5 ms·

When I see one of these cars in South Boston (narrow streets with street parking) during the winter (piles of snow everywhere), I'll believe they're a reality.

by tapoxi 5y ago

When I see one of these cars in South Boston (narrow streets with street parking) during the winter (piles of snow everywhere), I'll believe they're a reality. Until then, they'll remain 90% of the way there.

wutbrodo 5y ago
This is a strange perspective. Do you consider subways "not a reality" because small rural towns can't sustain one?
- the_other 5y ago
  I guess there's a mismatch in some people's understanding of what a driverless car should be. It sounds like you think "a vehicle that works in a limited set of circumstances" qualifies as a car. As a mode of transport in some areas, I get why that would seem useful. Busses, trams and trains work like that. And subways! I use all those: they're great. I imagine the GP thinks of cars as "can go almost anywhere with limited immediate infrastructure, even some way off-road". That's how I think of them. I can imagine "driverless cars that operate like 1-5 person taxis in urban areas that have specialised roadways" could show up. But to me, these are not "cars". They don't get me to a party in the woods; they don't let me park up illegally when I need to sleep; they probably don't let me rush an injured person or someone giving birth to prepared to deal with the legal consequences later.. etc. These things will not be "cars"; they'll be non-mass-public-transit.
  - staz 5y ago
    > If an autonomous car don't let me run over someone it's not really a car. ... do we even need n-gate anymore?
  - wutbrodo 5y ago
    > in some people's understanding of what a driverless car should be. I don't understand at all what you mean by "should". The comment I was responding to said that [whatever this is] "wasn't a reality". This was a top-level comment to the announcement itself, not a response to a comment claiming "well, human-operated cars are officially over". Doing exactly what a current, human-operated car is an irrelevant, arbitrary point of comparison, introduced by the GP comment. This makes exactly as much sense as saying that the first motor vehicles "weren't a reality" until, like a horse, you could take them on trails, jump over low obstacles, and live in the wilderness with them indefinitely. That's what I'm pushing back against: it's classic ignorant Luddism to set imaginary bars for new technologies and then insist that the new tech isn't valuable at all on that basis. I know this is super-common, but it's an eternal pet peeve of mine, as I can't help but imagine how much better the world would be without people like this.
  - shkkmo 5y ago
    > They don't get me to a party in the woods; Many cars today have severely limited ability to drive on even rough roads (let alone off-road), that doesn't make them not "cars". In general, I think the argument you are poorly phrasing the argument you are trying to make. You seem to be trying to say that until self-driving technology can handle all use cases, you don't want to own a car without human driving controls. I don't think such exclusively driverless cars will be marketed to consumers for a long time. What we will see in the nearer is more standard consumer cars with varying ranges of level 4 self driving capabilities. These cars will match every one of your criteria.
- slingnow 5y ago
  What does whether or not a rural town can sustain a subway have to do with autonomous cars? Roads currently exist that human beings can currently drive on. If you tell me you have a fully autonomous car, I would expect that to mean it can do everything a human can do on currently existing roads in all conditions that a human being can operate in. This seems entirely reasonable. This has nothing to do with "sustainability".
  - wutbrodo 5y ago
    What does the behavior of current human-operated cars have to do with the value of domain-limited AVs? Your comment was not "these are not 100% replacement for cars yet", which would obviously be uncontroversial. It was "these are not a reality yet". You've chosen an arbitrary bar for considering these "real", in exactly the same way that serving small rural communities is an arbitrary bar with which to dismiss the real value that subways create.
gfodor 5y ago
I imagine the final standard of skeptics will be that as long as there's any manual driving happening anywhere, autonomous driving hasn't arrived yet.
efsavage 5y ago
Boston will certainly be one of the boss levels for AI drivers to try and beat, but even then, there's massive value in them working for even 50% of the roads out there. If my robot car said "I can take you from Rhode Island to Maine, but you're on your own while we're in Suffolk County", it would still be very useful, or it could just avoid the tricky areas and take a longer trip while I sleep!
- acdha 5y ago
  The catch is how contiguous that 50% is: humans are terribly at switching contexts so it'd probably be okay if your car could be fine on, say, a long interstate trip but force you to handle the cities but it'd be a different story if you're zoning out on the highway but every couple miles there's some situation (road work, weather, other drivers, etc.) which it can't handle safely but you're distractedly looking up from Netflix.
  - shkkmo 5y ago
    You seem to be conflating level 3 with level 4. A level 4 car would, by definition, never require you to take over while the vehicle is in motion. This level of automation operates safely with nobody in the driver's seat. A level 3 car requires a driver to pay full attention and "zoning out" would be unsafe behavior on behalf of the driver. Level 3 is considered by many to be dangerous given the human propensity to zone out despite being responsible.
    - acdha 5y ago
      If you read more carefully note that this is precisely why I drew that distinction: until you reach the point of level 4 everywhere under all conditions, you are going to have build systems which safely handle that challenge of inconsistent attention. Nobody is anywhere near that consistently high level of performance so there's an important question about how you can safely implement these systems — for example, a system which could be level 4 on a well-maintained road might be suitable for a driver-less transit system with a well-defined route even if the fire department are driving their own trucks for decades to come. One key question here is how you'd handle the cases where the system can't reliably perform at the top level. Consider the scenario I described earlier with a system which was level 4 in reasonable conditions: attempting to switch between full self-driving and human oversight frequently would be a safety hazard but you could probably safely release a system which is, say, L4 for long highway trips where a human driver could take a nap for an hour before having to take control to enter a complex city like Boston where the system would you to treat it as L3 or less for the entire trip during bad storm conditions or construction because it's safer to set the expected level of attention clearly at the beginning of the trip.
danielmarkbruce 5y ago
Maybe self driving cars will be so amazing in cities which don't snow that everyone will leave Boston. And then they will be 100% of the way there.
axg11 5y ago
You won’t believe they’re a reality until AVs are perfect? Technology doesn’t arrive perfectly in its final form. Progress for AVs is going to look painfully iterative from here. Waymo and others will roll out their AVs to increasingly more difficult areas while also reducing the number of disengagements. They will all likely have a human operator fallback for quite some time.
danielmarkbruce 5y ago
I'm certain my mother in law couldn't drive in South Boston during the winter. I'm 50% certain I can't. Everyone keeps going on about the edge cases, about self driving cars not being ready until they can handle everything. Half the people on the road can't handle all the edge cases. They exist, they are drivers. Let's not pretend the bar to be a "driver" is so high.

