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Alternate headline: Some people overstated how simple this problem was because they didn't know what they were talking about, could promote themselves as expert

by cletus 7y ago

Alternate headline: Some people overstated how simple this problem was because they didn't know what they were talking about, could promote themselves as experts, could get funding for a self-driving startup or some combination of the above. I guess that isn't as pithy but it's closer to the truth. When it became clear that Uber's strategy (under Kalanick anyway) was premised on replacing drivers with AIs before the cash ran out I couldn't see general self-driving vehicles coming within 20 years. I still say that's true. AI assistance? Sure. But there's an uncanny valley there too where the AI will be good enough in most circumstances that drivers lose attention and people will die. You already see this with Tesla autopilot. Here's a simple counterexample to the idea that self-driving cars are "just around the corner": in NYC, quite a few buildings have doormen. This is great for residents. Part of this is dealing with deliveries and so forth but there's also an issue of general security. People can sneak in (and I'm sure do) but just the fact that a human is there acts a strong (but not complete) deterrent. Just like having a dog is one of the most effective burglary deterrents. What prevents a lot of bad actions on the roads is actually fear. Fear of what other drivers might do. Fear of road rage by other drivers. That sort of thing. This is just how humans work. Once a driver knows the car next to them isn't driven by a person it changes their behaviour. They will do things they wouldn't do if it were a human behind the wheel, particularly because they know an AI won't ram them, cut them off, yell at them and whatever. There's no fear there. Even if there's a passenger in the car, it's still (psychologically) different. How do you program around humans changing their behaviour to take advantage of there being no driver in your car?

