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Driverless cars are stuck in a jam
- neonate 7y agohttps://outline.com/y8F3b8 https://outline.com/y8F3b8
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mellosouls 7y agoPaywalled
- loons2 7y agoPaywall bypassed by CTRL-ALT-R (reader mode in FF) and then CTRL-R (reload).
- mellosouls 7y agoI'm on a tablet. Anyway somebody else has kindly provided an outline link. I wish paywalled articles were flagged in the title with an indication as to whether the OP had provided an alternative. I think this was discussed recently, can't remember the conclusion as to why it isn't.
- tictok4 7y agoWorks fine with no script.
- heyflyguy 7y agoI'm a cheap SOB so I can't read the whole article, but I am really looking forward to a time when a city center no longer allows human operated vehicles. A time when streets have no lights, lanes or direction of traffic. A time when during certain times of the day a street can dynamically change from one way to two way and back to one way traffic, all based on the collaborative hive mind of self driving cars. Cars constantly talking to eachother, the network and making thousand of tiny decisions about what lane to occupy, where to turn in order to expedite their own trip and that of their nearby neighbor.
- loons2 7y agoI read the whole thing without even realizing there was a paywall by CTRL-ALT-R (reader mode in FF) and then CTRL-R (reload).
- L_Rahman 7y agoIt is stunning to me that we can more easily imagine a city center with a collaborative hive mind of self driving cars than we can one with no cars at all. Why do we want that future so badly?
- heyflyguy 7y agoWhat is your vision?
- L_Rahman 7y agoI believe /u/gherkinnn has painted a picture that represents both of our desired futures.
- FreelanceX 7y agoJust what he said... A city with no cars at all.
- heyflyguy 7y agoI hope in 100 years you're right. I hope in 20 years I'm right.
- gherkinnn 7y agoA hivemind of spacious boxes on wheels, linked to make a sort of snake. Each fitted with seats and things to hold on to. They run along fixed routes in regular intervals. They could transport thousands of people per hour safely around a town of any size. And as ‘snake’ is not an ideal word, I’d suggest the word ‘tram’. Has a nice ring to it. A variation could be ones that don’t run on tracks but normal wheels. Rest still applies. Shall we call those ‘busses’? Bike lanes, access for business and residents keep the rest alive. Bonus points of we plant lots of trees and build little fountains.
- wongarsu 7y agoThe Key quotes: > Mr Urmson now talks of self-driving cars appearing gradually over the next 30 to 50 years. Firms are increasingly switching to a more incremental approach, building on technologies such as lane-keeping or automatic parking. A string of fatalities involving self-driving cars have scotched the idea that a zero-crash world is anywhere close. Markets are starting to catch on. > The most general point is that, like most technologies, what is currently called “AI” is both powerful and limited. Recent progress in machine learning has been transformative. At the same time, the eventual goal—the creation in a machine of a fluid, general, human-like intelligence—remains distant. People need to separate the justified excitement from the opportunistic hyperbole. Few doubt that a completely autonomous car is possible in principle. But the consensus is, increasingly, that it is not imminent. Anyone counting on AI for business or pleasure could do worse than remember that cautionary tale.
- wongarsu 7y agoI think researching autonomous cars but continously extracting and bringing the "easy" accomplishments to market, like automated parking, is the more successful strategy. This is what many traditional car manufacturers and to a lesser degree Tesla seem to be doing. Others like Waymo want to skip all intermediary steps and go straight for the big prize. That's a high risk strategy that may or may not pay off.
- mdorazio 7y agoThe problem is this is a dangerous strategy. As in dangerous to people’s lives. We know how distracted drivers are without any advanced features in cars today. The more “it does some things on its own” options you add, the more likely people are to over-rely on those features and assume the car is capable of more than it actually is, which leads to accidents. Tesla is a perfect example of this, with people assuming it’s Level 3ish capabilities are really Level 4 and then happily taking naps or watching movies in the drivers seat while the car plows into a stopped vehicle. Waymo is doing the right thing for safety here by skipping 3 entirely.
- Dumblydorr 7y agoLet's not pretend we care about life and safety, when we discuss a handful of lives while we glide over the 30,000 yearly deaths on the road in the US alone. The only truly safe thing to do with cars would be to ban them or to vastly increase licensing requirements.
