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Self driving cars are not going to happen in established cities for a very, very long time. The only thing that could make it happen is a giant like Google/Alp

Self driving cars are not going to happen in established cities for a very, very long time. The only thing that could make it happen is a giant like Google/Alphabet investing enough cash to lobby governments to repurpose existing transportation infra to only belong to self-driving cars. But that's also the doorway to a dystopian future where megacorps run entire countries.

madengr 8y ago
Delta City (aka New Detroit) would be the ideal for testing.
- paganel 8y ago
  When I think of self-driving cars I always think of this taxi scene (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWgrvNHjKkY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWgrvNHjKkY) from Total Recall. Paul Verhoeven is a genius.
  - madengr 8y ago
    Isn’t that the one with the body scanners (at the airport)?
maxxxxx 8y ago
I really hope that the future won't be even more car centric but that's how things may go.
alkonaut 8y ago
I think the ambition will be adjusted and it will happen. The realization that will come is that solving the last percent (or five, or ten) of driving is so expensive that it's just not pursued. So we'll have these 99% autonomous cars that will be confused and handed off to a human driver, inside the car or remote. This will give most of the benefit at a tiny fraction of the cost. The race won't be to reach fully autonomous driving, but to reach 99.9% when the competition is 99.8%, because that is half the workforce needed to drive all those confused cars. If we take "self driving cars" to mean "cars handling every siytuation", I completely agree that reaching 100% without either restricting the area or modifying the driving environment won't be possible within several decades. But my guess is we never get there because no one will make that investment for such little gain. Completely autonomous driving (handling the things that happen only once in a drivers lifetime) will require so much of human intelligence that if you have that kind of AI there are probably better things to do with it than drive cars around.
- emodendroket 8y ago
  Cars that drive themselves 99% of the time but 1% of the time give up and hand off to human drivers are going to kill the drivers or somebody else about 1% of the time.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    That's a faulty assumption; if the 1% isn't “give up because otherwise we are certain to kill people” but instead “give up because this is a circumstance we aren't confident that the system will handle better than a human”, for instance.
    - lx3459683 8y ago
      It's a very reasonable assumption. When self driving cars give up, they give you a second or less to assess the situation around you and avert disaster. This is now well understood to be less safe than just 100% manual driving since your attention is then on the road at all times instead of inevitably wandering when the car is doing just fine 99% of the time. Don't forget that Wayomo killed off their SAE-2 test program after finding drivers were falling asleep at the wheel of these 99.0% autonomous cars. And to build a self driving system that can give you a reasonable time to actually assess the situation and respond to it? That's the same system that's 99.9999% reliable. This is the crux of why self driving cars will simply not work in the foreseeable future unless sequestered to their own tightly controlled road networks.
      - alkonaut 8y ago
        > When self driving cars give up, they give you a second or less to assess the situation around you and avert disaster. I don't think the problem will be any situation with short reaction times at all. Nothing at freeway speeds, or situations like the Uber accident. That I think is where autonomous cars will shine, because sensors never get tired and reaction times are great. The weird things that will happen which I count to the "not going to solve any time soon" category will be when the car comes to a completely snowed over roadworks, in the middle of the night, with the diversion signs completely hidden in snow. Construction workers barely visible in the snowstorm. Are those guys roadworkers or pedestrians? Are they working? Can I pass here? Will I get oncoming traffic because they narrowed it to one lane? When things this weird happens at highway speeds or anywhere else where reaction is important - humans probably fail too. And at that point it's not really a question of technology but one of trust. Can we allow autonomous car to kill tons of people every year, with the sole excuse that humans would have killed all those people too, and then some? I'm not convinced of that either - I'm only arguing that from a technological standpoint, it should be possible to reach the 99% cars within a rather short timeframe. Those cars may be left on the scrapheap of history because of legal or ethical reasons, however.
emodendroket 8y ago
By the time you're building self-driving car-exclusive tunnels and the like, you really are getting very little benefit over a train system to justify doing it, especially when you take emissions into account.
- gdulli 8y ago
  I agree. Anything with low-occupancy vehicles feels like a dead end to me. Of all things, car ownership is the thing we're aggressively enabling/optimizing in 2018? Really? I'm usually not a person who's sympathetic to complaints about advances in technology eliminating jobs. Not for a real overall long term gain to society. But autonomous cars putting swaths of people out of work while at the same time taking us in the wrong direction on traffic, emissions, etc. doesn't feel great. Those drivers losing work slowly over time as cities evolve truly better and more sustainable transportation options feels more right. Aside from the opportunity cost of not furthering public transportation, autonomous cars will drive around aimlessly anytime the cost of fuel is less than the cost of parking. We already have Uber creating waste by idling/driving around between passengers.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    car ownership is the thing we're aggressively enabling/optimizing in 2018? Really? On the contrary: making taxis cheaper (which self-driving can do, by eliminating the biggest cost - the driver) makes it much easier to live without owning a car. If there was no Uber and such, I'd probably have to own a car for the exceptions not covered by public transport. And after paying for the fixed costs anyway, the marginal cost per trip is low, making me more likely to use it over PT. autonomous cars will drive around aimlessly anytime the cost of fuel is less than the cost of parking Per the above, cheaper taxis → fewer owned cars → more free parking spaces.
    - gdulli 8y ago
      Who happens to own the car, the driver or a service provider, is inconsequential in assessing the big picture consequences of more cars on the road vs. more sustainable options.
sidibe 8y ago
You have to ignore Waymo to still have this opinion. I doubt they'd buy 80k cars if they didn't think they could use them soon.
- epmatsw 8y ago
  Or you’d have to not have walked around downtown SF lately. It’s a rare day where I don’t see multiple self-driving cars.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Zarel 8y ago
I don't know why people are still casting aspersions on self-driving cars when Waymo is this close to market. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-07-31/inside-the-life-of-waymo-s-driverless-test-family https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-07-31/inside-th... They're already testing with customers! Customers who love the service! They're planning for a roll-out later this year! https://www.engadget.com/2018/05/08/waymo-snow-navigation/ https://www.engadget.com/2018/05/08/waymo-snow-navigation/ They can handle rain and snow!
- randomdata 8y ago
  Waymo uses remote drivers for their service. It is neat that technology has progressed to allow drivers to sit an office rather than the vehicle, but that's not exactly what people imagine when they hear driverless.
  - datguacdoh 8y ago
    They use remote assistance for tricky emergency situations. That's a pretty big distinction. The remote assistance can be called in to help the car if it gets into a completely unknown state, but otherwise the cars are self driving. https://www.wired.com/story/phantom-teleops/ https://www.wired.com/story/phantom-teleops/
- dmode 8y ago
  Waymo also runs on well mapped, predictable, grid like city patterns. Most of the world is not like Phoenix suburbs or Mountain View.
  - Zarel 8y ago
    The second article I linked to also mentioned work on unmapped roads: https://www.engadget.com/2018/05/07/mit-maplite-self-driving-car/ https://www.engadget.com/2018/05/07/mit-maplite-self-driving... Waymo has solved problem after problem you think they haven't solved yet, for some reason. They've intentionally gone after unpredictable situations and dealt with them. Look at any video where they explain how it works, and you'll notice how many situations they can manage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSX3qdy0dFg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSX3qdy0dFg And even if Waymo only works on well-mapped cities? That's still far from "can only work if they repurpose existing transportation infrastructure to only belong to self-driving cars" which is the comment I was replying to.

