12 ms·

Given time to market constraints and the potential value of having widely adopted autonomous vehicle software, it's not all surprising that vendors will take ex

• frgtpsswrdlame 8y ago
  >That being said, I still want this tech on the road ASAP, not because it's perfect, but because human drivers are So. Fucking. Awful. This narrative is so pervasive and I must admit a bit strange to me. Millions and millions of people strap themselves into thousands of pounds of metal and then drive 80 down the highway while texting and changing the radio and telling your kids to please stop fighting surrounded by other people doing the exact same thing. And we do that every single day and almost all of us are fine and will never have a 'major' accident. Humans are pretty fucking great at driving. Besides to say that human are bad (or good) at driving would require some comparison, we're bad at it compared to what? As far as we know humans are the best drivers in universe. There's no evidence that self-driving is currently better than human drivers and there's no evidence that self-driving cars will soon be better than human drivers and there's no evidence that if we allow tons of self-driving cars on the roads then they will be better than humans. It's just blind hope, it really makes me want a word for whatever the opposite of a luddite is, instead of a belief that we can destroy machines to benefit people we believe we can destroy people to benefit machines. It's all twisted up. If you want to be an Uber or Tesla crash test dummy and walk/bike across a test track while they see if their vehicle can avoid you then by all means go for it. But don't just foist that upon average people.
  • wetpaws 8y ago
    It's not that humans are bad, it's more about humans being unreliable by definition. That's why we have autopilots, industrial robots, elevator or traffic light control system, or, in general trying to automate stuff.
    • occamrazor 8y ago
      The point is that, until now, humans are _better_ drivers than self driving cars.
      • w_t_payne 8y ago
        An alert, attentive, sober human will be a better driver than a self driving car for some time to come.
        • w_t_payne 8y ago
          It's the exhausted, distracted, drunk ones you need to look out for.
          • simion314 8y ago
            And we could install some cheap device in each cars to detect when a driver is tired and keep him awake, and detect a drunk driver and stop him drive or perform some other action. Until most of people will afford a self driving car you would still have to face the drunk, or the ones that text so you will not remove those of the roads.
            • w_t_payne 8y ago
              Not a bad idea.
            • perl4ever 8y ago
              There are luxury cars that attempt to detect when a driver is falling asleep, and people are sometimes mandated to have an interlock on their cars that prevents starting if they have alcohol in their breath. So if these things are not universal, presumably it's because of cost-benefit analysis, not because they need to be invented.
• mannykannot 8y ago
  There's a good chance that reckless testing will ultimately delay the introduction of the technology.
  • w_t_payne 8y ago
    You could well be right.
• ksk 8y ago
  >So are big corporations going to do kind of a careless job testing live vehicles in a rush to market? Yes. Will people get hurt? Yes. Is it worth it? Yes. Hey, another human driver on the freeway here. Sorry, but I don't want to be killed because you want to play with some toys. It is completely unethical and immoral to ship unproven tech that has the potential to kill people. I'd suggest running an experiment with OPT-IN volunteers in a neighborhood or small city for a year or however long it takes and then coming back with data.
  • true_religion 8y ago
    Becoming proven tech won't necessarily make it better. It will just mean that the failure cases are well known, such as with other tech like cruise control, or anti-lock breaks, or power steering. For better or worse, our laws acknowledge that being alive has unnecessary risks, and accepting the social order means accepting the standard of risk caused by other people.
  • beat 8y ago
    It's not about "play with some toys". It's about saving lives. Tens of thousands of people are killed by cars every year in the US alone. And the primary causes of those fatalities are the kinds of things most easily addressed by automation - lane drift. Running red lights and stop signs. Speeding. Driving too fast for conditions. Aggressive maneuvering leading to loss of control. Drunken or distracted driving, by itself, doesn't kill. It leads to the behaviors that kill, like lane drift and speeding and running lights. These are all things that autonomous cars handle really well.
    • arkades 8y ago
      You’re begging the question. Given performance to date, real world deployment is no way certain to be as safe - much less safer - than human drivers at the current state of the tech. I don’t doubt it will get there and, when it does, these profit-oriented corner-cutting behemoths had better have a shit ton of data to prove it. when they’ve proven the premise you’re taking for granted. Then I’ll happily see this tech widely deployed.
