Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020. • Hacker News Board

Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.

#51

Post by jerf » Tue, Aug 27, 2013, 7:19 PM UTC

stevewilhelm wrote: post #12

wayne_h wrote: post #2

Meanwhile... California is trying to build a 100 billion dollar bullet-train boondogle that will be ready in 20 years. By that point our efficient electric cars will be able to link together in high speed freeway 'trains'. What if that money was invested in developing the autonomous cars? The public thinks everyone else is going to ride the train and free the highway up for them... what a waste.

People fail to realize that the California bullet-train project is primarily an economic stimulus exercise.

No sale. Economic stimulus is completely nonfunctional when the lead time is in the "many years". The term "shovel-ready" was thrown around a couple of years ago for a reason.

Of course, I suppose you could just hope that you start planning for the project in this downturn, but it'll only start in the next one....

Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.

#52

Post by sp332 » Tue, Aug 27, 2013, 7:21 PM UTC

ebbv wrote: post #18

jjcm wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I politely disagree. Having driven next to self-driving cars for the past few years in the bay area, in my opinion they are far more competent than most drivers. They don't stop tracking the road to put on makeup or check their phone. They don't get distracted by the kids in the back seat. They have their sensors on the road constantly, and not just in front of them. They don't have blind spots. Will bugs happen even…

I don't think you read what I wrote. I said people are terrible drivers. I think likely a fleet of all automated cars will be safer than a fleet of human drivers. The problem comes in the interaction between automated drivers and human drivers. Among other things.

I still don't get it. Maybe a computer could react to an erratic human driver faster. But more importantly, it can react more consistently than a human driver who gets tired or distracted (or confused by other humans' behavior).

Edit: To put it another way, a computer that avoids common-case crash scenarios most of the time outweighs humans avoiding edge-case scenarios sometimes.

Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.

#53

Post by heurist » Tue, Aug 27, 2013, 7:22 PM UTC

corin_ wrote: post #30

ebbv wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you were to replace every human driven car on the road with only autonomous cars, I will agree with you that the accident rate would likely be much lower over all. But there's two problems here: 1) We won't be replacing all the cars overnight. The problem comes with the interaction between terrible human drivers doing wildly unpredictable, insane things and the inflexible, unadaptable automated cars. And 2) I'm no…

> I'm not comfortable with dying or being injured due to a software error regardless of whether its likelihood is higher or lower. Why on earth is dying due to a software error worse than dying due to a human error if you can chose one or the other, and the chance of a software error is lower?

Individual odds of being in an accident may be lower than the average. Software for all of the cars would be approximately the same, so the chances of being in an accident could increase for extremely cautious drivers. I doubt they would, personally, but it would be an argument against adoption until the cars are demonstrably safer than possible with human drivers.

Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.

#54

Post by melling » Tue, Aug 27, 2013, 7:22 PM UTC

wayne_h wrote: post #2

Meanwhile... California is trying to build a 100 billion dollar bullet-train boondogle that will be ready in 20 years. By that point our efficient electric cars will be able to link together in high speed freeway 'trains'. What if that money was invested in developing the autonomous cars? The public thinks everyone else is going to ride the train and free the highway up for them... what a waste.

It costs so much money because the land is so expensive. The land is so expensive because 40 years ago many people like yourself said bullet trains won't work in America.

Is it really that hard to be convinced that traveling 220mph on a train between cities 200-500 miles apart is a good thing?

California isn't getting the ideal system now but if it builds the first one, lots of people will use it, and the next generation will have an easier time building the 300-350 mph maglev.

Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.

#55

Post by uncoder0 » Tue, Aug 27, 2013, 7:22 PM UTC

hardtke wrote: post #50

I don't see any feasible way to transition to high speed linked autonomous cars. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who need to get to work via car, and these people will not be able to afford a new car. Transitioning from a driver based to a driverless technology would take a government intervention in the economy that is unacceptable to most Americans. If we utilize the same road system, there would need to b…

The teams Nissan and Google are using to develop this technology already dealt with the problems of a highway/city populated with human pedestrians and drivers. High speed linked autonomous cars are certainly not the fist step of this transition.[1]

[1]http://archive.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/

Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.

