28 ms·

Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

207 points by dsr12 8y ago

cicero 8y ago
"Our love affair with self-driving cars is a form of 'techno-chauvinism,' Prof. Broussard says. 'It's the idea that technology is always the highest and best solution, and is superior to the people-based solution.'"
- dunpeal 8y ago
  The current disillusionment is a natural consequence of the preceding over-hype and over-exuberance. We've been there before. After the AI winter, many people argued AI will never come, and many achievements we already have (such as speech recognition) are impossible.
  - melling 8y ago
    I wouldn’t say speech recognition is solved. It’s still quite error prone. Self-driving cars need to be even better or people will die. Perhaps self-driving cars can be deployed in a limited way, as taxis, for example.
    - x220 8y ago
      >I wouldn’t say speech recognition is solved. It’s still quite error prone. Sure it is, but it's doing a hell of a lot better than many critics thought ever possible. >Self-driving cars need to be even better or people will die. People will always die. Requiring with certainty that self-driving cars will never cause accidents is a purely emotional instinct with no regard for facts or well-being of people. The only thing that self driving cars need to demonstrate is statistically lower deaths or injuries caused per mile (or hour) of driving than the average human would cause. This would mean that adoption of technology would reduce total deaths if substituted for human drivers, which is what actually matters.
      - bussierem 8y ago
        >Self-driving cars need to be even better or people will die. He is right - the problem with your response to this statement is that it doesn't identify the _actual_ reason behind why they need to be better, and it's a problem identified by the article in question: When a human driver swerves randomly and kills someone, we know EXACTLY who is to blame, and something can be done. If a driverless car, or even a car with "driverless technology" that also has a driver in it (like the Tesla driver mentioned in the article) hits someone and god forbid kills them, we still have no idea who is to blame for that problem, because it practically becomes a marketing argument in some cases. Before we can be okay with driverless cars, ESPECIALLY if we don't plan on them being 100% accident free, we need to solve a lot of ethical and legal battles that don't seem to be even on the minds of the people that tout this as the future, or a necessity.
        stale2002 8y ago
        You argument is basically that it is more important to figure out who to blame for deaths, than it is to get rid of those deaths in the first place. That strikes me as weird. Also, the people who will be paying out damages will be exactly the same as the people who are paying out for them today. The insurance companies. The simple solution to these "ethical" issues is for everyone to have insurance, and for the insurance to pay out. And I am sure that the insurance companies will be very happy with this arrangement, as reduced accident rates mean that they make more money.
        enord 8y ago
        Nobody will accept liability for actions outside of their control, and car manufacturers can not possibly afford to insure all cars they sell in perpetuity. Insurance only works if the insuree bears the risk (and it has to be an actual risk with nonzero probability times cost, i'll leave why as an exercise to the reader) and in the case of car accidents, that risk is liability, which people have and computers don't. Can TSLA or Uber be charged and convicted of vehicular manslaughter? Lower rate of accidents will just lower the market rate of insurance contracts.
- Buldak 8y ago
  We like the idea of technological solutions that don't require us to change our lifestyle or make hard choices. Driverless cars are appealing because they would allow us to largely maintain the status quo (as opposed to, say, reorienting toward public transportation). It's like an obese person who says, "I don't want to eat healthy and exercise. Why can't scientists just invent low-calorie versions of the food I like?"
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - bytematic 8y ago
    Sounds preferable in both cases to me What is the non tech solution for automobiles, better designed cities?
    - piyh 8y ago
      Sounds to me like driverless cars are easier than redesigning existing cities.
      - adrianN 8y ago
        Redesigning cities to be less reliant on cars is pretty much a solved problem. It just needs a few decades of focused policies. Check out for example how the Netherlands became bike friendly by relentless improvement since the seventies.
        travisoneill1 8y ago
        And being completely flat and never getting very hot/cold. Bikes aren't really workable in most cities as a primary form of transit.
        Karrot_Kream 8y ago
        Ebikes make most cities flat, and the Netherlands only relies on bikes for last mile transport. Medium and long-haul routes in the Netherlands have great transit options.
- sp332 8y ago
  But human drivers kill a lot of people. It would be a shame if that's the best we can do. And some car tech improvements have saved lives, so it's not necessarily chauvinism it's just extrapolation.
  - irq11 8y ago
    Self-driving cars will also kill a lot of people. We just don’t know how many yet.
    - wyldfire 8y ago
      It will very likely kill far fewer per mile driven than humans do. Unfortunately you're right -- it probably still will kill some. Even nonfatal accidents will be scrutinized heavily and leave a lasting impression of fear/loss of control.
      - camjohnson26 8y ago
        That's totally unproven, the technology doesn't even exist yet and we're still assuming we know what it will look like. In their current state self driving cars would kill far more people than humans if all cars used self driving 100% of the time, and no one knows if we will ever move past that.
        danenania 8y ago
        Despite the imperfect technology, I'd bet that if we could somehow make all cars autonomous today (with current tech) and network them all together, it would drastically reduce both accidents and fatalities. The vast majority of accidents by human drivers are caused by basic neglect, not tricky edge case situations. I think it's hard to really comprehend just how bad humans are at driving. It wouldn't take anything close to a perfect autonomous system to do better--just having "drivers" that actually pay attention to their surroundings all the time would be a massive improvement, even if there were occasional bugs and glitches.
        Fricken 8y ago
airstrike 8y ago
https://www.fullwsj.com/articles/driverless-hype-collides-with-merciless-reality-1536831005 https://www.fullwsj.com/articles/driverless-hype-collides-wi...
- neonate 8y ago
  That doesn't work for me but http://archive.is/xKX1T http://archive.is/xKX1T does.
  - airstrike 8y ago
    Thanks. fullwsj.com links you to a facebook redirect which is not paywalled, so YMMV depending on your treatment of facebook
    - neonate 8y ago
      The Facebook redirect takes me to the WSJ article, still paywalled.
      - m0skit0 8y ago
        Works fine for me
- 100ideas 8y ago
  http://outline.com/www.wsj.com/articles/driverless-hype-collides-with-merciless-reality-1536831005 http://outline.com/www.wsj.com/articles/driverless-hype-coll... works and does not require facebook or any other kind of login. (edited to remove unique shortlink url)
airstrike 8y ago
I think Musk notwithstanding, folks who are actually developing ADAS technologies are not* really touting driverless capabilities – that's the ultimate goal but the genuine projects today are focused on HD mapping and image recognition from cameras to overcome the LiDAR price hurdle. OEMs are very interested in startups working on those specific issues, but for various reasons these incremental steps aren't as widely reported so all we get left is the hype that self driving cars "are here" and things like Tesla Autopilot
agentultra 8y ago
