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I like Filip Piekniewski's take on this [0] - deep learning is appropriate for environments where the cost of mistakes is low (or the errors are reversible) and

• ianai 6y ago
  Right. We’d probably be better as a society if we were interested and willing to do some infrastructure projects to alleviate the burden of driving cars. I really wish Elon’s boring company were further along and getting much more headwind for this reason.
  • barnacled 6y ago
    I am extremely skeptical of the boring project. The claimed money saving (a 10x improvement vs. every single tunnel digger in the world without any evidence to back it up?) the safety issues of a car breaking down in a tunnel or being brought up and down, the enormous cost with digging deeper tunnels, etc. etc. Road tunnels exist and have been built all around the world, these kinds of ideas have been tried and ultimately general underground road tunnels are just not economical or particularly safe. Thunderf00t has done a series of videos debunking these claims [0,1,2]. Unfortunately Elon has a habit of frankly lying which I think does serious harm to public perception of these things. These kind of infrastructure problems are just hard and have a ton of trade offs, there is no silver bullet. [0]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBtL3qDvdZc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBtL3qDvdZc [1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ezF7NmwQZs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ezF7NmwQZs [2]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hyy-19qyNWE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hyy-19qyNWE
    • AstralStorm 6y ago
      Why tunnels instead of the Japanese/German solution of ramps/viaducts? In the same vein, why underground instead of light rail? See, open air systems like those are much easier to service. Removing a crashed car from that requires just a big crane.
      • ianai 6y ago
        Underground doesn’t get affected by weather. I wonder whether simply having more tunnels side by side would help for servicing issues. Small, numerous tunnels instead of large tunnels.
        • AstralStorm 6y ago
          Building wide tunnels is very hard and nullifies the main advantage of having the tunnel in the first place, which is easier routing. Cost also vastly increases, likelihood of total failure as well. Big tunnels need big supports and big service ducts.
      • kanox 6y ago
        Because tunnels can go under buildings, roads and other tunnels with very little interference.
        • animal_spirits 6y ago
          Bridges can also go above bridges, probably cheaper and safer as well
    • njarboe 6y ago
      Rocket launch technology was at a standstill for 30-40 years until Elon Musk founded SpaceX. 15 years later they built reusable rockets. The cost of putting something into orbit is likely to drop by a factor of 100-1000 when SpaceX's next rocket is up and running sometime in the next few years. It seems like such a waste of time for people to try and debunk these claims from people who are very competent and have access to the best in people and technology. Do they want a world where people don't try new things and make great improvements? One should really encourage people with a track record of getting people together to do amazing things to continue to do so. Elon Musk has stated that he thought that SpaceX had a 10% chance of success. I'm glad he could look at that chance of failure and tried anyway.
  • itsoktocry 6y ago
    >I really wish Elon’s boring company were further along It's unfathomable to me that people believe car tunnels are the future of anything. Right now The Boring Company is trying to recreate an underground train in Las Vegas, and is already behind schedule and running into issues people predicted before this started: https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/16/21519692/elon-musk-boring-company-vegas-loop-less-impressive-promised https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/16/21519692/elon-musk-borin...
    • qz2 6y ago
      Agree. Personal rapid transit system might work but cars, nope!
    • nickik 6y ago
      What the difference between electric buses behind each other in a tunnel compared to multiple rail way cars behind each other? One system is cheaper because the units are mass produced far more often and the system is more flexible. Carrying around a battery rather then having complex high power electronics along the tunnel seems like a no brainier as well. Las Vegas is literally a first of its kind system, being a few month behind is not surprising or concerning. And the problems have to do with specific fire codes, not any inherent flaw in the system.