mullingitover 7y ago
> Once a driver knows the car next to them isn't driven by a person it changes their behaviour. If the car next to me isn't driven by a person, but is bristling with high resolution cameras that will immediately upload footage of my face to the authorities if I collide with it, I would indeed change my behavior.
- falcolas 7y ago
  Being excessively cautious makes you an unpredictable driver as well. Unpredictability is the antithesis of safe driving.
  - mullingitover 7y ago
    In my experience, I have never been surprised by overly cautious drivers, only drivers who have an excess of confidence. How do you define 'excess caution'?
    - simplesleeper 7y ago
      If you try driving in Italy like you do in the UK, people will use their horn. Then you will understand.
    - tempestn 7y ago
      For the most part I don't really disagree with you, but there are ways drivers could behave unpredictably out of what might be called an excess of caution. For example, my wife just yesterday told me about something that happened to her that day. She was waiting to turn right from a side street, behind another car also turning right. The first car started their turn, she pulled up, checked that there was ample room, and so started to turn in behind them. Then the car in front slammed on their brakes, stopping partway into the lane. It seems they did this because there was a car approaching in the distance on the main street. The thing is, that car was far enough away that both cars could have easily turned in front with room to spare. My wife had seen it before starting her turn, and realized there was plenty of time. In fact, after a few seconds, the driver in front of my wife realized just how much time they had, and finally made the turn, still before this other car arrived. Because my wife is an attentive driver this wasn't a problem, but you could certainly see a driver in her position starting to make the turn while looking to the left, and rear-ending the car that suddenly stops for no apparent reason. Of course they would be at fault for doing so, but the first driver's excess of caution, if you want to call it that, would also be a contributing factor.
    - s5fs 7y ago
      In Portland, OR we have 4-way intersections where the stop signs alternate every 2 blocks. Drivers still tend to stop at every intersection, even when they have no stop sign.
- vorpalhex 7y ago
  I can see you've never tried to actually get charges brought against someone using dashcam footage...
  - mikepurvis 7y ago
    I wear a helmet cam, and yes, as an individual it's basically impossible to get traction, even when you have a clear plate and face shot. But when the self-driving car company has thousands or millions of these incidents on record, they'll quickly find themselves wielding enormous power. They'll be able to correlate across time and space, similar to how phones running Google Maps are reporting their position and velocity to create up to the minute traffic overlays. They'll be able to approach politicians and police forces with a message like "hey, want to get serious about safety? These are the top one hundred drivers in your area who need to be taken off the road now— click through to our portal to find dozens and dozens of videos of each one speeding, weaving, failing to yield, running stop signs, etc." Each individual incident may be hard to prosecute, but when you have all of them in a bundle, a few a week for months at a time, it'll become impossible not to act on it. When crashes happen, they'll be able to shame the jurisdiction after the fact by publishing dumps of the incidents leading up to it that were not acted on.
    - russdill 7y ago
      Heh, imagine "vigilante" network justice. Oh, hey, you messed with our cars one too many times. We'll arrange for some cars to line up in front of you and drive 25.
    - __m 7y ago
      Why would they do that? That footage might include their own customers.
      - TomMarius 7y ago
        They would simply report their customers just as well. Covering them up is a liability, they would probably have another way to tell anyways. I got an automated parking fine from a shared car a few weeks ago - it's real.
jeremysalwen 7y ago
So you're saying we need to program our driverless cars to occasionally go on road-rage rampages if they're cut off too many times?
- alexpetralia 7y ago
  No, that is reductio ad absurdum. He is simply saying that things which are too predictable are easily gamed, and this changes others' behavior in a game theoretical sense. Irrationality can have utility: see the "Ultimatum game."
- salawat 7y ago
  Nah. You need to have an ALRU and vehicle to vehicle comm net whereby all the self-driving AI's distribute amongst themselves information on jerk behavior so the entire macropopulation of AI cars can wolfpack these drivers. Now please laugh, put down the phone and don't even think about implementing this. It's a terrible idea.
  - nomel 7y ago
    I assume, by then, you'll see massive insurance discounts if you provide the feeds to your insurance company. They'll use these feeds to evaluate your risk and the risk of every car around you. Cars, especially those with manual drivers, who are seen causing unsafe conditions will receive an eventual, or maybe immediate, notice: "Your premium has been increased for aggressive driving".
    - schrodinger 7y ago
      That actually doesn’t sound like a bad end state!
    - rootusrootus 7y ago
      How that works will depend on whether the insurance company cares more about how you drive, or whether you cost them money in payouts. If there are no claims related to your policy, and haven't been for years, then it doesn't really matter how you drive. In absence of competition they might use it as a way to gouge you for more money, but there is no lack of competition in the insurance space.
chipperyman573 7y ago
Counterpoint: personally I don't avoid doing things on the road from fear of the person behind the wheel but for fear that their reaction will cause an accident (swerving, slamming on the brakes, etc). Self driving cars have the same problem and honestly are probably less predictable. This might be due to the fact that I don't really care much about road rage. At least where I live, the chance of someone getting out of their car and actually escalating it into a situation that matters is basically 0. When I lived in a major city, I felt the same way but for different reasons (most people in big cities Don't Have Time For That). But I can't imagine it's an isolated opinion.
- bdamm 7y ago
