11 ms·

I get that tech companies want self-driving cars really bad because they smell billions of dollars in "disruption" but no matter how good AI gets, I have a susp

I get that tech companies want self-driving cars really bad because they smell billions of dollars in "disruption" but no matter how good AI gets, I have a suspicion it won't actually do better than a decent human driver can do. It's not about processing speed, it's about experience and reflexes, which granted, not everyone has. Let's see a self-driving car win a Formula 1 race--and even that controlled racetrack environment isn't the same as the real world! It's actually harder to drive on the typical American roadways than it is to be on a track. And yes, I am aware that AI stuff is improving exponentially or whatever, but the more I think about this, the more I think it is mostly a pipe dream to grab headlines and be a "look over here" type distraction for the purposes of raising funding. In terms of safety, people will still lose their lives, they will just die from different kinds of car accidents than the kinds we have now.

IndianAstronaut 10y ago
>In terms of safety, people will still lose their lives, they will just die from different kinds of car accidents than the kinds we have now If self driving cars kill 20 thousand people a year, it would still be a major improvement. 30 thousand people die every year from human drivers.
- jjnoakes 10y ago
  I don't think stats will be enough to overcome the human perception factor. Self driving cars have what I consider to be an insurmountable pr problem.
  - Frogolocalypse 10y ago
    I think americans are going to get left behind in this technology. It's not just the crumbling infrastructure, it's the lack of public transport options. I expect there will be plenty of cities around the world that will be adopting self-driving car technology long before the US does.
    - chc 10y ago
      Surely lack of mass transit would be a boon to self-driving cars. Public transportation makes owning a car — self-driving or otherwise — less necessary.
      - IndianAstronaut 10y ago
        Also, self driving cars can follow eachother and communicate closely. A group of cars could be like a train going along the road. Thus, much less roadway space is needed and valuable real estate brought back into use.
      - Frogolocalypse 10y ago
        The people who use public transport are much more likely to be users of share drive services. The target people for this technology, at least at the beginning, aren't going to be suburban or rural people, but urban people, and especially people with constraints such as no garage's or associated services and infrastructure. Any walk around New York, Singapore, or London, will demonstrate this. These people will already be using public transport. They won't want to own a car if they don't need to. They'll want the convenience of a car, without the inconvenience of parking it and owning it. As more people do it, the costs associated with doing alternate things will increase (except, probably, for public transport). As less infrastructure is available for cars that sit empty all day in car parks, that empty-car infrastructure will get more expensive. When some bright spark recognizes that the space now occupied by a car-park, in a high-density city environment, can be turned into multi-million-dollar apartments, with a small private fleet of self-driving cars for their residents, there aren't too many wealthy people that won't want to have that property and service. There will be billions to be made. All of these reasons, and more (like the insurance thing I talked about), I think, will contribute to it overtaking traditional methods of driving quite quickly when it is introduced.
- eanzenberg 10y ago
  Nah because the human stat is for the average human. Being above average means I'd rather have control.
  - eridius 10y ago
    Studies have shown[1] that most people think they're an above-average driver, so your statement isn't very convincing. This cognitive bias is called Illusory superiority (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority). [1] Here's one that says 80% of people rated themselves above-average on a number of important driving characteristics - http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0001457586900047 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/00014575869.... And it's easy to find many sources saying that this conclusion has been reproduced time and time again.
    - Dylan16807 10y ago
      Do you have evidence that most people aren't above-average drivers? I would be pretty shocked if driving skill was normally distributed. I would guess that there are few extremely good drivers (you can only do so much to improve), but significantly more extremely bad drivers. This would drag down the average. Even if you word your survey question in terms of medians, people are bad at numbers. I don't think you can really decide if that's illusory superiority without more digging.
      - eridius 10y ago
        I don't think there are huge numbers of extremely bad drivers. People who are extremely bad drivers tend to have their license taken away, and thus are no longer drivers at all. In fact, I would wager that, when considering average as the mean (not the median), most people are probably below-average. As previously mentioned, there's a minimum bar for driving ability, and I would also wager that most people are pretty close to the average to begin with. But there are fair number of exceptional drivers (e.g. anyone who drives for a living is likely to be a much better driver than the average person, as are any of the numerous people who do a lot of recreational driving). All that said, even if your premise was correct, it would allow for a simple majority to be better than average, but it wouldn't allow for 80% of people to be better than average.
