5 ms·

I don't understand why there is so much focus on automobiles instead of just about everything else. In every other instance - airplanes, boats, long-haul trucki

by evo_9 7y ago

I don't understand why there is so much focus on automobiles instead of just about everything else. In every other instance - airplanes, boats, long-haul trucking - the problem in significantly less complex to solve. The only tangible reason I see for such disproportionate focus is some sense of false futurism; aka, driver-less cars have become the 'flying cars' of our times.

bane 7y ago
Large aircraft are basically self-driving these days. Pilots can choose to do almost nothing at all from takoff to landing. However, the failure modes are all mostly catastrophic so pilots remain under the assumption that they can slightly increase the survivability rate when the automation fails. Modern drone systems are also have elements of this kind of automation and can fly complex flight paths and station keep and land and so on more or less on their own. Some large boat systems have are also similarly "self-driving" and can navigate to way points and along various lanes without too much intervention. They need pilots and tugs for the small-nav stuff like canals and ports and so on, there's simply too many permutations of "things that can be hit and sunk" to rely on the automation. Smaller boats can also buy commercial "autonav" systems that link the engine, steering and such to GPS. However, the marine environment is hellish on equipment. Trucking is being seriously looked at, with active test runs, but like big ships needs local pilots for the end-points and local nav. Again too many things in flux and too many things to hit. Cars exist basically continuously at the terminal ends of the trucking problem and are trying to solve the local pilot problem. Humans, with our highly adaptive sensory-response systems can do it to various levels of skill, but even we have lots and lots of failure modes even without impairment.
- i_am_proteus 7y ago
  One advantage of ocean-going ships for automation is that they can (and do) embark pilots for operation waters. On the flipside, the machinery isn't designed to operate for weeks on end without any engineering crew.
- boxy310 7y ago
  Long-haul trucking would be a great use-case. Even if you need humans for local pilot guidance, you can queue them up to a "cell phone lot" and courier the last-mile drivers in between shifts of going back & forth. It would also mean drivers would be based more locally to points of loading, rather than having to be constantly on the road away from home.
  - magduf 7y ago
    >It would also mean drivers would be based more locally to points of loading, rather than having to be constantly on the road away from home. Which would probably make it much easier to hire drivers, too. Lately, long-haul trucking has had a hard time recruiting people into the profession, because the pay isn't that great and the lifestyle completely destroys any relationship you have. Local trucking doesn't have this problem: a driver can drive for the day and be home for dinner.
  - virmundi 7y ago
    Long-haul is more than just driving. Will smart trucks be able to put chains on and pull them off when necessary? Handle unloading of items of weighing process proves problematic? Call for pick up of items removed during weighing? Handle snow? Handle loss of sensors? Handle run away down hill on a steep incline. None of these are insurmountable, but all are well out of the current horizon. Heck, just refueling is hard.
    - rtkwe 7y ago
      Most of those can be solved by changes to the truck or delivering spot local drivers. For weighing the trucks could run different trailers with load cells to weigh itself to ensure they're under the weight limit for their route. For snow there are automatic chain systems used on buses today those might be adaptable. Run away ramps are usually marked so a combination of good mapping data for route planning and finding run offs and vision/driving they'll have anyways.
- cjrp 7y ago
  > Large aircraft are basically self-driving these days. Pilots can choose to do almost nothing at all from takoff to landing. Sort of. The plane will continue to fly the pre-programmed route without pilot involvement, so the actual manipulation of the control surfaces is no longer their primary task. But there are systems to monitor, controllers to talk to, weather systems to navigate around, climbs/descents to find more favourable winds, fuel imbalances to correct, etc. And of course, baseball scores to pick up from ADF. I'd liken it to how (most) software engineers are not writing in Assembly. Instead they're using higher-level languages and libraries to solve problems. Similarly a pilot is not hands-on flying for 7 hours over the Atlantic, but they're still operating the aircraft.
  - rtkwe 7y ago
