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It still strikes me why so many people are still against a future with self driving cars. Sure, people throughout history are scared of change & new tech. But i

• Topgamer7 7y ago
  It surprised me how long it took it to realize the road was wet.
  • sixothree 7y ago
    I was pulling up to an intersection on a wet road and realized I was seeing reflections of oncoming cars underneath the parked cars. Additionally I was seeing oncoming cars through the windows of some of the parked cars. I realized that no AI has any understanding of these things. Sure it knows not to pull out from other methods. But I knew it wasn't even safe to look. Note - our roads are a bit tighter than most. You have to pull car lengths beyond the stop signs to know if it is safe to proceed.
  • pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    How do they assess stopping distances without accounting for surface wetness? Is grip established through traction control systems somehow.
    • greglindahl 7y ago
      The wheels have to slip to figure out that the roads are slick. Even then it can be difficult to tell whether or not you just drove over some bumps.
• xkjkls 7y ago
  I think it is much less that people are opposed to self-driving cars as a concept, just that they are skeptical of their current efficacy, and even more skeptical of what many of the current competitors in the field self-report their efficacy is. I for one am skeptical of many current claims that self-driving cars are eminent, and would like a greater regulatory setup to confirm that self-driving is in fact as safe to safer than human driving, and in what instances that is not true. In order to prove that to a statistical significance, you are going to need many many miles, which we should force companies to do in the effort of being cautious.
  • milesward 7y ago
    It's that people think it will work as good as their phone, which, well, does goofy stuff every once-in-a-while. Meatspace is harder.
• axguscbklp 7y ago
  I'm not against it, I just think that it requires AGI and humanity is nowhere close to developing AGI. I think that AGI is somewhere between "50 years away" and "will never be developed by humans".
• ctdonath 7y ago
  When the alleged dangers are scary/obvious, and the benefits hard to comprehend, easy to oppose. I remember when credit cards, caller ID, online shopping, tax software, etc were all new. Each was loudly denounced as evil for various reasons; eventually the benefits became so obvious that we all now use those techs with little concern - even though many/most of the concerns were warranted. Just became too convenient to use them. Self-driving will be the same. Scary concept to hurtle down the road completely & existentially subject to a machine built of (per A.C.Clarke) pure magic. Once in one, and seeing how smoothly & smartly it transports you, people will quickly embrace self-driving cars ... especially when they discover how too darned convenient it is to use them. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." And self-driving neural-net cars, to most, are flat-out magic.
  • gibolt 7y ago
    Most people have 0 experience with it, and 0 experiences seeing it (at least that they are aware of). If you gave a random sample Tesla-level autopilot with their current car and walked them through how to use if, I'd guess that at least 75% would want to use it regularly. Familiarity and basic understanding work wonders on shifting the human mind.
  • josefx 7y ago
    > I remember when credit cards I have one because I need it for online booking, my first one was revoked because I apparently cost them more by not using it enough. I practically don't see a significant benefit, most places accept other forms of payment. > caller ID faked and missing all the time. > subject to a machine built of (per A.C.Clarke) pure magic. As a software dev. I really would feel much safer with pure magic. I will buy your self driving car the moment Linux went a year without new significant bugs or exploits. Not even bug free, just no significant bugs. I do not trust the industry in its current state to produce a complex piece of software that can reliably control a car in an even more complex and constantly changing environment.
    • ctdonath 7y ago
      You're the anomaly. Most people find "swipe and pay later" far more convenient, "pizza shop already knows where to deliver" & "oh it's Joe, I'd better answer" far more convenient, etc. Yes they're imperfect, but the flaws aren't "all the time" - they're lost amid the overwhelming convenience. Opposite your "complex piece of software that can reliably control a car" is "humans who damage/injure/maim/kill other drivers with alarming frequency" (but the aforementioned overwhelming convenience mitigates our concern). Sure we want "no significant bugs", but rapidly reaching the point where even the existing & concerning bugs are better than facing distracted/drunk/debilitated/dumb human drivers.
• heavyset_go 7y ago
  There's no evidence that computers are any better at driving than humans, and there is no evidence that this generation of machine learning will be able to tackle this problem sufficiently. All signs point to driving requiring an understanding of what's going on around you, which this generation of ML does not provide. On the other hand, there is a lot of hype and promises being made without the results to back them up.