  I had that opinion too, until someone decided to get out of their car and escalate a situation that really shouldn't have been such a big deal. But they were macho in a car oozing with hormones so yeah, it happened. Even so, I'm personally more motivated by financial damage, the headache of dealing with insurance, and the consequences of being found to have broken the law, than I am by the threat of road rage.
bsder 7y ago
> How do you program around humans changing their behaviour to take advantage of there being no driver in your car? The AI car will have sufficient cameras to record your actions and report them directly to your insurance company if not the police. This will be MORE effective at deterring stupid driving, not less.
- eckza 7y ago
  That sounds... Orwellian.
  - Piskvorrr 7y ago
    Welcome to the new millennium, this is your 2010 wake up call.
  - bsder 7y ago
    It is. And yet people are already doing this to themselves. Look at the number of "Plug this in so we can track your driving continuously and we'll give you an insurance discount" apps that now exist. People will be even happier to tattle on others.
WalterBright 7y ago
That is an interesting point. I can see that human drivers will be much more willing to drive aggressively (i.e. play chicken) if they know the other driver(s) are AI and will take evasive action. For example, I avoid doing things on the road that an inattentive other driver might be slow to react to and hit me, such as suddenly cutting across 3 lanes of traffic.
- wyxuan 7y ago
  A little bit like how some people aggressively brake in front of Tesla drivers
  - bdamm 7y ago
    Exactly. It's a form of bullying. Taking a swipe at cars that are under AI control is a form of intimidation just like "rolling coal", popping the finger, throwing coins at other cars, ICE pickups parking in EV charging spots, etc. So while it makes sense to me that an AI car should do something to indicate it is so to other drivers (e.g. quick double-pulse of the hazards every 10 seconds perhaps) that comes with a very real possibility of greatly increasing "road rage" incidents and even potentially undermining what driving assistance is meant to be for.
    - SilasX 7y ago
      For anyone else who was confused like me, ICE here = internal combustion engine, not Immigration and Customs Enforcement. I was wondering what Immigration's connection to electric vehicles was.
AtlasBarfed 7y ago
As usual the article conflates the (very difficult problem) of self-driving everywhere with various other sub-problems. The self-driving problem on highways is much more solvable, and can further be improved by convergent infrastructure evolution (forewarning of traffic jams from central control, embedded rfid to aid pathfinding in bad weather, weather reports, wildlife nets/barriers, highly standardized signage, internetworked cars). It would solve and serve a number of functions that are extremely valuable in efficient logistics, safety automation of boring long term driving, and better utilization of infrastructure (automated overnight driving when the interstates are much less used). I don't really care if my trip to Taco bell is automated. Sure it would be nice, but that is so insanely difficult compared to automating a 400 mile trip on an interstate. When they can full automate a 400-800 mile interstate trip so that I can sleep in my car while it drives overnight, it will massively disrupt the airline industry in so many positive ways. But the article is from a sensationalist news source, so what can one expect.
- ghaff 7y ago
  I suspect that part of it is that a lot of people in the tech and tech journalism space live in and around cities. Many of them are mostly focused on being driven around and not owning a car. Long highway drives may be something they don't do that often. So the ability to own a car that can automate that subset of their driving probably doesn't strike them as all that interesting. Personally, as I've said elsewhere, this seems like a much more tractable problem and gives me a lot of the total benefit of self-driving.
  - AlotOfReading 7y ago
    It's way more difficult from a fleet operational perspective and more importantly, way less profitable. Take LA<->SF as an example. That's about 6h driving, and buses do it for $25-50. That's a measly 7-14 cents per minute. Once you've made the trip, the company has to find someone going the other way. If there's any directional or temporal imbalance, the fleet ends up with a lot of cars sitting idle or driving hours to be useful, further reducing utilization. If the car has an issue halfway, now someone has to pick the customer up hours from a company facility and get them to their destination. All this for pennies. You don't even get an easier problem, because you still have to drive in the city to drop people off. Compare to city driving: 10 minute drive, $5. That's at least 5x more profitable and takes less capex. Plus, if anything goes wrong, your facilities and backup vehicles are already nearby.
saber6 7y ago
> How do you program around humans changing their behaviour to take advantage of there being no driver in your car? I have another angle: Every "self driving" car becomes a rolling collection of evidence. Some jackass does a massively risky move to cut you off? Your camera captures it and you can send it to the police. Maybe even make a feature to detect it - "DANGEROUS/ASSHOLE DRIVER DETECTED" - and fire off the video complete with the license plate to the cops. I fucking hate drivers who put others at risk. My feeling is less than one half of the population has an attention span necessary to drive. The other half are functionally retarded, behind the seat of a 3500lbs rolling weapon.
technofiend 7y ago
>Alternate headline: Some people overstated how simple this problem was because they didn't know what they were talking about, could promote themselves as experts, could get funding for a self-driving startup or some combination of the above. I jokingly call it management myopia: anything I don't understand can't be that hard.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  > anything I don't understand can't be that hard. Brilliant line, that probably goes a long way towards explaining why software in general simply sucks from a users perspective.
  - technofiend 7y ago
    That sounds more like any use cases I don't understand can't be that important. i.e. people who use software different than the way I designed are wrong.
SilasX 7y ago