- gambiting 10y ago
  That's not how it works. Imagine you had a medical device that had a high rate of operator-error that would result in serious injury or death. Now imagine someone made a fully automatic device performing the same function, but which would kill or injure a person half the time a manual operator would. Would such a device be allowed on the market? Of course not. The first time a machine did any damage to a human it would be recalled and would disappear off the market, no matter how much better it is than a manually operated machine. If an automatic car kills a person through software error(and I would argue it has already happened with Tesla) the public backlash will be severe, even if those errors happen much less often than human mistakes in manual cars.
- hash-set 10y ago
  I wonder if we could get those numbers down simply by having better driver training programs?
Frogolocalypse 10y ago
> I have a suspicion it won't actually do better than a decent human driver can do. I have the opposite opinion. I don't think self-driving cars are going to start on ALL roads, but on specific routes that are expanded as required. Eventually all routes will be covered, but it will take time. In truth, 90% (99%?) of my driving is on the same routes, so I don't think this is going to be a major issue. In the end, I don't think this is going to be about what you, me, or even Tesla thinks. It will be about what insurance companies think. If self-driving cars turn out to be as good as they are promised to be, having a license for driving a car yourself will get more and more expensive. As more riskier drivers have less licenses, those insurance fees will ratchet up and ratchet up, until they are prohibitively expensive. There's a model for this type of thing... Singapore. This is the type of place that I think will use self-driving cars first. When it starts to happen, I think the transition is going to be very quick.
surrealize 10y ago
Human drivers who generally do a decent job still have bad days. They still get tired and distracted. They still can't see 360 degrees around them all the time. Each new human driver also has to be trained from scratch; when we're starting out, we're dangerous, all of us. An experienced human can't download their knowledge into a new driver telepathically. But software (including AI models trained with data from millions of road miles) can be copied into new cars, no problem. > It's actually harder to drive on the typical American roadways than it is to be on a track. Highway driving is relatively easy to automate, compared to driving on surface streets with pedestrians, bicycles, etc. Even if self-driving only worked on the highway, it'd still free up a huge amount of time for a lot of commuters. That'd be worth it even if self-driving cars didn't improve the accident rate.
mabbo 10y ago
Computers don't have fatigue. Ever driven for 12 hours? I have. I was so exhausted, I couldn't tell how much of safety hazard I was to everyone else. Humans fuck up like that. Even if computers can only match humans at skill level, they will be at the skill level 100% of the time, no directions. (And they will probably exceed us in skill anyways) Car accidents don't happen because people lack skill nearly as often as because people aren't at their best for just a moment. That's why autonomous cars will be safer.
- eanzenberg 10y ago
  I've driven 12 hours a day for 5 days straight (going 3000 miles cross country). Didn't have an issue.
  - eridius 10y ago
    Just because you didn't have an accident doesn't mean your risk of having one wasn't significantly higher (it almost certainly was).
prostoalex 10y ago
A marginal improvement on 1.3 million deaths a year (source: http://asirt.org/initiatives/informing-road-users/road-safety-facts/road-crash-statistics http://asirt.org/initiatives/informing-road-users/road-safet...) might be a bit more worthwhile goal than winning a race. Can you elaborate on possible causes of ~1.3 million deaths in autonomous vehicle world?
flukus 10y ago
I'm pretty confident AI will get better at driving than humans, we're pretty rubbish. I'm more concerned about the AI being hacked, either directly or by something like overloading a sensor.
Dylan16807 10y ago
> it's about experience and reflexes Experience is hard. But computers can have reflexes that are enormously better than any human. And reflexes are a huge part of safe driving.
grecy 10y ago
> I have a suspicion it won't actually do better than a decent human driver can do No suspicion needed, Telsa's data already shows their systems are doing better than Human drivers. I'm quite certain they won't release full autonomy until that also performs better than human drivers.
tim333 10y ago
>Let's see a self-driving car win a Formula 1 race Aside from the obvious that you or I probably couldn't win an F1 race either, autonomous race cars are coming along - one beat a top driver at Thunderhill Raceway Park in Northern California last year. Not F1 but give it time. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/11410261/Driverless-car-beats-racing-driver-for-first-time.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/1141026...
tim333 10y ago
>Let's see a self-driving car win a Formula 1 race Aside from the obvious that you or I probably couldn't win as F1 race either, autonomous race cars are coming along - one beat a top driver at Thunderhill Raceway Park in Northern California last year. Not F1 but give it time. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/11410261/Driverless-car-beats-racing-driver-for-first-time.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/1141026...