  • daniel_iversen 7y ago
    Isn’t there already a mounting amount of statistics of accidents of self driving cars vs manual ones and the difference is night and day that the self driving ones are statistically safer?
    • occamrazor 7y ago
      Self driving cars killed one pedestrian in 10 million miles driven, about an order of magnitude worse than humans
      • seltzered_ 7y ago
        Is that data on self driving cars or assisted driving? I think disengagement statistics also need to be factored in.
        • blattimwind 7y ago
          That's the Uber "Level 3" accident.
      • NobodyNada 7y ago
        But that’s a sample size of one, so we can’t really draw any meaningful conclusions from that data. (Also the safety driver was watching Netflix on her phone; it could be argued that the vehicle was not production-ready and not expected or intended to be able to handle every situation.)
• whylie 7y ago
  I am in full agreement with you. Also, it seems like the amount of drivers on their phones, texting and driving or what have you, is at an all time high today. I work in an urban area and the amount of times I've missed a light because someone is on their phone stopped in the lane with a green has begun to give me legitimate road rage that I have never experienced in my life until now in my late 30's. I would trust the car more than the average person at this point.
• sb057 7y ago
  At least traditionally, the driver had direct physical control over the vehicle through hydraulics. Obviously this has become less true over the past couple of decades with the introduction of electronic systems, but the traditional imprint remains in the popular mind. (Truly) self-driving cars are, inversely, completely outside the control of the "driver". Anyone who has considered it even briefly has realized that governments will inevitably mandate lockout systems preventing people from using their own car if they are a wanted felon/drunk/a dissident. Such restrictions are completely impractical on traditional vehicles.
  • jmvoodoo 7y ago
    They're already in use in the case of repeat drunk drivers and it's not a stretch to imagine similar technology in other ways with traditional vehicles. Self driving is completely orthogonal to this concern.
• rabryan35 7y ago
  > The reality of driving (as a human) is that most of it happens on autopilot anyway. Right. So the marginal benefit of a self-driving car to people who feel that they already drive on autopilot most of the time is low. Especially when they weigh that benefit against the risk of putting their life into the hands of a 4000lb machine controlled by what? A computational system programmed by the same group of people (in the general public's mind) that brought them clippy, the Hawaii nuclear missile scare, algorithmic flash crashes, bloated ad-filled websites, telephone bots, 8 remote controls per living room, and Flappy Bird.
• rahulnair23 7y ago
  I'd suggest reading the NTSB report on the pedestrian killed by Uber's "self-driving" vehicle [0]. The vehicle misclassified Elaine Herzberg so many times in the seconds leading up to taking her out at 40 mph - its clear to me that none of this is ready for public use. We are so normalised to vehicular violence. This would never be allowed in any other sector, say healthcare for instance. [0] https://www.ntsb.gov/news/events/Pages/2019-HWY18MH010-BMG.aspx https://www.ntsb.gov/news/events/Pages/2019-HWY18MH010-BMG.a...
  • jcims 7y ago
    Medical errors and omissions kill way more people than vehicles every year [1]. There's no evidence a human driver wouldn't have killed Elaine. An intoxicated one probably would have and we have direct evidence that a distracted one would have. On average two bicyclists get killed every day in the US. [2] [1] https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/study_suggests_medical_errors_now_third_leading_cause_of_death_in_the_us https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/study_su... [2] https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/bicyclists https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/bicyc...
  • strbean 7y ago
    To be fair, jaywalking at night away from any streetlights on a road with a 45 mph speed limit is a risky endeavor whether or not there are autonomous cars on the road. It seems likely the outcome would have been the same if the car was being operated by a typical human driver.
    • brokenmachine 7y ago
      The car spotted the pedestrian 5.6 seconds before the crash, but didn't have the brains to know what to do. The main argument for self driving cars is that they have better sensors and reaction time than humans, but clearly those things aren't enough.
  • brokenmachine 7y ago
    Which document describes where it "misclassified Elaine Herzberg so many times"?
• rospaya 7y ago
  I've only seen autopilot examples in places with uniformed and fairly good infrastructure. Self driving even in the near future will be a toy for the rich and geographically privileged. That should trickle down during time, but the fact that a self driving car is still a car won't. We need better and efficient trasport and self driving cars won't chage that very much.