>When it became clear that Uber's strategy (under Kalanick anyway) was premised on replacing drivers with AIs before the cash ran out I couldn't see general self-driving vehicles coming within 20 years. I still say that's true. Even so, this never made sense as a business strategy, unless Uber somehow has a comparative advantage in achieving self-driving cars and then can get a long monopoly on them. If they don't -- if others have SDCs around the same time, then sure, their costs go way down, but they can also charge a lot less, because the competition has the same "advantage"! It's like: "Hey, man, do you really think your grocery store can make those superhuge profits when you sell at the wholesale price?" 'Oh, no, I have a plan. You know those barcodes they're putting on products now? I'm going to invent a way to integrate that with the checkouts, and boom, I don't have to pay for people to put price tags on. Labor costs go way down!' Same problem: "No, you're not. Someone better at that will, and they'll sell the tech to all grocery stores." There was never a reason to believe Kalanick's operation as it stood in 2010/11 had that comparative advantage, so that strategy never made sense. And today, not surprisingly, Uber is one of the worst at SDCs, and is correspondingly unlikely to have that advantage.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  I think you mean competitive advantage, not comparative. I got a D in my only economics class, but I think that I've seen comparative advantage used to mean that "X is better at doing Y than doing Z", whereas competitive advantage is "X is better at doing Y than Z is at doing Y". If you're not using it as jargon, then the fact that it is jargon might be confusing.
  - SilasX 7y ago
    If you’re going to insist on proper jargon, you might want to refresh first. Comparative advantage [1] in X means you suffer a lower opportunity cost (forgone profit from what you could have done) to produce X than others. A canonical example would be the doctor who is a better secretary than their secretary (produces more value per hour, looking only at secretarial value). The secretary still has a comparative advantage in secretarial labor because they forgo $0 of doctor income to work that job, while the doctor would forgo $100/hour they could be earning as a doctor in order to work as a secretary. This is true even though the doctor has an absolute (or competitive) advantage in secretarial work. The real test for whether something is financially optimal is if you have a comparative, not absolute advantage. Uber not having a competitive/absolute advantage in SDCs would also be a reason not to do it, because of the details of this case, but comparative advantage is correct as well, though perhaps an unnecessarily strong criterion for the point I needed to make. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage
lacker 7y ago
it became clear that Uber's strategy (under Kalanick anyway) was premised on replacing drivers with AIs before the cash ran out This is kind of nitpicking, but this has always been a backup plan at best for Uber. Look at their expenditures and it is clear that their strategy has never been "all in" on self-driving. Their main plan was and basically still is a combination of driving competitors out of the market, increasing their efficiency, raising prices, and lowering payments to drivers, before the money runs out. If self-driving cars happen, it will be a tremendous boon to Uber's bottom line, but it is not a necessity.
- mLuby 7y ago
  > driving competitors out of the market,… raising prices, and lowering payments to drivers So, textbook monopoly behavior.
  - setr 7y ago
    Afaict, that's just textbook corporate behavior. It only becomes monopoly behavior if they succeed in driving every competitor out of the market
- beamatronic 7y ago
  Those at the top, early, get rich either way.
hindsightbias 7y ago
Troll driving. Imagine testing/probing AI cars with the intent of getting them into an accident with you so you can sue for uber-millions and AI hysteria social media points.
- schrodinger 7y ago
  Interestingly, that might actually lead to self driving cars being better in the end.
- Johnny555 7y ago
  Self driving cars tend to have enough cameras that it might be hard to do that without it being caught on camera.
danieltillett 7y ago
I always thought Uber’s strategy was to get large enough for the VC and PE guys to be able to offload the whole pile of steaming garbage onto the index funds.
JKCalhoun 7y ago
Or simply: Self-driving cars turned out to be just as hard as we thought they would be
gvhst 7y ago
Aggressive driving will be captured and recorded by multiple cameras (potentially by multiple vehicles), making most court cases open-and-shut. I think that serves to put the fear in people.
rmtech 7y ago
> couldn't see general self-driving vehicles coming within 20 years. I still say that's true. 20 years is a long time, arguably you're already wrong because self-driving vehicles already exist. But Self-driving with the ability to replace Uber drivers will be here by 2030 at the latest.
- thebruce87m 7y ago
  If you’re talking about level 5 then I disagree with this. None of the technologies I see in use today can work in the same weather conditions that humans currently drive in. Things like snow, fog, and even heavy rain. If you’re talking anything below level 5 then all we will be doing is making current human drivers worse. Some of the deaths so far have been people who knew the limitations of the technology and still got complacent. If it requires you to have constant supervision then people simply won’t do that and will die.
  - rmtech 7y ago
    People obsess about weather conditions as a limiting factor for level 5 and it's bizarre. Bad weather conditions will favour robots over humans because the robot drivers have sensors that can penetrate fog and rain whereas humans have to rely on mk1 eyeballs that can't. The real limiting factors for level 5 are less legible to humans. We understand the physical world via years of experience and good priors. Teslas crash straight into concrete lane separators and Ubers hit pedestrians that they know are there. In the latter case the actual reasons for the collision would strike a human as absolutely nuts - things like the algorithm not having a proper sense of object persistence or being terrible at commonsense reasoning. Yes, the Uber system was quite primitive, but the way that it broke gives us some insight into how AI drivers face a totally different set of challenges than what we would think of as "difficult conditions". See: https://www.jefftk.com/p/uber-self-driving-crash https://www.jefftk.com/p/uber-self-driving-crash
    - thebruce87m 7y ago
      Can you link to some of these sensors? As far as I know, anyone who knows what they’re doing is using Lidar at the moment which has significant difficulties with weather.