IndianAstronaut 10y ago

>In terms of safety, people will still lose their lives, they will just die from different kinds of car accidents than the kinds we have now If self driving cars kill 20 thousand people a year, it would still be a major improvement. 30 thousand people die every year from human drivers.

jjnoakes 10y ago
I don't think stats will be enough to overcome the human perception factor. Self driving cars have what I consider to be an insurmountable pr problem.
- Frogolocalypse 10y ago
  I think americans are going to get left behind in this technology. It's not just the crumbling infrastructure, it's the lack of public transport options. I expect there will be plenty of cities around the world that will be adopting self-driving car technology long before the US does.
  - chc 10y ago
    Surely lack of mass transit would be a boon to self-driving cars. Public transportation makes owning a car — self-driving or otherwise — less necessary.
    - IndianAstronaut 10y ago
      Also, self driving cars can follow eachother and communicate closely. A group of cars could be like a train going along the road. Thus, much less roadway space is needed and valuable real estate brought back into use.
    - Frogolocalypse 10y ago
      The people who use public transport are much more likely to be users of share drive services. The target people for this technology, at least at the beginning, aren't going to be suburban or rural people, but urban people, and especially people with constraints such as no garage's or associated services and infrastructure. Any walk around New York, Singapore, or London, will demonstrate this. These people will already be using public transport. They won't want to own a car if they don't need to. They'll want the convenience of a car, without the inconvenience of parking it and owning it. As more people do it, the costs associated with doing alternate things will increase (except, probably, for public transport). As less infrastructure is available for cars that sit empty all day in car parks, that empty-car infrastructure will get more expensive. When some bright spark recognizes that the space now occupied by a car-park, in a high-density city environment, can be turned into multi-million-dollar apartments, with a small private fleet of self-driving cars for their residents, there aren't too many wealthy people that won't want to have that property and service. There will be billions to be made. All of these reasons, and more (like the insurance thing I talked about), I think, will contribute to it overtaking traditional methods of driving quite quickly when it is introduced.
eanzenberg 10y ago
Nah because the human stat is for the average human. Being above average means I'd rather have control.
- eridius 10y ago
  Studies have shown[1] that most people think they're an above-average driver, so your statement isn't very convincing. This cognitive bias is called Illusory superiority (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority). [1] Here's one that says 80% of people rated themselves above-average on a number of important driving characteristics - http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0001457586900047 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/00014575869.... And it's easy to find many sources saying that this conclusion has been reproduced time and time again.
  - Dylan16807 10y ago
    Do you have evidence that most people aren't above-average drivers? I would be pretty shocked if driving skill was normally distributed. I would guess that there are few extremely good drivers (you can only do so much to improve), but significantly more extremely bad drivers. This would drag down the average. Even if you word your survey question in terms of medians, people are bad at numbers. I don't think you can really decide if that's illusory superiority without more digging.
    - eridius 10y ago
      I don't think there are huge numbers of extremely bad drivers. People who are extremely bad drivers tend to have their license taken away, and thus are no longer drivers at all. In fact, I would wager that, when considering average as the mean (not the median), most people are probably below-average. As previously mentioned, there's a minimum bar for driving ability, and I would also wager that most people are pretty close to the average to begin with. But there are fair number of exceptional drivers (e.g. anyone who drives for a living is likely to be a much better driver than the average person, as are any of the numerous people who do a lot of recreational driving). All that said, even if your premise was correct, it would allow for a simple majority to be better than average, but it wouldn't allow for 80% of people to be better than average.
gambiting 10y ago
That's not how it works. Imagine you had a medical device that had a high rate of operator-error that would result in serious injury or death. Now imagine someone made a fully automatic device performing the same function, but which would kill or injure a person half the time a manual operator would. Would such a device be allowed on the market? Of course not. The first time a machine did any damage to a human it would be recalled and would disappear off the market, no matter how much better it is than a manually operated machine. If an automatic car kills a person through software error(and I would argue it has already happened with Tesla) the public backlash will be severe, even if those errors happen much less often than human mistakes in manual cars.
hash-set 10y ago
I wonder if we could get those numbers down simply by having better driver training programs?

