4 ms·

I specifically said that it should be done on high volume, maintained roads, such as highways and ring roads. It doesn't have to happen overnight, but it could

I specifically said that it should be done on high volume, maintained roads, such as highways and ring roads. It doesn't have to happen overnight, but it could happen gradually. It would serve other purposes too, like guidance for snow plows. It's a 80/20 solution - cover 80% of the travel for 20% of the cost. Solving the problem on highways and high volume roads without cyclists are significantly easier, and would still give a tremendous benefit. Regarding laying the cables in existing roads. We're already pretty good at "shooting" cables under existing roads with pneumatic solutions, and I'm confident that we could do so for rural roads at a modest price. But that's a different talk. If we want to develop an "AI" for this, it's not going to be ready in 10 year, nor 20 - we do not have the processing power, or understanding of the domain to do it at this point, and we're moving rather slowly. Some of the more practical problems such as secure communication are 100% solved, and reliable car, pedestrian, cycle detecting are problems that are, fairly well understood at this point, and we certainly can make solutions that rival even alert and good drivers. Things like this move slowly - it's not going to be retrofitted, but agreeing on a standard and new vehicles can implement in gradually.

hnlmorg 7y ago
> I specifically said that it should be done on high volume, maintained roads, such as highways and ring roads. It doesn't have to happen overnight, but it could happen gradually. It would serve other purposes too, like guidance for snow plows. It's a 80/20 solution - cover 80% of the travel for 20% of the cost. Solving the problem on highways and high volume roads without cyclists are significantly easier, and would still give a tremendous benefit. I've travelled by road a fair bit around different countries and I assure you that a lot of high volume maintained roads still fall into the categories I outlined. Moreover, a lot of high volume roads aren't maintained. I honestly don't think you would even get remotely close to covering 80% of the roads for 20% of the cost. Maybe if you isolate specific districts like Silicon Valley then your figure might be accurate. But for "normal" towns in Europe that wouldn't be the case and, as has been discussed elsewhere on HN, having some roads updated and others not would actually be more dangerous than having none redeveloped because humans would demonstrate the same complacency across all the roads once they're used to autonomy on the new roads. Also highways aren't the problem - they're significantly easier to determine in code and see fewer deaths per year. It's the smaller streets in towns that are the problem. Both from the perspective of statistical deaths and also from the perspective of the complexity of AI required to navigate them. They're what really need guide wires the most. However going back to highways: even on motorways you still have the problem of motorcyclists weaving in and out of traffic. So I'd argue that you haven't entirely eliminated the "cyclists" problem - you just now have faster and even deadlier ones. I should say that I do agree with you that there would be tremendous benefit if it were feasible. What I disagree with is just how feasible it is. > Regarding laying the cables in existing roads. We're already pretty good at "shooting" cables under existing roads with pneumatic solutions, and I'm confident that we could do so for rural roads at a modest price. But that's a different talk. Shooting the cables is the easy if you have pavements with cables already installed. If you don't then you need to dig up the road to lay them. And that's still only half the story. There's a whole load of costs involved in the planning stage; scheduling the work around busy periods (which sometimes means paying for night shift work) and organising the road closures. And it's the maintenance of that infrastructure after the work has happened. Remember that a lot of busy streets aren't even maintained currently. And it's doing that work sympathetically around historical locations (where applicable). There's a significant amount of more cost and work involved than I feel you're giving credit for. > If we want to develop an "AI" for this, it's not going to be ready in 10 year, nor 20 - we do not have the processing power, or understanding of the domain to do it at this point, and we're moving rather slowly. I completely agree that we're decades from a solution but I disagree that we're moving rather slowly. 10 years ago the stuff that are in consumer vehicles - even some entry level cars - would have been considered Sci-Fi just 10 years ago. But even if we are 50 years away, I can't see cables laid in twice that time. I mean half the towns in England and America don't even have broadband, let alone fibre, and you have consumers begging to pay for it. Who's going to foot the bill for redeveloping all our roads? Musk certainly wont. > Things like this move slowly - it's not going to be retrofitted, but agreeing on a standard and new vehicles can implement in gradually. The problem is you need it implemented on every vehicle for it to work. It's like anti-vaxers argument that "I don't need to get vaccinated when everyone else is" but it actually doesn't need to take a large percentage of unvaxinated people for an outbreak to still occur. Equally you only need one vehicle without a mesh network installed to case an accident that could kill several people - including those in autonomous vehicles. If you don't have total coverage then the mesh network isn't going to be reliable.