#56

Post by krisoft » Tue, Aug 27, 2013, 7:22 PM UTC

ebbv wrote: post #7

No thank you. I am very dubious about other people's driving skills, I tend to assume everyone else on the road is out to kill me and will do the dumbest thing possible at any given moment. But even so, I am also an experienced software developer, and I know that software is only as good as the author(s). Bugs happen. It's inevitable. And I don't want to die or be injured because of software errors. I'd rather it be…

A driver kills a dozen people in a freak accident. A real tragedy for everyone involved. A panel of independent investigators founds his action to be faulty. He goes to prison. Next day another guy, on an other road makes the same mistake...

An autonomous vehicle kills a dozen people in a freak accident. Newspapers scream bloody murder. A panel of independent investigators determines a chain of causes. The Immediate bug gets fixed, and the inadequacies in the testing methodology is remedied. We all get to live a tinny bit safer ever after.

Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.

#57

Post by ebbv » Tue, Aug 27, 2013, 7:22 PM UTC

Amadou wrote: post #38

ebbv wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you were to replace every human driven car on the road with only autonomous cars, I will agree with you that the accident rate would likely be much lower over all. But there's two problems here: 1) We won't be replacing all the cars overnight. The problem comes with the interaction between terrible human drivers doing wildly unpredictable, insane things and the inflexible, unadaptable automated cars. And 2) I'm no…

the interaction between terrible human drivers doing wildly unpredictable, insane things and the inflexible, unadaptable automated cars. There are only so many things bad human drivers can do, the physics is pretty limiting. It isn't like they can teleport in front of another car. Even the craziest things like opposing traffic jumping the median into oncoming traffic isn't all that crazy, it isn't conceptually differ…

> There are only so many things bad human drivers can do, the physics is pretty limiting. It isn't like they can teleport in front of another car. Even the craziest things like opposing traffic jumping the median into oncoming traffic isn't all that crazy, it isn't conceptually different from a deer jumping in front of a car.

I was thinking about your assertion that it's easy to solve, and why exactly I disagree with it so strongly on a base level. What am I basing this belief on?

And I figured it out. Driving games.

The AI in driving games like Gran Turismo has had more work than Google or any other company has done on theirs. And not only that, the AI in driving games has perfect information of the physics involved and the environment around them.

And those AIs are still fucking terrible when interacting with human players. Pack of AI driving around? Just fine. Add a human driver to the mix and it turns into a disaster.

This is why I am very concerned about automated driving in the real world alongside human drivers.

Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.

#58

Post by jerf » Tue, Aug 27, 2013, 7:23 PM UTC

hardtke wrote: post #50

I don't see any feasible way to transition to high speed linked autonomous cars. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who need to get to work via car, and these people will not be able to afford a new car. Transitioning from a driver based to a driverless technology would take a government intervention in the economy that is unacceptable to most Americans. If we utilize the same road system, there would need to b…

Nonsense. You start with driverless cars that can use existing infrastructure with everybody else, then as the density of driverless cars goes up over time, you take advantage of the other economies that emerge. At some point, probably decades later, eventually society will simply ban driverless cars, but you don't have to start there. There's no need for a "big bang" event.

By the time that happens, the "poor" won't have to "replace" their car, because they'll already have dumped the expensive rust-buckets for time-shared rent-a-cars. It's the rich that will be the last holdouts, not the poor.

Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.

#59

Post by dylangs1030 » Tue, Aug 27, 2013, 7:23 PM UTC

enraged_camel wrote: post #45

johansch wrote: post #23

Why doesn't Google just buy Tesla already?

What a great idea! That way the NSA can know your real-time location on the roads too, even if you have your cellphone off.

If the NSA wants to know your real-time location on the roads, it really doesn't need Google to do that. Or Facebook...or any other $BIG_COMPANY for that matter.

Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.

#60

Post by Contero » Tue, Aug 27, 2013, 7:30 PM UTC

hrvbr wrote: post #34

Cars are way too dangerous. We accept the absurdly high number of injuries and deaths they cause only by lack of a better mean of transportation. I hope self-driving cars will have hyper-efficient safety mechanisms, especially to protect pedestrians and bikers, not just the car's passengers. This would be a huge progress for humanity.

Making self-driving cars safer than people-driven cars is trivial. The hard thing will be handling the tidal wave of FUD when the inevitable happens and someone dies as a result of one. Google or Nissan or whoever will need a mountain of good PR and safety statistics to be able to push it back. That alone is enough reason to motivate the creation of "hyper-efficient safety mechanisms".