So the computer won't know what to do and you're going to dump it on someone in a cubicle a thousand miles away? Here, make a decision in at most a second and a half or you crash? That's going to work ;<).
If the computer is confused I want to be the one to make the decision. I am perfectly happy having a system right now that works 95% of the time in good weather.
I think it will be at least 2025 before it can handle a Michigan winter, maybe longer. Still want a limited system ASAP.
> If the computer is confused I want to be the one to make the decision. I am perfectly happy having a system right now that works 95% of the time in good weather.
Sounds like a Tesla Model 3 reservation is in your future! ;)
You can still buy a Tesla in Michigan; you buy it on tesla.com, and the sale officially takes place in California. The vehicle is delivered to your home (or you could pick it up from a gallery/service center over the border in OH).
Can you not charge at home with a 240V outlet? You might also check out PlugShare.com for local charging options.
If you're in a condo or apartment, several states have legislation now mandating reasonable accommodation (at the EV owner's cost) of EV charging stations. I do not know if Michigan has such legislation though.
It's a common misconception that states like Michigan ban Tesla sales entirely. They can't do that, as it's interstate commerce and the Feds have exclusive powers over that. All the states can do is regulate how businesses operate within the state. So they can prevent Tesla from opening stores or service centers within the state, but they can't prevent people from buying the cars.
I would assume the computer would still be responsible for getting the car into a fail safe situation until a human could take over. Much as how mars rovers are driven semi-autonomously.
This makes a lot more sense for a fleet of self driving vehicles. Not for personal transportation in your own car.
Most drivers can't handle a Michigan winter. I just drove from Lansing to Grand Rapids in this weather we had today, and there were four cars off the road in the span of a dozen miles. Front-wheel drive cars on straight roads, too. They didn't just spin out, those drivers had to seriously mis-handle their vehicle to wind up in the ditch.
That being said, the "self driving" part of my car (cruise control) turns itself off when the wheels slip already, so I agree that I could handle a car that drove itself in good weather but punted back to me in the snow. Vision-imparing snowfall is actually a more rare event than people might think. Normally the roads are quickly cleared.
Most drivers can't handle a Michigan winter. I just drove from Lansing to Grand Rapids in this weather we had today, and there were four cars off the road in the span of a dozen miles.
A lot of drivers have problems driving in winter conditions. But most? Over 50%? That's a pretty strong claim.
I believe it's understood that the drivers under discussion are Michigan drivers, are they not? If not, I'm not sure how interesting the statement is. Drivers in India, southern China, or the equatorial belt won't have need of a car that can handle Michigan winters, either.
I don't think that was clear from context at all, no. However unlike a human driver, people will expect a car to continue working and working safely in non typical thriving conditions.
It's not clear to me that this is true. Here on HN I'm surprised how often members can't imagine how a problem might be solved using a computer or other technology. Or people in general being surprised that technology can be applied to everyday problems. I bring this up as examples of people having limited expectations of technology, not that they're right or wrong in their assumptions.
That's not to say sometimes people have unreasonable assumptions as well. That's why I say it's not clear to me.
It is 100% tongue in cheek, it's a very common complaint around here. The first snowfall of the year, traffic becomes a nightmare because people forget how to drive in the snow. And on snowy days, road with two lanes in each direction tend to turn into roads with one lane in each direction as people forget where the lines are drawn and then no one wants to drive outside of the established tire tracks.
Complaining about people driving in the snow is what gets us northerners through the winter months. It keeps us warm.
Absolutely. In Michigan winters, and in most other circumstances, I definitely want to be the one driving if I'm the one that's at risk of [and has great incentive to minimize] crashing my automobile. I really don't want to outsource that yet to a remote staffing center.
Are you really interested in a system that does the right thing 95% of the time, and the wrong thing for three seconds out of every minute? That sounds absolutely nerve-wracking to me.
> Here, make a decision in at most a second and a half or you crash
This is not the kind of system they're talking about at all. From the article:
> Nissan’s cubicle-based drivers aren’t emergency backups. If the car hits black ice, it’s in charge of staying on the road. There’s no feasible way to get the human into the loop in time to act. [When encountering an unusual scenario, a] human operator would look around using the car’s cameras and other sensors and issue new instructions—direct control would pose latency issues. Like: When it’s safe, cross the double yellow and get back to the right side after 20 yards.
Nissan also released a car that's controllable over the internet with nothing more than the VIN[0]. I wouldn't necessarily trust what they say in terms of technology advancements.
I wish people would just give up on this self-driving car business for now.
We don't even want autonomous robots in our house, pitter pattering about like toddlers, at 3 miles an hour. We don't even trust our smart TV sets.
So let's make 2 ton versions, and throw them into a frying pan with people? Yeah, great idea. I bet they'll act just like TCP packets. Good job.
Why not segregated roadways? If we're so desperate to automate trucking and shipping, how about big, thick K-rails, and dedicated roadway?
We all know that early adopters suffer the growing pains of buggy first versions. No reason for all of society to share this burden when It hasn't even been put to a vote.
Keep these things the hell away from ordinary people, and their kids for at least another 50 years.
Plenty of people have robots pitter pattering in their house like toddlers. They're called Roombas, and they're the highest selling vacuum cleaner on the market right now. And the reason "we" don't trust smart TVs is because they spy on us without telling us. And the "we" in this situation is a tiny, tiny subset of the population. A lot of people don't know and don't care, they just like Netflix and how it's built into their TVs.
