5 ms·

I wouldn't be that optimistic.. I grew up in Duluth, MN. A city that in 2 miles goes from 600' ASL to 1400' ASL, there are some roads with a greater than 10%

I wouldn't be that optimistic.. I grew up in Duluth, MN. A city that in 2 miles goes from 600' ASL to 1400' ASL, there are some roads with a greater than 10% grade to them. It snows there, and not just any snow, lake-effect snow. You really do need a special set of skills and roadway awareness to navigate inclement weather in cities like this. Detroit is a great step, but I'd really like to see some more challenging areas handled before I'm convinced.

beager 9y ago
I think a good question that follows from that is: how unsafe is too unsafe for autonomous vehicles? Can we evaluate roads in some generalized way that will not only prevent autonomous vehicle activity, but inform local governments about when they should institute driving bans? In an ideal world, I trust autonomous cars over human-operated cars. So if the conditions are too dire for autonomous cars, I really don't want to be out there with humans driving.
- akira2501 9y ago
  > but inform local governments about when they should institute driving bans? In the U.S. I'm not even sure what such a mechanism would look like? How could you enforce this? > In an ideal world, I trust autonomous cars over human-operated cars. I don't understand this mentality out-of-hand, especially because I've been in cars that have had mechanical failures. There is no mechanical system that is perfectly reliable, and I'm not sure we're considering the emergent effects of this properly. Finally, unless you outright _force_ all drivers to use the autonomous mode, then users can still take control of their cars as they see fit and we're really not improving anything. Case in point, the video says that driving deaths disproportionately affects young _people_. Which is garbage.. it affects young _men_ who are 8 times more likely to die in a vehicle that they're driving than a female of the same age. I don't know how autonomous modes being available are really going to help this group.
  - beager 9y ago
    > In the U.S. I'm not even sure what such a mechanism would look like? How could you enforce this? Some entity produces the data that finds roads unfit for driving based on weather and publishes it, local governments consume that data and institute a driving ban, non-essential personnel cannot drive or they'll get a citation. > I don't understand this mentality out-of-hand, especially because I've been in cars that have had mechanical failures. There is no mechanical system that is perfectly reliable, and I'm not sure we're considering the emergent effects of this properly. Correct, but I believe that a well-conceived autonomous car has a much higher standard of proper operation than a human, so even if there were mechanical problems, I'd trust the autonomous car to halt operation before the human. I also don't really understand your last point so sorry for not addressing it.
    - ntsplnkv2 9y ago
      > so even if there were mechanical problems, I'd trust the autonomous car to halt operation before the human. Unless there was a problem with the halt override.
      - Retric 9y ago
        Perfection is not the comparison, as long as they do better than human in the event of a failure it's a net win. Are you more likely to get food poisoning from a person prepared meal or a snickers prepared by machines? Now, why assume driving is different?
        ntsplnkv2 9y ago
        It will probably not win head to head with a human if the halt override fails, that's the point. > Are you more likely to get food poisoning from a person prepared meal or a snickers prepared by machines? Now, why assume driving is different? Both are so slim who really cares?
        Retric 9y ago
- bm1362 9y ago
  It’s also possibly not worth solving. I don’t know off the top of my head but I’d assume most of the population lives in temperate cities that rarely see the kind of icy weather regularly. Your vehicle could just not drive automatically in suboptimal settings and I think that’d be totally fine.
tyingq 9y ago
4 way stop at the top of a steep icy hill comes to mind.
solipsism 9y ago
And it's your opinion that Google's machine learning is going to be unable to learn to do this better than the average Duluthian? Come on :)
adrianN 9y ago
We allow humans that have never driven in adverse conditions before to hop in their cars and take a road trip to Duluth. If we plan to ban robots from doing similar things then maybe we shouldn't allow humans either.

beager 9y ago

I think a good question that follows from that is: how unsafe is too unsafe for autonomous vehicles? Can we evaluate roads in some generalized way that will not only prevent autonomous vehicle activity, but inform local governments about when they should institute driving bans? In an ideal world, I trust autonomous cars over human-operated cars. So if the conditions are too dire for autonomous cars, I really don't want to be out there with humans driving.

akira2501 9y ago
> but inform local governments about when they should institute driving bans? In the U.S. I'm not even sure what such a mechanism would look like? How could you enforce this? > In an ideal world, I trust autonomous cars over human-operated cars. I don't understand this mentality out-of-hand, especially because I've been in cars that have had mechanical failures. There is no mechanical system that is perfectly reliable, and I'm not sure we're considering the emergent effects of this properly. Finally, unless you outright _force_ all drivers to use the autonomous mode, then users can still take control of their cars as they see fit and we're really not improving anything. Case in point, the video says that driving deaths disproportionately affects young _people_. Which is garbage.. it affects young _men_ who are 8 times more likely to die in a vehicle that they're driving than a female of the same age. I don't know how autonomous modes being available are really going to help this group.
- beager 9y ago
  > In the U.S. I'm not even sure what such a mechanism would look like? How could you enforce this? Some entity produces the data that finds roads unfit for driving based on weather and publishes it, local governments consume that data and institute a driving ban, non-essential personnel cannot drive or they'll get a citation. > I don't understand this mentality out-of-hand, especially because I've been in cars that have had mechanical failures. There is no mechanical system that is perfectly reliable, and I'm not sure we're considering the emergent effects of this properly. Correct, but I believe that a well-conceived autonomous car has a much higher standard of proper operation than a human, so even if there were mechanical problems, I'd trust the autonomous car to halt operation before the human. I also don't really understand your last point so sorry for not addressing it.
  - ntsplnkv2 9y ago
    > so even if there were mechanical problems, I'd trust the autonomous car to halt operation before the human. Unless there was a problem with the halt override.
    - Retric 9y ago
      Perfection is not the comparison, as long as they do better than human in the event of a failure it's a net win. Are you more likely to get food poisoning from a person prepared meal or a snickers prepared by machines? Now, why assume driving is different?
      - ntsplnkv2 9y ago
        It will probably not win head to head with a human if the halt override fails, that's the point. > Are you more likely to get food poisoning from a person prepared meal or a snickers prepared by machines? Now, why assume driving is different? Both are so slim who really cares?
        Retric 9y ago
bm1362 9y ago
It’s also possibly not worth solving. I don’t know off the top of my head but I’d assume most of the population lives in temperate cities that rarely see the kind of icy weather regularly. Your vehicle could just not drive automatically in suboptimal settings and I think that’d be totally fine.

tyingq 9y ago

4 way stop at the top of a steep icy hill comes to mind.

solipsism 9y ago

And it's your opinion that Google's machine learning is going to be unable to learn to do this better than the average Duluthian? Come on :)

adrianN 9y ago

We allow humans that have never driven in adverse conditions before to hop in their cars and take a road trip to Duluth. If we plan to ban robots from doing similar things then maybe we shouldn't allow humans either.