6 ms·

> Given that often human-driven, or human-parked, cars create similar temporary obstacles, the most important question here is: does this happen more-often, or

by flutas 4y ago

> Given that often human-driven, or human-parked, cars create similar temporary obstacles, the most important question here is: does this happen more-often, or for longer-periods, with autonomous cars? Honestly the article is pure tech-scare bait. It blames a car that stopped (while it was driving) when a truck was driving at it head on, but tries to glance over the fact that a (human driven) garbage truck is the reason the fire truck had to go into oncoming traffic in the first place. > a San Francisco Fire Department truck responding to a fire tried to pass a doubled-parked garbage truck by using the opposing lane.

aetherson 4y ago
What's your suggestion here? That garbage trucks don't pick up on streets without two lanes in each direction? The reality of driving is that there are a lot of these messy situations, and driverless cars need to be able to handle them.
- flutas 4y ago
  > What's your suggestion here? That garbage trucks don't pick up on streets without two lanes in each direction? Maybe they don't block the travel lane for extended periods, just like any regular person is expected to not do. The article is basically saying "it's ok for the human driven car to do, but not the self driving car."
  - anyfoo 4y ago
    Garbage trucks (the article mentions the operator was working) and other service vehicles, including school busses, are expected to block travel lanes for extended periods and time, and humans are usually able to understand the situation and react accordingly in emergency situations.
  - rurp 4y ago
    Suppose the travel lane had been blocked by any other obstacle, say some large object fell into the road. The Cruise car would have failed in the exact same way, there just wouldn't be an extra human in the loop to blame.
  - mint2 4y ago
    Not familiar with sf or cities? Cars, delivery trucks, garbages trucks often stop in traffic lane for loading/unloading because there is literally nowhere else to stop. It’s annoying but expected and understandable. If they do that prior to sirens showing up there is no issue. They can’t predict the future.
- rglullis 4y ago
  This may seem an wild idea for those in North America, but how about just eliminating car dependency in the first place?
  - throwaway92394 4y ago
    To put it mildly - this is unrealistic in the US except for major cities. Even then, depending on the city and where in the city, its going to be very difficult to convince and implement methods of cutting cars. While I think it's a good idea I just don't see this happening in the majority of the US other then major cities. In my state I just don't see how it would be possible given people commute 30+ miles regularly.
    - rglullis 4y ago
      Start with better zoning laws so that people are not pushed to live 15 miles away from the their work and general/light commerce areas. After that, just copy the playbook from the Netherlands. Amsterdam was very much like most big American cities until the 70s, their streets were steadily being redesigned for human scale and less car dependency. It can be done and it can be done easily if Americans stop believing in their Exceptionalism.
      - Gordonjcp 4y ago
        > After that, just copy the playbook from the Netherlands The Netherlands has a ridiculously dense population and is completely flat. It's only a good model for other places with a ridiculous population density and pancake-flat geography. You couldn't apply the Netherlands model to, for example, Scotland.
        rglullis 4y ago
        Flatlands or not, it does not mean that cars are the only reasonable mode of transportation. Even if you insist of trying to solve a social problem with technology, it would make more sense for those living in hilly areas to push for electric bikes than self-driving cars.
- anonporridge 4y ago
  They need to be able to handle messy situations at least as good as human drivers, which isn't necessarily a high bar. And importantly, unlike human drivers, autonomous cars will only get persistently better at handling these kinds of situations as they encounter more of them.
  - ganbatekudasai 4y ago
    Yes it is an impossibly high bar, and no they will not persistently get better unlike humans until they develop fully generalized AI. It's so an easy to just say human drivers aren't as good, but it's not grounded in any reality. Just take voice controlled assistants for example. We've made pretty big strides on them, haven't we? And yet an entirely unmotivated teenager who's doing badly at school working a 7-Eleven outperforms voice assistants by several orders of magnitudes, through the sheer wonder of context clues and general intelligence, no matter how dim you want to assert that teenager to be. I am proud of my voice assistant when it properly understood that I wanted to indeed set a timer for 50 minutes instead of 15 minutes, while any person would immediately understand what I mean even in a noisy environment just from why I'm setting the timer, and even fuzzily adjust their behavior based on what continues to happen. Anyone who claims automated cars can fully learn the arbitrarily complicated physical situations they have to navigate around is either disingenuous, or does not know how computers work.
  - kergonath 4y ago
    > They need to be able to handle messy situations at least as good as human drivers, which isn't necessarily a high bar. You might have an overly-optimistic opinion of what AI can do. Not to say that humans are not stupid quite often, but we are very far from having AIs that can be as good as a 4 years old child. AIs are good at what they know and what they can account for. So yes, they will get better at what they know, but they cannot, by design, get better at what they don’t. So there will always be situations where they will be unbelievably stupid because their designers did not think it would happen. There is no solution to that at the moment.
anonporridge 4y ago
God awful "journalism".
mawise 4y ago
I wouldn't point the blame to the garbage truck, but I agree with your description of it as scare-bait. I would gladly accept random 25-second delays from the fire department in exchange for eliminating the 30~40k American deaths[1] each year due to traffic fatalities. [1]: https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state-by-state https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state...
2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
The garbage truck being double parked while it was collecting garbage is probably common. They probably are used to routing around them. I go around double parked cars in my city all the time. Sometimes drivers in both directions need to magically negotiate. The driverless car that doesn’t understand it has to safely get out of the way of a fire truck is the new part of this situation.