- hvidgaard 7y ago
  > I've travelled by road a fair bit around different countries and I assure you that a lot of high volume maintained roads still fall into the categories I outlined. Moreover, a lot of high volume roads aren't maintained. I honestly don't think you would even get remotely close to covering 80% of the roads for 20% of the cost. I did not say 80% of the road, but 80% of the travel. Most of the kms driven are on highways, ring roads, and main roads into larger cities. > having some roads updated and others not would actually be more dangerous than having none redeveloped because humans would demonstrate the same complacency across all the roads once they're used to autonomy on the new roads. The car will pull over if you don't take over. I fail to see the issue in that. I'm advocating for a system that will autonomously drive where the infrastructure allows, not everywhere. If the system can handle driving at the highway for me for 2 hours, I'll be significantly more fit for driving the last 20 minutes. > Shooting the cables is the easy if you have pavements with cables already installed. If you don't then you need to dig up the road to lay them No you do not. They can even remove a small patch of tarmac, "shoot" and entire sewer line a long way and remove patch of tarmac at the destination. That's how they get optical fibers under roads and brick paving without digging it up. > There's a whole load of costs involved in the planning stage; scheduling the work around busy periods (which sometimes means paying for night shift work) and organising the road closures I never said it wasn't extra work. A cost benefit is needed, but the current AI approach will either cost many lives, or we agree on a better more expensive way. > If you don't have total coverage then the mesh network isn't going to be reliable. Again, a 100% solution is never happening. But by legislation we can increase adoption slowly, but steadily, until and past the point where we see the many benefits. In the EU all new cars must have DLR, AEB, TPM, ESP, ABS, seat belts, ect. - this would just be another thing new cars must have to ever be allowed to be sold on the market. It should not be up to the manufactures to agree, because they all want their solution, not an interoperable one.
  - hnlmorg 7y ago
    > I did not say 80% of the road, but 80% of the travel. Most of the kms driven are on highways, ring roads, and main roads into larger cities. I don't think your experiences are typical for most people the world over. For example in the UK, we don't have that many motorways so most of the commutes by cars are along busy "normal" roads or dual carriageways (which are a little like motorways but with frequent junctions like roundabouts that have complex social interactions and thus might need AI to navigate safely anyway. But even there, most people people in the UK don't spend 80% of their drive on dual carriageways - let alone motorways. Instead we have "main roads" which join towns together. Commuter traffic in the towns in the Netherlands where I've been were more focused on public transport and bicycles than they are cars - though that's not to say they don't also have a heavy motor-vehicle traffic as well. I remember when I travelled around America thinking how much different attitudes to transport were to the UK and many European countries. I think that's in part because of how much farther away places are in the US. But I'm now drifting into speculation. My point was your observation about travel behaviours isn't globally representative. > The car will pull over if you don't take over. I fail to see the issue in that. I'm advocating for a system that will autonomously drive where the infrastructure allows, not everywhere. If the system can handle driving at the highway for me for 2 hours, I'll be significantly more fit for driving the last 20 minutes. Again, motorway driving is the easy part. It's where there is less to observe, low risk of people stepping out in front of you etc. It's where there are fewer road deaths too. And it's also the easiest part of driving to automate. So motorway driving isn't where we should be concentrating our efforts. > No you do not. They can even remove a small patch of tarmac, "shoot" and entire sewer line a long way and remove patch of tarmac at the destination. That's how they get optical fibers under roads and brick paving without digging it up. That's not how they do things here :) But in any case I did say that's still only a small part of the overall cost and orchestration needed in deploying cables. > the current AI approach will either cost many lives Will it though? That sounds like baseless speculation to me. Any who's to say your solution wouldn't also have glitches that result in a fatality? Ultimately you're still depending on software to make decisions and even robotic lawn mowers aren't without their own odd hiccup. > Again, a 100% solution is never happening. I know. That was my point. It's not going to happen and partial coverage isn't good enough. > But by legislation we can increase adoption slowly, but steadily, until and past the point where we see the many benefits. 50% coverage isn't enough. 90% coverage isn't even enough. 99% coverage isn't even enough but at least you're starting to get close. And how long will that take? Lots of people are still driving 20 year old cars every day. So lets say 10 years to design, develop. 5 years to then standardise the specification. 5 years of bureaucracy to get legislated then another 5 years for the legislation to become effective (because governments like to give a warning). They you need to wait 20 to 30 years until most people have bought a new car. That's 55 years at a minimum and you'd still not cover the thousands of people who like to drive classic cars. So you might as well double that figure. By which point AI has long since caught up with the ability to sense other cars on the road (because we've already mostly solved that specific part of the problem anyway) and at a fraction of the cost. I've already said that if we were to build infrastructure from scratch then your approach is definitely the way we should progress. But with the way our road infrastructures run at the moment: the vehicles on there, the hazards that can occur, the cost of maintaining the infrastructure and how that's even funded; well your solutions are simple not feasible for the real world. AI is one of those occasions where worse is better. I completely agree with you that your solutions are better - technically speaking - at solving specific problems related to driverless cars but it doesn't solve all the problems, it's more expensive to implement, can't be deployed everywhere, and yet it will still take longer to roll out than our current tact of developing AI. When you actually look at each problem in detail your proposals fall far short of being workable. These things aren't built without considerable thought put in them and I seem to recall that early prototypes of driverless cars did work on the principle of having smart cars that communicated with each other and smart roads too. Essentially everything you've been advocating. So it's not like you're suggesting anything that hasn't already been tried. But every lecture and documentary I've watched on this subject come back to the same final conclusion: for self-driving cars to become a thing they need to build the car to drive like a human would because changing the roads and the cars on it is actually a harder problem to solve.