I was just having this discussion last night as it happens. We sat at an impasse as everyone was quite inebriated and didn't have any real empirical evidence to back any of our claims up. I was rather curious if the rate of deaths caused by human drivers would continue to dwarf those caused by edge cases of deployed self-driving cars if we scaled up the number of self-driving vehicles. Presently human drivers cause an awful number of deaths with cars. However even despite the edge cases of machine learning, which can be adapted for relatively quickly, would drunk drivers still kill more people every year even if we replaced all of the cars with robot ones? We've been trying for decades to minimize the damage caused by drunk drivers but policies don't seem to have much of an effect. Compared to the massive amount of data we could collect from robot cars in order to optimize them and adapt them... it seems like we'd be faster at making them safer than preventing humans from making poor decisions. I think in the case of piloting a slow-moving bullet around crowds of humans... I'd trust technology more in this case. It did wonders for the aviation industry and while cars are more complicated to pilot in many cases I don't see how we can make current human-piloted cars safer vs. optimizing robot piloted cars. We've been trying the former for decades with diminishing success.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
  - stephengillie 8y ago
    Even Japan's trains don't run 24 hours. Deadheading is expensive.
- stephengillie 8y ago
  > *Presently human drivers cause an awful number of deaths with cars. ... would drunk drivers ... Sober drivers crash a lot of cars too. Are all traffic situations NP-complete?
- akira2501 8y ago
  > didn't have any real empirical evidence to back any of our claims up. NHTSA publishes the FARS every year. It is their database of every known roadway fatality in the United States. It's free to the public. It's well worth study. Here's an example: Texas has more fatalities than California. Not per-capita, but in total. California has 10m more people living there than Texas. This is not a uniform problem. > Presently human drivers cause an awful number of deaths with cars. Yes, a majority of accidents only involve a single vehicle. It is often the case that a driver exceeds their ability or roadway conditions and kills only themselves. > would drunk drivers still kill more people every year even if we replaced all of the cars with robot ones? Replaced them with cars that have no manual control option. Given everything we've learned about automation, this is a bad idea given our current infrastructure. So, it's highly unlikely that they will have much of an impact for this group. > it seems like we'd be faster at making them safer than preventing humans from making poor decisions. This ignores the nearly 100 years of saftey history that we already have. We have already reduced roadway fatalities by a staggering amount and have created a regulatory framework that has successfully created higher saftey margins for all drivers. We already drive Trillions of miles every year in the US and we only have 36k fatalities. Further: 6k of those are pedestrians and 8k of those are motorcycles. 7k are young men under 24 and 7k were drivers under the influence. There are not a lot of "easy gains" left out there where it's obvious that self-driving cars will have a major impact. > I think in the case of piloting a slow-moving bullet around crowds of humans Which is one thing. However, we're talking about piloting thousands of slow-moving bullets around crowds of humans _and_ each-other. There will not be a single manufacturer of technology, nor will there be a single auto-pilot system. Plus we haven't experienced any automation failures yet that have caused us to establish best-practices around this system. For example, should the autonomous system have full 100% authority over the cars controls? It may be useful in an accident that the car can use full authority to avoid an accident. It may be disastrous in a situation where the car has bad data from it's sensors. So, should we limit control authority to reduce the opportunity for failure here and also leave some margins for a human to override the machine? Will drivers actually understand the complicated and subtle difference? What happens when we need to roll out regulatory changes to autopilot functions? Do we do that all at once? How do we force drivers to do these updates? How do we keep drivers safe now that we've changed a major operational mode of their vehicle? We expect airline pilots to engage in simulations and continual training to ensure that they are on top of these changes, what are we going to do in vehicles? > It did wonders for the aviation industry It wasn't without it's own set of challenges[0]. Upshot of the video is, switching to a lower level of automation is now recommended practice in many situations because it's actually safer. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pN41LvuSz10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pN41LvuSz10
djsumdog 8y ago
I think a lot of people in this field did see this coming. I knew a few people in this space about a year ago and I pretty much hear: "realistically, 15 years out at the earliest." I really really hate the concept of a driverless car. It's an incredibly difficult problem space; and for the same cost, America could build up municipal rail and bus infrastructure to where they were in the 1940s/1950s. We need more cities like Seattle with its rail expansion and fewer New York City where the infrastructure is finally getting money so it doesn't fall apart. There are already so many tax breaks going into driverless companies. If Alphabet or Here want to do this on their own, go for it; but governments around the world should stop giving tax breaks and municipal incentives for this technology. I can see it being more useful in Europe, where so much of the country is connected and it'd help sold the last leg problem. But in most of America we need to get back to the point where cars are no longer a necessity, not just for those who can afford to live in the city, but all the people who are barely making it who's lives fall apart if something on their car breaks.
- save_ferris 8y ago
  > But in most of America we need to get back to the point where cars are no longer a necessity While I completely agree with you, the cultural barriers to this are petty much a non-starter in much of the country. I love not owning a car and being able to rely on mass transit where I live (Austin, TX), but Texas is so culturally opposed to anything like this. A lot of people think that mass transit is for the poor, and the car represents independence and freedom. Go where you want, when you want (but you're gonna be bumper-to-bumper most of the way there.) I hate that mentality, but driverless cars represent the "have your cake and eat it too" solution. It more closely aligns with the culture of driving here in the US, while also claiming numerous commercial and infrastructure benefits.
  - bunderbunder 8y ago
    > driverless cars represent the "have your cake and eat it too" solution <Insert obligatory Portal reference.>
  - stephengillie 8y ago
rounce 8y ago
Totally unrelated to the article's content but is Refactor now part of common english?
- sowbug 8y ago
  If you factored algebraic expressions in high school, and you agree that the "re" prefix generally can be added to a verb, then it's already part of your lexicon. The process of code refactoring, especially extracting common code into a method, is very similar to the process of simplifying algebraic expressions. So it's not just a grammar argument; the two words really do represent related concepts.
expertentipp 8y ago
Automotive industries never had problems with attracting taxpayer’s money. Graduating the car from break-clutch-engine machine to airliner level of complexity vehicle is a perfect money sink.
- landryraccoon 8y ago
  > Automotive industries never had problems with attracting taxpayer’s money. I wasn't aware that the government is funding self driving car development. Do you have a source?
  - ModernMech 8y ago
    In the 00s driverless car tech was heavily incubated by DARPA, a branch of the US DOD.
Zigurd 8y ago