No one voted on if they wanted cars in the first place. I'm not sure if you're aware of how incredibly dangerous cars are, but I can tell you without looking up the numbers that if we were to vote on it today with an unbiased viewpoint, there's no way anyone would be allowed to drive a car.
I'm sorry, but I feel like you're going to be in the minority on this one. You seem really scared. I'm not trying to change your mind, but I would like for you to take a look at traffic fatality statistics and and think hard about whether or not it's worthwhile pursuit to try to bring that number down.
>I would like for you to take a look at traffic fatality statistics and and think hard
I would like those people who take it as an article of faith that self driving cars will cause fewer fatalities to watch closely where the liability falls.
If executives go to jail when the software crashes the car and kills or maims somebody and they let it out on the roads then I'm happy.
If instead those companies get slapped with token fines, I'm pretty sure that they're going to push out faulty software before it's ready and kill a bunch of people.
Politically it's still up in the air but currently it's looking like there won't be any criminal liability.
Hmm, I can't seem to find my source to back that up so I'll have to concede that point. I remember reading something on HN a few months ago that the Roomba was the single best-selling vacuum cleaner of 2016, in the same vein that the MacBook is the best selling laptop even though all PC makers combined out-sell MacBooks.
But since I can't back up that claim, I'll give it to you.
Is it even an option? Where are we getting the space to put new roads along the existing roads? Many cities don't even have space for bike lanes without taking away traffic lanes, let alone literally doubling the number of roads they have.
But the answer is, we already have segregated roadways for self-driving vehicles. They're called rails, and trains drive on them. People still drive cars, surprisingly. Because if that segregated roadway doesn't go someplace that a normal road does, people will still drive their cars.
Autonomous robots in houses are not about to save lives and provide hours of free time to anyone.
Growing pains will kill people, the only question is: under which conditions can we say that thay will be more safe than their human-driven counterparts.
We need time to mature this technology. Household home-ec bots are a safe start to a bold plan.
Autonomy is an ambitious project. Large heavy machinery is an unnecessarily risky entry into an immature field.
Building reliable technology in a mild environment will permit the opportunity to prove trusted patterns of operation, under the safest conditions. People will be able to gain a feel for normal dispositions of autonomous motile devices, and build good collective practices for safe operating environments.
Corporations should not be trusted as accountanle entities. Volkwagen's deceptive green emissions scandal shows how far a sub-department will go, to meet the bottom line.
Competitive business practices in a hazardous and unforgiving operating environment are not what we want birthing this sort of technology.
If you're worried about surveillance now, wait till every car on the road is a backdoor into your life, every conversation, you're mood, everything will be up for grabs, being constantly transmitted back to base.
Next up, is the surveillance of the public, imagine all those cameras and microphones driving around, goodbye privacy for good.
The best bit is it's being sold to us under the banner of safety. I don't like road deaths either, but mas-scale surveillance is just the same problem.
This technology will eventually be used by those in power to easily kidnap or kill targets via remote commands. Fake news will dismiss the accidents as malfunction.
Driving as a whole is safe now because everyone knows the stakes. If you screw up, you die. Computers don't care if you die, nor if they themselves are destroyed.
I don't look forward to a world where one Bluetooth RCE worm can kill tens of millions of people in 24 hours.
> We all know that early adopters suffer the growing pains of buggy first versions. No reason for all of society to share this burden when It hasn't even been put to a vote.
Humans, when aware, rested, and trained, are far better input devices for cars, I agree.
Where my sympathy for self-driving cars enters is that humans can be distracted by in-car entertainment (phones, screens, other humans or animals), tired/drunk/on drugs, or inexperienced. At least in the US (and several other countries I've visited, but not lived more than a handful of months in), I don't think driving safely is treated as a serious responsibility.
Beyond that, cars are already relatively automated -- steering, braking, traction, transmissions, and acceleration is computer controlled, and my car even tracks its maintenance schedule and various subsystem status, so I think it's somewhat logical that some degree of automation occurs to assist the driver more properly (/safely) operate the machine. At some point, this means normalizing "auto-pilot" functionality.
> Why not segregated roadways? If we're so desperate to automate trucking and shipping, how about big, thick K-rails, and dedicated roadway?
Because massive structural changes would be required. Similar to why buses are the go-to for public transit in developing countries -- four wheels and a relatively flat surface and you're done. Add in the challenge of retrofitting existing routes and our tendency to build large structures along roads and this is hilariously non-trivial.
Further, how would you design the segregated roadway? Do you take an existing lane from a highway? Is this railed-lane protected by barriers to prevent vehicular debris or illegal use? How do the shipping-vehicles exit the highway without blocking/crossing lanes?
Believe me, I understand that dedicated roadways would become a huge, ridiculous rat's nest of red tape, and pork barrel money pits.
And probably a Robert Moses character might emerge and cause just as many problems re-engineering roadways in broad, callous strokes.
But there's a huge ugly blind spot we're going to unleash upon the world with cars that decide what happens and when, all on their own.
People don't even like when the cops know how many emails are filled with retarded emojis on their phones. People go batshit insane about full disk encryption.
You're all mad if you think this car business going to work out in your favor.
The only way autonomous cars will work is when they are driven on pre-certified roads. And the cars continuously report back what they see to update the certification. Combined with traffic monitoring cameras that can keep a road section's certification updated.
So just like most cars are to be driven on paved roads, reliable autonomous cars will need to be driven on roads with good visibility of lane markings. And road construction or road hazard cones will need to be electronic, so they can give the car computer unambiguous instructions (such as "shut down until driver manual control is confirmed").
