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Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.

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Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.

#61

Post by Amadou »

ebbv wrote: post #57
Amadou wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

First, I don't think it is easy. I just think it is feasible because it is a reasonably bounded problem.

As for driving games, those have a different set of requirements and incentives. Driving poorly isn't necessarily a bad thing from the position of game play.

Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.

#62

Post by melling »

stevesearer wrote: post #28
hnriot wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously the bullet train is going to be a disaster, but if there were a high speed train (as in Europe) from SF to LA, I would definitely leave my car home and use the train. I'm only to happy to free up I5 for you.

I take the train from Santa Barbara to San Francisco from time to time and would even put up with a train with decent internet connectivity. Even if the train is slow, I could at least be doing some work on the ride. Unfortunately the train is currently more expensive, less productive, and slower than driving.

The technology to build faster trains was invented before man landed on the moon. It has been 49 years since this technology went into production. It's older than most people reading this discussion.

Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.

#63

Post by dylangs1030 »

ebbv wrote: post #33
stephenhuey wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not alone, but the reality is that the automated cars might react to the human drivers much more quickly than the other way around.

I am sure that the automated drivers will react faster, but the problem is that they can only react to events they have been programmed to react to and only in the ways they have been programmed to react. There's no ensuring either of: a) It will react to everything that it needs to react to / not react to things that it shouldn't. b) It will react in the proper way when it does react. This is the problem. Like I sai…

The problem with your thinking is that you assume the engineer's behind this can't program a response to every conceivable condition. I'd argue they can.

If you have a 3-dimensional model, with a finite number of axes to move upon, any movement towards the vehicle from another vehicle, no matter what it is, can be enumerated and mathematically modeled.

Once that has been done, it is a matter of programming the autonomous car's probabilistic response to the oncoming collision.

You think that most people significantly underestimate the complexity of solving this problem - I'd argue that, no, figuring out how to maintain satellites in orbit is more difficult than modeling every possible 3-dimension interaction between two, four, or 20 different cars.

No matter what kind of "stupid shit" human drivers do, there's only so much "stupid shit" they can actually perform. It can all be modeled mathematically on a 3-dimensional plane, and thus programmed for.

Is it a complex problem? Yes, assuredly. But your comments are approaching it with what seems to be mild hysteria - it's a basic engineering problem, and all you need to do is model it out. The math is there. It's solid. And I trust math more than I trust human drivers.

Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.

#64

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.

#65

Post by corin_ »

heurist wrote: post #53
corin_ wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If the chance of an accident increases then sure, be against that. And I've no idea what the chances are. But to say you'd rather have a higher chance of dying from human error than lower chance of dying from software error... doesn't make any sense.

Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.

#67

Post by johansch »

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.

That's a bug with the american government (your?), not Google. Tesla on its own can't fight it any more than Google can, them both being american companies.

Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.

#68

Post by turtle4 »

schabernakk wrote: post #25
daeken wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you seen car accident stats? I'll concede that bugs do occur, but it would take some serious failure to make it any worse than the average driver. Even decent or good drivers are not that great, especially when you factor in distraction, tiredness, poor judgement of road conditions, etc.

You're right, but the software of an autonomous car will be held to much higher standard than just 'has be to better or equal to a human driver'. The whole thing gets interesting when you look at the judicial side of it: Who is responsible in the case of an accident? The car manufacturer (if it was a software failure)? Then even one accident triggered by it is too much.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Hopefully society sees the benefits and gets out of the mindset you mention above (which I understand you are pointing out, not advocating).

The idea that 'even one accident is too many' is a joke when you consider how many accidents there are with human drivers, and yet we accept them willingly. If there are 30,000 deaths per year from human driven accidents, then surely the real answer to how many accidents by computer driven cars is acceptable should have an upper bound of 29,999, right? Why isn't it acceptable if it saves even one human life, rather than being unacceptable if it costs one?

Unfortunately, we as a group don't tend to be very logical, and love to spread blame, so I am afraid we'll take a long time to start saving lives. The data on the self-driven cars on the road is pretty overwhelming that they are safer than human drivers, but unfortunately there will be those (as in this thread) who believe that is true of everyone but themselves.

Its going to be a long road to acceptance.

Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.

#69

Post by dylangs1030 »

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…

I have pretty solid counters to your objections:

1. Autonomous cars shouldn't really be impacted by density. You can only make a highway so dense...there's one-four lanes, and it's like minesweeper. You can be surrounded by six cars at a time, maximum (two on either side, one above and one behind). Density might increase the likelihood of an accident just because there's more objects in motion, but an individual autonomous car would theoretically account for this.

2) The entire point of an autonomous car is for drivers to not need to react to anything at all. So...I'm not sure what this has to do with risk. Maybe the drivers of non-autonomous cars wouldn't be safe...but that's the same situation as today. Autonomous car drivers could read a magazine in the middle of an accident. Who cares?

3) Again, my above comment, this doesn't seem relevant.

I think you're being a bit hysterical, to be honest. It's a problem of math. You can model every possible interaction between the cars on a 3-dimensional plane with a finite number of axes. It might be complex, but we can program every single possible interaction and collision - and that's the first step to programming collision response.

Basically, the takeaway is, I don't think there's a model of car interaction that isn't improved by having an autonomous car, even if only one car out of the two is autonomous. And I'm pretty sure this scales.

Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.

#70

Post by waffle_ss »

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…

Why would they have to be linked? If I were building autonomous vehicles, I wouldn't trust information from other vehicles in the same way I don't trust a human driver to use their turn signal properly. The vehicle should rely only on its sensor data and drive defensively.
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