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With all of the talk, usually around Teslas but I suppose it applies to all EVs, that I've seen over the years akin to, "Just imagine how safe driving will be w
by jjulius 4y ago
With all of the talk, usually around Teslas but I suppose it applies to all EVs, that I've seen over the years akin to, "Just imagine how safe driving will be when every vehicle is FSD and can talk to one another," I have to ask... shouldn't we anticipate seeing similar issues to this in that scenario?
I mean yeah, there will be different manufacturers so it's not like every car in a city could come to a standstill. And I'm also speaking from a place of ignorance, so please correct me if I'm off-base. But isn't this kind of a thing (mass stoppages of entire fleets) a cause for concern as we see increased FSD adoption?
- synicalx 4y ago> "Just imagine how safe driving will be when every vehicle is FSD and can talk to one another," Some genius 10x'er forgets to carry the 1 or something, and all of a sudden an entire city full of cars all collide with pedestrians all at once.
- not_your_mother 4y agoAnd that will usher in the great Engineering licensing requirements for building high-risk software.
- synicalx 4y agoCan't come soon enough IMO
- al_borland 4y agoWe could have the same fear with all these satellites being shot up into space. Couldn't they all start raining down on earth with some poor calculations or coding mistakes in the course-correction software? I don't know enough about this stuff to know if this is a realistic thing or just the premise of a bad sci-fi movie.
- synicalx 4y agoSatellites would, I assume, burn up on re-enter if they happened to de-orbit. I'm more worried about them banging into one another and surrounding the Earth in an impenetrable debris field that makes future space exploration/travel nearly impossible - IMO that would be a death sentence for all of us.
- al_borland 4y agoMaybe Team Seas can pivot to space once they take care of the oceans.
- unnouinceput 4y ago1 - they burn in atmosphere 2 - each satellite is under observation by a team 3 - how many satellites do you think are there actually? Not that many, unlike the driverless cars we are setting up nowadays 4 - Earth is actually big. Satellite pouring down all at once and you'll have maximum like 100 casualties - worse case scenario if 1). doesn't happen. Cars OTOH are in busy cities. One battery to explode and can easily do 100 casualties
- redisman 4y ago> One battery to explode and can easily do 100 casualties That’s definitely not true. A 66KWh battery is not a tactical nuke
- jfoster 4y agoI think autonomous cars are something that must happen, and the sooner the better, but I am also a bit concerned that they could represent the ultimate weapon if a malicious actor gained control over them. One battery fire isn't a problem, but if every 2nd car in a city or country crashes into something in a way that starts a fire, that becomes a very big problem extremely quickly.
- unnouinceput 4y agoWatch on youtube any video that shows puncturing a cellphone battery what happens. Then scale that up and imagine a scenario where one idiot on drugs drives one in supermarket or mall entrance and the car's battery gets punctured. After that comeback and tell me you still think 100 casualties are hard to happen from only one EV car.
- TheSpiceIsLife 4y agoEvery new technological advance brings with it new possibilities for human creativity, and sharing if experience and knowledge. And new ways for us to better destroy ourselves and each other. Imagine, say, a pandemic like lockdown, but now only authorised vehicles may travel at certain times, or at all, and that software is buggy, or gets hacked, or used malevolently by one or another political faction.
- IG_Semmelweiss 4y ago>>>>>Imagine, say, a pandemic like lockdown, but now only authorised vehicles may travel at certain times, or at all, No need to imagine. This was de facto policy for quarantine in most south american countries. You couldnt drive unless: - you were a doctor or politician, then only if - the weekday corresponded to the last digit of your plate, then if, - only before x time, like 10pm, - etc.
- ra7 4y agoGiven the list of things that could go horribly wrong with self driving vehicles, incidents like these are only a minor, harmless inconvenience. The more immediate concern is self driving vehicles that are clearly not ready to be on public roads being allowed to test (or not being pulled off the roads).
- al_borland 4y agoI'd be curious on the statistics related to new under-developed FSD software vs a new teenage driver. The only way for either of these things to get better is through real-world experience.
- jvanderbot 4y agoI wouldn't get in the car with a new teenage driver, nor will I enable self-driving on my cars for a long, long time. And I work in robotics.
- enriquto 4y agoYet every day you get in the road with new teenager drivers (and drunk people, and idiots of all sorts). Doesn't that scare you? Driving is terrifying.
- al_borland 4y agoEvery time I hear people say they don't trust anyone, I wonder if they drive, as it requires an insane level of trust in the rest of humanity.
- jvanderbot 4y agoI am the person I trust the most in my immediate vicinity. Removing me sounds like a downgrade in trust in the overall experience. To my selfish self.
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- duxup 4y agoI’m personally little concern about some horrible mistake resulting in a GTA negative friction carmageddon… either through a bug or hacking https://youtu.be/ifTIuA8Dq58 https://youtu.be/ifTIuA8Dq58
- hirundo 4y agoIf friction becomes negative we'll explode from Brownian motion before an autopilot bug can get us.
- totetsu 4y agoThis reminded me of good ol happy hopeful days of youtube before it was bought by google.
- duxup 4y agoI sometimes wish for an anonymous video service. No channels, no personalities. Just the videos are the focus.
- soulofmischief 4y agowould you be willing to sacrifice quality or latency, or pay a small fee? if so, that seems easy using current distributed tech.
- tsimionescu 4y agoWhat do you mean? Videos of what, made by whom?
- arthurcolle 4y agoIt's like people have totally forgotten about the CAP theorem just because it is cars and not some kind of concurrent threading infrastructure!!