Short version is that the road is full of things at the 99th percentile that won't be programmable so the car will either fail, bail, or simply stop.
I don't disagree with that sentiment but there were all sorts of things that "PCs" couldn't do that real computers could and they were still commercially successful (and eventually caught up to "real" computers for the most part). I could imagine that someone could come up with signage which self driving cars would understand and act on. Basically put up a QR code that links to the government approved way self driving cars should navigate the hazard, and of course a programming language that could communicate that to the car.
Of course you would not want just anyone to set up overrides or you would have pranksters sending cars off into corn fields or worse.
The part that Nissan appeared to miss is that if you can make them work in 99.9% of the cases, then you can hack around that last .1% and the cars will still be a net win in terms of better road behavior.
The difference is when a PC couldn't do something a mainframe couldn't nobody got killed.
I'm not trying to be hyperbolic here, those really are the stakes with self driving cars. The problem is that when consumers think they are getting a self driving car they will very quickly resort to bad behavior (see the terribly sad Tesla fatality from last year.)
We really need to be careful about how these features are marketed and implemented.
Self driving cars don't have to be 100% equal to humans in all circumstances. Some of these edge cases are things like construction workers or traffic cops guiding traffic. That's a damn hard thing to get right. But you could instead just give the traffic cop a radio clicker.
The edge cases are not going to be adverse driving conditions, which machines actually handle better with superior reaction times and finer control.
They do because people need to have more confidence in them than in human drivers.
People still feel that "it won't happen to them" because they have agency and can drive safer than others, it isn't neccrary true but you give up on this agency when you let a computer drive.
You can drive in a way which will reduce you likelihood of being in a fatal accident if all autonomous cars have say a 2.5% fail rate on decisions it becomes just a matter of time.
> Short version is that the road is full of things at the 99th percentile that won't be programmable so the car will either fail, bail, or simply stop.
Autonomous cars aren't programmed, they're trained, like humans. So I don't think this reasoning applies. If they behave poorly in some circumstances, they'll just create new training simulations covering those cases with better outcomes and push an update out. The cars will learn better and faster than humans.
That training is a different method of programming the system.
It will never be able to handle unique and novel cases because it cannot think. "AI" isn't intelligent, it is a dumb bureaucrat executing instructions.
One thing that humans have going for them is that they have an understanding of what is going on around them, including in the minds of other people. I don't think this is fatal to your argument, but it is something to consider.
I am in the apparently unusual position of believing that autonomy is both feasible and desirable, while thinking that the capabilities of current implementations are being oversold.
> One thing that humans have going for them is that they have an understanding of what is going on around them, including in the minds of other people.
I hear this argument often, but I see no evidence for it. It just sounds like yet another flawed attempt to make humans more special than they really are.
I guess we'll see over the next 5 years as autonomous vehicles become deployed.
Well, I at least have empathy. Maybe we could say "some humans have an understanding..."? Nobody was claiming 'only humans' - Chimpanzees clearly have empathy.
Understanding the state of mind of another is the definition of empathy. "Did that guy see me? Is he waiting for me to go?" is exactly the kind of question that requires empathy to answer.
I won't dispute your use of empathy because that will start a whole other debate. Instead, I'll simply demonstrate that understanding another driver's mind has nothing to do with the scenario you presented.
The rules of the road define who has the right of way. Of course, sometimes other drivers don't see you, but you literally have no way of knowing whether or not they do. The only thing you can do is begin your attempt cautiously in accordance with road rules and abort at the first sign of potential collision.
Notice how this decision process is completely algorithmic. Proper understanding of another driver's mind is a red herring. You use the almost-collision to infer what the other driver knows, not the other way around like you seem to think.
From your replies to me, I was beginning to think I was being trolled, but I see you probably simply have not experienced the full unpleasantness of urban driving, in which people violate both the rules of the road and common sense for motives, not just through a lack of awareness. From my experience and informal discussions, I am very confident that people weigh the presumed motives and purpose of other drivers in their predictions of future outcomes - in fact, when I am in urban traffic and not alone, discussions of other drivers' motivations and likely behavior do come up.
Now, I do not doubt that if all (or most) vehicles were autonomous, things could work as you describe (though traffic might flow more smoothly or efficiently if vehicles could signal 'intent'), but that is not how it works at the moment, and the transition is probably the hardest part of introducing autonomous vehicles.
> in fact, when I am in urban traffic and not alone, discussions of other drivers' motivations and likely behavior do come up.
Sure, after they do something seemingly stupid that you don't understand. Inference follows observation, not the other way around, and autonomous vehicles are observing all the time with reaction times much faster than a human's. Even if an autonomous vehicle weren't able to understand high-level goals, it understands and detects vectors much better than humans do, which is all that's really needed to create and adapt a plan that avoids collisions.
> I am very confident that people weigh the presumed motives and purpose of other drivers in their predictions of future outcomes
And I'm very confident that even if this were true, it's largely irrelevant to being a good driver.
It is a bit self-serving of you to include the unnecessary dependent clause "that you don't understand", but as you are just stating your personal opinion, it is ultimately inconsequential.
And what evidence do you see to the contrary of the proposition you quoted? The deployment of autonomous vehicles will not contradict anything I wrote.
Why would I have to supply evidence? You're the one making the claim that humans can understand the minds of other drivers. So where's the evidence that a) this actually happens, and b) that this ability is even relevant to driving?