madengr 8y ago

Delta City (aka New Detroit) would be the ideal for testing.

paganel 8y ago
When I think of self-driving cars I always think of this taxi scene (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWgrvNHjKkY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWgrvNHjKkY) from Total Recall. Paul Verhoeven is a genius.
- madengr 8y ago
  Isn’t that the one with the body scanners (at the airport)?

maxxxxx 8y ago

I really hope that the future won't be even more car centric but that's how things may go.

alkonaut 8y ago

I think the ambition will be adjusted and it will happen. The realization that will come is that solving the last percent (or five, or ten) of driving is so expensive that it's just not pursued. So we'll have these 99% autonomous cars that will be confused and handed off to a human driver, inside the car or remote. This will give most of the benefit at a tiny fraction of the cost. The race won't be to reach fully autonomous driving, but to reach 99.9% when the competition is 99.8%, because that is half the workforce needed to drive all those confused cars. If we take "self driving cars" to mean "cars handling every siytuation", I completely agree that reaching 100% without either restricting the area or modifying the driving environment won't be possible within several decades. But my guess is we never get there because no one will make that investment for such little gain. Completely autonomous driving (handling the things that happen only once in a drivers lifetime) will require so much of human intelligence that if you have that kind of AI there are probably better things to do with it than drive cars around.