    They could automate pretty much all of those away but even if they did I don't think flying is a good comparison for self-driving. Flying is pretty much the ideal environment for computer control because there are only a few actual obstacles to deal with; weather, terrain, and other planes and all of those can be handled with outside signals.
dwild 7y ago
> airplanes I remember when Mythbuster did their episode on driving an airplane in emergencies like they do in movies, they came to the conclusion that if it was going to happen, the airplane autopilot would be used instead or a civilian that never flew one. That was in 2007. > long-haul trucking I'm pretty sure that's a long term goal of Tesla with their new semi. I have no doubt many are on that too. The challenges are similar to the one for a car. There's no so much focus on automobile, it's just that we are talking about it more than the others one. Hell the airplane one was done more than a decade ago and you still don't know about it.
hodgesrm 7y ago
Another drawback is that it's taking focus away from mass transit, at least in the US. Decent mass transit ameliorates such a wide range of issues in cities it's hard to understand why we don't put more effort into making it work.
- magduf 7y ago
  Mass transit doesn't really work in US suburbs because everything is just too spread out; it's not economical, nor logistically effective, to build subways to subdivisions. But even in built-up cities, Americans cling to their cars just like they cling to guns and religion. Look at all the uproar in Manhattan, NYC, where they're taking away street parking and putting in protected cycling lanes. People are upset at this "attack" on cars, and somehow think they deserve free places to put their personal vehicles. If you look at another highly built-up city for comparison, Tokyo, they don't have this problem. There is NO street parking; it's all paid lots that cost a fortune. In fact, you're not even allowed to buy a car there unless you can prove you have a place to park it! So most people get around with subways, trains, walking, cycling, and taxis. The bottom line is that it's cultural: Americans just don't like public transit and don't want to fund it with their tax dollars, but they do want to subsidize car driving with their tax dollars.
  - rootusrootus 7y ago
    Americans like cars so much because they're incredibly useful. And public transit sucks, which is sort of a chicken-and-egg problem. We don't want to invest in something which is unpleasant to use, so it remains unpleasant to use. In my city, we have the additional problem that the local transit agency only wants to spend money on light rail, which is just a smaller version of the "nobody builds subways to subdivisions" problem. I'd be more likely to use mass transit if the bus was clean, comfortable, and came a lot more often than once an hour.
    - rtkwe 7y ago
      Yeah, I always describe it as the US setup being in a relatively stable configuration currently and the mass transit solution being another very stable setup but the transition between the two being both painful, expensive, and time consuming.
likeclockwork 7y ago
I think the difference between your other examples and personal automobiles is that aviation, shipping, and trucking are important industrial concerns that are worth paying someone to operate -- while the private driver is almost completely superfluous.
notus 7y ago
A ton of money has been dumped into automated long haul trucking already. I think you're just not aware as to what type of work is being donee.
zhobbs 7y ago
Is it a cost structure issue? Ie, replacing the captain on a ship that holds 15,000 shipping containers, does that lower the cost of each container by a couple of dollars? Similarly, with airline pilots, how much of my ticket cost is pilot labor? However, if you look at Uber, if you removed driver labor cost from my fare, does each ride now become 60-80% cheaper?
greiskul 7y ago
Whats the percentage of the cost of the driver for airplanes, boats and long-haul trucking, compared to the cost of each trip? Maybe for the trucking it is significant, but I'm not sure airplane ticket prices would go down significantly if we automated them. But with cars, the price of the driver is actually pretty big, at least 50% of the cost of each ride, when taking a cab or Uber. So that can be a lot of money people are saving. Plus the whole part where we might get rid of parking spaces in urban centers. This might actually change the way we build cities in the future.
- tomerico 7y ago
  With airplanes, it might open up new things that seem far fetched today. For example, commuting to work with a drone.
nikanj 7y ago
In the US, most people experience car commutes and being stuck in traffic all the time. Fixing that in a way that requires no lifestyle changes is an instant ticket to the Forbes 500, so it’s easy to get cofounders, investors, and media visibility.
Robotbeat 7y ago
It is already solved for (very small) airplanes in Rwanda and Ghana: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnoUBfLxZz0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnoUBfLxZz0