- asdkhadsj 7y agoEh, I agree, BUT... lets not pretend that is immediately viable, either. Severely restricting license access in a country with often (varying by city) terrible public transit seems to be a recipe for disaster. Your comment quips as if state officials have their finger over the button of restricting licenses, but choose not to merely for lack of care. It is far, far more complicated than you give it credit for. Or so, I imagine. As HN sometimes forgets, the world exists beyond the lines of SF. Some places have terrible public transport.
- CuriousSkeptic 7y agoIs there any work being done on remote controlled cars? I was thinking the other day that I would pay for a service delivering a car for me on-demand, for me to drive, (don’t need a self-driving car when I can drive) and then just leave wherever I am when I’m done. It seems it should be more or less practical to deliver such a service using remote controlled cars.
- mdorazio 7y agoWhy do you need a remote controlled car for that? There are many car sharing services in major cities already. Between zipcar, turo, enterprise carshare, getaround, etc. there are plenty of micro rentals available. And I think most people would prefer Uber or Lyft to driving themselves inside a city these days. But to directly answer your question, I’m only aware of this for trucks with Starsky Robotics.
- CuriousSkeptic 7y agoI want it delivered to my door on demand. To schedule a slot in car pool or book a rental I need to pick-up somewhere is out of the question. (Also the whole “pool” things sounds way to social, just want to pay someone and get going) I don’t live in a city, so would need to take the train or bus to the city to pickup a cheap rental as it is. Don’t think we have Uber or Lyft here but my assumption was that they are mostly useful as a taxi replacement to get around within a city. My use case are more focused on removing the need to have a car in the garage but keep the freedom drive on short notice to run errands and take trips. Perhaps drive to work but take the train home after a beer in the evening. Having remote controlled cars was simply a way to optimize costs. Should be cheaper to have drivers located offshore somewhere than tied to a particular car.
- mdorazio 7y agoOk, I see. You've basically described a business model that is completely non-viable. The overhead of owning the car, getting it to you, then getting it back to a central hub would force the price past a point people in your situation are willing to pay. Remote control is not much cheaper than having an actual driver in terms of operating cost (they need to be close enough that latency is not an issue), and much more expensive in terms of hardware, software, and liability insurance. You'd have to price the service high enough to cover at least an additional $50k in hardware, software, and data per vehicle, lowest minimum wage within 500 miles for the time required to get it to and from you, vehicle operating costs for the distance to get it to and from you, and added insurance because few companies are going to say remote control driving is safe. There's also the regulatory component since I don't think most places allow remote driving.
- seibelj 7y agoDriving on roads with human drivers, bikers, pedestrians, animals, freak weather events, maintenance and construction workers, and all manner of situations is - in reality - a problem of unbounded complexity. Unless we create infrastructure that radically reduces the complexity, like invisible “tracks” and banning as many variables as possible (other humans) then nothing short of AGI will get us close to the current below-average human driver. Self driving cars is Silicon Valley hubris and hype at its finest. I genuinely feel proud about the computer scientists who have wrangled millions of dollars from investors, truly excellent work, I wish all engineers could get that kind of money. Hopefully the billions keep flowing.
- dsfyu404ed 7y agoThere are lots of places where the variables are constrained enough that the current state could be useful. An AI shunt truck would be super useful and a much easier problem than a self driving car. We don't even have those yet and nobody seems to be trying to make them or similiar. I think most of the reason is there's no chance of hockey stick growth for niche commercial applications so VCs don't care.
- davnicwil 7y agoIt's not of unbounded complexity, though. That doesn't imply it's not complex, it is very complex, but it's way, way off being a problem whose solution maps to any other problem, i.e. only solvable by general AI. Remember also, the goal is not dealing perfectly with every possible situation. The goal (at first) is dealing slightly better with the average predictable situation than the average human driver.
- sverige 7y ago> The goal (at first) is dealing slightly better with the average predictable situation than the average human driver. The average human driver is terrible at driving. The goal should be higher; i.e., to be slightly better than the top 10% of human drivers. One of those skills will be refusing to drive when the weather is too bad.
- acollins1331 7y agoAs a counter-point I think large parts of driving have already been automated. We aren't far from long lines of semi trucks following each other through Kansas and then a human hops into them at the next depot to park and unload it.
- williesleg 7y agoCommie websites like the economist are stuck in a jam.