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There's a saying in software, you throw away the first version. The main idea is that when you start on something, you don't know what you don't know. The lab

There's a saying in software, you throw away the first version. The main idea is that when you start on something, you don't know what you don't know. The labor of the first version allows you to learn the domain, the limits, edge cases, and what you need to do. Then the second version starts on a much better foundation. At this point, many teams (Waymo, Tesla, Uber, etc.) have been working on this for years. And there must have been times when the engineers thought, this would work so much better if only... Maybe it's time to gather these thoughts and sort them by low effort/high reward. For example, if all cars had a cheap sticker indicating forward vs back, would that improve self-driving performance by a lot? It wouldn't be that hard to get car manufacturers to add a sticker somewhere. Or what about traffic lights? Maybe adding a cheap light or sensor to it would vastly improve self-driving performance. Or those road reflectors, can they get some minor changes to help the self-driving software? It doesn't seem likely that level 5 or even level 4 will happen when self-driving is literally defined as replacing what a human driver would do. But what if the computer had some help from both infrastructure and other vehicles? Why not start thinking about cheap changes that can be implemented to fix the blind spots and flaws in the self-driving software? If these changes are cheap and easy to implement and would vastly improve the software performance, isn't that worth it for true self-driving to work?

oliv__ 6y ago
What happens when the helps disappears, gets obstructed etc...?
BigJono 6y ago
When people first started talking about self driving this is what I thought it was going to be. If you want to enter the "self driving zone" your car needs to be equipped with a government approved self driving module, and everything on the roads in that zone is standardised and maintained. It just seems like a problem that's multiple orders of magnitude easier to solve from a technical standpoint.
- Shank 6y ago
  It’s definitely easier to solve, but who’s going to foot the bill for this stuff? The whole problem is that road conditions conditions are variable. A lot of the time a Tesla FSD system makes a bad decision, that decision would be possible for a human to make. Sure, it’s not probable all the time, but it’s not outside of the realm of possibility. You can always decrease the odds of something bad happening with better road design (and better viability), better lane markings, better signs, etc. This would work for both FSD systems and humans. Yet, terribly unmaintained roads are the norm for a lot of people who are just “used to it.” If you create an FSD zone and outfit it with tons of sensors, why not just fix the road design problems that would benefit humans too?
  - BigJono 6y ago
    The same people who foot the bill for road maintenance now? Obviously it's not the same in every city in the world, but roads are pretty decently maintained where I live. And it's not like we're talking about high tech stuff, like other people said, it's just painting distinctive patterns on things to give sensors more information than they otherwise would have. We already paint distinctive markings for humans, it's not much of a big step further. Probably just some QR-code-looking stuff sprinkled on signs, lane markings and the front/back of other cars etc. Honestly to me the hard bit seems to be getting everyone together and deciding on the standards, especially with how technophobic some cities/countries governments are. Painting a few markings once every few years to keep them fresh is a piece of cake.

oliv__ 6y ago

What happens when the helps disappears, gets obstructed etc...?

BigJono 6y ago

When people first started talking about self driving this is what I thought it was going to be. If you want to enter the "self driving zone" your car needs to be equipped with a government approved self driving module, and everything on the roads in that zone is standardised and maintained. It just seems like a problem that's multiple orders of magnitude easier to solve from a technical standpoint.

Shank 6y ago
It’s definitely easier to solve, but who’s going to foot the bill for this stuff? The whole problem is that road conditions conditions are variable. A lot of the time a Tesla FSD system makes a bad decision, that decision would be possible for a human to make. Sure, it’s not probable all the time, but it’s not outside of the realm of possibility. You can always decrease the odds of something bad happening with better road design (and better viability), better lane markings, better signs, etc. This would work for both FSD systems and humans. Yet, terribly unmaintained roads are the norm for a lot of people who are just “used to it.” If you create an FSD zone and outfit it with tons of sensors, why not just fix the road design problems that would benefit humans too?
- BigJono 6y ago
  The same people who foot the bill for road maintenance now? Obviously it's not the same in every city in the world, but roads are pretty decently maintained where I live. And it's not like we're talking about high tech stuff, like other people said, it's just painting distinctive patterns on things to give sensors more information than they otherwise would have. We already paint distinctive markings for humans, it's not much of a big step further. Probably just some QR-code-looking stuff sprinkled on signs, lane markings and the front/back of other cars etc. Honestly to me the hard bit seems to be getting everyone together and deciding on the standards, especially with how technophobic some cities/countries governments are. Painting a few markings once every few years to keep them fresh is a piece of cake.