I'm not sure you understand how this works: those making positive claims must present evidence supporting those claims. You claimed humans could understand other people's minds, and that this is somehow relevant to being a good driver. So as I said 3 posts ago, where's the evidence?
There is no such obligation when the question is ridiculous. We might feel that all other drivers are completely self-absorbed and unreflective over others' viewpoints and motives, but I don't think I know anyone who would take it to be literally and universally true. I am beginning to wonder whether you have a genuine difficulty figuring out other peoples' thoughts and emotions.
I think self-driving cars have incredible potential, but the media hype is just too strong around this technology. People are used to startups going from 0 to unicorn in 5+ years, because they are often based on simple technologies and business models centered around exponential growth. AirBnB, Uber, twitch, and many more are all technology companies that obviously had many challenges, but they did not depend on a technological breakthrough in order to get where they are today.
There is a gap between Level 2 and Level 4 (arguably Level 5 with the new standards, but I'm going to assume Level 4 means what most people would call a true self-driving car) autonomy which is dangerous, because it lulls humans into a false sense of safety. And then when the car can no longer drive itself, the user is expected to take over with a delayed reaction time and little to no context in what could be a very dangerous situation. It is a deadly valley. There are numerous studies on this topic from the aviation industry, and drivers don't have nearly as much training as pilots.
I think real self-driving cars are awesome, and the first time I sat in one years ago when I worked on it as a PhD student was truly an incredible experience. But the hype around the technology is too much, and when investors push for a product in a few years when it's not ready at best companies will fail and at worst people will die. Misinforming the public on this is a very serious problem which nobody seems to care about, even after at least 1 death which is still under investigation.
I am all for working on this technology and seeing incremental improvements over the years. But I am frustrated with the media's portrayal of how it's just around the corner (I am frustrated with the media in general), and I believe the overpromise of the technology is largely responsible for the death of the Tesla owner in Florida last year (and there are other accidents that are reported in China which get much less coverage).
People will say self-driving cars save lives and are safer. In theory, yes - but the problem is we aren't there yet. There just isn't enough data to make that claim. When Tesla said it was safer, they ignored the fact that all of their driving was on highways (which are statistically safer) and that their owners are more affluent and older (at least I assume the average Tesla owner is 25+). The data isn't available when you break down these demographics, but I suspect if it were that 1 death would actually make autopilot deadlier than manual driving. It's a moot point though - anybody trying to extrapolate meaningful conclusions from a single data point is making a ridiculous claim.
This can't be understated. The potential of self-driving cars is so vastly immense, it is hard to see at what level it will stop having a positive impact on people. And this potential reaches across every level of autonomy. Its just an opinion, but I believe the market demand for this technology will ensure success of the endeavor (except possibly at the margins).
As a thought experiment, just imagine how every daily activity is improved by self driving cars; not just relaxing while driving to work, but automatic transportation of children to school, removal of the annoying of finding a parking spot at a grocery store. Social activities are made much more convenient; having drinks with a friend, picking up parents from the airport, lending your car to the neighbor. And there is the potential of a world in which car ownership is itself redundant, and we are only speaking about lag time and comfort for transportation.
Autobraking is a great technology that has been around for a few years (BMW was selling it in 2013), but nobody touted it as a self-driving feature. My point isn't that working on this technology is bad, my point is people expect it to do more than it can.
That doesn't mean it isn't a self driving feature.... Automated accident prevention sounds awfully related to self driving.
The technology has been around, but it isn't deployed to the majority of cars yet.
What I am saying is that self driving technology doesn't have to be perfect for it to change the world.
It doesn't matter if we are a ways away from getting to the "nobody owns a car, and everyone just uses self driving Ubers" future. Because the current, shit accident prevention technology can ALREADY change the world, even if it is "just" by cutting accidents in half and saving "only" 40,000 lives every year.
I agree, and that's great! But when a company sells a feature called Autopilot, and it's marketed as a car that drives itself, I have an issue when someone dies and the company spins bad statistics to defend its practice.
Incremental improvements that save lives and make driving better are fantastic. Overselling a feature that can kill people is not.
I don't care about self-driving cars until car company CEOs have their kids riding in them. Until then, I am not interested in taking the risk of testing their engineering.
You point is sound that companies who produce faulty driverless cars take the upside of them after they socialize the losses from them.
Point 229 in Hammurabi's code:
[229] If a builder build a house for some one, and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built fall in and kill its owner, then that builder shall be put to death.
or to put it in your words. CEOs (or their kids) must drive around in driverless cars before patrons pay for them.
There's a human backup in the car itself. I don't see why you'd need remote control until we're ready to let cars drive without passengers which is a lot further away than cars driving with people in the car. What kind of car would not have some sort of a manual override anyway? That'd be incredibly stupid to the point of gross negligence.
Also, the posted title is clickbait bullshit and not the actual title of the article.
Google is actively promoting a self-driving technology that doesn't need a human to take over, ever. Their commercial for this technology features a blind man being driven by a car around Austin, TX. As well, the prototype at the Computer History Museum is a model that does not feature a steering wheel at all.
The thesis of the article is that the promises made by these companies -- and the promises are being made -- are not quite feasible in the short term.
So what kind of car would not have some sort of manual override? The car that all these companies are promising!
When you fly in an airplane the pilot is basically checked out the entire time because of autopilot. Over thousands of miles, too. But guess what? They have steering wheels (or whatever it is you call them) and manual control when things get dicey.
Point of person above you is that this should always be a feature of driverless cars: manual control. Always.
