of reckless driving.

A better solution would be to provision each car with its own key pair and the car maker's root CA just before it rolls off the factory floor, that way it can constantly beam 2 signals:

- a signed (regulator-mandated) signal for cars from other manufacturers;

- an encrypted signal intended for cars from the same manufacturer.

The first signal would be signed by the root CA of the car maker to indicate that its communications can be trusted.

The encrypted signal would of course carry an information-rich payload for coordinating a convoy to travel at the same speed, brake, signal a turn, etc simultaneously, for instance.

Re: Winner-take-all effects in autonomous cars

#55

Post by harrygeez » Wed, Aug 23, 2017, 7:35 AM UTC

mabbo wrote: post #29

One way to help prevent a winner-take-all situation is to have more open protocols for some of the hard problems. An example that I feel needs to be done right now: an open protocol for signaling intent. Today we have left and right blinkers, brake lights, the horn, and some 'body' language when you use the whole vehicle to show your intent. But with fully autonomous cars, we could be giving out signals that are rich…

Problem with this is the number of split-second decisions that are made on the road. How can we establish all the connections and pass on all these messages in these 'split-seconds'? Failure to do so can be catastrophic and cause all kinds of confusion.

Re: Winner-take-all effects in autonomous cars

#56

Post by tsomctl » Wed, Aug 23, 2017, 7:53 AM UTC

swiley wrote: post #35

cperciva wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confident that autonomous cars will handle mechanical failures and other "black swan" events far better than human drivers do. Human drivers are unlikely to encounter any such incident more than once, and so are unable to learn from them; but autonomous cars can learn from all of the weird situations encountered by other cars.

But you can read about them and hear from others.

Recovering from a skid is not something you read about. It is an instinctive response that you have to practice to do.

Re: Winner-take-all effects in autonomous cars

#57

Post by icebraining » Wed, Aug 23, 2017, 8:07 AM UTC

mabbo wrote: post #29

One way to help prevent a winner-take-all situation is to have more open protocols for some of the hard problems. An example that I feel needs to be done right now: an open protocol for signaling intent. Today we have left and right blinkers, brake lights, the horn, and some 'body' language when you use the whole vehicle to show your intent. But with fully autonomous cars, we could be giving out signals that are rich…

Work for legally standardizing vehicle-to-vehicle communications has been going on for years, both by the US and the EU: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-vehicle

Re: Winner-take-all effects in autonomous cars

#58

Post by icebraining » Wed, Aug 23, 2017, 8:16 AM UTC

harrygeez wrote: post #55

mabbo wrote: post #29

One way to help prevent a winner-take-all situation is to have more open protocols for some of the hard problems. An example that I feel needs to be done right now: an open protocol for signaling intent. Today we have left and right blinkers, brake lights, the horn, and some 'body' language when you use the whole vehicle to show your intent. But with fully autonomous cars, we could be giving out signals that are rich…

Problem with this is the number of split-second decisions that are made on the road. How can we establish all the connections and pass on all these messages in these 'split-seconds'? Failure to do so can be catastrophic and cause all kinds of confusion.

You can't rely on that, so don't. Self-driving cars should drive defensively too, even if for them that may mean half a second rather than two seconds.

Re: Winner-take-all effects in autonomous cars

#59

Post by dgregd » Wed, Aug 23, 2017, 8:18 AM UTC

So much talk about LIDAR and other sensors. Why nobody talks about obvious idea of Road Object Message Bus? ROMB is a protocol where each road object (a traffic light, a sign, a car, etc.) can transmit info about itself. A car could broadcast its direction vector, intention to turn, any non ROMB moving object it sees. A traffic light could broadcast current state and when it is going to change. That additional information would greatly enhance overall security, especially during rain and snow conditions.

Self-driving is such important (just after eliminating combustion engines) that we could upgrade existing cars with cheap ROMB boxes. Vehicle GPS tracking system costs about $30. ROMB box would cost about $60.

Let's say a car ROMB received info about the white truck, while your car cameras and vision recognition systems see just a cloud and any truck in 50 m range, that conflicting info should cause the car to slow down.

Re: Winner-take-all effects in autonomous cars

#60

Post by icebraining » Wed, Aug 23, 2017, 8:18 AM UTC

0xbear wrote: post #53

joewadcan wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Autonomous cars are going to kill people, lots of people. They are going to kill passengers, bicyclists, pedestrians etc. It has already happened and will continue. I wouldn't be surprised if Tesla (and other autonomous driving providers) directly offer customers their own insurance and liability coverage. The auto insurance companies of the world see the writing on the wall, yet have no data to accurately model or…

I would be absolutely stunned if they do. They'd be always one software bug away from bankruptcy then.

That's what stop-loss insurance is for.