4 ms·

Classic anti hype cycle. Won't age well.

by asah 6y ago

echelon 6y ago
How many nines of reliability do self driving cars need before they're safe? They have to operate in weather. Rain, snow, dark. They have to adapt to novel conditions. I put the self-driving car in the same category as the flying car and jet pack. This one just happens to have VC funding. I don't think we'll see these things for another decade, and when that next decade arrives we'll be saying the same. Another decade.
- TotempaaltJ 6y ago
  I think we'll see a lot of approximations of it. Autonomous taxis in predefined spaces (see Cruise, Waymo), trucks on highways (maybe changing to human drivers when entering/nearing cities). But no safe full self-driving for a while. Although I do feel like the money spent in the US so far would've been better spent setting up better public transit/train lines.
  - Super_Jambo 6y ago
    Better public transit can't be leveraged into a monopoly though, it would just quietly improve peoples lives.
    - AstralStorm 6y ago
      Of course it can, that's what most public transport companies are. They tend to be government subsidized. There's very little competition because there is not much to compete for, except in longer distance rail and bus. You also need permission from the city to use public stops, consult routes and times, which is a barrier of entry. Not an insurmountable one and nobody prohibits you from running private stops or garages. You can even negotiate the use of bus lanes or tram lines. The other barrier is much higher capital investment. Both bus drivers, busses and stops are not cheap, while the margin on a ticket is thin. (Compared to taxi fleet.) But it can be done even encouraging competition - see South Korea for an example of where it worked.
  - DarmokJalad1701 6y ago
    > Although I do feel like the money spent in the US so far would've been better spent setting up better public transit/train lines. How much are talking? Waymo is 10 billion in the hole. Tesla spent maybe around that much developing autopilot. This is also not public money being spent. A typical public transit system costs orders of magnitude more than that. Example: California's High Speed Rail project started at 40 billion and projections have already ballooned to 98 billion.
- audunw 6y ago
  > How many nines of reliability do self driving cars need before they're safe? That depends on your perspective. I think most of us just wants it to be more reliable than a human driver that's not drunk or sleep deprived. But the liability challenges could mean you'll want more "perfect" reliability. > They have to operate in weather. Rain, snow, dark. They have to adapt to novel conditions. Seems like the solutions out there are already getting pretty good at handling the kind of rain, snow and darkness you'd see in most urban/suburban areas. Maybe you'll "never" be able to drive autonomously to your cabin in the woods, but so what? > I don't think we'll see these things for another decade, and when that next decade arrives we'll be saying the same. Another decade. What exactly do you mean by "seeing these things"? By some measures they're already here. The ones that are truly self driving are slow, and mostly on static routes. The ones that drive on highways need to be monitored by a human, but they're doing pretty well. I think you'll see these different solutions just slowly become better and better. I'd be very surprised if you couldn't hail a fully autonomous robotaxi in many urban areas in a decade. Maybe it can't drive it anywhere, maybe you can't use it in a snowstorm, but it'll be a case of "good enough".
  - itsoktocry 6y ago
    >I think most of us just wants it to be more reliable than a human driver that's not drunk or sleep deprived That is a seriously low bar, and in no way do I think the majority of people feel that driving "better than a drunk" is good enough. In fact, I think it will be the opposite: people will want it to be almost flawless before it's accepted.
    - matz1 6y ago
      For me, "better than a drunk" is good enough >and in no way do I think the majority of people feel that driving "better than a drunk" is good enough If that the case something can be done such as smart marketing/social media campaign or something like that to change people perception.
    - leetcrew 6y ago
      you and rootusrootus have parsed this phrase incorrectly: > more reliable than a human driver that's not drunk or sleep deprived emphasis mine.
- AdrianB1 6y ago
  When self driving cars will be consistently more reliable than 99% of human drivers, that will be enough. That is not a lot of nines.