by evo_9 7y ago

bane 7y ago

Large aircraft are basically self-driving these days. Pilots can choose to do almost nothing at all from takoff to landing. However, the failure modes are all mostly catastrophic so pilots remain under the assumption that they can slightly increase the survivability rate when the automation fails. Modern drone systems are also have elements of this kind of automation and can fly complex flight paths and station keep and land and so on more or less on their own. Some large boat systems have are also similarly "self-driving" and can navigate to way points and along various lanes without too much intervention. They need pilots and tugs for the small-nav stuff like canals and ports and so on, there's simply too many permutations of "things that can be hit and sunk" to rely on the automation. Smaller boats can also buy commercial "autonav" systems that link the engine, steering and such to GPS. However, the marine environment is hellish on equipment. Trucking is being seriously looked at, with active test runs, but like big ships needs local pilots for the end-points and local nav. Again too many things in flux and too many things to hit. Cars exist basically continuously at the terminal ends of the trucking problem and are trying to solve the local pilot problem. Humans, with our highly adaptive sensory-response systems can do it to various levels of skill, but even we have lots and lots of failure modes even without impairment.

i_am_proteus 7y ago
One advantage of ocean-going ships for automation is that they can (and do) embark pilots for operation waters. On the flipside, the machinery isn't designed to operate for weeks on end without any engineering crew.
boxy310 7y ago
Long-haul trucking would be a great use-case. Even if you need humans for local pilot guidance, you can queue them up to a "cell phone lot" and courier the last-mile drivers in between shifts of going back & forth. It would also mean drivers would be based more locally to points of loading, rather than having to be constantly on the road away from home.
- magduf 7y ago
  >It would also mean drivers would be based more locally to points of loading, rather than having to be constantly on the road away from home. Which would probably make it much easier to hire drivers, too. Lately, long-haul trucking has had a hard time recruiting people into the profession, because the pay isn't that great and the lifestyle completely destroys any relationship you have. Local trucking doesn't have this problem: a driver can drive for the day and be home for dinner.
- virmundi 7y ago
  Long-haul is more than just driving. Will smart trucks be able to put chains on and pull them off when necessary? Handle unloading of items of weighing process proves problematic? Call for pick up of items removed during weighing? Handle snow? Handle loss of sensors? Handle run away down hill on a steep incline. None of these are insurmountable, but all are well out of the current horizon. Heck, just refueling is hard.
  - rtkwe 7y ago
    Most of those can be solved by changes to the truck or delivering spot local drivers. For weighing the trucks could run different trailers with load cells to weigh itself to ensure they're under the weight limit for their route. For snow there are automatic chain systems used on buses today those might be adaptable. Run away ramps are usually marked so a combination of good mapping data for route planning and finding run offs and vision/driving they'll have anyways.
cjrp 7y ago
> Large aircraft are basically self-driving these days. Pilots can choose to do almost nothing at all from takoff to landing. Sort of. The plane will continue to fly the pre-programmed route without pilot involvement, so the actual manipulation of the control surfaces is no longer their primary task. But there are systems to monitor, controllers to talk to, weather systems to navigate around, climbs/descents to find more favourable winds, fuel imbalances to correct, etc. And of course, baseball scores to pick up from ADF. I'd liken it to how (most) software engineers are not writing in Assembly. Instead they're using higher-level languages and libraries to solve problems. Similarly a pilot is not hands-on flying for 7 hours over the Atlantic, but they're still operating the aircraft.
- rtkwe 7y ago
  They could automate pretty much all of those away but even if they did I don't think flying is a good comparison for self-driving. Flying is pretty much the ideal environment for computer control because there are only a few actual obstacles to deal with; weather, terrain, and other planes and all of those can be handled with outside signals.