This assessment of the state of play is very uneven. For example, the assertion made by Meredith Broussard quoted in the article "It’s also not true that we must transition to self-driving cars because human-piloted ones are so lethal" is a truism. The article goes on to say "Countless innovations have made cars radically safer since the 1950s and continue to do so." Yet vehicles remain as lethal as dread diseases, mostly down to the humans piloting them. Just cutting that number of deaths and injuries significantly would be a boon similar to eradicating malaria. I expect the flourishing of autonomous vehicles to be sudden and unanticipated. Just as you can't tell unless you are looking for the decals or attuned to why back seats are suddenly more populated you might miss the fact there are two million ride share drivers in the US now. One day we will realize the wait for a bus is much shorter because busses are right-sized and more frequent and can surge where they are needed because drivers aren't a bottleneck and routes are dynamic.
briatx 8y ago
Generalized self driving cars seems like such a hard problem, laced with a huge amount of hard to handle edge cases and a huge amount of hard to enumerate possible scenarios. I think it will still happen, but they need to simplify the problem. The way to simplify it is to create automated driving lanes, similar to the current HOV lanes, that have standardized markers that are easy for computers to read, and then eventually extend it to automated driving routes. That will take some amount of buy-in by the government to install, but I have faith in our well paid lobbyists.
- danenania 8y ago
  Afaik, highways in non-severe weather are already pretty much solved, so I’m not sure that special lanes would make much difference, except perhaps during snow storms. The edge cases seem to be mostly around city driving, rural back roads, and bad weather.
  - blattimwind 8y ago
    Just like teaching humans to drive. Yes, sure, you have to show them how to do it on the highway/BAB, driving safely at 130+ km/h, but it's really not hard (over long distances things you can't really teach make it difficult). City driving on the other hand takes time to master; here easily 80 % of the driver education is done in cities (0-50 km/h). Practically all the edge cases, all the difficult situations and complex maneuvers are done in cities. Outside cities driving is very simple and safe (if you stick to the limits).
  - briatx 8y ago
    > highways in non-severe weather are already pretty much solved And yet all the automated driving driver fatalities have been on the highway, with the Mountain View crash in particular having been caused by weathered / confusing road markings. I wouldn't consider that solved at all. But to the larger point, self driving lanes would only be a first step. Eventually it would develop into a standard set of markings and signage for automated driving friendly roads so that you could safely have self driving cars in things like snow storms. There's no need to limit it to highways only, although there I think there is some benefit in the near term to segregating automated driving cars from human driving ones.
chubot 8y ago
I can't read this paywall article, but here are some similar counterpoints to hype, starting in 2016. They are from people actually working on self-driving technology or executives/investors close to it. (I'm interested in any earlier "expectation setting", having heard a lot of this at Google.) March 2016: Chris Urmson: How quickly can we get this into people's hands? If you read the papers, you see maybe it's three years, maybe it's thirty years. And I am here to tell you that honestly, it's a bit of both. https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self-driving/google-selfdriving-car-will-be-ready-soon-for-some-in-decades-for-others https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/sel... https://mondaynote.com/autonomous-cars-the-level-5-fallacy-247ae9614e14 https://mondaynote.com/autonomous-cars-the-level-5-fallacy-2... ---- April 2017: It will be 25 years before self-driving cars take off in America, says early Uber investor Bill Gurley https://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/06/bill-gurley-uber-investor-self-driving-cars-25-years-away-in-us.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/06/bill-gurley-uber-investor-se... ---- October 2017: https://medium.com/self-driven/a-decade-after-darpa-our-view-on-the-state-of-the-art-in-self-driving-cars-3e8698e6afe8 https://medium.com/self-driven/a-decade-after-darpa-our-view... Those who think fully self-driving vehicles will be ubiquitous on city streets months from now or even in a few years are not well connected to the state of the art or committed to the safe deployment of the technology. For those of us who have been working on the technology for a long time, we’re going to tell you the issue is still really hard, as the systems are as complex as ever.
quotemstr 8y ago
I wish cities would create zones specifically designed around facilitating autonomous car operation. For example, there's zero reason to allow random private cars in Manhattan south of 96th street. In a small, dense area like this, it should be possible to optimize around the limits of current autonomous car software.
Animats 8y ago
Driverless cars are coming along just fine. Waymo is making steady progress. The sensors are getting better. The problem comes from all those "fake it til you make it" startups, Uber and Tesla being the worst. Both have killed people. This is mostly about sensors and geometry. Machine learning has a role, but only in target identification. That's how Waymo does it. The fake it til you make it crowd had the fantasy that you just hook up some cameras to a machine learning system, train it, and you have self driving. Doesn't work. Machine learning is way too dumb. You can maybe identify "traffic light", "car", "pedestrian", and "deer" with machine learning. That's just used to guess what they're going to do next. It's not used to decide if they're an obstacle. Obstacle detection and avoidance is all sensors and geometry. Also, "self driving car", "electric car", and "transportation as a service" are all independent. All will be available, but not from the same companies.
- Nydhal 8y ago
  I'm sorry I can't back up my claims but you will be proved wrong with time. I would bet in less than 10 years you'll have camera only fully autonomous systems.
  - Fricken 8y ago
    From Sterling Anderson, former director of Autopilot who oversaw the implementation of HW2: >Perception is a game of statistics.Crudely speaking, if we have three independent modalities with epsilon miss-detection-rates and we combine them we can achieve an epsilon³ rate in perception. In practice, relatively orthogonal failure modes won’t achieve that level of benefit, however, an error every million miles can get boosted to an error every billion miles. It is extremely difficult to achieve this level of accuracy with a single modality alone. >Different sensor modalities have different strengths and weaknesses; thus, incorporating multiple modalities drives orders of magnitude improvements in the reliability of the system. Cameras suffer from difficulty in low-light and high dynamic range scenarios; radars suffer from limited resolution and artifacts due to multi-path and doppler ambiguity; lidars “see” obscurants. https://medium.com/aurora-blog/auroras-approach-to-development-5e42fec2ee4b https://medium.com/aurora-blog/auroras-approach-to-developme...
iabacu 8y ago
The argument that autonomous tech will save lives is the most dangerous. This will take decades to be true. The same companies who are pushing for that narrative, are also the first ones to blame the drivers when their tech goes wrong. There’s so much data fudging to push for those narratives — they want the credit for lives saved, and at the same time don’t want the blame or liability for accidents caused.
- yannyu 8y ago
  Or maybe we hold driverless cars up to an unfair standard. Today, 3000 people die in the US every single day because of car accidents. Many, many more are injured or disabled. Why would we expect driverless cars to reduce that to 0? Shouldn't it be good enough if they reduce it to 50%? 25%?
  - iabacu 8y ago