    • 8y ago
• mtgx 8y ago
  And because of those shortcuts we may see a "self-driving car" winter. If we're seeing these fatalities with these companies having only tens of cars on the road, what can we expect if they deployed millions?
• Karrot_Kream 8y ago
  No. I'm tired of utilitarian responses to ethical dilemmas. The ends do not justify the means.
  • beat 8y ago
    You say "utilitarian responses to ethical dilemmas", I say "using reason to respond to magical thinking".
    • bildung 8y ago
      1) utilitarianism is absolutely not the same as "reason". Its one of several ethical theories, and it isn't without its fair share of problems. 2) right now self driving cars are more deadly than human drivers by several orders of magnitude. Thats the reality.
      • beat 8y ago
        1. I know what utilitarianism is, and its shortcomings. Do you know what humor is? 2. You're misusing statistics. There isn't enough data on autonomous driving performance to make your claim, not enough road miles.
        • bildung 8y ago
          So we agree that there is no empirical base for the assumption that self driving cars really save lives?
          • beat 8y ago
            Only if we're separating empirical evidence from inferential evidence. We can't demonstrate empirically, because there is far too little data at this point (and refusing to do the thing to collect the data because we don't have enough data is not a sound moral argument). But we can infer a great deal. And I've already established grounds for inference... - Better sensors. Sensors that can detect 360 degrees at all times, and see into infrared, not to mention LIDAR. The sensors can easily outperform human eyes attached to human heads. - Better mechanics. Automation can be directly connected to steering and brakes, as opposed to modulating through human hands and feet and into other mechanical linkages. - Better reflexes. Less lag from observation to action, compared to the eyes/brain/hands system. - No distraction. Human minds wander. - No intoxication. - No sleeping! Falling asleep at the wheel causes many fatal accidents. - No emotions, no anger, no aggression. So emotionally and mechanically, autonomous systems are clearly superior to humans. The only real argument left is interpretation of the environment. Can they detect hazards more effectively than humans can? Let's look at some hazard categories... Lane drift - easily solved. Running red lights and stop signs - easily solved. Speeding - easily solved. Maintaining braking distance in traffic - easily solved. I could go through more, but you get the idea. We're focusing on "What if a pedestrian steps out in front of it and it doesn't recognize them as a hazard?", and ignoring much more common categories of accident-causing situations, categories where machines easily outperform humans. So "empirical base"? Sure, no basis. But inferentially, the argument for the superiority of autonomous driving systems is very strong.
• chimeracoder 8y ago
  > That being said, I still want this tech on the road ASAP, not because it's perfect, but because human drivers are So. Fucking. Awful. And yet, so far, Uber's self-driving vehicles have a higher fatality rate than the status quo. Sure, it could be improved over time, but the whole point of TFA is that Uber is currently not doing the requisite diligence and testing with their vehicles to ensure safety.
  • Consultant32452 8y ago
    I wonder how Uber's fatality rate compares to other high risk groups. For example, I suspect teenagers or new drivers in general have a higher fatality rate. And yet obviously new/young drivers must be allowed to operate vehicles on the open road. Would your opinion change if, for example, Uber's fatality rate was better than $worst_category_of_current_drivers?
• pjc50 8y ago
  > Will people get hurt? Yes. Is it worth it? Yes. Do you get to decide this? No. Does Uber get to decide this? No. Is this attitude going to produce a backlash against the idea of the technology, similar to the GMO backlash? Probably.
  • lobotryas 8y ago
    But he's not deciding it - he's merely stating his opinion. Uber apparently did decide this earlier by taking the shortcuts they did. I also agree with GP. We need to take more _calculated_ risks instead of trying for strictly risk-free science. Personally I'll gladly accept more dead astronauts (and hail them as heroes) if they push spaceflight further.
    • thousandautumns 8y ago
      > Personally I'll gladly accept more dead astronauts (and hail them as heroes) if they push spaceflight further. How noble of you.