I know Alphabet is peddling some blind-person shit, but let's be real, that's many year away (2050+) and would be for limited use cases.
I say this whenever this topic comes up: we have public transport today, it's safer and cheaper than having a car, it allows you to make use of your commute time (read, study, eat a sandwich, have a coffee), it's better for the environment (electric doesn't come from nowhere), and it's faster and even more so if more people use it. Your city maybe lacks it, but then the solution is not to say "meh, public transport is crap" and go buy a car. But this is the answer I always get in this community of people who make a living finding solutions to problems.
On the road, an actor's actions do not merely affect itself, but all the others on that road. If you slow down at a point, that can cause the driver arriving at that point five, ten minutes after to stop. On the road, everything creates a butterfly effect. And just like you can't run around naked or listen to very loud music in residential areas, you can't just get on the road with your new toy which if fails, does not only put your life at danger, but also many others'.
My old boss' master's degree in city planning was a plan to run a grid of 15-minute busses throughout LA. His analysis showed it would nearly eliminate the need for private cars. In LA. Good luck convincing anybody. But I believe it could work. Principally because the transfers wouldn't be an hour wait, so the wait time wouldn't dominate the total trip time.
Where I'm it goes down to about -5C in wintertime (-4C ATM). I'm actually fine with it.
Certainly in rural areas and in wider peripheral suburban areas public transport is less useful. But in actual cities (London, Paris, Istanbul, etc.) with a high density of people and their residences, public transport is the way to go. I don't know much about American cities, but if we got a comprehensive and functional system of metros, buses and boats here in Istanbul, where some of you would classify as a part of the third world, I guess you are capable of doing it in the US too.
London doesn't get to sub zero temperatures often, and with 2 flakes of Snow half the tube and the overground is in turmoil.
London is probably a "bad" example, I live in London and sure the public transport is probably in the top 5 in the world, so is Tokyo and Paris.
But what many cities with good public transport have in common is that they had public transportation for a long time, were designed / rebuilt with that in mind when it was manageable and are relatively small for their population density.
I would not want to be the one that has to design a public transport system for a sprawling city like LA where the greater LA area covers nearly 90,000 square kilometers for a size comparison the entirety of England is 130,000 sq/km.....
Sadly, anything that requires taxpayer funding toward the common good is a political non-starter in the US (socialism!). The best hope we have in the US for decent bus network is probably Uber/Lyft:
Using public transport to get to work for me, would mean:
- Walk to the next village
- Take a bus to the next city (bus comes by every 2 hours)
- Walk to the train station
- Take the train to the next city
- Take another train to the next city
- Walk to the outskirts of the city to where I work
And I live in Germany, which is presumably the public transport heaven.
It would also take me several hours every day.
My car costs me maybe a maximum of 90€ every month and takes me to work in about 15 minutes.
I know what you will say. "Just live in the city and use a bike to get to work, faster and costs nothing! (apart from the bike)". But that would not only reduce my quality of living (let's face it, the countryside is nicer) but also let my rent costs skyrocket (average price per m² more than doubles).
> I know what you will say. "Just live in the city and use a bike to get to work, faster and costs nothing! (apart from the bike)".
Well I'd actually not say that, because I'm not really saying "kill all the cars". What I'm saying is that "in most cases most probably public transport is equivalent to if not better than autonomous vehicles, so the effort and the risks are not worth them". I live in Istanbul and my school and my home are 30-20 kilometers apart on a straight line. When there's no traffic it'd take ~30 minutes to drive there, and at my usual times it'd take 1-2 hours with traffic. Via public transport it's 30min fixed + 5-10min walking. And in that time I can have my morning coffee from my thermos flask and eat a simit, and I don't need to be alert at all (I'd probably be dead by now if I drove in the mornings).
So TL;DR: for me, I'm perfectly fine w/ your commute, I just say that self-driving is not really a necessary and fruitful burden, however cool it may be, in solving traffic jams and traffic safety problems.
I think the self driving stories on HN have consistently underestimated human drivers and overestimated the tech and hand waved away the myriad challenges.
There is something deeply unpleasant about underestimating people and underestimating the problem is generally not a great way to solve it.
In the real world hundreds of millions of drivers have been driving on extremely varied roads and traffic conditions all over the world for decades. Given the sheer scale and volume of drivers, conditions and cars involved it appears self driving proponents are massively overplaying the safety card and worse with little to no data for the other side.
Any ai vehicle that requires new kinds of roads or contraints is a completely different ball game and cannot be compared to human drivers. Trains are far safer and in many cases faster than cars. Yet the train story in the US has remained dire for decades making ai safety proponents look self serving.
Technology does not exist in a vaccum, it is to benefit us and things like cars are tecnological as much as social and political. A car gives you basic transportation but also the freedom to go wherever you want. Having ai cars, constraints for them and control that could limit mobility and freedom then become more than techology issues in which the voice of society becomes far more important than the people creating the technology.
88 comments
[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 131 ms ] threadIf the computer is confused I want to be the one to make the decision. I am perfectly happy having a system right now that works 95% of the time in good weather.
I think it will be at least 2025 before it can handle a Michigan winter, maybe longer. Still want a limited system ASAP.
Sounds like a Tesla Model 3 reservation is in your future! ;)
1. Thanks to the car dealer lobby here in Michigan you can't buy one in the state
2. No local charging options. Nearest supercharger is 70 miles away in either Ann Arbor or Grand Rapids
I'm not very far from my local Ford dealer and the rumor is they're getting a charging station so that is probably how I will go.