by cletus 7y ago

mullingitover 7y ago

> Once a driver knows the car next to them isn't driven by a person it changes their behaviour. If the car next to me isn't driven by a person, but is bristling with high resolution cameras that will immediately upload footage of my face to the authorities if I collide with it, I would indeed change my behavior.

falcolas 7y ago
Being excessively cautious makes you an unpredictable driver as well. Unpredictability is the antithesis of safe driving.
- mullingitover 7y ago
  In my experience, I have never been surprised by overly cautious drivers, only drivers who have an excess of confidence. How do you define 'excess caution'?
  - simplesleeper 7y ago
    If you try driving in Italy like you do in the UK, people will use their horn. Then you will understand.
  - tempestn 7y ago
    For the most part I don't really disagree with you, but there are ways drivers could behave unpredictably out of what might be called an excess of caution. For example, my wife just yesterday told me about something that happened to her that day. She was waiting to turn right from a side street, behind another car also turning right. The first car started their turn, she pulled up, checked that there was ample room, and so started to turn in behind them. Then the car in front slammed on their brakes, stopping partway into the lane. It seems they did this because there was a car approaching in the distance on the main street. The thing is, that car was far enough away that both cars could have easily turned in front with room to spare. My wife had seen it before starting her turn, and realized there was plenty of time. In fact, after a few seconds, the driver in front of my wife realized just how much time they had, and finally made the turn, still before this other car arrived. Because my wife is an attentive driver this wasn't a problem, but you could certainly see a driver in her position starting to make the turn while looking to the left, and rear-ending the car that suddenly stops for no apparent reason. Of course they would be at fault for doing so, but the first driver's excess of caution, if you want to call it that, would also be a contributing factor.
  - s5fs 7y ago
    In Portland, OR we have 4-way intersections where the stop signs alternate every 2 blocks. Drivers still tend to stop at every intersection, even when they have no stop sign.
vorpalhex 7y ago
I can see you've never tried to actually get charges brought against someone using dashcam footage...
- mikepurvis 7y ago
  I wear a helmet cam, and yes, as an individual it's basically impossible to get traction, even when you have a clear plate and face shot. But when the self-driving car company has thousands or millions of these incidents on record, they'll quickly find themselves wielding enormous power. They'll be able to correlate across time and space, similar to how phones running Google Maps are reporting their position and velocity to create up to the minute traffic overlays. They'll be able to approach politicians and police forces with a message like "hey, want to get serious about safety? These are the top one hundred drivers in your area who need to be taken off the road now— click through to our portal to find dozens and dozens of videos of each one speeding, weaving, failing to yield, running stop signs, etc." Each individual incident may be hard to prosecute, but when you have all of them in a bundle, a few a week for months at a time, it'll become impossible not to act on it. When crashes happen, they'll be able to shame the jurisdiction after the fact by publishing dumps of the incidents leading up to it that were not acted on.
  - russdill 7y ago
    Heh, imagine "vigilante" network justice. Oh, hey, you messed with our cars one too many times. We'll arrange for some cars to line up in front of you and drive 25.
  - __m 7y ago
    Why would they do that? That footage might include their own customers.
    - TomMarius 7y ago
      They would simply report their customers just as well. Covering them up is a liability, they would probably have another way to tell anyways. I got an automated parking fine from a shared car a few weeks ago - it's real.

jeremysalwen 7y ago

So you're saying we need to program our driverless cars to occasionally go on road-rage rampages if they're cut off too many times?