    • erobbins 8y ago
      Me too, and the astronauts make that choice themselves knowing their butts are on the line... we don't have some "move fast" CEO grab random people off the street and shove them into poorly built and untested rockets.
• switch007 8y ago
  > If that jackass had a self-driving vehicle, the bicyclist would still be alive today. That seems like a huge leap? What if the driver had a gun and just expressed his rage with bullets? What if the self-driving vehicle, prior to the rage part, hit a bug and hit the cyclist? And by self-driving vehicle you mean e.g. Level 5? The driver could not take control to express his rage?
  • beat 8y ago
    The driver had actually been road-raging with another driver when he hit the bicyclist. He wasn't directing his anger at the cyclist. (edit: He had also left a bar, and may have been drunk, but he was not connected to the hit-and-run for days, so there was no evidence to charge him with drunk driving.) This doesn't seem like a huge leap to me at all. If he'd been driving responsibly, he probably would not have hit the cyclist. And autonomous drivers don't get angry or careless. Your follow-on about imaginary scenarios kind of underscores the weakness of that argument. And I do agree that a raging driver taking control from the automation continues to be a problem. But that's no worse than the original situation, now is it?
    • switch007 8y ago
      Well, yes, it's easy to attack my "argument" when you didn't originally give the full details. Bugs are not imaginary scenarios. Also, did the US outlaw gun ownership without the rest of the world noticing? > And I do agree that a raging driver taking control from the automation continues to be a problem. But that's no worse than the original situation, now is it? I only replied to one point: that you cannot state with 100% conviction that the cyclist wouldn't have died had there been a self-driving vehicle. You could back down and just concede you really meant to add at least one condition: "if that jackass had a completely autonomous vehicle, with no manual input possible, it is highly unlikely the cyclist would have been killed"
      • beat 8y ago
        I'll concede to the point of "If the car had a good quality collision detection system, and the jackass did not deliberately disable it". You don't need "no manual input possible" for this. You just need a system smart enough to apply the brakes when the driver doesn't. I was out car shopping recently, and even affordable midrange cars (Subaru Crossfire and Honda HRV) offer technology that could have done this, as a standard feature.
• mdev 8y ago
  > So are big corporations going to do kind of a careless job testing live vehicles in a rush to market? Yes. Will people get hurt? Yes. Is it worth it? Yes. There is a big difference between humans killing others as one off incidents vs one bug, defect or security flaw making a crash possible with the whole fleet. It can be far more catastrophic.
  • beat 8y ago
    I'm actually far more afraid of a security flaw than a defect. Security flaws could be deliberately exploited by terrorists or other bad actors. That's a really serious concern. On the other hand, that's the kind of thing that gets addressed by brute-force improvement. Security is a well-understood field, and the main problems we've seen with car security so far have been caused by insufficient effort, not insufficient technology.
• jellicle 8y ago
  > Plus, the additional sensors available and the software response time mean autonomous drivers can outperform even sober, attentive, skilled human drivers in most situations. [citation needed] All the current evidence is that humans grossly outperform computers at the task of "driving vehicles to arbitrary locations in all conditions", and that that isn't changing any time soon. Like, it isn't close. HUMANS: ========================================================= MACHINES: == You can talk about your speculative perfect-performance car if you like, but there's no evidence that it will ever exist. Why not give it hyperdrive too?
  • beat 8y ago
    I'm not talking about perfect performance. I'm talking about "superior to humans in the general case* performance. And there is plenty of evidence that it will exist, starting with the huge number of things that humans used to do that are now done by computers, faster and more accurately. Driving vehicles to all locations in all conditions? Yeah, humans will have advantages there for a long time to come. Driving on highways and city streets within the bounds of traffic laws and expected velocities? I think computers will be better than humans very soon, if they aren't already so.