  - itsoktocry 6y ago
    >When self driving cars will be consistently more reliable than 99% of human drivers How could you even calculate this? By running massive experiments and seeing if fewer people die over a given period of time driving versus self-driving? Do you really think we can run such an experiment?
    - AdrianB1 6y ago
      It is possible, but hard, to calculate human performance, it was done very scientific in aviation since ~ 1950. It is easier to do it if you consider 1% worst drivers, either older people with long reaction times, distracted drivers, drunk drivers etc. If you have a car that is obeying all traffic rules, it never goes above the speed limit and it has sensors that makes it brake before rear-ending other cars you are already better than the 1% limit. It is a simplistic approach, just giving an example of how 99% is not that hard to reach.
    - kanox 6y ago
      Such experiments are already running and there are statistics available comparing the rate of accidents with human versus computer driving.
- reader_mode 6y ago
  >They have to operate in weather. Rain, snow, dark. No they don't - a self driving car that knows when it can't drive is perfectly acceptable - not everyone can drive in extreme conditions reliably - doesn't mean they can't drive.
  - itsoktocry 6y ago
    >a self driving car that knows when it can't drive is perfectly acceptable I don't agree, because of the grey area between the car knowing it can't drive and believing it can, but in practice doing so poorly.
    - srtjstjsj 6y ago
      So, like a human?
  - rootusrootus 6y ago
    I am imagining the whole fleet of self-driving cars stopping on the side of the road at the same time every time a little rainstorm blows through, kinda like what happens now for a snowstorm. Except rain is a heck of a lot more common. I guess we won't be seeing self-driving cars in the PNW ;)
  - deleted 6y ago
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- deleted 6y ago
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- taneq 6y ago
  The goalposts are attached to the front of the car, so we'll never reach them.
- bob33212 6y ago
  Cars will never be safe. At any point if you are moving 50 miles an hour and an animal runs out in front of an oncoming car they may swerve and hit you head on. Or if your tire pops you may swerve into a tree. When cars have accidents 10x less frequently than humans it will be stupid not to switch over.
  - falcolas 6y ago
    That “when” is nowhere on the horizon, is what this article and other commenters are saying.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  flying cars and jet packs have VC funding.
- SuoDuanDao 6y ago
  I rather like the XKCD comic in regards to that question: https://xkcd.com/1720/ https://xkcd.com/1720/
- kanox 6y ago
  > I put the self-driving car in the same category as the flying car and jet pack. This one just happens to have VC funding. Flying cars and jet packs are limited by physics (specifically energy density) and progress in this area is almost non-existent. We barely got batteries to be vaguely competitive with internal combustion. Self-driving cars are limited by software and hardware accelerators and this field is making real progress.
simonh 6y ago
Well, the predictions 15 years ago that we’d have fleets of self driving cars on all our roads long before now didn’t age all that well either. I remember a friend saying my kids would never need to learn how to drive. My eldest started her driving lessons last month.
pessimizer 6y ago
> Classic anti hype cycle. Won't age well. People also posted this about 3D TVs and Cuecats.
- asah 6y ago
  Won't argue!! But those technologies (a) had a fraction of the upside, (b) don't offer partial wins that pay back the R&D (like self driving trucks), and (c) never attracted the same level of investment or talent. Self driving vehicles will save $250+B/year in labor costs in the US alone - this is more impactful than the cotton gin and rivals the impact of refrigeration. 3D TVs and cuecat are 3-6 orders of magnitude smaller impact Finally, it's worth mentioning that cuecat became QR codes which took off after getting built into cellphone cameras. 3D television didn't take off but 4K did i.e. consumer demand existed for richer TV images just not specifically 3D. Projectors remain niche as well even though they promise to take TV from 80" to 130+" - if ultra short throw (UST) projectors come down in price, I could see them going mainstream, especially in tandem with 4K/8K.