hnlmorg 7y ago

> I specifically said that it should be done on high volume, maintained roads, such as highways and ring roads. It doesn't have to happen overnight, but it could happen gradually. It would serve other purposes too, like guidance for snow plows. It's a 80/20 solution - cover 80% of the travel for 20% of the cost. Solving the problem on highways and high volume roads without cyclists are significantly easier, and would still give a tremendous benefit. I've travelled by road a fair bit around different countries and I assure you that a lot of high volume maintained roads still fall into the categories I outlined. Moreover, a lot of high volume roads aren't maintained. I honestly don't think you would even get remotely close to covering 80% of the roads for 20% of the cost. Maybe if you isolate specific districts like Silicon Valley then your figure might be accurate. But for "normal" towns in Europe that wouldn't be the case and, as has been discussed elsewhere on HN, having some roads updated and others not would actually be more dangerous than having none redeveloped because humans would demonstrate the same complacency across all the roads once they're used to autonomy on the new roads. Also highways aren't the problem - they're significantly easier to determine in code and see fewer deaths per year. It's the smaller streets in towns that are the problem. Both from the perspective of statistical deaths and also from the perspective of the complexity of AI required to navigate them. They're what really need guide wires the most. However going back to highways: even on motorways you still have the problem of motorcyclists weaving in and out of traffic. So I'd argue that you haven't entirely eliminated the "cyclists" problem - you just now have faster and even deadlier ones. I should say that I do agree with you that there would be tremendous benefit if it were feasible. What I disagree with is just how feasible it is. > Regarding laying the cables in existing roads. We're already pretty good at "shooting" cables under existing roads with pneumatic solutions, and I'm confident that we could do so for rural roads at a modest price. But that's a different talk. Shooting the cables is the easy if you have pavements with cables already installed. If you don't then you need to dig up the road to lay them. And that's still only half the story. There's a whole load of costs involved in the planning stage; scheduling the work around busy periods (which sometimes means paying for night shift work) and organising the road closures. And it's the maintenance of that infrastructure after the work has happened. Remember that a lot of busy streets aren't even maintained currently. And it's doing that work sympathetically around historical locations (where applicable). There's a significant amount of more cost and work involved than I feel you're giving credit for. > If we want to develop an "AI" for this, it's not going to be ready in 10 year, nor 20 - we do not have the processing power, or understanding of the domain to do it at this point, and we're moving rather slowly. I completely agree that we're decades from a solution but I disagree that we're moving rather slowly. 10 years ago the stuff that are in consumer vehicles - even some entry level cars - would have been considered Sci-Fi just 10 years ago. But even if we are 50 years away, I can't see cables laid in twice that time. I mean half the towns in England and America don't even have broadband, let alone fibre, and you have consumers begging to pay for it. Who's going to foot the bill for redeveloping all our roads? Musk certainly wont. > Things like this move slowly - it's not going to be retrofitted, but agreeing on a standard and new vehicles can implement in gradually. The problem is you need it implemented on every vehicle for it to work. It's like anti-vaxers argument that "I don't need to get vaccinated when everyone else is" but it actually doesn't need to take a large percentage of unvaxinated people for an outbreak to still occur. Equally you only need one vehicle without a mesh network installed to case an accident that could kill several people - including those in autonomous vehicles. If you don't have total coverage then the mesh network isn't going to be reliable.