Can you not charge at home with a 240V outlet? You might also check out PlugShare.com for local charging options.
If you're in a condo or apartment, several states have legislation now mandating reasonable accommodation (at the EV owner's cost) of EV charging stations. I do not know if Michigan has such legislation though.
This makes a lot more sense for a fleet of self driving vehicles. Not for personal transportation in your own car.
That being said, the "self driving" part of my car (cruise control) turns itself off when the wheels slip already, so I agree that I could handle a car that drove itself in good weather but punted back to me in the snow. Vision-imparing snowfall is actually a more rare event than people might think. Normally the roads are quickly cleared.
A lot of drivers have problems driving in winter conditions. But most? Over 50%? That's a pretty strong claim.
That's not to say sometimes people have unreasonable assumptions as well. That's why I say it's not clear to me.
Complaining about people driving in the snow is what gets us northerners through the winter months. It keeps us warm.
This is not the kind of system they're talking about at all. From the article:
> Nissan’s cubicle-based drivers aren’t emergency backups. If the car hits black ice, it’s in charge of staying on the road. There’s no feasible way to get the human into the loop in time to act. [When encountering an unusual scenario, a] human operator would look around using the car’s cameras and other sensors and issue new instructions—direct control would pose latency issues. Like: When it’s safe, cross the double yellow and get back to the right side after 20 yards.
[0] http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35642749
We don't even want autonomous robots in our house, pitter pattering about like toddlers, at 3 miles an hour. We don't even trust our smart TV sets.
So let's make 2 ton versions, and throw them into a frying pan with people? Yeah, great idea. I bet they'll act just like TCP packets. Good job.
Why not segregated roadways? If we're so desperate to automate trucking and shipping, how about big, thick K-rails, and dedicated roadway?
We all know that early adopters suffer the growing pains of buggy first versions. No reason for all of society to share this burden when It hasn't even been put to a vote.
Keep these things the hell away from ordinary people, and their kids for at least another 50 years.
No one voted on if they wanted cars in the first place. I'm not sure if you're aware of how incredibly dangerous cars are, but I can tell you without looking up the numbers that if we were to vote on it today with an unbiased viewpoint, there's no way anyone would be allowed to drive a car.
I'm sorry, but I feel like you're going to be in the minority on this one. You seem really scared. I'm not trying to change your mind, but I would like for you to take a look at traffic fatality statistics and and think hard about whether or not it's worthwhile pursuit to try to bring that number down.
I would like those people who take it as an article of faith that self driving cars will cause fewer fatalities to watch closely where the liability falls.
If executives go to jail when the software crashes the car and kills or maims somebody and they let it out on the roads then I'm happy.
If instead those companies get slapped with token fines, I'm pretty sure that they're going to push out faulty software before it's ready and kill a bunch of people.
Politically it's still up in the air but currently it's looking like there won't be any criminal liability.
Gee whiz! I never heard of roombas! How do they work? Can we make self driving cars behave just like them?
You seem like you seem to seem.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
I don't care about your policies. I'll post as I will, and leave you to currate your own opinions with your whitewash.
A correction: they're the top-selling robotic vacuum cleaners. Traditional 'dumb' cleaners still outsell them by magnitudes.
But since I can't back up that claim, I'll give it to you.
Yeah, I think this is the only real option, with the eventual goal of slowly phasing out non-automated driving altogether.
But the answer is, we already have segregated roadways for self-driving vehicles. They're called rails, and trains drive on them. People still drive cars, surprisingly. Because if that segregated roadway doesn't go someplace that a normal road does, people will still drive their cars.
Autonomy is an ambitious project. Large heavy machinery is an unnecessarily risky entry into an immature field.
Building reliable technology in a mild environment will permit the opportunity to prove trusted patterns of operation, under the safest conditions. People will be able to gain a feel for normal dispositions of autonomous motile devices, and build good collective practices for safe operating environments.
Corporations should not be trusted as accountanle entities. Volkwagen's deceptive green emissions scandal shows how far a sub-department will go, to meet the bottom line.
Competitive business practices in a hazardous and unforgiving operating environment are not what we want birthing this sort of technology.
Next up, is the surveillance of the public, imagine all those cameras and microphones driving around, goodbye privacy for good.
The best bit is it's being sold to us under the banner of safety. I don't like road deaths either, but mas-scale surveillance is just the same problem.
I share your sentiments exactly, welcome to 1984.
Driving as a whole is safe now because everyone knows the stakes. If you screw up, you die. Computers don't care if you die, nor if they themselves are destroyed.
I don't look forward to a world where one Bluetooth RCE worm can kill tens of millions of people in 24 hours.
Humans, when aware, rested, and trained, are far better input devices for cars, I agree.
Where my sympathy for self-driving cars enters is that humans can be distracted by in-car entertainment (phones, screens, other humans or animals), tired/drunk/on drugs, or inexperienced. At least in the US (and several other countries I've visited, but not lived more than a handful of months in), I don't think driving safely is treated as a serious responsibility.
Beyond that, cars are already relatively automated -- steering, braking, traction, transmissions, and acceleration is computer controlled, and my car even tracks its maintenance schedule and various subsystem status, so I think it's somewhat logical that some degree of automation occurs to assist the driver more properly (/safely) operate the machine. At some point, this means normalizing "auto-pilot" functionality.
> Why not segregated roadways? If we're so desperate to automate trucking and shipping, how about big, thick K-rails, and dedicated roadway?