  • atharris 6y ago
    It's been stated elsewhere in this thread, but there really are a lot of practical, well-understood engineering issues with Elon's proposals that he refuses to admit or deal with. Here's a somewhat humorous review of his claims / what's wrong with them and how they stack up to actual civil engineering projects: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dn6ZVpJLxs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dn6ZVpJLxs
• pedrocr 6y ago
  I can see it being possible to "average out" the mortality of self-driving cars when you consider how high road mortality is. But they won't be the same deaths, some would be things a human driver would avoid. We generally define the safety requirements of self-driving cars as being close to airliner reliability but also generally accept that roads, cars and drivers have much lower standards than that right now. So in this environment we can very soon be stuck in an uncanny valley where self-driving cars would already be a net positive in reducing road fatalities but at a level that is still generally considered unacceptable.
  • ImprobableTruth 6y ago
    I think what further compounds this is that normally responsibility for accidents is 'distributed' across the population. whereas with autonomous driving it's going to be a single/a few companies shouldering it all. Being even responsible even just for 10% of total road fatalities (~4000 deaths per year) would be absolutely ruinous if they're held liable for them.
    • ghaff 6y ago
      There's (arguably) the limited exception of pharmaceuticals--and, even there, there's a government fund to handle people who get sick or die because of vaccines. But it's hard to otherwise identify products used by consumers that, when maintained and used properly, sometimes randomly kill people and we shrug our shoulders and say "Stuff happens. Still a net benefit to society." We certainly don't do it today in the case of manufacturing or design defects in vehicles.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • srtjstjsj 6y ago
      Responsibility for accidents is concentrated in insurance companies. Nothing substantial will change.
  • barnacled 6y ago
    I think firstly it's going to be tough with long-tail edge case deaths to really be sure the numbers will be less than human drivers until self-driving cars are unleashed in sufficient numbers. Secondly, even if you're right (and you may well be) - imagine that a common edge case was a small child jumping out in front of the car. Would we want to accept a vehicle that consistently ran them over? The raw numbers might be better but that doesn't fully paint a picture of what those numbers would look like. I also think the 'will randomly kill people, but rarely' aspect of self-driving cars will be majorly off-putting on a very human level. And finally there's a perception issue here - the self-driving hype is around the idea that the car is effectively being driven by a far better driver than a human, the second it turns out it does really crazy things sometimes (doesn't even have to involve fatalities necessarily) is also going to put people off I think. I personally prefer the idea of driver assists (responsibly developed so drivers aren't just distracted) aiding driver safety while we work on a supplemental self-driving solution, or perhaps as discussed in the article create some infrastructure along roads to make things more certain. I am far from being against self-driving cars, I just feel the timeline is longer than currently hyped.
• agumonkey 6y ago
  It's actually very interesting .. humans/lifeforms are wired to deal with critical irreversible errors.
• therockspush 6y ago
  I think the best way to reduce those outlier cases in this phase is to just focus on self driving on the freeway. That's where it has the most value for me, taking over for the long boring hauls. On the freeway you minimize a lot of those wildcards like bikes and pedestrians, everyone is going about the same speed, and there are only a few places you can enter and exit. We don't need to jump all the way to self driving in SF, and have people point out all the things that can go wrong, since theres a huge gain just from being able to do it on the freeway.
  • neaanopri 6y ago
    I totally agree with you. So why hasn't this happened yet? I believe this is because what we have here is not a technical problem, but primarily a regulatory and legal problem. If the political leadership of the NHTSA had the will to make highway self-driving happen, they could publish a draft safety and liability standard. The technical problem here is that while shuttle and robotaxi systems can go slow enough as to make fatal accidents rare, as you said, the most consumer benefit potential is for a highway self-driving system that would not require active monitoring like Autopilot does. The political/legal question is: when fatal accidents occur, who has the legal liability? If it's the manufacturer, then why would they accept the risk? If it's the driver, then who would actually go to sleep and let their robot potentially kill people? Especially given the problems that Tesla autopilot has with stationary targets in the road. It's possible that the key innovation required here is not anything technical, but an insurance product that would allow the manufacturer to assume the liability, but be insured for damages. This insurance product would involve a deep technical evaluation of the self-driving system to get actuarial-level probabilities of mortality. On the NHTSA website, there are many >50 self-driving test sites, but only 3 which are classified as "highway". The most common vehicle type is "shuttle". A full self-driving airport shuttle, with purpose-built road markings, makes a lot of sense as a goal achievable with today's technology, and is far more likely to kill people due to its controlled built environment and slow speeds. https://www.nhtsa.gov/automated-vehicles-safety/av-test-initiative-tracking-tool https://www.nhtsa.gov/automated-vehicles-safety/av-test-init...