dwild 7y ago

> airplanes I remember when Mythbuster did their episode on driving an airplane in emergencies like they do in movies, they came to the conclusion that if it was going to happen, the airplane autopilot would be used instead or a civilian that never flew one. That was in 2007. > long-haul trucking I'm pretty sure that's a long term goal of Tesla with their new semi. I have no doubt many are on that too. The challenges are similar to the one for a car. There's no so much focus on automobile, it's just that we are talking about it more than the others one. Hell the airplane one was done more than a decade ago and you still don't know about it.

hodgesrm 7y ago

Another drawback is that it's taking focus away from mass transit, at least in the US. Decent mass transit ameliorates such a wide range of issues in cities it's hard to understand why we don't put more effort into making it work.

magduf 7y ago
Mass transit doesn't really work in US suburbs because everything is just too spread out; it's not economical, nor logistically effective, to build subways to subdivisions. But even in built-up cities, Americans cling to their cars just like they cling to guns and religion. Look at all the uproar in Manhattan, NYC, where they're taking away street parking and putting in protected cycling lanes. People are upset at this "attack" on cars, and somehow think they deserve free places to put their personal vehicles. If you look at another highly built-up city for comparison, Tokyo, they don't have this problem. There is NO street parking; it's all paid lots that cost a fortune. In fact, you're not even allowed to buy a car there unless you can prove you have a place to park it! So most people get around with subways, trains, walking, cycling, and taxis. The bottom line is that it's cultural: Americans just don't like public transit and don't want to fund it with their tax dollars, but they do want to subsidize car driving with their tax dollars.
- rootusrootus 7y ago
  Americans like cars so much because they're incredibly useful. And public transit sucks, which is sort of a chicken-and-egg problem. We don't want to invest in something which is unpleasant to use, so it remains unpleasant to use. In my city, we have the additional problem that the local transit agency only wants to spend money on light rail, which is just a smaller version of the "nobody builds subways to subdivisions" problem. I'd be more likely to use mass transit if the bus was clean, comfortable, and came a lot more often than once an hour.
  - rtkwe 7y ago
    Yeah, I always describe it as the US setup being in a relatively stable configuration currently and the mass transit solution being another very stable setup but the transition between the two being both painful, expensive, and time consuming.

likeclockwork 7y ago

I think the difference between your other examples and personal automobiles is that aviation, shipping, and trucking are important industrial concerns that are worth paying someone to operate -- while the private driver is almost completely superfluous.

notus 7y ago

A ton of money has been dumped into automated long haul trucking already. I think you're just not aware as to what type of work is being donee.

zhobbs 7y ago

Is it a cost structure issue? Ie, replacing the captain on a ship that holds 15,000 shipping containers, does that lower the cost of each container by a couple of dollars? Similarly, with airline pilots, how much of my ticket cost is pilot labor? However, if you look at Uber, if you removed driver labor cost from my fare, does each ride now become 60-80% cheaper?

greiskul 7y ago

Whats the percentage of the cost of the driver for airplanes, boats and long-haul trucking, compared to the cost of each trip? Maybe for the trucking it is significant, but I'm not sure airplane ticket prices would go down significantly if we automated them. But with cars, the price of the driver is actually pretty big, at least 50% of the cost of each ride, when taking a cab or Uber. So that can be a lot of money people are saving. Plus the whole part where we might get rid of parking spaces in urban centers. This might actually change the way we build cities in the future.

tomerico 7y ago
With airplanes, it might open up new things that seem far fetched today. For example, commuting to work with a drone.

nikanj 7y ago

In the US, most people experience car commutes and being stuck in traffic all the time. Fixing that in a way that requires no lifestyle changes is an instant ticket to the Forbes 500, so it’s easy to get cofounders, investors, and media visibility.

Robotbeat 7y ago

It is already solved for (very small) airplanes in Rwanda and Ghana: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnoUBfLxZz0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnoUBfLxZz0