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Why does the tech industry focus on self-driving cars so much? It's absolutely never going to happen, ever. The world would be much better off if we converted

Why does the tech industry focus on self-driving cars so much? It's absolutely never going to happen, ever. The world would be much better off if we converted our roads to a rail/streetcar system and drop the personal car concept entirely. The hype around this is worse than VR.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Stanleyc23 9y ago
because local maxima vs global maxima?
slackoverflower 9y ago
Is it that you don't want self driving cars to happen or you don't THINK it will happen? I, for one, am super excited for self driving personal vehicles and will be glad to see the eradication of mass public transportation like trains and buses.
- jamestimmins 9y ago
  There's a strong case to be made that this isn't a desirable outcome in a lot of areas. Trains and buses are much more efficient at moving people than individual cars, even if they're self-driving. I'm also extremely excited about autonomous cars, but neither desire nor think they will replace mass transit. edit: As a few people have mentioned, my suggestion that "trains are buses are much more efficient" is dubious. And I certainly don't mean to say they're better in all circumstances. It's more accurate to say that in certain scenarios, it still makes sense to use mass transit instead of self driving cars. Moving inside Manhattan, or commuting from a suburb to Manhattan, are examples where mass transit likely makes sense. With the obligatory disclaimer that I could be incorrect, this is simply my understanding.
  - hossbeast 9y ago
    "Trains and buses are much more efficient at moving people than individual cars, even if they're self driving" Dubious claim that needs evidence. I think you're underestimating the potential throughput gains from autonomy. As just one example, speed limits can probably be greatly increased when you take the realities of human reaction times out of the equation.
    - mozumder 9y ago
      How much energy does it take to move 500 cars? How much energy does it take to move one train? That's your answer.
      - briandear 9y ago
        How much energy does it take to operate a train station or get people to the train station? What is the time and monetary cost spent getting to and from a train station and waiting on trains? How many NYC or Paris or Seoul subways run at 3am?
        vonmoltke 9y ago
        Can't speak for Paris or Seoul, but in NYC probably about helf the lines run 24/7. Of course, that's one of the reasons the system is so hard to maintain.
  - freehunter 9y ago
    Trains are great at moving people to train stations. Buses are great at moving people to bus stops. Cars are great at moving people to their homes and businesses. When millions of Americans live in rural or suburban areas, what do you think is easier? Extending rail and bus routes to within walking distance of every house, or convincing everyone to move to a city? The answer is neither, and that's why cars exist. Here's one that isn't a trick question: is it more efficient to build a rail line to my office and have a train run there or to have individual cars drive there? I don't know the answer for sure, but considering you may possibly need 15 trains filled mainly with people who don't work there converging on one location or 15 cars with one person each who does work there converging on one location, I'm almost willing to bet 15 electric cars would be more efficient than 15 trains. There's a certain density requirement that mass transit needs that doesn't always exist. That's why we have cars.
    - mozumder 9y ago
      And streetcars are great at moving people that last mile. Take that road in front of your office, and just put rails in it. If your local government can pay for a road in front of your house, it can pay for a streetcar. This applies to dense areas as well as rural areas. Rail lines actually cost less to maintain than roads, and they cost YOU less because you don't have to buy and pay for a car. And you don't have to fear dying in a crash every time you set foot inside a streetcar, like you do in a car.
      - freehunter 9y ago
        But would a streetcar go past my house? How far do I have to walk to get from my house to a bus stop or train station? Because I own 19 acres and my nearest neighbor is three miles from my house. The nearest town is 20 minutes by car. How would public transport deal with that kind of remoteness? My office is one end of the equation, my home (and the homes of my coworkers) are the other end. It's surprisingly common when you leave the bigger cities. 90% of the country might live in cities, but the other 10% is spread out across the other 99% of the nation.
        9y ago
  - scarmig 9y ago
    I think you overstate how much better mass transit is than self driving cars. Transportation is fundamentally about traversing a graph, and transportation infrastructure is about maximizing the value of the flows on that graph. Mass transit only makes sense when the edges become a certain weight. The vast majority of point to point connections are far too light to support mass transit. Car transit is a bit better for these P2P and near P2P connections, but still pretty mediocre, because of coordination costs. To a significant extent the issues with mass transit can be remedied by breaking the global graph up into connected subgraphs, and each subgraph can be similarly subdivided, recursively down to the point where the form factors and utilization rates cause the economics to break down. The edges between those subgraphs is mass transit. Autonomous technologies make both point to point and mass transit transportation much cheaper. But labor (market or not) comprises a much more of car transportation costs than mass transit costs. Eliminating that cost inherently drives a shift from mass transit to car transit. Combine that with an efficient coordination algorithm to increase car utilization rates, and it gets a significant upper hand. Each approach will still have its place, of course.
    - jamestimmins 9y ago
      That's an interesting approach to breaking the problem down, and a way in which I hadn't thought of it. I can see that I likely overstated my initial comment. I'll edit it to clarify what I meant.
    - robinsloan 9y ago
      Just a nitpick here, but when you write > breaking the global graph up into connected subgraphs I feel like it's too conservative -- and takes "the transportation graph" as too fixed an entity. Consider how much the shape of the U.S. changed between 1917 and 2017 -- suburbs, the Interstate Highways, malls, fast food, huge parking lots, and on and on. The car literally gave us new ways of living with each other, for better and for worse. So I think we should expect changes at least that radical in the next hundred years -- which suggests that we'll not just divide some abstract, eternal graph differently, but really truly reshape it. I can't wait for super-fast trains + self-driving cars, AND I can't wait to see what kind of world they create.
  - didip 9y ago
    What if trains and buses can be made autonomous? From software perspective, there isn't much difference between form of vehicles.