hvidgaard 7y ago
> I've travelled by road a fair bit around different countries and I assure you that a lot of high volume maintained roads still fall into the categories I outlined. Moreover, a lot of high volume roads aren't maintained. I honestly don't think you would even get remotely close to covering 80% of the roads for 20% of the cost. I did not say 80% of the road, but 80% of the travel. Most of the kms driven are on highways, ring roads, and main roads into larger cities. > having some roads updated and others not would actually be more dangerous than having none redeveloped because humans would demonstrate the same complacency across all the roads once they're used to autonomy on the new roads. The car will pull over if you don't take over. I fail to see the issue in that. I'm advocating for a system that will autonomously drive where the infrastructure allows, not everywhere. If the system can handle driving at the highway for me for 2 hours, I'll be significantly more fit for driving the last 20 minutes. > Shooting the cables is the easy if you have pavements with cables already installed. If you don't then you need to dig up the road to lay them No you do not. They can even remove a small patch of tarmac, "shoot" and entire sewer line a long way and remove patch of tarmac at the destination. That's how they get optical fibers under roads and brick paving without digging it up. > There's a whole load of costs involved in the planning stage; scheduling the work around busy periods (which sometimes means paying for night shift work) and organising the road closures I never said it wasn't extra work. A cost benefit is needed, but the current AI approach will either cost many lives, or we agree on a better more expensive way. > If you don't have total coverage then the mesh network isn't going to be reliable. Again, a 100% solution is never happening. But by legislation we can increase adoption slowly, but steadily, until and past the point where we see the many benefits. In the EU all new cars must have DLR, AEB, TPM, ESP, ABS, seat belts, ect. - this would just be another thing new cars must have to ever be allowed to be sold on the market. It should not be up to the manufactures to agree, because they all want their solution, not an interoperable one.
- hnlmorg 7y ago
  > I did not say 80% of the road, but 80% of the travel. Most of the kms driven are on highways, ring roads, and main roads into larger cities. I don't think your experiences are typical for most people the world over. For example in the UK, we don't have that many motorways so most of the commutes by cars are along busy "normal" roads or dual carriageways (which are a little like motorways but with frequent junctions like roundabouts that have complex social interactions and thus might need AI to navigate safely anyway. But even there, most people people in the UK don't spend 80% of their drive on dual carriageways - let alone motorways. Instead we have "main roads" which join towns together. Commuter traffic in the towns in the Netherlands where I've been were more focused on public transport and bicycles than they are cars - though that's not to say they don't also have a heavy motor-vehicle traffic as well. I remember when I travelled around America thinking how much different attitudes to transport were to the UK and many European countries. I think that's in part because of how much farther away places are in the US. But I'm now drifting into speculation. My point was your observation about travel behaviours isn't globally representative. > The car will pull over if you don't take over. I fail to see the issue in that. I'm advocating for a system that will autonomously drive where the infrastructure allows, not everywhere. If the system can handle driving at the highway for me for 2 hours, I'll be significantly more fit for driving the last 20 minutes. Again, motorway driving is the easy part. It's where there is less to observe, low risk of people stepping out in front of you etc. It's where there are fewer road deaths too. And it's also the easiest part of driving to automate. So motorway driving isn't where we should be concentrating our efforts. > No you do not. They can even remove a small patch of tarmac, "shoot" and entire sewer line a long way and remove patch of tarmac at the destination. That's how they get optical fibers under roads and brick paving without digging it up. That's not how they do things here :) But in any case I did say that's still only a small part of the overall cost and orchestration needed in deploying cables. > the current AI approach will either cost many lives Will it though? That sounds like baseless speculation to me. Any who's to say your solution wouldn't also have glitches that result in a fatality? Ultimately you're still depending on software to make decisions and even robotic lawn mowers aren't without their own odd hiccup. > Again, a 100% solution is never happening. I know. That was my point. It's not going to happen and partial coverage isn't good enough. > But by legislation we can increase adoption slowly, but steadily, until and past the point where we see the many benefits. 50% coverage isn't enough. 90% coverage isn't even enough. 99% coverage isn't even enough but at least you're starting to get close. And how long will that take? Lots of people are still driving 20 year old cars every day. So lets say 10 years to design, develop. 5 years to then standardise the specification. 5 years of bureaucracy to get legislated then another 5 years for the legislation to become effective (because governments like to give a warning). They you need to wait 20 to 30 years until most people have bought a new car. That's 55 years at a minimum and you'd still not cover the thousands of people who like to drive classic cars. So you might as well double that figure. By which point AI has long since caught up with the ability to sense other cars on the road (because we've already mostly solved that specific part of the problem anyway) and at a fraction of the cost. I've already said that if we were to build infrastructure from scratch then your approach is definitely the way we should progress. But with the way our road infrastructures run at the moment: the vehicles on there, the hazards that can occur, the cost of maintaining the infrastructure and how that's even funded; well your solutions are simple not feasible for the real world. AI is one of those occasions where worse is better. I completely agree with you that your solutions are better - technically speaking - at solving specific problems related to driverless cars but it doesn't solve all the problems, it's more expensive to implement, can't be deployed everywhere, and yet it will still take longer to roll out than our current tact of developing AI. When you actually look at each problem in detail your proposals fall far short of being workable. These things aren't built without considerable thought put in them and I seem to recall that early prototypes of driverless cars did work on the principle of having smart cars that communicated with each other and smart roads too. Essentially everything you've been advocating. So it's not like you're suggesting anything that hasn't already been tried. But every lecture and documentary I've watched on this subject come back to the same final conclusion: for self-driving cars to become a thing they need to build the car to drive like a human would because changing the roads and the cars on it is actually a harder problem to solve.