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How much of this delay is just perfectionism and excess risk aversion? In pretty much any pursuit, demanding perfection ensures that you'll never be finished. B

How much of this delay is just perfectionism and excess risk aversion? In pretty much any pursuit, demanding perfection ensures that you'll never be finished. Based on what I'm seen, autonomous vehicles already work. Waymo's cars have driven millions of miles. Other companies have working systems too. The technology is already at the point where it's useful. I understand wanting to keep people safe, but the benefits of this technology so are enormous that I'd rather companies launch now and iterate than spend decades wringing every last disengagement out of the system while the carnage on our highways continues. I feel like we're in one of those situations where everyone is just afraid to be first. Meanwhile, people die every day.

frosted-flakes 7y ago
You'd rather have car companies release beta software to millions of cars than stick with the status quo? This isn't the Windows 10 Insider Preview. Cars can kill people, and production vehicles should never contain beta software, which is beta because it's buggy/untested/unreliable.
- quotemstr 7y ago
  No software is perfect --- and that goes for the wetware in our heads too. Why would you want people to keep dying on the roads just so we can avoid shipping imperfect-but-still-superhuman autonomous driving vehicles? We need a more nuanced outlook than "Disengagement! NO RELEASE!".
  - frosted-flakes 7y ago
    Do you think beta software belongs in airplanes too? We sure could do with a lot more 737 MAX incidents.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - CamperBob2 7y ago
      That point might actually carry some weight if we lost 30,000 people in air crashes every year, instead of roughly zero.
      - 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
        Plane crashes are so rare because of the risk aversion. It's perfectly relevant.
        CamperBob2 7y ago
        In any case, that degree of risk aversion is unachievable, unaffordable, and unproductive when discussing personal automobiles. Cars are killing people now. It is not reasonable to wait for some Utopian future where every car has the ability to pilot itself with NASA-grade software. Human drivers are already "moving fast and breaking things," and they're not getting any better at it.
        frosted-flakes 7y ago
        But we're not waiting. Cars today are absolutely crammed with automated safety features. Far more than the airbags and ABS on my 20 year old VW. Think automatic collision avoidance, blind zone detectors, traction control, lane departure warnings, back-up cameras, adaptive cruise control, and more that I've probably never heard of yet.[0] To think that we're waiting until perfect level 5 automated driving before we release it to the public is ridiculous. As the article clearly states, > Most OEMs are now more forthright about the fact that autonomy will be a succession of small, graduated steps. We didn't go straight to landing on the moon. Neither will we go straight to autonomous driving, or flying cars. Flying cars will never happen, because there are no gradual steps between flying and not flying, but software can be gradually improved. That doesn't mean running untested beta software in cars though. [0] Also, advanced crumple zones, numerous airbags, proper safety restraints, crash guards on transport trailers, high-tech road makings, restrictive driving tests, and strict laws on driving while intoxicated or distracted.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
llukas 7y ago
> I feel like we're in one of those situations where everyone is just afraid to be first. Tesla is not afraid. They killed few people already with autopilot. Best part about it where they fixed bug that lead car into concrete barriers and then regressed few months later...
northwest65 7y ago
>I'd rather companies launch now and iterate Well I think they have in a way. The Tesla Autopilot is an example, and probably not a bad example of where the level of self driving cars is really at. Given Tesla's demonstrated in service capabilities, it seems that we can do a few things, but remove the steering wheel self driving is many many moons away.
wpietri 7y ago
That you are willing to let other people die for the sake of increasing your convenience isn't very compelling. And I think that's also unnecessary. From what I can tell about Waymo's approach, they are launching with something well below level 5, but where they cut over to a remote driver whenever the car is unsure. It's a smart approach, in that they can offer a level-5 service with level-3 technology. They've turned the technology cliff into a cost-optimization problem, which they can chip away at over time.
- quotemstr 7y ago
  > That you are willing to let other people die for the sake of increasing your convenience isn't very compelling. That's how we got the original automobile, and that's been a great benefit to the human experience. Everything is costs and benefits. In exchange for reducing the amount of very dangerous manual driving that people do, we plug in autonomous technology that's very good, but not perfect. It still saves lives overall. This idea that autonomous must be perfect or you're a murderer --- it's simplistic and counterproductive, and following this kind of absolutist thinking guarantees that we'll never get autonomous technology and that people will continue to slaughter each other with manually-driven vehicles. Taking an absolute stance against dangerous technology might seem good at first, but in the long run, it increases the sum of human misery. It's perfectionism, not autonomous, that's killing people every day.
- BurningFrog 7y ago
  1.25 million people die in human driven traffic per year, 37,000 of those in the US. SDCs should only need to beat that safety level, not be perfect.
  - wpietri 7y ago
    I understand the theory, but good luck selling a car on the basis of "probably as safe as the average driver!" And good luck convincing the parents of some kid run over by Google that it's just one of those things. Note also that for many of those 37,000 deaths, a human is found culpable, often doing time. Who do you propose should do the time for autonomous cars? An engineer? Their manager? The CEO? In practice, our corporate accountability is such that nobody will pay any penalty. Maybe that's fine when, as with the 2008 financial crisis, the losses are abstract and distributed. But when it's the life of somebody's kid, somebody's mom, somebody's sister? That at best will be an extremely volatile situation. Especially if Google or Uber captures 20% of the self-driving car market and is now responsible for 37,000 * 0.20 = 7400 deaths per year, or about 20 per day.
im_down_w_otp 7y ago
Waymo has already come out and stated that realizing AVs as they've been pitching them are much further away than they've previously claimed, and now they've moved to try to become a Tier 1 component supplier to try to monetize at least _something_ for all the money they've dumped into this endeavor. Additionally, despite driving the exact same corridor for several years, there are still trivial and commonplace scenarios that their system can't handle reliably due to environmental ambiguity (i.e. multimodal human intent). Though, not to gang up on Waymo here. Probably most programs are stuck/grappling with these problems. You just mentioned them directly, so I picked on them.
pdonis 7y ago
> The technology is already at the point where it's useful. Useful for certain limited purposes, yes. But that's not where it needs to be to start taking the place of human drivers in everyday usage, in order to reduce harm in everyday usage (which I agree is a good thing to do). For that purpose it needs to be more reliable than the human drivers are, and it's not even close to that and won't be for quite some time.