    - robertlagrant 9y ago
      Well there is, because you get autonomous trains today due to the massively reduced problem space.
  - mikebenfield 9y ago
    I would love to have reliable and efficient mass transit. However, for most places in the USA, that seems to be politically and socially impossible. For whatever reason, Americans have almost completely rejected public transit. For that reason, I'm more excited about self driving cars than about public transit.
  - ajmurmann 9y ago
    Public transit in the US generally fails at the last mile for me especially in the suburbs. Self driving cars would be awesome for getting me to the train station. Currently I'd have to take a bus for that. However the bus stops at literally every block which is insane. Extremely frequent stops are a general problem I've had in both the bay area and the Portland area as well as the few times I've used public transit in LA. I'm more than happy to walk 5-10 minutes but I'm not happy to sit in a bus or train that is stopping all the time and never gets up to speed.
  - Turing_Machine 9y ago
    "Trains and buses are much more efficient at moving people than individual cars, even if they're self-driving." I've said this on here before, but I'll say it again: efficiency is not everything. Individual houses (or even apartments) are less efficient than having everybody living in barracks, hot-bunking the beds in three shifts, and eating some sort of nutrient-balanced kibble in cafeterias. Human beings have goals other than efficiency. One ignores this fact at one's own peril.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - tonyedgecombe 9y ago
      If we stop pulling oil out of the ground efficiency will become everything. The whole western economy is based on cheap energy.
    - lmm 9y ago
      > Individual houses (or even apartments) are less efficient than having everybody living in barracks, hot-bunking the beds in three shifts, and eating some sort of nutrient-balanced kibble in cafeterias. Efficient at what? The comment you replied to explicitly talked about what's "efficient at moving people". Of course some people like cars for reasons other than how good they are at getting from A to B, but is that a matter of fundamental human needs, or something more like fashion? Certainly people who commute by car don't seem to actually enjoy doing it.
      - Turing_Machine 9y ago
        "Efficient at what?" Efficient in terms of resource usage, which is exactly how the comment I replied to was using it. "but is that a matter of fundamental human needs, or something more like fashion?" I'm pretty sure that being able to go where you want, any time you want, in a conveyance that doesn't smell like urine, isn't just a "fashion".
        aninhumer 9y ago
- mozumder 9y ago
  My belief is that it just won't happen without infrastructure changes, such as new road designs and car-to-car communications regulations. And I don't see those changes happening without an infrastructure overhaul, at which point you might as well create a streetcar infrastructure.
- nolta 9y ago
  Self-driving cars are not going to replace mass transit. Even electric cars produce produce small-particle pollution, e.g.: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/aug/04/fewer-cars-not-electric-cars-beat-air-pollution-says-top-uk-adviser-prof-frank-kelly https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/aug/04/fewer-ca...
- Tiktaalik 9y ago
  I suspect you would not be so happy when all the people that travel on the more space efficient public transportation systems buy cars and clog up the roads in front of you.
- lmm 9y ago
  That would be terrible if it were to happen; it would mean either sprawling, inhumane cities or small settlements that are awful to live in if you don't conform to the norm. Possibly both. Personal vehicles just take up far too much land.
CaptSpify 9y ago
> Why does the tech industry focus on self-driving cars so much? It's absolutely never going to happen, ever. It's already happened.
- mindcrime 9y ago
  For the "happy path" case, in good weather, etc., sure. But that's the first 90%. The second 90%, dealing with all weather conditions, all traffic conditions, arbitrary road hazards, crazy road conditions, etc., might take a lot longer. To the point that it's not crazy to say "it'll never happen". That said, I do think we'll get there eventually, as I think we'll get to AGI (or even ASI) eventually. But I can't prove that either. And I can understand a certain measure of skepticism about the whole thing.
  - freehunter 9y ago
    There was a day when I booted my computer, I'd have to run a few commands and enter a few keys and insert a diskette. If, at that point, you told me I'd one day have a computer that boots itself and starts programs by itself upon booting to the point where a reboot would be indistinguishable from merely turning the monitor on and off, I may have laughed at you. But here we are, in an era where when my Mac reboots I can open the lid and be looking at the same CNN article as before it rebooted. I'm not trying to say self driving cars are as easy as building a modern OS, however difficult that may be. I'm trying to say, in the area of how advanced computers can become in a very short period of time, humans have historically been incredibly, actually laughable inaccurate. Anyone who says "computers will never X" deserves to be shunned into nonexistence. Literally all of the proof is on the other side of their argument. Historically, computers have always been able to do exactly what humans have claimed they could not do. It's only a matter of time.
    - moxious 9y ago
      Throughout all of that development, computers remained remarkably dumb. We still program them manually and they do what we tell them to even if it's disastrous. Driving on open roads with other humans is going to require elements of real intelligence that are qualitatively different than your OS example where they just did more programming, better, faster. It's apples and dump trucks. What if computers are just the wrong approach for this problem? Computers are always improving. Granted. Doesn't mean it's going to be in a direction that's useful for general AI and driving full-autonomous. On the flip side of constant improvement is are the claims that we'd have full autonomous cars "real soon now" for each of the last 20 years. In 2017, we're still far enough away no one will give a product availability date. This again points to a qualitatively different challenge than what came before, and the need to develop several new layers of tech (not just integrate what's there) to get the job done
Tycho 9y ago
Tesla and Uber need constant hype to keep investors believing. Even Google needs to diversify away from its desktop ads business, or show it has significant room to grow. For a while last year I was taken in by the hype and thought self driving cars were really a lot closer than I previously admitted, but then I realised there is an agenda pushing these success stories.
stale2002 9y ago
Self driving cars work right now. Tesla currently sells them. Sure, they only work on the highway, but that is still a large amount of driving time. Replacing 50% of driving hours is still a world changing revolutionary benefit.
sumedh 9y ago
> It's absolutely never going to happen, ever. Famous last words?