  • aeternum 7y ago
    Traditional public transit only works for the geographically privileged. If you don't live along one of the few transit routes in a city, it doesn't work, and even when it does it can be quite inefficient. In contrast, self-driving cars scale quite well especially to rural areas. They are point-to-point and on-demand. Low cost to operate compared to traditional public transit means that even rural cities could have a self-driving car based public transit option.
• donkeyd 7y ago
  > it's really hard for me to see me being better at it than a computer There's a big difference between seeing and interpreting. The car sees literally everything and can maybe identify most things, but a pedestrian window shopping across the street isn't really that interesting and neither is a bollard. As humans, we filter out the unimportant stuff to focus on the important stuff. We can also pickup on subtle clues in posture, through eye contact and even through the driving style of another person. The car will see all this, even in people across the street, but it won't be able to interpret it. Humans are still way ahead of anything close to autonomy in most situations and it will take years for anyone to get close to covering 95% of situations. Removing the steering wheel needs way more than 95% covered.
  • teetermld 7y ago
    you think the average driver is aware of other people's posture and eye contact while driving?
    • kevinskii 7y ago
      Yes. Humans are currently much better at recognizing subtle danger signs and planning accordingly. As one example, let’s say you have a right turn a few hundred yards ahead of you. There are no cars behind or beside you, but there is a long row of parallel parked cars next to the right lane. An average human driver, anticipating the danger of a car door opening, will stay in the left lane until the last minute, or at least slow down considerably. A current self-driving car will likely stay in the right lane and proceed at the speed limit.
  • tenpies 7y ago
    > We can also pickup on subtle clues in posture, through eye contact and even through the driving style of another person. I think this is what a lot of people take for granted. Driving anywhere where there is another vehicle immediately becomes a social activity. There is a tacit agreement to work within the framework of the enforced driving laws, but beyond that there is a social agreement as to who is doing that. Even which driving laws we follow when and were is fluid, but relatively cohesive among drivers. It's why pedestrians try to make eye contact with drivers. It's why drivers make eye contact when there is even an iota of ambiguity on who has the right of way. It's why almost no one drives at the posted speed on a high way and we usually go as fast as the fastest lead driver. It's why we gesture, flash our lights, honk, and sometimes curse. We've built vehicles to communicate as much as possible, but that is still not even an ounce of what we can communicate with our eyes. And sure, when vehicles communicate with each other, that will be even better. In the meantime you've got different actors using incompatible protocols.
• GaryNumanVevo 7y ago
  I would much rather we invest billions into existing public transit solutions as a community. A light weight electric train doesn't need advanced LIDAR + AI to navigate, it can transport 100x people than a single car.
  • scarejunba 7y ago
    Well, that depends on what problem you're solving. Self-driving vehicles aren't solving mass transportation. They're solving ubiquitous personal transportation. They may also solve mass transport by being cheap, ubiquitous, and by performing an end-run around the piles of local regulation that restrict mass transit.
    • benrbray 7y ago
      Density + mass transport is the solution to the problem of ubiquitous personal transportation.
      • jgust 7y ago
        This is the answer, but it opens up another line of questioning: do we force people to live in dense urban areas? Sometimes I wonder if pro mass-transit commenters (I'm pro mass transit, FWIW) have ever lived outside of a major metro. There are so many places where people live where mass transit is never going to be viable in way that replaces the car. Who gets to decide when/if we invalidate their way of living? Maybe I'm not seeing all the angles here.
    • GaryNumanVevo 7y ago
      Self-driving is largely a reaction to the single-person-single-car scale problem. When you're trying to transport millions of people on a weekday, cars will never be able to meet demand. Look at China trying to vertically scale their highways resulting in 40-lane wide highways and multi-day traffic jams.
      • plexicle 7y ago
• tw04 7y ago
  Show me a self-driving car functioning in the middle of a blizzard and we can start talking. Southern California and the weather it experiences is a poor representation of what is required for self-driving to replace humans.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • ggreer 7y ago
    Isn't that asking for too much? Most humans can't drive safely in blizzards. And unlike self-driving cars, many humans are overconfident in their abilities. If a self-driving car recognizes dangerous conditions (poor visibility, malfunctioning sensors, etc), it can simply stop. It seems as long as these machines are safer on average than humans, they're worth deploying.
