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Why do you think self-driving-cars are so far fetched? We already have some pretty good prototypes. Additionally, what would be those massively positive effect

by nene 16y ago

Why do you think self-driving-cars are so far fetched? We already have some pretty good prototypes. Additionally, what would be those massively positive effects? I can see less car accidents and reduced amount of mundane driving, but I wouldn't consider those effects as dwarfing everything else.

jessriedel 16y ago
> Why do you think self-driving-cars are so far fetched? We already have some pretty good prototypes. We've had pretty good prototypes for more than 20 years. There are two huge barriers: (1) The progress in computer vision, like voice recognition, has slowed. People had pretty good speech recognition since the 1980's, but the gap between "pretty good" and "good enough to use" remains uncrossed. The gap in computer vision for cars will be even wider because mistakes will be much more costly. (2) Even with all the tech problems solved, the regulatory hurdles to implementing this are staggering. Suffice it to say, I would make a "Long Bet" (longbets.org/) against autonomous cars making up 5% of all cars in 20 years, with 10:1 odds. > Additionally, what would be those massively positive effects? Car accidents cost the US about $250 Billion per year, with 45,000 killed. Autonomous driving has the potential to decrease this by at least an order of magnitude (most accidents are due to driver error). That's a mind-bogglingly staggering benefit. 10 million Americans commute more than an hour each day, which is $25 Billion per year at minimum wage. There's much more lost among the rest of the commuters, and a factor of 4 to account for realistic wages. I could go on about how autonomous driving would also (a) drastically reduce the total number of cars we'd need, (b) cut emissions and gas usage by allowing ubiquitous slip streaming, (c) virtually eliminate the need for nearby parking in cities, freeing up vast amounts of extremely valuable real estate.
- bsaunder 16y ago
  > Even with all the tech problems solved, the regulatory hurdles to implementing this are staggering. I think we will "back in" to self driving cars. I think they will first appear as safety features on luxury cars (this is already happening). The real statistics of these features will become obvious. Eventually the car won't let the driver do anything stupid and people will become annoyed that they have to hold on to the wheel when basically the car could be doing that for them. Earlier production models of self driving cars will work like cruise control. Perhaps the system analyzes the road conditions and in optimum environments it enables a button that engages autopilot with warnings when conditions degrade (eventually stopping the car if the driver does not resume control).
- orangecat 16y ago
  Yes, it's absolutely huge. A while back I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation trying to account for the direct and indirect economic benefits, and it was on the order of a trillion dollars a year. That might even be low, because I don't think I considered your points about parking and real estate. I would have agreed with your barriers, but I'm very encouraged by Google's experiments. They show that you can deploy automated vehicles alongside normal traffic, and that getting government permission isn't an insurmountable problem. If it does gain traction, there will be a point where our collective rationality will be tested. It's nearly certain that occasional system malfunctions will occur resulting in deaths. Hopefully we'll be able to realize that such incidents are on balance vastly less harmful than the damage done by human drivers, and won't allow manufacturers to be sued out of existence or shut down by demagoguing politicians.

by nene 16y ago

jessriedel 16y ago

> Why do you think self-driving-cars are so far fetched? We already have some pretty good prototypes. We've had pretty good prototypes for more than 20 years. There are two huge barriers: (1) The progress in computer vision, like voice recognition, has slowed. People had pretty good speech recognition since the 1980's, but the gap between "pretty good" and "good enough to use" remains uncrossed. The gap in computer vision for cars will be even wider because mistakes will be much more costly. (2) Even with all the tech problems solved, the regulatory hurdles to implementing this are staggering. Suffice it to say, I would make a "Long Bet" (longbets.org/) against autonomous cars making up 5% of all cars in 20 years, with 10:1 odds. > Additionally, what would be those massively positive effects? Car accidents cost the US about $250 Billion per year, with 45,000 killed. Autonomous driving has the potential to decrease this by at least an order of magnitude (most accidents are due to driver error). That's a mind-bogglingly staggering benefit. 10 million Americans commute more than an hour each day, which is $25 Billion per year at minimum wage. There's much more lost among the rest of the commuters, and a factor of 4 to account for realistic wages. I could go on about how autonomous driving would also (a) drastically reduce the total number of cars we'd need, (b) cut emissions and gas usage by allowing ubiquitous slip streaming, (c) virtually eliminate the need for nearby parking in cities, freeing up vast amounts of extremely valuable real estate.

bsaunder 16y ago
> Even with all the tech problems solved, the regulatory hurdles to implementing this are staggering. I think we will "back in" to self driving cars. I think they will first appear as safety features on luxury cars (this is already happening). The real statistics of these features will become obvious. Eventually the car won't let the driver do anything stupid and people will become annoyed that they have to hold on to the wheel when basically the car could be doing that for them. Earlier production models of self driving cars will work like cruise control. Perhaps the system analyzes the road conditions and in optimum environments it enables a button that engages autopilot with warnings when conditions degrade (eventually stopping the car if the driver does not resume control).
orangecat 16y ago
Yes, it's absolutely huge. A while back I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation trying to account for the direct and indirect economic benefits, and it was on the order of a trillion dollars a year. That might even be low, because I don't think I considered your points about parking and real estate. I would have agreed with your barriers, but I'm very encouraged by Google's experiments. They show that you can deploy automated vehicles alongside normal traffic, and that getting government permission isn't an insurmountable problem. If it does gain traction, there will be a point where our collective rationality will be tested. It's nearly certain that occasional system malfunctions will occur resulting in deaths. Hopefully we'll be able to realize that such incidents are on balance vastly less harmful than the damage done by human drivers, and won't allow manufacturers to be sued out of existence or shut down by demagoguing politicians.