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

Stanleyc23 9y ago

because local maxima vs global maxima?

slackoverflower 9y ago

Is it that you don't want self driving cars to happen or you don't THINK it will happen? I, for one, am super excited for self driving personal vehicles and will be glad to see the eradication of mass public transportation like trains and buses.

jamestimmins 9y ago
There's a strong case to be made that this isn't a desirable outcome in a lot of areas. Trains and buses are much more efficient at moving people than individual cars, even if they're self-driving. I'm also extremely excited about autonomous cars, but neither desire nor think they will replace mass transit. edit: As a few people have mentioned, my suggestion that "trains are buses are much more efficient" is dubious. And I certainly don't mean to say they're better in all circumstances. It's more accurate to say that in certain scenarios, it still makes sense to use mass transit instead of self driving cars. Moving inside Manhattan, or commuting from a suburb to Manhattan, are examples where mass transit likely makes sense. With the obligatory disclaimer that I could be incorrect, this is simply my understanding.
- hossbeast 9y ago
  "Trains and buses are much more efficient at moving people than individual cars, even if they're self driving" Dubious claim that needs evidence. I think you're underestimating the potential throughput gains from autonomy. As just one example, speed limits can probably be greatly increased when you take the realities of human reaction times out of the equation.
  - mozumder 9y ago
    How much energy does it take to move 500 cars? How much energy does it take to move one train? That's your answer.
    - briandear 9y ago
      How much energy does it take to operate a train station or get people to the train station? What is the time and monetary cost spent getting to and from a train station and waiting on trains? How many NYC or Paris or Seoul subways run at 3am?
      - vonmoltke 9y ago
        Can't speak for Paris or Seoul, but in NYC probably about helf the lines run 24/7. Of course, that's one of the reasons the system is so hard to maintain.
- freehunter 9y ago
  Trains are great at moving people to train stations. Buses are great at moving people to bus stops. Cars are great at moving people to their homes and businesses. When millions of Americans live in rural or suburban areas, what do you think is easier? Extending rail and bus routes to within walking distance of every house, or convincing everyone to move to a city? The answer is neither, and that's why cars exist. Here's one that isn't a trick question: is it more efficient to build a rail line to my office and have a train run there or to have individual cars drive there? I don't know the answer for sure, but considering you may possibly need 15 trains filled mainly with people who don't work there converging on one location or 15 cars with one person each who does work there converging on one location, I'm almost willing to bet 15 electric cars would be more efficient than 15 trains. There's a certain density requirement that mass transit needs that doesn't always exist. That's why we have cars.
  - mozumder 9y ago
    And streetcars are great at moving people that last mile. Take that road in front of your office, and just put rails in it. If your local government can pay for a road in front of your house, it can pay for a streetcar. This applies to dense areas as well as rural areas. Rail lines actually cost less to maintain than roads, and they cost YOU less because you don't have to buy and pay for a car. And you don't have to fear dying in a crash every time you set foot inside a streetcar, like you do in a car.
    - freehunter 9y ago
      But would a streetcar go past my house? How far do I have to walk to get from my house to a bus stop or train station? Because I own 19 acres and my nearest neighbor is three miles from my house. The nearest town is 20 minutes by car. How would public transport deal with that kind of remoteness? My office is one end of the equation, my home (and the homes of my coworkers) are the other end. It's surprisingly common when you leave the bigger cities. 90% of the country might live in cities, but the other 10% is spread out across the other 99% of the nation.
      - 9y ago
- scarmig 9y ago
  I think you overstate how much better mass transit is than self driving cars. Transportation is fundamentally about traversing a graph, and transportation infrastructure is about maximizing the value of the flows on that graph. Mass transit only makes sense when the edges become a certain weight. The vast majority of point to point connections are far too light to support mass transit. Car transit is a bit better for these P2P and near P2P connections, but still pretty mediocre, because of coordination costs. To a significant extent the issues with mass transit can be remedied by breaking the global graph up into connected subgraphs, and each subgraph can be similarly subdivided, recursively down to the point where the form factors and utilization rates cause the economics to break down. The edges between those subgraphs is mass transit. Autonomous technologies make both point to point and mass transit transportation much cheaper. But labor (market or not) comprises a much more of car transportation costs than mass transit costs. Eliminating that cost inherently drives a shift from mass transit to car transit. Combine that with an efficient coordination algorithm to increase car utilization rates, and it gets a significant upper hand. Each approach will still have its place, of course.