alexpetralia 7y ago
No, that is reductio ad absurdum. He is simply saying that things which are too predictable are easily gamed, and this changes others' behavior in a game theoretical sense. Irrationality can have utility: see the "Ultimatum game."
salawat 7y ago
Nah. You need to have an ALRU and vehicle to vehicle comm net whereby all the self-driving AI's distribute amongst themselves information on jerk behavior so the entire macropopulation of AI cars can wolfpack these drivers. Now please laugh, put down the phone and don't even think about implementing this. It's a terrible idea.
- nomel 7y ago
  I assume, by then, you'll see massive insurance discounts if you provide the feeds to your insurance company. They'll use these feeds to evaluate your risk and the risk of every car around you. Cars, especially those with manual drivers, who are seen causing unsafe conditions will receive an eventual, or maybe immediate, notice: "Your premium has been increased for aggressive driving".
  - schrodinger 7y ago
    That actually doesn’t sound like a bad end state!
  - rootusrootus 7y ago
    How that works will depend on whether the insurance company cares more about how you drive, or whether you cost them money in payouts. If there are no claims related to your policy, and haven't been for years, then it doesn't really matter how you drive. In absence of competition they might use it as a way to gouge you for more money, but there is no lack of competition in the insurance space.

chipperyman573 7y ago

Counterpoint: personally I don't avoid doing things on the road from fear of the person behind the wheel but for fear that their reaction will cause an accident (swerving, slamming on the brakes, etc). Self driving cars have the same problem and honestly are probably less predictable. This might be due to the fact that I don't really care much about road rage. At least where I live, the chance of someone getting out of their car and actually escalating it into a situation that matters is basically 0. When I lived in a major city, I felt the same way but for different reasons (most people in big cities Don't Have Time For That). But I can't imagine it's an isolated opinion.

bdamm 7y ago
I had that opinion too, until someone decided to get out of their car and escalate a situation that really shouldn't have been such a big deal. But they were macho in a car oozing with hormones so yeah, it happened. Even so, I'm personally more motivated by financial damage, the headache of dealing with insurance, and the consequences of being found to have broken the law, than I am by the threat of road rage.

bsder 7y ago

> How do you program around humans changing their behaviour to take advantage of there being no driver in your car? The AI car will have sufficient cameras to record your actions and report them directly to your insurance company if not the police. This will be MORE effective at deterring stupid driving, not less.

eckza 7y ago
That sounds... Orwellian.
- Piskvorrr 7y ago
  Welcome to the new millennium, this is your 2010 wake up call.
- bsder 7y ago
  It is. And yet people are already doing this to themselves. Look at the number of "Plug this in so we can track your driving continuously and we'll give you an insurance discount" apps that now exist. People will be even happier to tattle on others.

WalterBright 7y ago

That is an interesting point. I can see that human drivers will be much more willing to drive aggressively (i.e. play chicken) if they know the other driver(s) are AI and will take evasive action. For example, I avoid doing things on the road that an inattentive other driver might be slow to react to and hit me, such as suddenly cutting across 3 lanes of traffic.

wyxuan 7y ago
A little bit like how some people aggressively brake in front of Tesla drivers
- bdamm 7y ago
  Exactly. It's a form of bullying. Taking a swipe at cars that are under AI control is a form of intimidation just like "rolling coal", popping the finger, throwing coins at other cars, ICE pickups parking in EV charging spots, etc. So while it makes sense to me that an AI car should do something to indicate it is so to other drivers (e.g. quick double-pulse of the hazards every 10 seconds perhaps) that comes with a very real possibility of greatly increasing "road rage" incidents and even potentially undermining what driving assistance is meant to be for.
  - SilasX 7y ago
    For anyone else who was confused like me, ICE here = internal combustion engine, not Immigration and Customs Enforcement. I was wondering what Immigration's connection to electric vehicles was.

