7 ms·

Yeah, because computers never crash right? <pun intended> I think way too many people are viewing self driving vehicles with rose colored glasses. They underes

Yeah, because computers never crash right? <pun intended> I think way too many people are viewing self driving vehicles with rose colored glasses. They underestimate the cost and overestimate the utility to the public.

lukas099 10y ago
I think his point is that they crash less than human drivers, especially when only a very small percentage of drivers on the road are human. Other computers are more predictable to computers than humans are, especially with automatic communication of acceleration, lane changes, etc.
bigato 10y ago
So far the statistics are overwhelmingly in favour of computers doing less mistakes in traffic than humans. Furthermore, if we had mostly self-driving cars, bugs found could be easily deployed to all of the cars, fixing the problems once and for all. While human drivers require cultural changes to drive more safely, and that's way harder to deploy.
- monkmartinez 10y ago
  Yeah, no heartbleed for cars will ever exist! We can just push an update... like mid-trip... I am dumbfounded by the rose colored glasses on this HN regarding self driving.
fdej 10y ago
If a computer crashes, you can identify the software or hardware flaw that caused the crash and fix it once and for all. Improving human driving skills collectively is much more difficult. Even if one driver learns from their own mistake, other drivers and the next generation of drivers will still be just as prone as before to make that mistake. Better education can only do so much anyway, since people often don't think rationally and don't necessarily make safety the number one priority (e.g. drunk driving, trying to get to the destination as quickly as possible, or reckless driving for entertainment purposes).
- jacquesm 10y ago
  > If a computer crashes, you can identify the software or hardware flaw that caused the crash and fix it once and for all. Right. Except that 40 years later computers still crash. The more complex a system the harder it becomes to debug and there is no complex software system without bugs. It's like rocks in a field, you'll never get the last one out even if you think you did.
  - Sharlin 10y ago
    And 100 years later humans still do stupid things in traffic (not to mention they also "crash" - fall asleep, get strokes, whatever). Why does a computer driver have to be flawless when human drivers are anything but?
    - jacquesm 10y ago
      It doesn't have to be flawless, just better than humans. And that's not a simple thing: it will have to be better than humans in every situation, just being better in some but clearly worse in others will still end up looking bad for self driving cars. People don't deal in statistics, they simply look at the situation and say 'that would never happen to a human' and will keep on driving themselves. So it's a very fine line to roll this sort of thing out, do it too early and you end up turning off your potential early adopters.
  - SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
    We build lots of computing systems that rarely have components crash and almost never (eg, not even once over decades) have the whole system go down. We know how to do it. It's just not worth the effort in the vast majority of circumstances -- so you get computer crashes.
    - jacquesm 10y ago
      I know we know how to do it. It's just that the cost-benefit analysis usually falls to 'let it crash' rather than 'let it crash and put a supervisor on top of it'. Besides the fact that most developers don't care too much about their stuff crashing (for instance: one valid excuse for not digging in and solving a problem is 'can't reproduce', whereas those are the worst problems to allow to persist). In the end it is all economics. But I really would like to see some real life stats on how these self driving cars perform over the longer term in less controlled situations and with an honest accounting of the root cause of any issues. Fat chance that will ever happen but that's the sort of rigor that would get me to switch from driving myself to being driven by a pile of software. That's the good bit about Google being involved: at least they really 'grok' software and reliability engineering. As opposed to your average car manufacturer where software is a dirty word best outsourced to some contractor.

lukas099 10y ago

I think his point is that they crash less than human drivers, especially when only a very small percentage of drivers on the road are human. Other computers are more predictable to computers than humans are, especially with automatic communication of acceleration, lane changes, etc.

bigato 10y ago

So far the statistics are overwhelmingly in favour of computers doing less mistakes in traffic than humans. Furthermore, if we had mostly self-driving cars, bugs found could be easily deployed to all of the cars, fixing the problems once and for all. While human drivers require cultural changes to drive more safely, and that's way harder to deploy.

monkmartinez 10y ago
Yeah, no heartbleed for cars will ever exist! We can just push an update... like mid-trip... I am dumbfounded by the rose colored glasses on this HN regarding self driving.

fdej 10y ago

If a computer crashes, you can identify the software or hardware flaw that caused the crash and fix it once and for all. Improving human driving skills collectively is much more difficult. Even if one driver learns from their own mistake, other drivers and the next generation of drivers will still be just as prone as before to make that mistake. Better education can only do so much anyway, since people often don't think rationally and don't necessarily make safety the number one priority (e.g. drunk driving, trying to get to the destination as quickly as possible, or reckless driving for entertainment purposes).

jacquesm 10y ago
> If a computer crashes, you can identify the software or hardware flaw that caused the crash and fix it once and for all. Right. Except that 40 years later computers still crash. The more complex a system the harder it becomes to debug and there is no complex software system without bugs. It's like rocks in a field, you'll never get the last one out even if you think you did.
- Sharlin 10y ago
  And 100 years later humans still do stupid things in traffic (not to mention they also "crash" - fall asleep, get strokes, whatever). Why does a computer driver have to be flawless when human drivers are anything but?
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    It doesn't have to be flawless, just better than humans. And that's not a simple thing: it will have to be better than humans in every situation, just being better in some but clearly worse in others will still end up looking bad for self driving cars. People don't deal in statistics, they simply look at the situation and say 'that would never happen to a human' and will keep on driving themselves. So it's a very fine line to roll this sort of thing out, do it too early and you end up turning off your potential early adopters.
- SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
  We build lots of computing systems that rarely have components crash and almost never (eg, not even once over decades) have the whole system go down. We know how to do it. It's just not worth the effort in the vast majority of circumstances -- so you get computer crashes.
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    I know we know how to do it. It's just that the cost-benefit analysis usually falls to 'let it crash' rather than 'let it crash and put a supervisor on top of it'. Besides the fact that most developers don't care too much about their stuff crashing (for instance: one valid excuse for not digging in and solving a problem is 'can't reproduce', whereas those are the worst problems to allow to persist). In the end it is all economics. But I really would like to see some real life stats on how these self driving cars perform over the longer term in less controlled situations and with an honest accounting of the root cause of any issues. Fat chance that will ever happen but that's the sort of rigor that would get me to switch from driving myself to being driven by a pile of software. That's the good bit about Google being involved: at least they really 'grok' software and reliability engineering. As opposed to your average car manufacturer where software is a dirty word best outsourced to some contractor.