by tapoxi 5y ago

wutbrodo 5y ago

This is a strange perspective. Do you consider subways "not a reality" because small rural towns can't sustain one?

the_other 5y ago
I guess there's a mismatch in some people's understanding of what a driverless car should be. It sounds like you think "a vehicle that works in a limited set of circumstances" qualifies as a car. As a mode of transport in some areas, I get why that would seem useful. Busses, trams and trains work like that. And subways! I use all those: they're great. I imagine the GP thinks of cars as "can go almost anywhere with limited immediate infrastructure, even some way off-road". That's how I think of them. I can imagine "driverless cars that operate like 1-5 person taxis in urban areas that have specialised roadways" could show up. But to me, these are not "cars". They don't get me to a party in the woods; they don't let me park up illegally when I need to sleep; they probably don't let me rush an injured person or someone giving birth to prepared to deal with the legal consequences later.. etc. These things will not be "cars"; they'll be non-mass-public-transit.
- staz 5y ago
  > If an autonomous car don't let me run over someone it's not really a car. ... do we even need n-gate anymore?
- wutbrodo 5y ago
  > in some people's understanding of what a driverless car should be. I don't understand at all what you mean by "should". The comment I was responding to said that [whatever this is] "wasn't a reality". This was a top-level comment to the announcement itself, not a response to a comment claiming "well, human-operated cars are officially over". Doing exactly what a current, human-operated car is an irrelevant, arbitrary point of comparison, introduced by the GP comment. This makes exactly as much sense as saying that the first motor vehicles "weren't a reality" until, like a horse, you could take them on trails, jump over low obstacles, and live in the wilderness with them indefinitely. That's what I'm pushing back against: it's classic ignorant Luddism to set imaginary bars for new technologies and then insist that the new tech isn't valuable at all on that basis. I know this is super-common, but it's an eternal pet peeve of mine, as I can't help but imagine how much better the world would be without people like this.
- shkkmo 5y ago
  > They don't get me to a party in the woods; Many cars today have severely limited ability to drive on even rough roads (let alone off-road), that doesn't make them not "cars". In general, I think the argument you are poorly phrasing the argument you are trying to make. You seem to be trying to say that until self-driving technology can handle all use cases, you don't want to own a car without human driving controls. I don't think such exclusively driverless cars will be marketed to consumers for a long time. What we will see in the nearer is more standard consumer cars with varying ranges of level 4 self driving capabilities. These cars will match every one of your criteria.
slingnow 5y ago
What does whether or not a rural town can sustain a subway have to do with autonomous cars? Roads currently exist that human beings can currently drive on. If you tell me you have a fully autonomous car, I would expect that to mean it can do everything a human can do on currently existing roads in all conditions that a human being can operate in. This seems entirely reasonable. This has nothing to do with "sustainability".
- wutbrodo 5y ago
  What does the behavior of current human-operated cars have to do with the value of domain-limited AVs? Your comment was not "these are not 100% replacement for cars yet", which would obviously be uncontroversial. It was "these are not a reality yet". You've chosen an arbitrary bar for considering these "real", in exactly the same way that serving small rural communities is an arbitrary bar with which to dismiss the real value that subways create.