    No one is talking about reducing anything to zero — that’s a straw argument. It you really want a fair comparison, one can start by controlling statistical variables by car price point, car age and driver demographics. It’s not hard to spot blatant data fudging by companies that are big on marketing.
  - TheLoneAdmin 8y ago
    Note that the 3000 daily deaths is worldwide, not just the US. The daily US total is about 100. I do agree that any improvement on those numbers with AI should be applauded.
  - Alupis 8y ago
    > Today, 3000 people die in the US every single day because of car accidents Whoa... that's over 1 million people annually... you probably mean globally? Depending on the year, it's somewhere between 30,000 - 40,000 annually[1][2][3], or in the worst-case, about 109 people daily in the US. When you examine those numbers further, you'll see about 10,000-18,000 (depending on the year) are sadly still alcohol related[4]. We can and should fix this first and foremost. With over 3.1 Trillion miles driven annually in the US, that's about 0.001 fatalities per 100,000 miles driven, or about 1 fatality per 80,000,000 miles driven. Driving is pretty safe - although I agree we can make it safer. [1] https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/usdot-releases-2016-fatal-traffic-crash-data https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/usdot-releases-2016-fat... [2] https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/motor-vehicle-safety/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/motor-vehicle-safety/index.ht... [3] https://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/general-statistics/fatalityfacts/state-by-state-overview https://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/general-statistics/fatali... [4] https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/impaired_driving/impaired-drv_factsheet.html https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/impaired_driving/impa... [5] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/02/21/516512439/record-number-of-miles-driven-in-u-s-last-year https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/02/21/516512439...
hnburnsy 8y ago
While I am still waiting for my Tesla Model 3 SR, I browse the Tesla forums and find it amusing (or maybe just sad) that Tesla is charging $5000+ for Full Self Driving (FSD). Owners are paying for the future possibility that the car will be "conducting trips with no action required by the person in the driver’s seat" [per Tesla Model 3 ordering page]. I think some Tesla owners are even expecting that their car will go self work for Uber over night, generating the user income. Other customers seem to be paying the fee, yet they are just leasing their car. Will these leasees ever see any significant FSD features? This article gets it right that self-driving is way, way off. It will be interesting to see what and when Telsa delivers to its customers who prepaid for FSD. I think Tesla already settled a lawsuit with some owners over self-driving fees and associated delays.
- kart23 8y ago
  Ha! I can just see the teenagers blocking the car, covering cameras with paint, and leaving an empty Tesla in the middle of a busy intersection for the cops to deal with. Pranks for the future generations are going to be really interesting.
ocdtrekkie 8y ago
I think the car manufacturers will, in the end, win out with the continued, steady progress of smarter and more capable driver assistance systems. Cruise control gave way to super cruise with lane keeping, warnings when your back bumper was approaching something gave way to features that stop the car for you before you hit something. Eventually, the car will be less dependent on the human's attention, as the safety features will make the human's attention less important (while not telling the human their attention is less important), until it's good enough to take over for the human. I think a lot of the issue is that dream and expectation that "hey, I can just watch a movie, I don't really need to pay attention" is crazy, and will continue to be for many years to come. We need to stop marketing that future.
izzydata 8y ago
I'm still skeptical that this will happen anytime soon outside of selected small zones. I may be wrong, but I feel like the US or wherever these get deployed need a major infrastructure update to be better or more consistent. Even with the most advanced automated driving system imaginable you will still have poor and inconsistent infrastructure everywhere.
dboreham 8y ago
Driverless vehicles are "the new fusion power". Always "about 10 years in the future". >Driverless cars are coming along just fine. Even if this were true it doesn't mean humans will be fine with them being deployed. We had working driverless trains 20+ years ago yet almost none are deployed today (AND we have plenty of human-caused fatal train crashes that might be a good reason to want driverless trains).
- BurningFrog 8y ago
  There are plenty of driverless trains deployed all over the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_urban_metro_subway_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_urban_metro_...
- ehsankia 8y ago
  Except Waymo is being used by real people in Phoenix right now, albeit on an invite only system. They've said they'll go public by next year, and expand to other cities afterwards. Most of what is blocking them is regulation. I'd predict that by 2025, they will be in at least 10 major cities, regulation willing.
tenaciousDaniel 8y ago
Seems like a good interim solution is to build infrastructure for designated "driverless" lanes. I assume there's a good reason why this isn't being pursued though?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
person_of_color 8y ago
Anyone joined and then left an SDC company because they thought the product was too far away?
woodandsteel 8y ago
The people who argue that driverless cars can't match humans have a real double standard going. They talk about all the conditions like snow and edge cases that driverless cars can't handle now. But they have nothing to say about all the real conditions that everyday make human-driven cars unsafe, like lack of sleep, alcohol or illegal drugs, youthful showing off, road rage, texting, arguing with a passenger, old age, poor vision, and so on. Remember, the problem is not to make driverless cars perfect, it is to make them as good as humans, and that is much easier. Also, let's remember, the transition to driverless cars will not come all at once, with all vehicles handling all conditions. Instead we will gets lot of partial, easier cases, like a truck that drives only along a well-mapped route, or people using it only when weather conditions are reasonably good, and so on. As the AI and sensors improve, new uses will be added, until eventually we get it to be universal, or nearly so. And finally there is the likelihood of infrastructure improvements to make it easier. So want we are going to have is not suddenly one day driverless cars take over, rather a gradual increase in their use.
clay_the_ripper 8y ago
I think it’s important to distinguish between a self driving car that can work in every scenario, and a self driving car that can take over part of the time. Personally, if someone could make a car that was extremely good at highway driving so it could sit in traffic for me and drive on the highway (basically if Tesla autopilot actually worked and was 99.9999% safe) that would be AMAZING. that’s good enough for me. I don’t need a car that can self drive in the snow.
stretchwithme 8y ago
I think we underestimate how amazingly versatile even an 85 year old grandmother's brain truly is. I am certain AVs will work EVENTUALLY. And that will radically change the economy. But robotic killing machines will be working long before that happens. And you can bet somebody is working on that. Maybe we're focusing on the wrong things.
rdlecler1 8y ago
The web link to google often doesn’t work to find the non paywall version anymore. I’d be happier having a setting in my HN profile that ghosted these publications.
ur-whale 8y ago
Paywalled. http://archive.is/xKX1T http://archive.is/xKX1T
kuroguro 8y ago
https://outline.com/Psn6Px https://outline.com/Psn6Px
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