Frogolocalypse 10y ago

> I have a suspicion it won't actually do better than a decent human driver can do. I have the opposite opinion. I don't think self-driving cars are going to start on ALL roads, but on specific routes that are expanded as required. Eventually all routes will be covered, but it will take time. In truth, 90% (99%?) of my driving is on the same routes, so I don't think this is going to be a major issue. In the end, I don't think this is going to be about what you, me, or even Tesla thinks. It will be about what insurance companies think. If self-driving cars turn out to be as good as they are promised to be, having a license for driving a car yourself will get more and more expensive. As more riskier drivers have less licenses, those insurance fees will ratchet up and ratchet up, until they are prohibitively expensive. There's a model for this type of thing... Singapore. This is the type of place that I think will use self-driving cars first. When it starts to happen, I think the transition is going to be very quick.

surrealize 10y ago

Human drivers who generally do a decent job still have bad days. They still get tired and distracted. They still can't see 360 degrees around them all the time. Each new human driver also has to be trained from scratch; when we're starting out, we're dangerous, all of us. An experienced human can't download their knowledge into a new driver telepathically. But software (including AI models trained with data from millions of road miles) can be copied into new cars, no problem. > It's actually harder to drive on the typical American roadways than it is to be on a track. Highway driving is relatively easy to automate, compared to driving on surface streets with pedestrians, bicycles, etc. Even if self-driving only worked on the highway, it'd still free up a huge amount of time for a lot of commuters. That'd be worth it even if self-driving cars didn't improve the accident rate.

mabbo 10y ago

Computers don't have fatigue. Ever driven for 12 hours? I have. I was so exhausted, I couldn't tell how much of safety hazard I was to everyone else. Humans fuck up like that. Even if computers can only match humans at skill level, they will be at the skill level 100% of the time, no directions. (And they will probably exceed us in skill anyways) Car accidents don't happen because people lack skill nearly as often as because people aren't at their best for just a moment. That's why autonomous cars will be safer.

eanzenberg 10y ago
I've driven 12 hours a day for 5 days straight (going 3000 miles cross country). Didn't have an issue.
- eridius 10y ago
  Just because you didn't have an accident doesn't mean your risk of having one wasn't significantly higher (it almost certainly was).

prostoalex 10y ago

A marginal improvement on 1.3 million deaths a year (source: http://asirt.org/initiatives/informing-road-users/road-safety-facts/road-crash-statistics http://asirt.org/initiatives/informing-road-users/road-safet...) might be a bit more worthwhile goal than winning a race. Can you elaborate on possible causes of ~1.3 million deaths in autonomous vehicle world?

flukus 10y ago

I'm pretty confident AI will get better at driving than humans, we're pretty rubbish. I'm more concerned about the AI being hacked, either directly or by something like overloading a sensor.

Dylan16807 10y ago

> it's about experience and reflexes Experience is hard. But computers can have reflexes that are enormously better than any human. And reflexes are a huge part of safe driving.

grecy 10y ago

> I have a suspicion it won't actually do better than a decent human driver can do No suspicion needed, Telsa's data already shows their systems are doing better than Human drivers. I'm quite certain they won't release full autonomy until that also performs better than human drivers.

tim333 10y ago

>Let's see a self-driving car win a Formula 1 race Aside from the obvious that you or I probably couldn't win an F1 race either, autonomous race cars are coming along - one beat a top driver at Thunderhill Raceway Park in Northern California last year. Not F1 but give it time. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/11410261/Driverless-car-beats-racing-driver-for-first-time.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/1141026...

tim333 10y ago

>Let's see a self-driving car win a Formula 1 race Aside from the obvious that you or I probably couldn't win as F1 race either, autonomous race cars are coming along - one beat a top driver at Thunderhill Raceway Park in Northern California last year. Not F1 but give it time. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/11410261/Driverless-car-beats-racing-driver-for-first-time.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/1141026...