frosted-flakes 7y ago

You'd rather have car companies release beta software to millions of cars than stick with the status quo? This isn't the Windows 10 Insider Preview. Cars can kill people, and production vehicles should never contain beta software, which is beta because it's buggy/untested/unreliable.

quotemstr 7y ago
No software is perfect --- and that goes for the wetware in our heads too. Why would you want people to keep dying on the roads just so we can avoid shipping imperfect-but-still-superhuman autonomous driving vehicles? We need a more nuanced outlook than "Disengagement! NO RELEASE!".
- frosted-flakes 7y ago
  Do you think beta software belongs in airplanes too? We sure could do with a lot more 737 MAX incidents.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - CamperBob2 7y ago
    That point might actually carry some weight if we lost 30,000 people in air crashes every year, instead of roughly zero.
    - 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
      Plane crashes are so rare because of the risk aversion. It's perfectly relevant.
      - CamperBob2 7y ago
        In any case, that degree of risk aversion is unachievable, unaffordable, and unproductive when discussing personal automobiles. Cars are killing people now. It is not reasonable to wait for some Utopian future where every car has the ability to pilot itself with NASA-grade software. Human drivers are already "moving fast and breaking things," and they're not getting any better at it.
        frosted-flakes 7y ago
        But we're not waiting. Cars today are absolutely crammed with automated safety features. Far more than the airbags and ABS on my 20 year old VW. Think automatic collision avoidance, blind zone detectors, traction control, lane departure warnings, back-up cameras, adaptive cruise control, and more that I've probably never heard of yet.[0] To think that we're waiting until perfect level 5 automated driving before we release it to the public is ridiculous. As the article clearly states, > Most OEMs are now more forthright about the fact that autonomy will be a succession of small, graduated steps. We didn't go straight to landing on the moon. Neither will we go straight to autonomous driving, or flying cars. Flying cars will never happen, because there are no gradual steps between flying and not flying, but software can be gradually improved. That doesn't mean running untested beta software in cars though. [0] Also, advanced crumple zones, numerous airbags, proper safety restraints, crash guards on transport trailers, high-tech road makings, restrictive driving tests, and strict laws on driving while intoxicated or distracted.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