Because massive structural changes would be required. Similar to why buses are the go-to for public transit in developing countries -- four wheels and a relatively flat surface and you're done. Add in the challenge of retrofitting existing routes and our tendency to build large structures along roads and this is hilariously non-trivial.
Further, how would you design the segregated roadway? Do you take an existing lane from a highway? Is this railed-lane protected by barriers to prevent vehicular debris or illegal use? How do the shipping-vehicles exit the highway without blocking/crossing lanes?
And probably a Robert Moses character might emerge and cause just as many problems re-engineering roadways in broad, callous strokes.
But there's a huge ugly blind spot we're going to unleash upon the world with cars that decide what happens and when, all on their own.
People don't even like when the cops know how many emails are filled with retarded emojis on their phones. People go batshit insane about full disk encryption.
You're all mad if you think this car business going to work out in your favor.
So just like most cars are to be driven on paved roads, reliable autonomous cars will need to be driven on roads with good visibility of lane markings. And road construction or road hazard cones will need to be electronic, so they can give the car computer unambiguous instructions (such as "shut down until driver manual control is confirmed").
I don't disagree with that sentiment but there were all sorts of things that "PCs" couldn't do that real computers could and they were still commercially successful (and eventually caught up to "real" computers for the most part). I could imagine that someone could come up with signage which self driving cars would understand and act on. Basically put up a QR code that links to the government approved way self driving cars should navigate the hazard, and of course a programming language that could communicate that to the car.
Of course you would not want just anyone to set up overrides or you would have pranksters sending cars off into corn fields or worse.
The part that Nissan appeared to miss is that if you can make them work in 99.9% of the cases, then you can hack around that last .1% and the cars will still be a net win in terms of better road behavior.
I'm not trying to be hyperbolic here, those really are the stakes with self driving cars. The problem is that when consumers think they are getting a self driving car they will very quickly resort to bad behavior (see the terribly sad Tesla fatality from last year.)
We really need to be careful about how these features are marketed and implemented.
The edge cases are not going to be adverse driving conditions, which machines actually handle better with superior reaction times and finer control.
People still feel that "it won't happen to them" because they have agency and can drive safer than others, it isn't neccrary true but you give up on this agency when you let a computer drive.
You can drive in a way which will reduce you likelihood of being in a fatal accident if all autonomous cars have say a 2.5% fail rate on decisions it becomes just a matter of time.
Autonomous cars aren't programmed, they're trained, like humans. So I don't think this reasoning applies. If they behave poorly in some circumstances, they'll just create new training simulations covering those cases with better outcomes and push an update out. The cars will learn better and faster than humans.
It will never be able to handle unique and novel cases because it cannot think. "AI" isn't intelligent, it is a dumb bureaucrat executing instructions.
I am in the apparently unusual position of believing that autonomy is both feasible and desirable, while thinking that the capabilities of current implementations are being oversold.
I hear this argument often, but I see no evidence for it. It just sounds like yet another flawed attempt to make humans more special than they really are.
I guess we'll see over the next 5 years as autonomous vehicles become deployed.
The rules of the road define who has the right of way. Of course, sometimes other drivers don't see you, but you literally have no way of knowing whether or not they do. The only thing you can do is begin your attempt cautiously in accordance with road rules and abort at the first sign of potential collision.
Notice how this decision process is completely algorithmic. Proper understanding of another driver's mind is a red herring. You use the almost-collision to infer what the other driver knows, not the other way around like you seem to think.
Now, I do not doubt that if all (or most) vehicles were autonomous, things could work as you describe (though traffic might flow more smoothly or efficiently if vehicles could signal 'intent'), but that is not how it works at the moment, and the transition is probably the hardest part of introducing autonomous vehicles.
Sure, after they do something seemingly stupid that you don't understand. Inference follows observation, not the other way around, and autonomous vehicles are observing all the time with reaction times much faster than a human's. Even if an autonomous vehicle weren't able to understand high-level goals, it understands and detects vectors much better than humans do, which is all that's really needed to create and adapt a plan that avoids collisions.
> I am very confident that people weigh the presumed motives and purpose of other drivers in their predictions of future outcomes
And I'm very confident that even if this were true, it's largely irrelevant to being a good driver.
There is a gap between Level 2 and Level 4 (arguably Level 5 with the new standards, but I'm going to assume Level 4 means what most people would call a true self-driving car) autonomy which is dangerous, because it lulls humans into a false sense of safety. And then when the car can no longer drive itself, the user is expected to take over with a delayed reaction time and little to no context in what could be a very dangerous situation. It is a deadly valley. There are numerous studies on this topic from the aviation industry, and drivers don't have nearly as much training as pilots.
I think real self-driving cars are awesome, and the first time I sat in one years ago when I worked on it as a PhD student was truly an incredible experience. But the hype around the technology is too much, and when investors push for a product in a few years when it's not ready at best companies will fail and at worst people will die. Misinforming the public on this is a very serious problem which nobody seems to care about, even after at least 1 death which is still under investigation.
I am all for working on this technology and seeing incremental improvements over the years. But I am frustrated with the media's portrayal of how it's just around the corner (I am frustrated with the media in general), and I believe the overpromise of the technology is largely responsible for the death of the Tesla owner in Florida last year (and there are other accidents that are reported in China which get much less coverage).