207 points by dsr12 8y ago

"Our love affair with self-driving cars is a form of 'techno-chauvinism,' Prof. Broussard says. 'It's the idea that technology is always the highest and best solution, and is superior to the people-based solution.'"

dunpeal 8y ago
The current disillusionment is a natural consequence of the preceding over-hype and over-exuberance. We've been there before. After the AI winter, many people argued AI will never come, and many achievements we already have (such as speech recognition) are impossible.
- melling 8y ago
  I wouldn’t say speech recognition is solved. It’s still quite error prone. Self-driving cars need to be even better or people will die. Perhaps self-driving cars can be deployed in a limited way, as taxis, for example.
  - x220 8y ago
    >I wouldn’t say speech recognition is solved. It’s still quite error prone. Sure it is, but it's doing a hell of a lot better than many critics thought ever possible. >Self-driving cars need to be even better or people will die. People will always die. Requiring with certainty that self-driving cars will never cause accidents is a purely emotional instinct with no regard for facts or well-being of people. The only thing that self driving cars need to demonstrate is statistically lower deaths or injuries caused per mile (or hour) of driving than the average human would cause. This would mean that adoption of technology would reduce total deaths if substituted for human drivers, which is what actually matters.
    - bussierem 8y ago
      >Self-driving cars need to be even better or people will die. He is right - the problem with your response to this statement is that it doesn't identify the _actual_ reason behind why they need to be better, and it's a problem identified by the article in question: When a human driver swerves randomly and kills someone, we know EXACTLY who is to blame, and something can be done. If a driverless car, or even a car with "driverless technology" that also has a driver in it (like the Tesla driver mentioned in the article) hits someone and god forbid kills them, we still have no idea who is to blame for that problem, because it practically becomes a marketing argument in some cases. Before we can be okay with driverless cars, ESPECIALLY if we don't plan on them being 100% accident free, we need to solve a lot of ethical and legal battles that don't seem to be even on the minds of the people that tout this as the future, or a necessity.
      - stale2002 8y ago
        You argument is basically that it is more important to figure out who to blame for deaths, than it is to get rid of those deaths in the first place. That strikes me as weird. Also, the people who will be paying out damages will be exactly the same as the people who are paying out for them today. The insurance companies. The simple solution to these "ethical" issues is for everyone to have insurance, and for the insurance to pay out. And I am sure that the insurance companies will be very happy with this arrangement, as reduced accident rates mean that they make more money.
        enord 8y ago
        Nobody will accept liability for actions outside of their control, and car manufacturers can not possibly afford to insure all cars they sell in perpetuity. Insurance only works if the insuree bears the risk (and it has to be an actual risk with nonzero probability times cost, i'll leave why as an exercise to the reader) and in the case of car accidents, that risk is liability, which people have and computers don't. Can TSLA or Uber be charged and convicted of vehicular manslaughter? Lower rate of accidents will just lower the market rate of insurance contracts.
Buldak 8y ago
We like the idea of technological solutions that don't require us to change our lifestyle or make hard choices. Driverless cars are appealing because they would allow us to largely maintain the status quo (as opposed to, say, reorienting toward public transportation). It's like an obese person who says, "I don't want to eat healthy and exercise. Why can't scientists just invent low-calorie versions of the food I like?"
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- bytematic 8y ago
  Sounds preferable in both cases to me What is the non tech solution for automobiles, better designed cities?
  - piyh 8y ago
    Sounds to me like driverless cars are easier than redesigning existing cities.
    - adrianN 8y ago
      Redesigning cities to be less reliant on cars is pretty much a solved problem. It just needs a few decades of focused policies. Check out for example how the Netherlands became bike friendly by relentless improvement since the seventies.
      - travisoneill1 8y ago
        And being completely flat and never getting very hot/cold. Bikes aren't really workable in most cities as a primary form of transit.
        Karrot_Kream 8y ago
        Ebikes make most cities flat, and the Netherlands only relies on bikes for last mile transport. Medium and long-haul routes in the Netherlands have great transit options.
sp332 8y ago
But human drivers kill a lot of people. It would be a shame if that's the best we can do. And some car tech improvements have saved lives, so it's not necessarily chauvinism it's just extrapolation.
- irq11 8y ago
  Self-driving cars will also kill a lot of people. We just don’t know how many yet.
  - wyldfire 8y ago
    It will very likely kill far fewer per mile driven than humans do. Unfortunately you're right -- it probably still will kill some. Even nonfatal accidents will be scrutinized heavily and leave a lasting impression of fear/loss of control.
    - camjohnson26 8y ago
      That's totally unproven, the technology doesn't even exist yet and we're still assuming we know what it will look like. In their current state self driving cars would kill far more people than humans if all cars used self driving 100% of the time, and no one knows if we will ever move past that.
      - danenania 8y ago
        Despite the imperfect technology, I'd bet that if we could somehow make all cars autonomous today (with current tech) and network them all together, it would drastically reduce both accidents and fatalities. The vast majority of accidents by human drivers are caused by basic neglect, not tricky edge case situations. I think it's hard to really comprehend just how bad humans are at driving. It wouldn't take anything close to a perfect autonomous system to do better--just having "drivers" that actually pay attention to their surroundings all the time would be a massive improvement, even if there were occasional bugs and glitches.
      - Fricken 8y ago

airstrike 8y ago

https://www.fullwsj.com/articles/driverless-hype-collides-with-merciless-reality-1536831005 https://www.fullwsj.com/articles/driverless-hype-collides-wi...

neonate 8y ago
That doesn't work for me but http://archive.is/xKX1T http://archive.is/xKX1T does.
- airstrike 8y ago
  Thanks. fullwsj.com links you to a facebook redirect which is not paywalled, so YMMV depending on your treatment of facebook
  - neonate 8y ago
    The Facebook redirect takes me to the WSJ article, still paywalled.
    - m0skit0 8y ago
      Works fine for me
100ideas 8y ago
http://outline.com/www.wsj.com/articles/driverless-hype-collides-with-merciless-reality-1536831005 http://outline.com/www.wsj.com/articles/driverless-hype-coll... works and does not require facebook or any other kind of login. (edited to remove unique shortlink url)

airstrike 8y ago

I think Musk notwithstanding, folks who are actually developing ADAS technologies are not* really touting driverless capabilities – that's the ultimate goal but the genuine projects today are focused on HD mapping and image recognition from cameras to overcome the LiDAR price hurdle. OEMs are very interested in startups working on those specific issues, but for various reasons these incremental steps aren't as widely reported so all we get left is the hype that self driving cars "are here" and things like Tesla Autopilot

