Lived in Russia and have some knowledge about programming. Unless some breakthrough happens in general purpose artificial intelligence research, I do not believe self-driving cars that can drive here are possible at all.
Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected
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Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected
#72I am a traffic engineer and one of the things that I do regularly is write 10 year traffic plans for small to medium sized cities, think 60,000 people max. When a lot of the self driving hype was really kicking off, I was told to make sure to incorporate them into the plans. This mostly consisted of a few sentences about self driving and that was it. When modeling future traffic growth, the client would always say, "…
I'm always baffled by folks who assume self-driving cars would reduce traffic. No matter what, even if they are privately owned, truly self-driving vehicles could only increase traffic. If they can be dispatched without a human driver to pick up groceries or take-out, for example, there'll be a lot more trips. And sharing self-driving cars rather than owning them would surely be more likely to increase the number of…
The rationale I have heard is that a single car could be used to make a multiple chained trips instead of multiple cars making multiple trips. This is the same idea behind ride sharing. I feel this breaks down with privately owned vehicles. I do see an increase in traffic in areas with expensive parking. Specifically I would sent my car to a cheaper lot and that would result in an additional trip. Even worse, that would be a zero occupancy trip.
Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected
#73I've been beating this drum for years (but I'm a nobody, so it's like pissing in the wind): 1. Anything less than 100% FULL automation is MORE dangerous than manual driving, because the "driver" will almost certainly lack any situational awareness. When the need for manual intervention happen, it will be at the moments where you need maximum awareness and split second reflexes. 2. There are SO many edge cases and nev…
> 4. At some point there will be an accident that kills a photogenic "middle America" person or people
I'm ready to guess what it looks like: Car on autopilot going through a residential neighborhood, playground ball bounces out into the street from between two parked cars, car does not brake in anticipation of a 6-year-old that is not currently visible.
Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected
#74What I think is interesting is that none of these articles talk about one specific implication of self-driving cars.
What happens to car-insurance companies?
Seems like with self driving cars the form of car insurance we have now wouldn't be really necessary. I expect car-insurance profits to decline. Isn't there an incentive ( read: lobbying ) for car insurance companies to discourage self-driving cars?
Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected
#75I am a traffic engineer and one of the things that I do regularly is write 10 year traffic plans for small to medium sized cities, think 60,000 people max. When a lot of the self driving hype was really kicking off, I was told to make sure to incorporate them into the plans. This mostly consisted of a few sentences about self driving and that was it. When modeling future traffic growth, the client would always say, "…
It will also restore mobility for many people who cannot drive yet or not anymore. Where I live, Taxis and Ubers are still too expensive and not ubiquitous enough to replace an owned car.
This is one of the most important use cases I can see for self driving cars. As it is, on demand transit is expensive and in rural areas not the most frequent. For example the northern portion of Montana has a very low population spread out across a large distance. For many elderly to get medical care they must travel 100-200 miles to the nearest hospital. When they have to make this trip every week, I can be a massive burden on their loved ones. On demand transit is an option but may only run a couple times a week due to limited drivers. A self driving vehicle would help this situation a lot.
Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected
#76Alternate headline: Some people overstated how simple this problem was because they didn't know what they were talking about, could promote themselves as experts, could get funding for a self-driving startup or some combination of the above. I guess that isn't as pithy but it's closer to the truth. When it became clear that Uber's strategy (under Kalanick anyway) was premised on replacing drivers with AIs before the…
As usual the article conflates the (very difficult problem) of self-driving everywhere with various other sub-problems.
The self-driving problem on highways is much more solvable, and can further be improved by convergent infrastructure evolution (forewarning of traffic jams from central control, embedded rfid to aid pathfinding in bad weather, weather reports, wildlife nets/barriers, highly standardized signage, internetworked cars). It would solve and serve a number of functions that are extremely valuable in efficient logistics, safety automation of boring long term driving, and better utilization of infrastructure (automated overnight driving when the interstates are much less used).
I don't really care if my trip to Taco bell is automated. Sure it would be nice, but that is so insanely difficult compared to automating a 400 mile trip on an interstate.
When they can full automate a 400-800 mile interstate trip so that I can sleep in my car while it drives overnight, it will massively disrupt the airline industry in so many positive ways.
But the article is from a sensationalist news source, so what can one expect.
Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected
#77Than expected? I am pretty sure none of the people who actually works in the related industry expect self-driving car to come out anytime soon. The hype is created by media and investors, with intention other than creating a viable product.
Driving is simple but still logical. Though it doesn't seem to involve too abstract of processing like what is required for language, that doesn't mean it is just looking the road ahead and making turns. Say if an accident happens and the road condition is messy now the one-way road is changed to switch to allow once direction then another, how would AI understand this? No it can't.
Current NN based model had huge problem guarantee Robustness, while human can be incredibly resilient against adverisal scenarios, because we are superfasr few shots learners.
Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected
#78Alternate headline: Some people overstated how simple this problem was because they didn't know what they were talking about, could promote themselves as experts, could get funding for a self-driving startup or some combination of the above. I guess that isn't as pithy but it's closer to the truth. When it became clear that Uber's strategy (under Kalanick anyway) was premised on replacing drivers with AIs before the…
> How do you program around humans changing their behaviour to take advantage of there being no driver in your car?
I have another angle: Every "self driving" car becomes a rolling collection of evidence. Some jackass does a massively risky move to cut you off? Your camera captures it and you can send it to the police. Maybe even make a feature to detect it - "DANGEROUS/ASSHOLE DRIVER DETECTED" - and fire off the video complete with the license plate to the cops.
I fucking hate drivers who put others at risk. My feeling is less than one half of the population has an attention span necessary to drive. The other half are functionally retarded, behind the seat of a 3500lbs rolling weapon.
Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm always baffled by folks who assume self-driving cars would reduce traffic. No matter what, even if they are privately owned, truly self-driving vehicles could only increase traffic. If they can be dispatched without a human driver to pick up groceries or take-out, for example, there'll be a lot more trips. And sharing self-driving cars rather than owning them would surely be more likely to increase the number of…
The rationale I have heard is that a single car could be used to make a multiple chained trips instead of multiple cars making multiple trips. This is the same idea behind ride sharing. I feel this breaks down with privately owned vehicles. I do see an increase in traffic in areas with expensive parking. Specifically I would sent my car to a cheaper lot and that would result in an additional trip. Even worse, that wo…
I'm also pretty sure it will increase commutes and this applies even if self-driving isn't fully door to door. There are probably a lot of people who would hesitate to do an hour car commute today who would be a lot more open to a 60 or even 90 minute commute of something else is doing the driving.
Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected
#80It's hard to fully understand the challenges of SDCs, because most of these players are extremely secretive about their approaches. The fact that we rely on disengagement data from California as some proxy, that's just not great data when so many of the players are doing 1000's of miles in other states. It's sad, I wish we knew more about the inner-workings of these systems, and I would love to see them collaborate for the benefit of society.