Classic anti hype cycle. Won't age well.

by asah 6y ago

Classic anti hype cycle. Won't age well.

How many nines of reliability do self driving cars need before they're safe? They have to operate in weather. Rain, snow, dark. They have to adapt to novel conditions. I put the self-driving car in the same category as the flying car and jet pack. This one just happens to have VC funding. I don't think we'll see these things for another decade, and when that next decade arrives we'll be saying the same. Another decade.

TotempaaltJ 6y ago
I think we'll see a lot of approximations of it. Autonomous taxis in predefined spaces (see Cruise, Waymo), trucks on highways (maybe changing to human drivers when entering/nearing cities). But no safe full self-driving for a while. Although I do feel like the money spent in the US so far would've been better spent setting up better public transit/train lines.
- Super_Jambo 6y ago
  Better public transit can't be leveraged into a monopoly though, it would just quietly improve peoples lives.
  - AstralStorm 6y ago
    Of course it can, that's what most public transport companies are. They tend to be government subsidized. There's very little competition because there is not much to compete for, except in longer distance rail and bus. You also need permission from the city to use public stops, consult routes and times, which is a barrier of entry. Not an insurmountable one and nobody prohibits you from running private stops or garages. You can even negotiate the use of bus lanes or tram lines. The other barrier is much higher capital investment. Both bus drivers, busses and stops are not cheap, while the margin on a ticket is thin. (Compared to taxi fleet.) But it can be done even encouraging competition - see South Korea for an example of where it worked.
- DarmokJalad1701 6y ago
  > Although I do feel like the money spent in the US so far would've been better spent setting up better public transit/train lines. How much are talking? Waymo is 10 billion in the hole. Tesla spent maybe around that much developing autopilot. This is also not public money being spent. A typical public transit system costs orders of magnitude more than that. Example: California's High Speed Rail project started at 40 billion and projections have already ballooned to 98 billion.
audunw 6y ago
> How many nines of reliability do self driving cars need before they're safe? That depends on your perspective. I think most of us just wants it to be more reliable than a human driver that's not drunk or sleep deprived. But the liability challenges could mean you'll want more "perfect" reliability. > They have to operate in weather. Rain, snow, dark. They have to adapt to novel conditions. Seems like the solutions out there are already getting pretty good at handling the kind of rain, snow and darkness you'd see in most urban/suburban areas. Maybe you'll "never" be able to drive autonomously to your cabin in the woods, but so what? > I don't think we'll see these things for another decade, and when that next decade arrives we'll be saying the same. Another decade. What exactly do you mean by "seeing these things"? By some measures they're already here. The ones that are truly self driving are slow, and mostly on static routes. The ones that drive on highways need to be monitored by a human, but they're doing pretty well. I think you'll see these different solutions just slowly become better and better. I'd be very surprised if you couldn't hail a fully autonomous robotaxi in many urban areas in a decade. Maybe it can't drive it anywhere, maybe you can't use it in a snowstorm, but it'll be a case of "good enough".
- itsoktocry 6y ago
  >I think most of us just wants it to be more reliable than a human driver that's not drunk or sleep deprived That is a seriously low bar, and in no way do I think the majority of people feel that driving "better than a drunk" is good enough. In fact, I think it will be the opposite: people will want it to be almost flawless before it's accepted.
  - matz1 6y ago
    For me, "better than a drunk" is good enough >and in no way do I think the majority of people feel that driving "better than a drunk" is good enough If that the case something can be done such as smart marketing/social media campaign or something like that to change people perception.
  - leetcrew 6y ago
    you and rootusrootus have parsed this phrase incorrectly: > more reliable than a human driver that's not drunk or sleep deprived emphasis mine.
AdrianB1 6y ago
When self driving cars will be consistently more reliable than 99% of human drivers, that will be enough. That is not a lot of nines.
- itsoktocry 6y ago
  >When self driving cars will be consistently more reliable than 99% of human drivers How could you even calculate this? By running massive experiments and seeing if fewer people die over a given period of time driving versus self-driving? Do you really think we can run such an experiment?
  - AdrianB1 6y ago
    It is possible, but hard, to calculate human performance, it was done very scientific in aviation since ~ 1950. It is easier to do it if you consider 1% worst drivers, either older people with long reaction times, distracted drivers, drunk drivers etc. If you have a car that is obeying all traffic rules, it never goes above the speed limit and it has sensors that makes it brake before rear-ending other cars you are already better than the 1% limit. It is a simplistic approach, just giving an example of how 99% is not that hard to reach.
  - kanox 6y ago
    Such experiments are already running and there are statistics available comparing the rate of accidents with human versus computer driving.
reader_mode 6y ago
>They have to operate in weather. Rain, snow, dark. No they don't - a self driving car that knows when it can't drive is perfectly acceptable - not everyone can drive in extreme conditions reliably - doesn't mean they can't drive.
- itsoktocry 6y ago
  >a self driving car that knows when it can't drive is perfectly acceptable I don't agree, because of the grey area between the car knowing it can't drive and believing it can, but in practice doing so poorly.
  - srtjstjsj 6y ago
    So, like a human?
- rootusrootus 6y ago
  I am imagining the whole fleet of self-driving cars stopping on the side of the road at the same time every time a little rainstorm blows through, kinda like what happens now for a snowstorm. Except rain is a heck of a lot more common. I guess we won't be seeing self-driving cars in the PNW ;)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
taneq 6y ago
The goalposts are attached to the front of the car, so we'll never reach them.
bob33212 6y ago
Cars will never be safe. At any point if you are moving 50 miles an hour and an animal runs out in front of an oncoming car they may swerve and hit you head on. Or if your tire pops you may swerve into a tree. When cars have accidents 10x less frequently than humans it will be stupid not to switch over.
- falcolas 6y ago
  That “when” is nowhere on the horizon, is what this article and other commenters are saying.
srtjstjsj 6y ago
flying cars and jet packs have VC funding.
SuoDuanDao 6y ago
I rather like the XKCD comic in regards to that question: https://xkcd.com/1720/ https://xkcd.com/1720/
kanox 6y ago
> I put the self-driving car in the same category as the flying car and jet pack. This one just happens to have VC funding. Flying cars and jet packs are limited by physics (specifically energy density) and progress in this area is almost non-existent. We barely got batteries to be vaguely competitive with internal combustion. Self-driving cars are limited by software and hardware accelerators and this field is making real progress.

simonh 6y ago

Well, the predictions 15 years ago that we’d have fleets of self driving cars on all our roads long before now didn’t age all that well either. I remember a friend saying my kids would never need to learn how to drive. My eldest started her driving lessons last month.

pessimizer 6y ago

> Classic anti hype cycle. Won't age well. People also posted this about 3D TVs and Cuecats.

asah 6y ago
Won't argue!! But those technologies (a) had a fraction of the upside, (b) don't offer partial wins that pay back the R&D (like self driving trucks), and (c) never attracted the same level of investment or talent. Self driving vehicles will save $250+B/year in labor costs in the US alone - this is more impactful than the cotton gin and rivals the impact of refrigeration. 3D TVs and cuecat are 3-6 orders of magnitude smaller impact Finally, it's worth mentioning that cuecat became QR codes which took off after getting built into cellphone cameras. 3D television didn't take off but 4K did i.e. consumer demand existed for richer TV images just not specifically 3D. Projectors remain niche as well even though they promise to take TV from 80" to 130+" - if ultra short throw (UST) projectors come down in price, I could see them going mainstream, especially in tandem with 4K/8K.