emodendroket 8y ago
Cars that drive themselves 99% of the time but 1% of the time give up and hand off to human drivers are going to kill the drivers or somebody else about 1% of the time.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  That's a faulty assumption; if the 1% isn't “give up because otherwise we are certain to kill people” but instead “give up because this is a circumstance we aren't confident that the system will handle better than a human”, for instance.
  - lx3459683 8y ago
    It's a very reasonable assumption. When self driving cars give up, they give you a second or less to assess the situation around you and avert disaster. This is now well understood to be less safe than just 100% manual driving since your attention is then on the road at all times instead of inevitably wandering when the car is doing just fine 99% of the time. Don't forget that Wayomo killed off their SAE-2 test program after finding drivers were falling asleep at the wheel of these 99.0% autonomous cars. And to build a self driving system that can give you a reasonable time to actually assess the situation and respond to it? That's the same system that's 99.9999% reliable. This is the crux of why self driving cars will simply not work in the foreseeable future unless sequestered to their own tightly controlled road networks.
    - alkonaut 8y ago
      > When self driving cars give up, they give you a second or less to assess the situation around you and avert disaster. I don't think the problem will be any situation with short reaction times at all. Nothing at freeway speeds, or situations like the Uber accident. That I think is where autonomous cars will shine, because sensors never get tired and reaction times are great. The weird things that will happen which I count to the "not going to solve any time soon" category will be when the car comes to a completely snowed over roadworks, in the middle of the night, with the diversion signs completely hidden in snow. Construction workers barely visible in the snowstorm. Are those guys roadworkers or pedestrians? Are they working? Can I pass here? Will I get oncoming traffic because they narrowed it to one lane? When things this weird happens at highway speeds or anywhere else where reaction is important - humans probably fail too. And at that point it's not really a question of technology but one of trust. Can we allow autonomous car to kill tons of people every year, with the sole excuse that humans would have killed all those people too, and then some? I'm not convinced of that either - I'm only arguing that from a technological standpoint, it should be possible to reach the 99% cars within a rather short timeframe. Those cars may be left on the scrapheap of history because of legal or ethical reasons, however.

emodendroket 8y ago

By the time you're building self-driving car-exclusive tunnels and the like, you really are getting very little benefit over a train system to justify doing it, especially when you take emissions into account.

gdulli 8y ago
I agree. Anything with low-occupancy vehicles feels like a dead end to me. Of all things, car ownership is the thing we're aggressively enabling/optimizing in 2018? Really? I'm usually not a person who's sympathetic to complaints about advances in technology eliminating jobs. Not for a real overall long term gain to society. But autonomous cars putting swaths of people out of work while at the same time taking us in the wrong direction on traffic, emissions, etc. doesn't feel great. Those drivers losing work slowly over time as cities evolve truly better and more sustainable transportation options feels more right. Aside from the opportunity cost of not furthering public transportation, autonomous cars will drive around aimlessly anytime the cost of fuel is less than the cost of parking. We already have Uber creating waste by idling/driving around between passengers.
- icebraining 8y ago
  car ownership is the thing we're aggressively enabling/optimizing in 2018? Really? On the contrary: making taxis cheaper (which self-driving can do, by eliminating the biggest cost - the driver) makes it much easier to live without owning a car. If there was no Uber and such, I'd probably have to own a car for the exceptions not covered by public transport. And after paying for the fixed costs anyway, the marginal cost per trip is low, making me more likely to use it over PT. autonomous cars will drive around aimlessly anytime the cost of fuel is less than the cost of parking Per the above, cheaper taxis → fewer owned cars → more free parking spaces.
  - gdulli 8y ago
    Who happens to own the car, the driver or a service provider, is inconsequential in assessing the big picture consequences of more cars on the road vs. more sustainable options.

sidibe 8y ago

You have to ignore Waymo to still have this opinion. I doubt they'd buy 80k cars if they didn't think they could use them soon.

epmatsw 8y ago
Or you’d have to not have walked around downtown SF lately. It’s a rare day where I don’t see multiple self-driving cars.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

Zarel 8y ago

I don't know why people are still casting aspersions on self-driving cars when Waymo is this close to market. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-07-31/inside-the-life-of-waymo-s-driverless-test-family https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-07-31/inside-th... They're already testing with customers! Customers who love the service! They're planning for a roll-out later this year! https://www.engadget.com/2018/05/08/waymo-snow-navigation/ https://www.engadget.com/2018/05/08/waymo-snow-navigation/ They can handle rain and snow!

randomdata 8y ago
Waymo uses remote drivers for their service. It is neat that technology has progressed to allow drivers to sit an office rather than the vehicle, but that's not exactly what people imagine when they hear driverless.
- datguacdoh 8y ago
  They use remote assistance for tricky emergency situations. That's a pretty big distinction. The remote assistance can be called in to help the car if it gets into a completely unknown state, but otherwise the cars are self driving. https://www.wired.com/story/phantom-teleops/ https://www.wired.com/story/phantom-teleops/
dmode 8y ago
Waymo also runs on well mapped, predictable, grid like city patterns. Most of the world is not like Phoenix suburbs or Mountain View.
- Zarel 8y ago
  The second article I linked to also mentioned work on unmapped roads: https://www.engadget.com/2018/05/07/mit-maplite-self-driving-car/ https://www.engadget.com/2018/05/07/mit-maplite-self-driving... Waymo has solved problem after problem you think they haven't solved yet, for some reason. They've intentionally gone after unpredictable situations and dealt with them. Look at any video where they explain how it works, and you'll notice how many situations they can manage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSX3qdy0dFg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSX3qdy0dFg And even if Waymo only works on well-mapped cities? That's still far from "can only work if they repurpose existing transportation infrastructure to only belong to self-driving cars" which is the comment I was replying to.