People will say self-driving cars save lives and are safer. In theory, yes - but the problem is we aren't there yet. There just isn't enough data to make that claim. When Tesla said it was safer, they ignored the fact that all of their driving was on highways (which are statistically safer) and that their owners are more affluent and older (at least I assume the average Tesla owner is 25+). The data isn't available when you break down these demographics, but I suspect if it were that 1 death would actually make autopilot deadlier than manual driving. It's a moot point though - anybody trying to extrapolate meaningful conclusions from a single data point is making a ridiculous claim.
Autobraking for accidents only, is a "self driving" feature that you can buy right NOW on most 2017 cars.
Auto braking alone could save 10s of thousands of lives every year, and it is absolutely production ready.
As a thought experiment, just imagine how every daily activity is improved by self driving cars; not just relaxing while driving to work, but automatic transportation of children to school, removal of the annoying of finding a parking spot at a grocery store. Social activities are made much more convenient; having drinks with a friend, picking up parents from the airport, lending your car to the neighbor. And there is the potential of a world in which car ownership is itself redundant, and we are only speaking about lag time and comfort for transportation.
The technology has been around, but it isn't deployed to the majority of cars yet.
What I am saying is that self driving technology doesn't have to be perfect for it to change the world.
It doesn't matter if we are a ways away from getting to the "nobody owns a car, and everyone just uses self driving Ubers" future. Because the current, shit accident prevention technology can ALREADY change the world, even if it is "just" by cutting accidents in half and saving "only" 40,000 lives every year.
Incremental improvements that save lives and make driving better are fantastic. Overselling a feature that can kill people is not.
Point 229 in Hammurabi's code: [229] If a builder build a house for some one, and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built fall in and kill its owner, then that builder shall be put to death.
or to put it in your words. CEOs (or their kids) must drive around in driverless cars before patrons pay for them.
That's beyond uncharitable. Please don't post inflammatory, unsubstantive comments to HN.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Also, the posted title is clickbait bullshit and not the actual title of the article.
The thesis of the article is that the promises made by these companies -- and the promises are being made -- are not quite feasible in the short term.
So what kind of car would not have some sort of manual override? The car that all these companies are promising!
Point of person above you is that this should always be a feature of driverless cars: manual control. Always.
I know Alphabet is peddling some blind-person shit, but let's be real, that's many year away (2050+) and would be for limited use cases.
On the road, an actor's actions do not merely affect itself, but all the others on that road. If you slow down at a point, that can cause the driver arriving at that point five, ten minutes after to stop. On the road, everything creates a butterfly effect. And just like you can't run around naked or listen to very loud music in residential areas, you can't just get on the road with your new toy which if fails, does not only put your life at danger, but also many others'.
It's not hard to find places where a 40min commute in a car turns into 2-3 hours using public transport.
Public transport is also not as reliable in places with extreme weather especially cold.
Have fun waiting for a bus in an open bus stop at -10c...
Certainly in rural areas and in wider peripheral suburban areas public transport is less useful. But in actual cities (London, Paris, Istanbul, etc.) with a high density of people and their residences, public transport is the way to go. I don't know much about American cities, but if we got a comprehensive and functional system of metros, buses and boats here in Istanbul, where some of you would classify as a part of the third world, I guess you are capable of doing it in the US too.
London is probably a "bad" example, I live in London and sure the public transport is probably in the top 5 in the world, so is Tokyo and Paris. But what many cities with good public transport have in common is that they had public transportation for a long time, were designed / rebuilt with that in mind when it was manageable and are relatively small for their population density.
I would not want to be the one that has to design a public transport system for a sprawling city like LA where the greater LA area covers nearly 90,000 square kilometers for a size comparison the entirety of England is 130,000 sq/km.....
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-15/uber-and-...
It would also take me several hours every day.
My car costs me maybe a maximum of 90€ every month and takes me to work in about 15 minutes.
I know what you will say. "Just live in the city and use a bike to get to work, faster and costs nothing! (apart from the bike)". But that would not only reduce my quality of living (let's face it, the countryside is nicer) but also let my rent costs skyrocket (average price per m² more than doubles).
Well I'd actually not say that, because I'm not really saying "kill all the cars". What I'm saying is that "in most cases most probably public transport is equivalent to if not better than autonomous vehicles, so the effort and the risks are not worth them". I live in Istanbul and my school and my home are 30-20 kilometers apart on a straight line. When there's no traffic it'd take ~30 minutes to drive there, and at my usual times it'd take 1-2 hours with traffic. Via public transport it's 30min fixed + 5-10min walking. And in that time I can have my morning coffee from my thermos flask and eat a simit, and I don't need to be alert at all (I'd probably be dead by now if I drove in the mornings).
So TL;DR: for me, I'm perfectly fine w/ your commute, I just say that self-driving is not really a necessary and fruitful burden, however cool it may be, in solving traffic jams and traffic safety problems.
There is something deeply unpleasant about underestimating people and underestimating the problem is generally not a great way to solve it.
In the real world hundreds of millions of drivers have been driving on extremely varied roads and traffic conditions all over the world for decades. Given the sheer scale and volume of drivers, conditions and cars involved it appears self driving proponents are massively overplaying the safety card and worse with little to no data for the other side.
Any ai vehicle that requires new kinds of roads or contraints is a completely different ball game and cannot be compared to human drivers. Trains are far safer and in many cases faster than cars. Yet the train story in the US has remained dire for decades making ai safety proponents look self serving.
Technology does not exist in a vaccum, it is to benefit us and things like cars are tecnological as much as social and political. A car gives you basic transportation but also the freedom to go wherever you want. Having ai cars, constraints for them and control that could limit mobility and freedom then become more than techology issues in which the voice of society becomes far more important than the people creating the technology.