    • hardtke 6y ago
• shadowgovt 6y ago
  SDCs will never be 100% safe because at the end of the day, the underlying task is still to push around a couple tons of metal on heterogeneous roads at speeds requiring dozens of feet of stopping distance. But if it can get to half the fatality rate of human drivers, that'd be a huge win. And unlike human drivers, every fatality involving an SDC can become a fleet-wide software improvement to, ideally, prevent that failure from ever happening again. That's not something we can do with people; nobody but traffic engineers and wonks read NHTSA reports to find out how accidents could have been avoided.
• simplyinfinity 6y ago
  > For me it's obvious the real issue are the edge cases - of course a self-driving car does fine in 99%+ of cases, but those small % of outlier cases are the ones where people potentially die. I suspect an entirely different approach is required to supplement/supplant the deep learning one and fully autonomous vehicles are still quite some way off. Why is that every time the safety of self driving cars is brought up, people appear to ignore that human drivers are not 100% perfect. There are on average of 104 deaths on the road each day in the US. if we can get that number to 50 people, that's a net positive. Self driving cars don't need to be perfect, just better than us. So the question shouldn't be "are SDC perfect yet?" but "are they better than us?"
  • mhermher 6y ago
    Is the manufacturer gonna take the liability for those deaths?
    • ghaff 6y ago
      It seems obvious they'll have to provided the vehicles are being used and maintained in accordance with manufacturer instructions. Would you get in a vehicle if you could be charged with manslaughter for killing someone through absolutely no fault of your own? Conversely, can imagine society collectively throwing up their hands in the event of a death caused by an autonomous vehicles and going "Them's the breaks. It's all for the good of society."
  • RodgerTheGreat 6y ago
    If self-driving cars are marginally better at driving than humans, but people take more rides in them out of convenience, it's easy for the technology to result in a net increase of human deaths.
  • barnacled 6y ago
    I think you misinterpret what I said, it is the edge case scenarios where fatalities tend to occur. Of course in humans that can be due to drunkeness or distraction or confusion, nobody is claiming human drivers are perfect, but if it is the 'weird' situations that tend to result in accidents and deep learning tends to make mistakes in 'weird' circumstances, that doesn't fill me with confidence. Also it is not at all obvious that self driving cars will do better than humans. Perhaps they will, but it isn't just about numbers. As I alluded to in another comment, imagine if they had 50% of the human death rate but it was all small children and occurred seemingly randomly. Do you think that would be acceptable and a better outcome? These things are less black and white than they might seem. Another factor is that with deep learning it is fully a black box. It is very difficult to understand WHY a particular course of action was taken, whereas in human cases you can usually determine this. The why might also be limited, e.g. 'human child was mislabelled as stop sign' or similar, which just causes further questions. The fact that you have scenarios the car will definitely not know how to handle combined with a deep level of inscrutability makes it difficult to have confidence in issues being resolved or the technology improving on a safety basis.
• hakfoo 6y ago
  I suspect the outliers that confound machines will also frequently confound human drivers, so a lot of that is a wash. The only way to remotely look at this meaningfully is in aggregate. Deaths and losses per million trip-miles. This is where the momentum will come from. There will be a day where machines reach and surpass the human level, and we'll see a huge momentum towards penalty-boxing human drivers. I fully expect to call Progressive in 2040 and the hologram Flo will tell me that it costs four times as much to insure me if I have the audacity to retain a steering wheel. I also think there's a snowball factor. Self-driving cars are going to be way more consistent and predictable than human drivers. That only amplifies as more and more vehicles on the road are self-driving. Once you get to 90% self-driving, I could imagine things like increasing speed limits and dynamically organizing convoys for efficiency.