by flutas 4y ago

aetherson 4y ago

What's your suggestion here? That garbage trucks don't pick up on streets without two lanes in each direction? The reality of driving is that there are a lot of these messy situations, and driverless cars need to be able to handle them.

flutas 4y ago
> What's your suggestion here? That garbage trucks don't pick up on streets without two lanes in each direction? Maybe they don't block the travel lane for extended periods, just like any regular person is expected to not do. The article is basically saying "it's ok for the human driven car to do, but not the self driving car."
- anyfoo 4y ago
  Garbage trucks (the article mentions the operator was working) and other service vehicles, including school busses, are expected to block travel lanes for extended periods and time, and humans are usually able to understand the situation and react accordingly in emergency situations.
- rurp 4y ago
  Suppose the travel lane had been blocked by any other obstacle, say some large object fell into the road. The Cruise car would have failed in the exact same way, there just wouldn't be an extra human in the loop to blame.
- mint2 4y ago
  Not familiar with sf or cities? Cars, delivery trucks, garbages trucks often stop in traffic lane for loading/unloading because there is literally nowhere else to stop. It’s annoying but expected and understandable. If they do that prior to sirens showing up there is no issue. They can’t predict the future.
rglullis 4y ago
This may seem an wild idea for those in North America, but how about just eliminating car dependency in the first place?
- throwaway92394 4y ago
  To put it mildly - this is unrealistic in the US except for major cities. Even then, depending on the city and where in the city, its going to be very difficult to convince and implement methods of cutting cars. While I think it's a good idea I just don't see this happening in the majority of the US other then major cities. In my state I just don't see how it would be possible given people commute 30+ miles regularly.
  - rglullis 4y ago
    Start with better zoning laws so that people are not pushed to live 15 miles away from the their work and general/light commerce areas. After that, just copy the playbook from the Netherlands. Amsterdam was very much like most big American cities until the 70s, their streets were steadily being redesigned for human scale and less car dependency. It can be done and it can be done easily if Americans stop believing in their Exceptionalism.
    - Gordonjcp 4y ago
      > After that, just copy the playbook from the Netherlands The Netherlands has a ridiculously dense population and is completely flat. It's only a good model for other places with a ridiculous population density and pancake-flat geography. You couldn't apply the Netherlands model to, for example, Scotland.
      - rglullis 4y ago
        Flatlands or not, it does not mean that cars are the only reasonable mode of transportation. Even if you insist of trying to solve a social problem with technology, it would make more sense for those living in hilly areas to push for electric bikes than self-driving cars.
anonporridge 4y ago
They need to be able to handle messy situations at least as good as human drivers, which isn't necessarily a high bar. And importantly, unlike human drivers, autonomous cars will only get persistently better at handling these kinds of situations as they encounter more of them.
- ganbatekudasai 4y ago
  Yes it is an impossibly high bar, and no they will not persistently get better unlike humans until they develop fully generalized AI. It's so an easy to just say human drivers aren't as good, but it's not grounded in any reality. Just take voice controlled assistants for example. We've made pretty big strides on them, haven't we? And yet an entirely unmotivated teenager who's doing badly at school working a 7-Eleven outperforms voice assistants by several orders of magnitudes, through the sheer wonder of context clues and general intelligence, no matter how dim you want to assert that teenager to be. I am proud of my voice assistant when it properly understood that I wanted to indeed set a timer for 50 minutes instead of 15 minutes, while any person would immediately understand what I mean even in a noisy environment just from why I'm setting the timer, and even fuzzily adjust their behavior based on what continues to happen. Anyone who claims automated cars can fully learn the arbitrarily complicated physical situations they have to navigate around is either disingenuous, or does not know how computers work.
- kergonath 4y ago
  > They need to be able to handle messy situations at least as good as human drivers, which isn't necessarily a high bar. You might have an overly-optimistic opinion of what AI can do. Not to say that humans are not stupid quite often, but we are very far from having AIs that can be as good as a 4 years old child. AIs are good at what they know and what they can account for. So yes, they will get better at what they know, but they cannot, by design, get better at what they don’t. So there will always be situations where they will be unbelievably stupid because their designers did not think it would happen. There is no solution to that at the moment.

anonporridge 4y ago

God awful "journalism".

mawise 4y ago

I wouldn't point the blame to the garbage truck, but I agree with your description of it as scare-bait. I would gladly accept random 25-second delays from the fire department in exchange for eliminating the 30~40k American deaths[1] each year due to traffic fatalities. [1]: https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state-by-state https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state...

2muchcoffeeman 4y ago

The garbage truck being double parked while it was collecting garbage is probably common. They probably are used to routing around them. I go around double parked cars in my city all the time. Sometimes drivers in both directions need to magically negotiate. The driverless car that doesn’t understand it has to safely get out of the way of a fire truck is the new part of this situation.