  - jamestimmins 9y ago
    That's an interesting approach to breaking the problem down, and a way in which I hadn't thought of it. I can see that I likely overstated my initial comment. I'll edit it to clarify what I meant.
  - robinsloan 9y ago
    Just a nitpick here, but when you write > breaking the global graph up into connected subgraphs I feel like it's too conservative -- and takes "the transportation graph" as too fixed an entity. Consider how much the shape of the U.S. changed between 1917 and 2017 -- suburbs, the Interstate Highways, malls, fast food, huge parking lots, and on and on. The car literally gave us new ways of living with each other, for better and for worse. So I think we should expect changes at least that radical in the next hundred years -- which suggests that we'll not just divide some abstract, eternal graph differently, but really truly reshape it. I can't wait for super-fast trains + self-driving cars, AND I can't wait to see what kind of world they create.
- didip 9y ago
  What if trains and buses can be made autonomous? From software perspective, there isn't much difference between form of vehicles.
  - robertlagrant 9y ago
    Well there is, because you get autonomous trains today due to the massively reduced problem space.
- mikebenfield 9y ago
  I would love to have reliable and efficient mass transit. However, for most places in the USA, that seems to be politically and socially impossible. For whatever reason, Americans have almost completely rejected public transit. For that reason, I'm more excited about self driving cars than about public transit.
- ajmurmann 9y ago
  Public transit in the US generally fails at the last mile for me especially in the suburbs. Self driving cars would be awesome for getting me to the train station. Currently I'd have to take a bus for that. However the bus stops at literally every block which is insane. Extremely frequent stops are a general problem I've had in both the bay area and the Portland area as well as the few times I've used public transit in LA. I'm more than happy to walk 5-10 minutes but I'm not happy to sit in a bus or train that is stopping all the time and never gets up to speed.
- Turing_Machine 9y ago
  "Trains and buses are much more efficient at moving people than individual cars, even if they're self-driving." I've said this on here before, but I'll say it again: efficiency is not everything. Individual houses (or even apartments) are less efficient than having everybody living in barracks, hot-bunking the beds in three shifts, and eating some sort of nutrient-balanced kibble in cafeterias. Human beings have goals other than efficiency. One ignores this fact at one's own peril.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - tonyedgecombe 9y ago
    If we stop pulling oil out of the ground efficiency will become everything. The whole western economy is based on cheap energy.
  - lmm 9y ago
    > Individual houses (or even apartments) are less efficient than having everybody living in barracks, hot-bunking the beds in three shifts, and eating some sort of nutrient-balanced kibble in cafeterias. Efficient at what? The comment you replied to explicitly talked about what's "efficient at moving people". Of course some people like cars for reasons other than how good they are at getting from A to B, but is that a matter of fundamental human needs, or something more like fashion? Certainly people who commute by car don't seem to actually enjoy doing it.
    - Turing_Machine 9y ago
      "Efficient at what?" Efficient in terms of resource usage, which is exactly how the comment I replied to was using it. "but is that a matter of fundamental human needs, or something more like fashion?" I'm pretty sure that being able to go where you want, any time you want, in a conveyance that doesn't smell like urine, isn't just a "fashion".
      - aninhumer 9y ago
mozumder 9y ago
My belief is that it just won't happen without infrastructure changes, such as new road designs and car-to-car communications regulations. And I don't see those changes happening without an infrastructure overhaul, at which point you might as well create a streetcar infrastructure.
nolta 9y ago
Self-driving cars are not going to replace mass transit. Even electric cars produce produce small-particle pollution, e.g.: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/aug/04/fewer-cars-not-electric-cars-beat-air-pollution-says-top-uk-adviser-prof-frank-kelly https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/aug/04/fewer-ca...
Tiktaalik 9y ago
I suspect you would not be so happy when all the people that travel on the more space efficient public transportation systems buy cars and clog up the roads in front of you.
lmm 9y ago
That would be terrible if it were to happen; it would mean either sprawling, inhumane cities or small settlements that are awful to live in if you don't conform to the norm. Possibly both. Personal vehicles just take up far too much land.