agentultra 8y ago

I was just having this discussion last night as it happens. We sat at an impasse as everyone was quite inebriated and didn't have any real empirical evidence to back any of our claims up. I was rather curious if the rate of deaths caused by human drivers would continue to dwarf those caused by edge cases of deployed self-driving cars if we scaled up the number of self-driving vehicles. Presently human drivers cause an awful number of deaths with cars. However even despite the edge cases of machine learning, which can be adapted for relatively quickly, would drunk drivers still kill more people every year even if we replaced all of the cars with robot ones? We've been trying for decades to minimize the damage caused by drunk drivers but policies don't seem to have much of an effect. Compared to the massive amount of data we could collect from robot cars in order to optimize them and adapt them... it seems like we'd be faster at making them safer than preventing humans from making poor decisions. I think in the case of piloting a slow-moving bullet around crowds of humans... I'd trust technology more in this case. It did wonders for the aviation industry and while cars are more complicated to pilot in many cases I don't see how we can make current human-piloted cars safer vs. optimizing robot piloted cars. We've been trying the former for decades with diminishing success.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
- stephengillie 8y ago
  Even Japan's trains don't run 24 hours. Deadheading is expensive.
stephengillie 8y ago
> *Presently human drivers cause an awful number of deaths with cars. ... would drunk drivers ... Sober drivers crash a lot of cars too. Are all traffic situations NP-complete?
akira2501 8y ago
> didn't have any real empirical evidence to back any of our claims up. NHTSA publishes the FARS every year. It is their database of every known roadway fatality in the United States. It's free to the public. It's well worth study. Here's an example: Texas has more fatalities than California. Not per-capita, but in total. California has 10m more people living there than Texas. This is not a uniform problem. > Presently human drivers cause an awful number of deaths with cars. Yes, a majority of accidents only involve a single vehicle. It is often the case that a driver exceeds their ability or roadway conditions and kills only themselves. > would drunk drivers still kill more people every year even if we replaced all of the cars with robot ones? Replaced them with cars that have no manual control option. Given everything we've learned about automation, this is a bad idea given our current infrastructure. So, it's highly unlikely that they will have much of an impact for this group. > it seems like we'd be faster at making them safer than preventing humans from making poor decisions. This ignores the nearly 100 years of saftey history that we already have. We have already reduced roadway fatalities by a staggering amount and have created a regulatory framework that has successfully created higher saftey margins for all drivers. We already drive Trillions of miles every year in the US and we only have 36k fatalities. Further: 6k of those are pedestrians and 8k of those are motorcycles. 7k are young men under 24 and 7k were drivers under the influence. There are not a lot of "easy gains" left out there where it's obvious that self-driving cars will have a major impact. > I think in the case of piloting a slow-moving bullet around crowds of humans Which is one thing. However, we're talking about piloting thousands of slow-moving bullets around crowds of humans _and_ each-other. There will not be a single manufacturer of technology, nor will there be a single auto-pilot system. Plus we haven't experienced any automation failures yet that have caused us to establish best-practices around this system. For example, should the autonomous system have full 100% authority over the cars controls? It may be useful in an accident that the car can use full authority to avoid an accident. It may be disastrous in a situation where the car has bad data from it's sensors. So, should we limit control authority to reduce the opportunity for failure here and also leave some margins for a human to override the machine? Will drivers actually understand the complicated and subtle difference? What happens when we need to roll out regulatory changes to autopilot functions? Do we do that all at once? How do we force drivers to do these updates? How do we keep drivers safe now that we've changed a major operational mode of their vehicle? We expect airline pilots to engage in simulations and continual training to ensure that they are on top of these changes, what are we going to do in vehicles? > It did wonders for the aviation industry It wasn't without it's own set of challenges[0]. Upshot of the video is, switching to a lower level of automation is now recommended practice in many situations because it's actually safer. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pN41LvuSz10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pN41LvuSz10

djsumdog 8y ago

I think a lot of people in this field did see this coming. I knew a few people in this space about a year ago and I pretty much hear: "realistically, 15 years out at the earliest." I really really hate the concept of a driverless car. It's an incredibly difficult problem space; and for the same cost, America could build up municipal rail and bus infrastructure to where they were in the 1940s/1950s. We need more cities like Seattle with its rail expansion and fewer New York City where the infrastructure is finally getting money so it doesn't fall apart. There are already so many tax breaks going into driverless companies. If Alphabet or Here want to do this on their own, go for it; but governments around the world should stop giving tax breaks and municipal incentives for this technology. I can see it being more useful in Europe, where so much of the country is connected and it'd help sold the last leg problem. But in most of America we need to get back to the point where cars are no longer a necessity, not just for those who can afford to live in the city, but all the people who are barely making it who's lives fall apart if something on their car breaks.

save_ferris 8y ago
> But in most of America we need to get back to the point where cars are no longer a necessity While I completely agree with you, the cultural barriers to this are petty much a non-starter in much of the country. I love not owning a car and being able to rely on mass transit where I live (Austin, TX), but Texas is so culturally opposed to anything like this. A lot of people think that mass transit is for the poor, and the car represents independence and freedom. Go where you want, when you want (but you're gonna be bumper-to-bumper most of the way there.) I hate that mentality, but driverless cars represent the "have your cake and eat it too" solution. It more closely aligns with the culture of driving here in the US, while also claiming numerous commercial and infrastructure benefits.
- bunderbunder 8y ago
  > driverless cars represent the "have your cake and eat it too" solution <Insert obligatory Portal reference.>
- stephengillie 8y ago

rounce 8y ago

Totally unrelated to the article's content but is Refactor now part of common english?

sowbug 8y ago
If you factored algebraic expressions in high school, and you agree that the "re" prefix generally can be added to a verb, then it's already part of your lexicon. The process of code refactoring, especially extracting common code into a method, is very similar to the process of simplifying algebraic expressions. So it's not just a grammar argument; the two words really do represent related concepts.

expertentipp 8y ago

Automotive industries never had problems with attracting taxpayer’s money. Graduating the car from break-clutch-engine machine to airliner level of complexity vehicle is a perfect money sink.

landryraccoon 8y ago
> Automotive industries never had problems with attracting taxpayer’s money. I wasn't aware that the government is funding self driving car development. Do you have a source?
- ModernMech 8y ago
  In the 00s driverless car tech was heavily incubated by DARPA, a branch of the US DOD.