    • frosted-flakes 7y ago
      > Most humans can't drive safely in blizzards. Sure they can. During snow squalls, accident rates obviously go up (especially if the roads are icy or if it's the first one of the season), but most drivers are good at assesing risk and take appropriate actions. Importantly, they have the ability to decide that it's worth the risk to go out on the roads to pick up Sally from daycare (for example). In any case, if the car computer decides it won't drive, do you really think people aren't going to drive the car manually so that Sally can come home for the night? Of course they will. And they'll be fine. Have you ever been on the freeway during white-out conditions before the ploughs have gotten a chance to come by? People slow down, turn on their hazards if necessary, and if the road markings aren't visible, naturally form two lanes instead of three (straddling the lanes). In snowy climates, a simple snow squall is something to talk about, but not stop you.
      • tensor 7y ago
        Your account of human drivers is hilarious utopian. I've driving in horrible conditions, I've watched people driving too fast and later having their car wrapped around the divider barrier, I've watched people get stuck on a residential street and end up in the ditch, then begging for someone else to go pick up their Sally. People are awful in these conditions and exercise incredibly poor risk decisions.
• qeternity 7y ago
  I don’t think object recognition is the important bit. Human’s are unbelievably adept at filtering out noise subconsciously and focusing on important things. We’ve evolved for this over many millennia. We will never be able to compete with machines for broad, shallow intelligence because that scales relatively linearly with CPU. The real issue is decision pathways which you can’t depict in a video, and are the real issue with self driving. The sheer solution space is so massive that even simulating with current DL techniques isn’t feasible with current hardware.
• andrepd 7y ago
  Lol. This is the kind of comment that I don't expect to see in hackernews, but then again it's about Tesla, so all reasonableness goes out the window. > if you look at this video and compare the amount of stuff the camera catches AND processes, with the things you are seeing & processing, it's really hard for me to see me being better at it than a computer. Such a handwavy argument is worth exactly squat. What does this mean? Brains are hugely complicated machines which we barely understand in any reasonable detail. You see a handful of lines and text across the screen and it's sufficient to make you go ":o"? Enough to conclude it must be better than a brain? So far I only see a world of promises and predictions of "self-driving cars are 5 years away", but no real tangible hard evidence that self-driving cars are better than humans. Point me to that, not to a fancy video, before we can have a discussion.
  • mavhc 7y ago
    Self driving cars are already here, just not widely distributed
  • tmh88j 7y ago
    > You see a handful of lines and text across the screen and it's sufficient to make you go ":o"? Enough to conclude it must be better than a brain? I think he's referring to selective attention. Can't comment on the validity of this "study", but I recall it catching me off guard the first time I saw it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo
• alkonaut 7y ago
  Because we are happy to accept bad consequences due to human error and human shortcomings. Even more so if the human with the errors and shortcomings also share the risk (e.g a distracted driver takes a risk themselves). I think few are “opposed” to self driving cars, but I’m not optimistic about when we’ll see the tech being widespread (level 5 self driving), and I think the ethical can of worms might delay it even further. I’m optimistic about cars that drive very safely for 95% of the way on 95% of all trips, with equipment that isn’t very expensive
• throwawayhhakdl 7y ago
  I think people fixate on “better” without really defining what that means. Imagine it as bell curves. The mean of the computer might be worse than the mean of the human, but the variance is likely to be a lot tighter, which means less of the computer bell curve will be in the “danger zone” where accidents happen. It’s ok if the human can technically do better, so long as the machine is more likely to avoid severe failure
• pasabagi 7y ago
  Driving is essentially a spiritual activity. By normal standards, it's insane to expect non-experts to maintain and operate heavy machinery, in public streets, half asleep or half paying attention. It's also a pretty absurd way of providing mass transport in most places. So if you're going to throw out normal risk assessment as a starting point, where do you go from there? People know how bad quality software can be, how ubiquitous bugs are, and how often programs are deep morasses of strange and perverse hacks, and how it only doesn't (normally) kill people because the stakes are small. Then Uber's car actually did kill someone, and predictably, the familiar problem of bad, buggy software looms larger, as a risk, than the dull and more or less commonly accepted fact of cars hitting people all the time. Very common threats, like pneunomia, poverty, or cancer, tend to get depreciated in comparison to symbolic, unusal threats - and I think it's pretty unsurprising that on HN, people feel threatened by the possibility of bugs not only ruining their day, but actually running them over.