AtlasBarfed 7y ago

As usual the article conflates the (very difficult problem) of self-driving everywhere with various other sub-problems. The self-driving problem on highways is much more solvable, and can further be improved by convergent infrastructure evolution (forewarning of traffic jams from central control, embedded rfid to aid pathfinding in bad weather, weather reports, wildlife nets/barriers, highly standardized signage, internetworked cars). It would solve and serve a number of functions that are extremely valuable in efficient logistics, safety automation of boring long term driving, and better utilization of infrastructure (automated overnight driving when the interstates are much less used). I don't really care if my trip to Taco bell is automated. Sure it would be nice, but that is so insanely difficult compared to automating a 400 mile trip on an interstate. When they can full automate a 400-800 mile interstate trip so that I can sleep in my car while it drives overnight, it will massively disrupt the airline industry in so many positive ways. But the article is from a sensationalist news source, so what can one expect.

ghaff 7y ago
I suspect that part of it is that a lot of people in the tech and tech journalism space live in and around cities. Many of them are mostly focused on being driven around and not owning a car. Long highway drives may be something they don't do that often. So the ability to own a car that can automate that subset of their driving probably doesn't strike them as all that interesting. Personally, as I've said elsewhere, this seems like a much more tractable problem and gives me a lot of the total benefit of self-driving.
- AlotOfReading 7y ago
  It's way more difficult from a fleet operational perspective and more importantly, way less profitable. Take LA<->SF as an example. That's about 6h driving, and buses do it for $25-50. That's a measly 7-14 cents per minute. Once you've made the trip, the company has to find someone going the other way. If there's any directional or temporal imbalance, the fleet ends up with a lot of cars sitting idle or driving hours to be useful, further reducing utilization. If the car has an issue halfway, now someone has to pick the customer up hours from a company facility and get them to their destination. All this for pennies. You don't even get an easier problem, because you still have to drive in the city to drop people off. Compare to city driving: 10 minute drive, $5. That's at least 5x more profitable and takes less capex. Plus, if anything goes wrong, your facilities and backup vehicles are already nearby.

saber6 7y ago

> How do you program around humans changing their behaviour to take advantage of there being no driver in your car? I have another angle: Every "self driving" car becomes a rolling collection of evidence. Some jackass does a massively risky move to cut you off? Your camera captures it and you can send it to the police. Maybe even make a feature to detect it - "DANGEROUS/ASSHOLE DRIVER DETECTED" - and fire off the video complete with the license plate to the cops. I fucking hate drivers who put others at risk. My feeling is less than one half of the population has an attention span necessary to drive. The other half are functionally retarded, behind the seat of a 3500lbs rolling weapon.

technofiend 7y ago

>Alternate headline: Some people overstated how simple this problem was because they didn't know what they were talking about, could promote themselves as experts, could get funding for a self-driving startup or some combination of the above. I jokingly call it management myopia: anything I don't understand can't be that hard.

jacquesm 7y ago
> anything I don't understand can't be that hard. Brilliant line, that probably goes a long way towards explaining why software in general simply sucks from a users perspective.
- technofiend 7y ago
  That sounds more like any use cases I don't understand can't be that important. i.e. people who use software different than the way I designed are wrong.

SilasX 7y ago

>When it became clear that Uber's strategy (under Kalanick anyway) was premised on replacing drivers with AIs before the cash ran out I couldn't see general self-driving vehicles coming within 20 years. I still say that's true. Even so, this never made sense as a business strategy, unless Uber somehow has a comparative advantage in achieving self-driving cars and then can get a long monopoly on them. If they don't -- if others have SDCs around the same time, then sure, their costs go way down, but they can also charge a lot less, because the competition has the same "advantage"! It's like: "Hey, man, do you really think your grocery store can make those superhuge profits when you sell at the wholesale price?" 'Oh, no, I have a plan. You know those barcodes they're putting on products now? I'm going to invent a way to integrate that with the checkouts, and boom, I don't have to pay for people to put price tags on. Labor costs go way down!' Same problem: "No, you're not. Someone better at that will, and they'll sell the tech to all grocery stores." There was never a reason to believe Kalanick's operation as it stood in 2010/11 had that comparative advantage, so that strategy never made sense. And today, not surprisingly, Uber is one of the worst at SDCs, and is correspondingly unlikely to have that advantage.