Zigurd 8y ago

This assessment of the state of play is very uneven. For example, the assertion made by Meredith Broussard quoted in the article "It’s also not true that we must transition to self-driving cars because human-piloted ones are so lethal" is a truism. The article goes on to say "Countless innovations have made cars radically safer since the 1950s and continue to do so." Yet vehicles remain as lethal as dread diseases, mostly down to the humans piloting them. Just cutting that number of deaths and injuries significantly would be a boon similar to eradicating malaria. I expect the flourishing of autonomous vehicles to be sudden and unanticipated. Just as you can't tell unless you are looking for the decals or attuned to why back seats are suddenly more populated you might miss the fact there are two million ride share drivers in the US now. One day we will realize the wait for a bus is much shorter because busses are right-sized and more frequent and can surge where they are needed because drivers aren't a bottleneck and routes are dynamic.

briatx 8y ago

Generalized self driving cars seems like such a hard problem, laced with a huge amount of hard to handle edge cases and a huge amount of hard to enumerate possible scenarios. I think it will still happen, but they need to simplify the problem. The way to simplify it is to create automated driving lanes, similar to the current HOV lanes, that have standardized markers that are easy for computers to read, and then eventually extend it to automated driving routes. That will take some amount of buy-in by the government to install, but I have faith in our well paid lobbyists.

danenania 8y ago
Afaik, highways in non-severe weather are already pretty much solved, so I’m not sure that special lanes would make much difference, except perhaps during snow storms. The edge cases seem to be mostly around city driving, rural back roads, and bad weather.
- blattimwind 8y ago
  Just like teaching humans to drive. Yes, sure, you have to show them how to do it on the highway/BAB, driving safely at 130+ km/h, but it's really not hard (over long distances things you can't really teach make it difficult). City driving on the other hand takes time to master; here easily 80 % of the driver education is done in cities (0-50 km/h). Practically all the edge cases, all the difficult situations and complex maneuvers are done in cities. Outside cities driving is very simple and safe (if you stick to the limits).
- briatx 8y ago
  > highways in non-severe weather are already pretty much solved And yet all the automated driving driver fatalities have been on the highway, with the Mountain View crash in particular having been caused by weathered / confusing road markings. I wouldn't consider that solved at all. But to the larger point, self driving lanes would only be a first step. Eventually it would develop into a standard set of markings and signage for automated driving friendly roads so that you could safely have self driving cars in things like snow storms. There's no need to limit it to highways only, although there I think there is some benefit in the near term to segregating automated driving cars from human driving ones.

chubot 8y ago

I can't read this paywall article, but here are some similar counterpoints to hype, starting in 2016. They are from people actually working on self-driving technology or executives/investors close to it. (I'm interested in any earlier "expectation setting", having heard a lot of this at Google.) March 2016: Chris Urmson: How quickly can we get this into people's hands? If you read the papers, you see maybe it's three years, maybe it's thirty years. And I am here to tell you that honestly, it's a bit of both. https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self-driving/google-selfdriving-car-will-be-ready-soon-for-some-in-decades-for-others https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/sel... https://mondaynote.com/autonomous-cars-the-level-5-fallacy-247ae9614e14 https://mondaynote.com/autonomous-cars-the-level-5-fallacy-2... ---- April 2017: It will be 25 years before self-driving cars take off in America, says early Uber investor Bill Gurley https://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/06/bill-gurley-uber-investor-self-driving-cars-25-years-away-in-us.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/06/bill-gurley-uber-investor-se... ---- October 2017: https://medium.com/self-driven/a-decade-after-darpa-our-view-on-the-state-of-the-art-in-self-driving-cars-3e8698e6afe8 https://medium.com/self-driven/a-decade-after-darpa-our-view... Those who think fully self-driving vehicles will be ubiquitous on city streets months from now or even in a few years are not well connected to the state of the art or committed to the safe deployment of the technology. For those of us who have been working on the technology for a long time, we’re going to tell you the issue is still really hard, as the systems are as complex as ever.

quotemstr 8y ago

I wish cities would create zones specifically designed around facilitating autonomous car operation. For example, there's zero reason to allow random private cars in Manhattan south of 96th street. In a small, dense area like this, it should be possible to optimize around the limits of current autonomous car software.

Animats 8y ago

Driverless cars are coming along just fine. Waymo is making steady progress. The sensors are getting better. The problem comes from all those "fake it til you make it" startups, Uber and Tesla being the worst. Both have killed people. This is mostly about sensors and geometry. Machine learning has a role, but only in target identification. That's how Waymo does it. The fake it til you make it crowd had the fantasy that you just hook up some cameras to a machine learning system, train it, and you have self driving. Doesn't work. Machine learning is way too dumb. You can maybe identify "traffic light", "car", "pedestrian", and "deer" with machine learning. That's just used to guess what they're going to do next. It's not used to decide if they're an obstacle. Obstacle detection and avoidance is all sensors and geometry. Also, "self driving car", "electric car", and "transportation as a service" are all independent. All will be available, but not from the same companies.

Nydhal 8y ago
I'm sorry I can't back up my claims but you will be proved wrong with time. I would bet in less than 10 years you'll have camera only fully autonomous systems.
- Fricken 8y ago
  From Sterling Anderson, former director of Autopilot who oversaw the implementation of HW2: >Perception is a game of statistics.Crudely speaking, if we have three independent modalities with epsilon miss-detection-rates and we combine them we can achieve an epsilon³ rate in perception. In practice, relatively orthogonal failure modes won’t achieve that level of benefit, however, an error every million miles can get boosted to an error every billion miles. It is extremely difficult to achieve this level of accuracy with a single modality alone. >Different sensor modalities have different strengths and weaknesses; thus, incorporating multiple modalities drives orders of magnitude improvements in the reliability of the system. Cameras suffer from difficulty in low-light and high dynamic range scenarios; radars suffer from limited resolution and artifacts due to multi-path and doppler ambiguity; lidars “see” obscurants. https://medium.com/aurora-blog/auroras-approach-to-development-5e42fec2ee4b https://medium.com/aurora-blog/auroras-approach-to-developme...

iabacu 8y ago

The argument that autonomous tech will save lives is the most dangerous. This will take decades to be true. The same companies who are pushing for that narrative, are also the first ones to blame the drivers when their tech goes wrong. There’s so much data fudging to push for those narratives — they want the credit for lives saved, and at the same time don’t want the blame or liability for accidents caused.