• djsumdog 8y ago
  > Plus, the additional sensors available and the software response time mean autonomous drivers can outperform even sober, attentive, skilled human drivers in most situations. Self driving cars are a hard problem, a very hard problem. So is CAPTCHA and machines are still not that great at solving them. The problem space of autonomus vehicles is a large one, and even with how many mistakes human drivers make, I still don't think we're anywhere near the tech to make safe autonomous driving vehicles. We're at a minimum, 15 years off. I want you to think about all the technology we use every day. Our phones, desktops, laptops, are full of bugs. Hell I found bugs in the ticketing system I buy metro cards from the other day. We see display kiosk crash all the time. A Tesla car with lane assistance (please stop calling it auto-pilot) recently drove a car into barrier. Another kept driving for hours without hands on the wheel (fixed in an update. Was that driver passed out? No way to know.) Now you might say, this is different. The engineers working on self-driving tech are at the level of the ones that build bridges, or make pacemaker software (which by the way, some were found to have a bluetooth vulnerability recently) or plane avionics. Maybe, but Uber certainly isn't. They're a culture of scum shit shop. This isn't a small thing here. It's a huge, huge problem space that no one completely understands yet. Why are there not any self-driving cars on the streets of NYC or Chicago? Because it's difficult, and dangerous and if there were, people would be dead right now. For all the money we're investing in self driving cars, we could build tech that already works. Singapore and London both have fully autonomous trains; some that arrive at 30 second intervals and carry millions of people a day. America needs to get its normal infrastructure back before we go down this fantasy world of self driving cars. I wrote more about this a while back: https://penguindreams.org/blog/self-driving-cars-will-not-solve-the-transportation-problem/ https://penguindreams.org/blog/self-driving-cars-will-not-so...
  • beat 8y ago
    Thanks for that well-reasoned disagreement. The quality of arguments here has been pretty low, but this is excellent.
  • vntok 8y ago
    > I want you to think about all the technology we use every day. Our phones, desktops, laptops, are full of bugs. Hell I found bugs in the ticketing system I buy metro cards from the other day. We see display kiosk crash all the time. These arguments don't make a lot of sense to me: - Do you think display kiosks would still crash all the time if the industry spent a few hundred millions at improving them? - Do you think the metro ticketing system would have as many bugs if the transit agency spent a billion on it? If not, why are you comparing very different situations? Maybe we need to use average number of bugs per amount spent on dev instead of average number of bugs per project or per # lines of code
• genericone 8y ago
  We as a society just need to focus on getting out of this local minima that we are stuck in. It is clear to any of us here on HN that autonomous cars will result in fewer deaths, I have no doubts about that whatsoever, humans are statistically terrible drivers. It will only be when the data becomes clear that autonomous vehicles (Uber at the bottom, Waymo at the top currently) are better than humans, that naysayers will not be able to fight this. There is not enough data at this point to fight naysayers. The argument will necessarily proceed to the point where "who is responsible" becomes less important than "reducing vehicular deaths". Since big money is driving all of this, the conversation is still about financial liability, the conversation needs to move past that. In 5-10 years time, we should be able to judge just based on statistics: For the USA: 37,000 vehicle deaths / year 2.35 million injuries / year 1,600 child deaths / year 8,000 killed in crashes involving drivers ages 16-20 $230.6 billion per year in crash associated costs If any company can show that these statistics can be reduced (halved/thirded/decimated) in any meaningful way with their autonomous tech, that's when we'll finally reach a new era in transportation. How can anyone advocate for human-driven cars once the implications become clear? Let's say that the Uber autonomous car reduces vehicular injuries and deaths by only 5%, well shouldn't that be enough evidence to say, put that on our roads? I think that the current level of tech is already at a point where it will save lives on average more than a human driver, what more do you need from a regulatory point of view?
  • londons_explore 8y ago
    The numbers can be dramatically reduced by better safety standards for roads, vehicles, and better training (stricter driving tests, better control of distracted and drunken driving). Take the UK for example. It has many of these safety improvements, and gets one quarter of the risk of dying in a car accident (one half the risk per mile driven, since Americans drive further). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
  • perl4ever 8y ago
    "We as a society just need to focus on getting out of this local minima that we are stuck in. It is clear to any of us here on HN that autonomous cars will result in fewer deaths, I have no doubts about that whatsoever, humans are statistically terrible drivers." Getting out of a "local minimum" by definition requires things to get worse before they get better - that's what makes it a local minimum. So it requires faith, which is belief in the absence of clear evidence. Faith is always uncertain, which is why people get strident and appeal to emotion when it is challenged.