perl4ever 7y ago
I think you mean competitive advantage, not comparative. I got a D in my only economics class, but I think that I've seen comparative advantage used to mean that "X is better at doing Y than doing Z", whereas competitive advantage is "X is better at doing Y than Z is at doing Y". If you're not using it as jargon, then the fact that it is jargon might be confusing.
- SilasX 7y ago
  If you’re going to insist on proper jargon, you might want to refresh first. Comparative advantage [1] in X means you suffer a lower opportunity cost (forgone profit from what you could have done) to produce X than others. A canonical example would be the doctor who is a better secretary than their secretary (produces more value per hour, looking only at secretarial value). The secretary still has a comparative advantage in secretarial labor because they forgo $0 of doctor income to work that job, while the doctor would forgo $100/hour they could be earning as a doctor in order to work as a secretary. This is true even though the doctor has an absolute (or competitive) advantage in secretarial work. The real test for whether something is financially optimal is if you have a comparative, not absolute advantage. Uber not having a competitive/absolute advantage in SDCs would also be a reason not to do it, because of the details of this case, but comparative advantage is correct as well, though perhaps an unnecessarily strong criterion for the point I needed to make. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage

lacker 7y ago

it became clear that Uber's strategy (under Kalanick anyway) was premised on replacing drivers with AIs before the cash ran out This is kind of nitpicking, but this has always been a backup plan at best for Uber. Look at their expenditures and it is clear that their strategy has never been "all in" on self-driving. Their main plan was and basically still is a combination of driving competitors out of the market, increasing their efficiency, raising prices, and lowering payments to drivers, before the money runs out. If self-driving cars happen, it will be a tremendous boon to Uber's bottom line, but it is not a necessity.

mLuby 7y ago
> driving competitors out of the market,… raising prices, and lowering payments to drivers So, textbook monopoly behavior.
- setr 7y ago
  Afaict, that's just textbook corporate behavior. It only becomes monopoly behavior if they succeed in driving every competitor out of the market
beamatronic 7y ago
Those at the top, early, get rich either way.

hindsightbias 7y ago

Troll driving. Imagine testing/probing AI cars with the intent of getting them into an accident with you so you can sue for uber-millions and AI hysteria social media points.

schrodinger 7y ago
Interestingly, that might actually lead to self driving cars being better in the end.
Johnny555 7y ago
Self driving cars tend to have enough cameras that it might be hard to do that without it being caught on camera.

danieltillett 7y ago

I always thought Uber’s strategy was to get large enough for the VC and PE guys to be able to offload the whole pile of steaming garbage onto the index funds.

JKCalhoun 7y ago

Or simply: Self-driving cars turned out to be just as hard as we thought they would be

gvhst 7y ago

Aggressive driving will be captured and recorded by multiple cameras (potentially by multiple vehicles), making most court cases open-and-shut. I think that serves to put the fear in people.

rmtech 7y ago

> couldn't see general self-driving vehicles coming within 20 years. I still say that's true. 20 years is a long time, arguably you're already wrong because self-driving vehicles already exist. But Self-driving with the ability to replace Uber drivers will be here by 2030 at the latest.

thebruce87m 7y ago
If you’re talking about level 5 then I disagree with this. None of the technologies I see in use today can work in the same weather conditions that humans currently drive in. Things like snow, fog, and even heavy rain. If you’re talking anything below level 5 then all we will be doing is making current human drivers worse. Some of the deaths so far have been people who knew the limitations of the technology and still got complacent. If it requires you to have constant supervision then people simply won’t do that and will die.
- rmtech 7y ago
  People obsess about weather conditions as a limiting factor for level 5 and it's bizarre. Bad weather conditions will favour robots over humans because the robot drivers have sensors that can penetrate fog and rain whereas humans have to rely on mk1 eyeballs that can't. The real limiting factors for level 5 are less legible to humans. We understand the physical world via years of experience and good priors. Teslas crash straight into concrete lane separators and Ubers hit pedestrians that they know are there. In the latter case the actual reasons for the collision would strike a human as absolutely nuts - things like the algorithm not having a proper sense of object persistence or being terrible at commonsense reasoning. Yes, the Uber system was quite primitive, but the way that it broke gives us some insight into how AI drivers face a totally different set of challenges than what we would think of as "difficult conditions". See: https://www.jefftk.com/p/uber-self-driving-crash https://www.jefftk.com/p/uber-self-driving-crash
  - thebruce87m 7y ago
    Can you link to some of these sensors? As far as I know, anyone who knows what they’re doing is using Lidar at the moment which has significant difficulties with weather.