yannyu 8y ago
Or maybe we hold driverless cars up to an unfair standard. Today, 3000 people die in the US every single day because of car accidents. Many, many more are injured or disabled. Why would we expect driverless cars to reduce that to 0? Shouldn't it be good enough if they reduce it to 50%? 25%?
- iabacu 8y ago
  No one is talking about reducing anything to zero — that’s a straw argument. It you really want a fair comparison, one can start by controlling statistical variables by car price point, car age and driver demographics. It’s not hard to spot blatant data fudging by companies that are big on marketing.
- TheLoneAdmin 8y ago
  Note that the 3000 daily deaths is worldwide, not just the US. The daily US total is about 100. I do agree that any improvement on those numbers with AI should be applauded.
- Alupis 8y ago
  > Today, 3000 people die in the US every single day because of car accidents Whoa... that's over 1 million people annually... you probably mean globally? Depending on the year, it's somewhere between 30,000 - 40,000 annually[1][2][3], or in the worst-case, about 109 people daily in the US. When you examine those numbers further, you'll see about 10,000-18,000 (depending on the year) are sadly still alcohol related[4]. We can and should fix this first and foremost. With over 3.1 Trillion miles driven annually in the US, that's about 0.001 fatalities per 100,000 miles driven, or about 1 fatality per 80,000,000 miles driven. Driving is pretty safe - although I agree we can make it safer. [1] https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/usdot-releases-2016-fatal-traffic-crash-data https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/usdot-releases-2016-fat... [2] https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/motor-vehicle-safety/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/motor-vehicle-safety/index.ht... [3] https://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/general-statistics/fatalityfacts/state-by-state-overview https://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/general-statistics/fatali... [4] https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/impaired_driving/impaired-drv_factsheet.html https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/impaired_driving/impa... [5] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/02/21/516512439/record-number-of-miles-driven-in-u-s-last-year https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/02/21/516512439...

hnburnsy 8y ago

While I am still waiting for my Tesla Model 3 SR, I browse the Tesla forums and find it amusing (or maybe just sad) that Tesla is charging $5000+ for Full Self Driving (FSD). Owners are paying for the future possibility that the car will be "conducting trips with no action required by the person in the driver’s seat" [per Tesla Model 3 ordering page]. I think some Tesla owners are even expecting that their car will go self work for Uber over night, generating the user income. Other customers seem to be paying the fee, yet they are just leasing their car. Will these leasees ever see any significant FSD features? This article gets it right that self-driving is way, way off. It will be interesting to see what and when Telsa delivers to its customers who prepaid for FSD. I think Tesla already settled a lawsuit with some owners over self-driving fees and associated delays.

kart23 8y ago
Ha! I can just see the teenagers blocking the car, covering cameras with paint, and leaving an empty Tesla in the middle of a busy intersection for the cops to deal with. Pranks for the future generations are going to be really interesting.

ocdtrekkie 8y ago

I think the car manufacturers will, in the end, win out with the continued, steady progress of smarter and more capable driver assistance systems. Cruise control gave way to super cruise with lane keeping, warnings when your back bumper was approaching something gave way to features that stop the car for you before you hit something. Eventually, the car will be less dependent on the human's attention, as the safety features will make the human's attention less important (while not telling the human their attention is less important), until it's good enough to take over for the human. I think a lot of the issue is that dream and expectation that "hey, I can just watch a movie, I don't really need to pay attention" is crazy, and will continue to be for many years to come. We need to stop marketing that future.

izzydata 8y ago

I'm still skeptical that this will happen anytime soon outside of selected small zones. I may be wrong, but I feel like the US or wherever these get deployed need a major infrastructure update to be better or more consistent. Even with the most advanced automated driving system imaginable you will still have poor and inconsistent infrastructure everywhere.

dboreham 8y ago

Driverless vehicles are "the new fusion power". Always "about 10 years in the future". >Driverless cars are coming along just fine. Even if this were true it doesn't mean humans will be fine with them being deployed. We had working driverless trains 20+ years ago yet almost none are deployed today (AND we have plenty of human-caused fatal train crashes that might be a good reason to want driverless trains).

BurningFrog 8y ago
There are plenty of driverless trains deployed all over the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_urban_metro_subway_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_urban_metro_...
ehsankia 8y ago
Except Waymo is being used by real people in Phoenix right now, albeit on an invite only system. They've said they'll go public by next year, and expand to other cities afterwards. Most of what is blocking them is regulation. I'd predict that by 2025, they will be in at least 10 major cities, regulation willing.

tenaciousDaniel 8y ago

Seems like a good interim solution is to build infrastructure for designated "driverless" lanes. I assume there's a good reason why this isn't being pursued though?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

person_of_color 8y ago

Anyone joined and then left an SDC company because they thought the product was too far away?

woodandsteel 8y ago

The people who argue that driverless cars can't match humans have a real double standard going. They talk about all the conditions like snow and edge cases that driverless cars can't handle now. But they have nothing to say about all the real conditions that everyday make human-driven cars unsafe, like lack of sleep, alcohol or illegal drugs, youthful showing off, road rage, texting, arguing with a passenger, old age, poor vision, and so on. Remember, the problem is not to make driverless cars perfect, it is to make them as good as humans, and that is much easier. Also, let's remember, the transition to driverless cars will not come all at once, with all vehicles handling all conditions. Instead we will gets lot of partial, easier cases, like a truck that drives only along a well-mapped route, or people using it only when weather conditions are reasonably good, and so on. As the AI and sensors improve, new uses will be added, until eventually we get it to be universal, or nearly so. And finally there is the likelihood of infrastructure improvements to make it easier. So want we are going to have is not suddenly one day driverless cars take over, rather a gradual increase in their use.

clay_the_ripper 8y ago

I think it’s important to distinguish between a self driving car that can work in every scenario, and a self driving car that can take over part of the time. Personally, if someone could make a car that was extremely good at highway driving so it could sit in traffic for me and drive on the highway (basically if Tesla autopilot actually worked and was 99.9999% safe) that would be AMAZING. that’s good enough for me. I don’t need a car that can self drive in the snow.

stretchwithme 8y ago

I think we underestimate how amazingly versatile even an 85 year old grandmother's brain truly is. I am certain AVs will work EVENTUALLY. And that will radically change the economy. But robotic killing machines will be working long before that happens. And you can bet somebody is working on that. Maybe we're focusing on the wrong things.

rdlecler1 8y ago

The web link to google often doesn’t work to find the non paywall version anymore. I’d be happier having a setting in my HN profile that ghosted these publications.

ur-whale 8y ago

Paywalled. http://archive.is/xKX1T http://archive.is/xKX1T

kuroguro 8y ago

https://outline.com/Psn6Px https://outline.com/Psn6Px

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]