• bonyt 7y ago
  > But if you look at this video and compare the amount of stuff the camera catches AND processes, with the things you are seeing & processing, it's really hard for me to see me being better at it than a computer. I wonder if the fear has more to do with it simply being different. The set of things that a CV system misses is likely quite different from the set of things that a human misses. A CV system is likely to make mistakes that a human would never make, and even if those mistakes are far fewer in number, they make it look bad to humans. We've all seen electronic devices do this. When an Amazon Echo interprets the sound of a tea kettle as its wake word, we're left with no explanation, and no way to rationalize it other than to assume the device is, in some way, bad at its job. Surely a human would never make this mistake, we think, and so therefore the device must be dumber than a human at word detection. And yet, there surely exists a class of noises that a human would mistake for a word that an Echo would not - but that doesn't factor in. Anyway, this means that a CV-controlled car would behave, compared to a human, strangely. When one's intuition about the car's behavior, tuned from years of experience both driving and observing cars, differs from the car's actual behavior, it becomes harder to make predictions about how the car will behave, and from here comes a fear and a sense of uneasiness. And when it makes a rare mistake that a human would never make, because it's perceptual system is entirely different, we assume its dumber than a human all-together.
  • ModernMech 7y ago
    > And yet, there surely exists a class of noises that a human would mistake for a word that an Echo would not This fits the bill: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voice_phenomenon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voice_phenomenon
• rad_gruchalski 7y ago
  > I just find it very hard to understand the perspective of those that are opposed to self driving cars. Once you observe how these things behave in severe weather, you get a little bit more perspective on why it simply can’t work. Not with today’s infrastructure, not with today’s technology, definitely not in mixed human / autonomous driver traffic.
• unapologetic 7y ago
  Big difference between being "against" self-driving cars and simply not buying into the hype. I don't buy into the hype, and I certainly don't buy what Tesla is promising.
• xkcd-sucks 7y ago
  > I just find it very hard to understand the perspective of those that are opposed to self driving cars Consider it in terms of human agency: People expect the use of "consumer electronics" and "appliances" to be mostly unpleasant, frustrating, buggy, full of arbitrary restrictions, and overmonetized.
• vincent-toups 7y ago
  I don't think anyone is against self driving cars if you assume they will work. Its whether they will work and what happens when they screw up that is the pertinent issue.
  • astrodust 7y ago
    Until they run over someone important and not just some grandmother in Arizona will the industry realize what they're doing here?
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• damon_c 7y ago
  People growing up 50 years from now will think the idea that we used to pilot our own cars is as ridiculous as the idea that people used to light their homes with whale oil.
• rnai 7y ago
  If self-driving cars become the majority of cars, how long until it is deemed that "manual operated cars" are unsafe and should be banned? For example, if it were the case that safe driving cars were on average 10% safer in most situations. Wouldn't there be pressure to reduce deaths and injuries by banning manually operated cars. What do you think about self-driving cars being a source of data for private and govertment organizations on where you are at any time, or your travel patterns? Do you think there would be a time when people who displeased the government could be essentially stranded because they can't get access to the self-driving network? I never expected the level of survailance and scanning happening in UK/China, etc. Are self-driving cars (possibly with biometric face and fingerprint scanners), another possible entry point into survailance? I've been wondering about the privacy / control aspects. What do you think?
• fit2rule 7y ago
  Driving appeals, very much, to the ego. Having freedom and control over a physical system that is bigger and more powerful than you, is a liberating experience for those whose spirit is used to a smaller, lighter frame. Car manufacturers know this - they cater their interior design to appeal to this factor - and it is indeed a cultural phenomenon well and truly imprinted on Western society. "Freedom means, freedom to drive yourself anywhere you want." This 'liberation' has become a chain. Real human beings spend hours in these containers, driving themselves somewhere, feeling powerful.. driving to their work or home, or whatever. 2 to 4 hours a day, on the mobile throne. When computers start to take that freedom, its going to tweak quite a few freak-outs. And really, why shouldn't it? Ultimately, automotive industries are hedging their bets that cars will no longer be personal possessions, but rather something you summon on an as-needed basis. This would be a highly desirable condition for the rent-makers/lease-share holders, who are really pushing this forward - along with their buddies in the insurance mega-industries, who stand to gain a great deal more control over their customers lives when it comes to computerised automation. Myself, I'd personally prefer cars were user-serviceable and user-operable, under no conditions do I need a computer, just make me a better car. Preferably electric, simple as possible, and ships with a manual.