CaptSpify 9y ago

> Why does the tech industry focus on self-driving cars so much? It's absolutely never going to happen, ever. It's already happened.

mindcrime 9y ago
For the "happy path" case, in good weather, etc., sure. But that's the first 90%. The second 90%, dealing with all weather conditions, all traffic conditions, arbitrary road hazards, crazy road conditions, etc., might take a lot longer. To the point that it's not crazy to say "it'll never happen". That said, I do think we'll get there eventually, as I think we'll get to AGI (or even ASI) eventually. But I can't prove that either. And I can understand a certain measure of skepticism about the whole thing.
- freehunter 9y ago
  There was a day when I booted my computer, I'd have to run a few commands and enter a few keys and insert a diskette. If, at that point, you told me I'd one day have a computer that boots itself and starts programs by itself upon booting to the point where a reboot would be indistinguishable from merely turning the monitor on and off, I may have laughed at you. But here we are, in an era where when my Mac reboots I can open the lid and be looking at the same CNN article as before it rebooted. I'm not trying to say self driving cars are as easy as building a modern OS, however difficult that may be. I'm trying to say, in the area of how advanced computers can become in a very short period of time, humans have historically been incredibly, actually laughable inaccurate. Anyone who says "computers will never X" deserves to be shunned into nonexistence. Literally all of the proof is on the other side of their argument. Historically, computers have always been able to do exactly what humans have claimed they could not do. It's only a matter of time.
  - moxious 9y ago
    Throughout all of that development, computers remained remarkably dumb. We still program them manually and they do what we tell them to even if it's disastrous. Driving on open roads with other humans is going to require elements of real intelligence that are qualitatively different than your OS example where they just did more programming, better, faster. It's apples and dump trucks. What if computers are just the wrong approach for this problem? Computers are always improving. Granted. Doesn't mean it's going to be in a direction that's useful for general AI and driving full-autonomous. On the flip side of constant improvement is are the claims that we'd have full autonomous cars "real soon now" for each of the last 20 years. In 2017, we're still far enough away no one will give a product availability date. This again points to a qualitatively different challenge than what came before, and the need to develop several new layers of tech (not just integrate what's there) to get the job done

Tycho 9y ago

Tesla and Uber need constant hype to keep investors believing. Even Google needs to diversify away from its desktop ads business, or show it has significant room to grow. For a while last year I was taken in by the hype and thought self driving cars were really a lot closer than I previously admitted, but then I realised there is an agenda pushing these success stories.

stale2002 9y ago

Self driving cars work right now. Tesla currently sells them. Sure, they only work on the highway, but that is still a large amount of driving time. Replacing 50% of driving hours is still a world changing revolutionary benefit.

sumedh 9y ago

> It's absolutely never going to happen, ever. Famous last words?