gfodor 5y ago

I imagine the final standard of skeptics will be that as long as there's any manual driving happening anywhere, autonomous driving hasn't arrived yet.

efsavage 5y ago

Boston will certainly be one of the boss levels for AI drivers to try and beat, but even then, there's massive value in them working for even 50% of the roads out there. If my robot car said "I can take you from Rhode Island to Maine, but you're on your own while we're in Suffolk County", it would still be very useful, or it could just avoid the tricky areas and take a longer trip while I sleep!

acdha 5y ago
The catch is how contiguous that 50% is: humans are terribly at switching contexts so it'd probably be okay if your car could be fine on, say, a long interstate trip but force you to handle the cities but it'd be a different story if you're zoning out on the highway but every couple miles there's some situation (road work, weather, other drivers, etc.) which it can't handle safely but you're distractedly looking up from Netflix.
- shkkmo 5y ago
  You seem to be conflating level 3 with level 4. A level 4 car would, by definition, never require you to take over while the vehicle is in motion. This level of automation operates safely with nobody in the driver's seat. A level 3 car requires a driver to pay full attention and "zoning out" would be unsafe behavior on behalf of the driver. Level 3 is considered by many to be dangerous given the human propensity to zone out despite being responsible.
  - acdha 5y ago
    If you read more carefully note that this is precisely why I drew that distinction: until you reach the point of level 4 everywhere under all conditions, you are going to have build systems which safely handle that challenge of inconsistent attention. Nobody is anywhere near that consistently high level of performance so there's an important question about how you can safely implement these systems — for example, a system which could be level 4 on a well-maintained road might be suitable for a driver-less transit system with a well-defined route even if the fire department are driving their own trucks for decades to come. One key question here is how you'd handle the cases where the system can't reliably perform at the top level. Consider the scenario I described earlier with a system which was level 4 in reasonable conditions: attempting to switch between full self-driving and human oversight frequently would be a safety hazard but you could probably safely release a system which is, say, L4 for long highway trips where a human driver could take a nap for an hour before having to take control to enter a complex city like Boston where the system would you to treat it as L3 or less for the entire trip during bad storm conditions or construction because it's safer to set the expected level of attention clearly at the beginning of the trip.

danielmarkbruce 5y ago

Maybe self driving cars will be so amazing in cities which don't snow that everyone will leave Boston. And then they will be 100% of the way there.

axg11 5y ago

You won’t believe they’re a reality until AVs are perfect? Technology doesn’t arrive perfectly in its final form. Progress for AVs is going to look painfully iterative from here. Waymo and others will roll out their AVs to increasingly more difficult areas while also reducing the number of disengagements. They will all likely have a human operator fallback for quite some time.

danielmarkbruce 5y ago

I'm certain my mother in law couldn't drive in South Boston during the winter. I'm 50% certain I can't. Everyone keeps going on about the edge cases, about self driving cars not being ready until they can handle everything. Half the people on the road can't handle all the edge cases. They exist, they are drivers. Let's not pretend the bar to be a "driver" is so high.