- jeshin 4y agoI feel like a lot of people have kind of wisened up about this hypothetical future anyway, now that we're seeing FSD in practice. Sure, some problems would be eliminated by all cars being self driving, and the roads being tailored to that use case. But then, at the same time, trains literally run on tracks and they still have conductors.
- dclowd9901 4y agoThe answer is going to look like: freeway and maybe roadway driving is autonomous while drivers are expected to takeover for irreconcilable issues. There can be no other way outside of someone actually factually creating general AI.
- tdumitrescu 4y ago> drivers are expected to takeover for irreconcilable issues Remote employee "drivers" take over when a car signals that it doesn't know what to do
- Xylakant 4y ago> Remote employee "drivers" take over when a car signals that it doesn't know what to do Because it has lost connectivity due to a technical glitch, an outage in the cell network, lack of coverage (tunnel, …)
- jfoster 4y agoEven humans can't safely drive in all sets of circumstances. There may even be circumstances where autonomous vehicles can drive, but humans can't or shouldn't.
- semi-extrinsic 4y agoYeah, nah. Even when you put a self-driving race car on a closed track with no other cars, a human driver still beats its time by a handsome margin. In challenging conditions (visibility/rain/ice/etc) the human will absolutely crush the computer. I'm extremely confident that self-driving cars will never make a significant improvement on car safety. I'm also confident that it will never be applicable to anything but highway driving in good weather conditions - we will never see a Level 5 car, those designations have about as much practical relevance to us as the Kardashev scale. First of all, the safety statistics that we have with modern cars today is such that you need to run 10 million cars for several years before you have gathered enough statistics to say whether a new development has actually improved the situation. For instance if you take the Volvo XC90, there has not been a single fatal accident in the US or UK since the model was launched in 2002, with over 1 million such cars sold in those markets combined. That kind of lag in your dev cycle means it's extremely hard to do any sort of meaningful development of a machine learning system in a way that demonstrably improves safety. Second of all, human factors such as being distracted by a cell phone or being intoxicated, plus not wearing a seat belt, accounts for the overwhelming majority of fatal accidents. It is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, much easier to build a system that detects such conditions and then deliberately slows down or stops the car. It's already being deployed today and will only increase in the future, so most of the potential safety improvement from self-driving will be eaten up by other tech.
- BurningFrog 4y agoThis standstill is bad, but it seems perfectly safe.
- bee_rider 4y agoStopping in the middle of the road might be dangerous depending on the situation. If there's something weird about the location where they are stuck -- maybe somebody is jamming GPS or whatever -- then they should at least be able to pull over using local sensors, right? On the other hand, if there's some effect that is tripping up their sensors -- maybe some odd geometry that, for whatever bizarre reason, looks like a wall to them -- this pretty embarassing, but probably an inevitable growing pain for this technology.
- jjulius 4y agoI suppose I could've clarified, I'm not necessarily looking at it from the perspective of the safety of people in the vehicles. Right now it's just a small fleet of driverless taxis. Doesn't this demonstrate the potential for it to be, say, every single Honda in the city? Why even limit it to a city? A single manufacturer's critical infrastructure has some kind of fault (malice, shit code, hardware failure - dealer's choice!) and suddenly Fords stop running nationwide, or internationally. Then I start thinking of the impact to emergency vehicles caused by a cavalcade of stopped cars, and other similar issues. Again, I need to point out that I'm not trying to be sensationalist or hyperbolic. I'm ignorant here and am genuinely curious how viable these types of scenarios could be. It's clear that it can happen, I'm just curious to what extent.
- BurningFrog 4y agoOK, those are actually interesting thoughts on new dangers introduced by self driving cars. I hadn't really thought about new single points of failure vulnerabilities as an aspect of this before. I'm still a big SDC fan, the pros are so massively bigger than the cons, but you've given me a new con to be aware of.
- oconnor663 4y agoOf course it's a cause for concern. It's a perfectly reasonable concern. It's just about certain that early fleets will have big outages for dumb reasons, just like major websites do. The question will be how frequent those are, how dangerous they are, and how effective the mitigations will be as everything matures. As with many of things related to self-driving cars, the target doesn't have to be "perfection" so much as "better than people on average". Human drivers do dumb things in large groups all the time, like highway pileups in bad weather, or rubbernecking traffic jams. I don't think all the humans on earth ever stopped driving at the same time, though, so...that'll be a first :p
- gambiting 4y ago>>the target doesn't have to be "perfection" so much as "better than people on average". You see, I completely disagree with this assumption. They should be perfect or they shouldn't be allowed on the road at all. You wouldn't accept a bread slicer that sometimes erroneously slices off your fingers, as long as it does so less frequently than people slice their own fingers on average, would you?
- distrill 4y agothe comparison is disingenuous, but yes, i absolutely would. "sometimes erroneously slices off your fingers" sounds scary, but if it happens less often than people in the wild, this is absolutely a net gain.
- battlebeansbogs 4y agoYes, I absolutely would. I think a better question is would I want other people to use a bread slicer that chopped my fingers off on average less than they did with a manual version. You might think more highly of your own abilities, but raising the average is worthwhile even if not perfect.
- sushid 4y agoI would if I thought I was worse than the average person at slicing bread. Wouldn't you?
- natch 4y agoI suspect these cars having problems in SF are using a centralized solution, so they are dependent on some server. The better approach is decentralized, with each car built to always fend for itself without a server, imho.
- amq 4y agoBlockchain for the rescue! /s
- Ekaros 4y agoNow I wonder how is this talking to each other done? Is it some centralized cloud service? Or some type of extremely complicated mesh? Both seem to have quite critical risk factors. It is not unseen for clouds to go down and self-organizing mesh networks might not be the stablest things, or even risk free...