llukas 7y ago

> I feel like we're in one of those situations where everyone is just afraid to be first. Tesla is not afraid. They killed few people already with autopilot. Best part about it where they fixed bug that lead car into concrete barriers and then regressed few months later...

northwest65 7y ago

>I'd rather companies launch now and iterate Well I think they have in a way. The Tesla Autopilot is an example, and probably not a bad example of where the level of self driving cars is really at. Given Tesla's demonstrated in service capabilities, it seems that we can do a few things, but remove the steering wheel self driving is many many moons away.

wpietri 7y ago

That you are willing to let other people die for the sake of increasing your convenience isn't very compelling. And I think that's also unnecessary. From what I can tell about Waymo's approach, they are launching with something well below level 5, but where they cut over to a remote driver whenever the car is unsure. It's a smart approach, in that they can offer a level-5 service with level-3 technology. They've turned the technology cliff into a cost-optimization problem, which they can chip away at over time.

quotemstr 7y ago
> That you are willing to let other people die for the sake of increasing your convenience isn't very compelling. That's how we got the original automobile, and that's been a great benefit to the human experience. Everything is costs and benefits. In exchange for reducing the amount of very dangerous manual driving that people do, we plug in autonomous technology that's very good, but not perfect. It still saves lives overall. This idea that autonomous must be perfect or you're a murderer --- it's simplistic and counterproductive, and following this kind of absolutist thinking guarantees that we'll never get autonomous technology and that people will continue to slaughter each other with manually-driven vehicles. Taking an absolute stance against dangerous technology might seem good at first, but in the long run, it increases the sum of human misery. It's perfectionism, not autonomous, that's killing people every day.
BurningFrog 7y ago
1.25 million people die in human driven traffic per year, 37,000 of those in the US. SDCs should only need to beat that safety level, not be perfect.
- wpietri 7y ago
  I understand the theory, but good luck selling a car on the basis of "probably as safe as the average driver!" And good luck convincing the parents of some kid run over by Google that it's just one of those things. Note also that for many of those 37,000 deaths, a human is found culpable, often doing time. Who do you propose should do the time for autonomous cars? An engineer? Their manager? The CEO? In practice, our corporate accountability is such that nobody will pay any penalty. Maybe that's fine when, as with the 2008 financial crisis, the losses are abstract and distributed. But when it's the life of somebody's kid, somebody's mom, somebody's sister? That at best will be an extremely volatile situation. Especially if Google or Uber captures 20% of the self-driving car market and is now responsible for 37,000 * 0.20 = 7400 deaths per year, or about 20 per day.

im_down_w_otp 7y ago

Waymo has already come out and stated that realizing AVs as they've been pitching them are much further away than they've previously claimed, and now they've moved to try to become a Tier 1 component supplier to try to monetize at least _something_ for all the money they've dumped into this endeavor. Additionally, despite driving the exact same corridor for several years, there are still trivial and commonplace scenarios that their system can't handle reliably due to environmental ambiguity (i.e. multimodal human intent). Though, not to gang up on Waymo here. Probably most programs are stuck/grappling with these problems. You just mentioned them directly, so I picked on them.

pdonis 7y ago

> The technology is already at the point where it's useful. Useful for certain limited purposes, yes. But that's not where it needs to be to start taking the place of human drivers in everyday usage, in order to reduce harm in everyday usage (which I agree is a good thing to do). For that purpose it needs to be more reliable than the human drivers are, and it's not even close to that and won't be for quite some time.