• londons_explore 8y ago
  Wait - this presumably happened in the USA, and a car which is primary evidence in a murder investigation could not be located? This is despite automatic numberplate recognition on most freeways, many cars having trackable cell/wifi/bluetooth connections, automated RFID identifiers for toll roads, every car having a unique VIN which is printed on nearly all components and will be registered by scrapyards, and tracking on all mobile phones (presumably the driver had a phone!).
  • beat 8y ago
    It's probably in a lake somewhere. I live in Minnesota, which is called the "Land of 10,000 Lakes". Actually, it's closer to 20,000, but we're modest. :) What's known is that the driver, after hitting the cyclist, drove to his mother's workplace, and she left with him. The car he was driving has not been seen since. If it was driven into a remote lake somewhere, it will probably never be found.
    • londons_explore 8y ago
      Ground scanning radar can look into lakes down to about 60 feet deep and find metal objects rather easily. One would think a murder investigation would (a) know this, and (b) have the ability to get data from a military or private satellite, both before and after the suspected incident. Failing that, tracking data from the pairs phones would likely indicate which lake, and probably which part of the lake even.
      • beat 8y ago
        Maybe. But that sort of thing is expensive for a court case, especially when there is sufficient evidence for conviction already. The driver was convicted of vehicular homicide (max five years), and leaving the scene of an accident. He can't be forced to testify about the location of the car (Fifth Amendment), and I don't know if he was charged with obstruction of justice. His mother was charged with obstruction-type charges, and her case hasn't been tried yet.
• wpietri 8y ago
  It's very generous of you to sacrifice other people's family members in service of your vision of a new, more perfect society. But if you were all that serious about your "killing people saves lives" vision you'd be out there walking back and forth in front of Uber cars on their test tracks. But since you aren't, I'm guessing even you don't really believe what you're saying. Which is good, because a key assumption of your theory is proven wrong by the article you're commenting on. Yes, these vehicles will eventually save lives once their error rate drops below that of a human driver. But there's no reason to think that running over a bunch of real people is necessary for progress until these cars work well in simulations. As the article explains, they get orders of magnitude more testing done in simulation than on the road. Uber's rush to test things in the real world was not about advancing the technology or saving lives. It was about getting a short-term commercial advantage on the cheap.
  • beat 8y ago
    And likewise? Your spirited defense of the status quo also sacrifices innocent lives. Over 30,000 Americans die in traffic accidents each year. Just how much better do autonomous cars need to be in order to be acceptable to test in the real world? The data and experience gathered from real-world testing should (I'm not saying "will") accelerate the progress to the point you mention - "once their error rate drops below that of a human driver". Let's look at the Uber case, since everyone infers so much from it. One fatality. One. And the program was immediately shut down. And how did it happen? Engineers had deliberately disabled the automated emergency braking system to reduce "erratic behavior", but had no automated notification to the driver. And the driver was distracted, doing data entry for the test as he was instructed to do. If the emergency braking system had been on, it would have stopped the car on time - they have the data for this. This sure looks like human error to me. And that single accident put Uber's program drastically behind schedule, relative to more cautious/thorough competitors. Uber paid a market price for its eager carelessness.
    • donarb 8y ago
      This one incident is not the cause of Uber being behind schedule. They shut down their program in California because they didn't want to follow the rules. So Uber moves to a state with lax rules and a woman paid for it with her life. If Uber was more focused on doing things the right way their program would be much further ahead.
• TheCoelacanth 8y ago
  I'll believe this argument when the self-driving car companies start testing them in the neighborhoods where their executives live.
  • pliny 8y ago
    Waymo cars currently drive all around Mountain View, including the Google campus.
• cjblomqvist 8y ago
  Or, you could actually make it harder to pass the driving license test which is a joke compared to many other countries, pass laws making it mandatory to insert speed control software into all vehicles and alcohol test machines (and also dramatically reduce the limit). And of course, create safer roads. But hey, why not kill a few people instead of these unpopular but proven options (compare with Sweden for example).