6 ms·

I am just wondering how many people have to die before it finally dawns on on us that the current approach is idiotic. The supposed smart cars can't even talk

I am just wondering how many people have to die before it finally dawns on on us that the current approach is idiotic. The supposed smart cars can't even talk to each-other directly 'without internet' to warn of a car pileup! They can't report to city traffic control about their condition. We should be innovating in infrastructure instead - create standardised computer readable infrared road markings, equip each traffic light and each lamp post with a radio beacon, each crash barrier could have a radio marker, create PUBLIC maps of each city, have a central traffic control sypercomputer in each city provide directions to cars. Have each car painted with infrared markers so they recognise each-other. Provide cyclists with something these cars can recognise. We could even make radar-reflective pants so that autonomous cars see them better. the whoe traffic system needs to be looked at and brought to a new set of standards, whatever they may be. I am not sure what they are, but it should be clear to anyome with half a brain thay having a car use a camera to tell if the traffic light is red or green is idiotic. untill a new system is ready, no car without AGI level ai will ever be safe The only problem is that such collective approach conflicts with the way VCs work.

runarberg 4y ago
Seems to me you’ve just reinvented a city rail transportation system with modern signalling. Modern rail system can indeed drive fully autonomously if they are fully grade separated from street traffic.
AbrahamParangi 4y ago
Even without knowing when AGI will get here, I know it will be faster than solving the collective action problem.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  I think eventually major car manufacturers will work with the regulator to bring on new standards, and it will happen withing 15 years. Infrastructure upgrades will take another 15. Most startups that aim to solve self driving will either find a niche in that ecosystem or go extinct. So I expect reasonable self driving cars to be common in depeloped nations in 2050, while AGI will be just as elusive. In a similar vein, the correct solution to electric trucks is not giant batteries, it's simply overhead wires: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/29/uk-to-study-using-overhead-wires-to-power-long-haul-trucks.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/29/uk-to-study-using-overhead-w...
- imtringued 4y ago
  We are not that far away from implementing negative interest on cash.
zaroth 4y ago
> I am just wondering how many people have to die before it finally dawns on on us that the current approach is idiotic. I was going to say about 30,000 per year in the US, but it’s actually up above 40,000 per year now. [1] - https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/early-estimate-2021-traffic-fatalities https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/early-estimate-2021-tra...
ecshafer 4y ago
40k people are dying a year from cars, and the problem is that driverless electric cars are not the solution. They are the faster horse kind of innovation. If we were serious about reducing fatalities, improving health, and reducing pollution, the solution would be to drastically reduce the amount of miles driven per year and the number and the size of the cars. We need to encourage people to bike and walk and use public transportation. Autonomous trains would work extremely well and we don't have to worry about bicyclists. The zoning laws and car centric development of cities is the issue.
- ghusbands 4y ago
  None or few of those options are particularly accessible (EDIT: for people who cannot walk/cycle long distances). Public transportation often is quite inaccessible while still claiming to be accessible (like the London Underground and the New York Subway). Central management of driverless cars could solve the problem in a more inclusive fashion and isn't just more of the same idea. We should still reduce the size of the vehicles, though. EDIT clarification: Accessibility for wheelchair users, blind people, and anyone with ambulatory restrictions. Most stations are not wheelchair accessible to the train and having to go on much longer routes to compensate is not equal access. And many 'encouraging other use' initiatives block all cars, leaving these people in the lurch. Something that gave door-to-door access to everyone, equally, via a fleet of cars, could be superior.
  - arrrg 4y ago
    If we could reduce car infrastructure to the point where only people who need a car for the transportation to be accessible would use it that would be a dream. I don’t get the accessibility angle at all. It’s a non-issue because you will have a very hard time finding people who have issues with exceptions for accessibility. That would still reduce the need for car infrastructure massively. The thing is, we need to start building the future right now, right here and massively. That means public transportation centric development (= building public transport to nowhere and letting the area develop alongside the walksheds with appropriate mixed use zoning) and actually being brave enough to re-structure existing solutions along those lines. That all isn’t magic, we just need to do it. We know it works, it doesn’t require any technological breakthroughs.
la64710 4y ago
>>The supposed smart cars can't even talk to each-other directly 'without internet' to warn of a car pileup! They can't report to city traffic control about their condition. - This by far in my opinion is the single most important attribute of any autonomous fleet of vehicles that is needed. There should be first of all a standard of communication via RFC defined for autonomous vehicles and drones. Any vendor manufacturing autonomous vehicles or drones should follow this standard of communication and be able to communicate to each other with the primary objective of avoiding collisions. This should be a RFC so that it works across vendors and is as standardized as TCP/IP. Communication medium can be over radio frequencies as well as the internet and can work as backup of each other but first there should be a established standard that all vendors adheres to.
- varjag 4y ago
  I think this is a bad idea. The potential for a malicious/incompetent/malfunctioning actor to wreck havoc becomes enormous. Vehicles should assess and plan driving from first principles and physical sensory inputs. Networked inputs could be helpful as augmentation but it's not something one should rely on at all. Kind of like you shouldn't take a human showing/not showing a turn for a reliable signal of intent.
  - la64710 4y ago
    Yes this is augmentation only but it is essential to have. This is what replaces a driver to driver communication part. Like two drivers at a four way crossing sometimes signaling each other. BTW being opinionated is fine but no need to downvote
    - varjag 4y ago
      Say what? I didn't downvote you.
  - shagie 4y ago
    Gonna recommend Car Wars by Cory Doctorow - https://web.archive.org/web/20170112064813/http://this.deakin.edu.au/culture/car-wars https://web.archive.org/web/20170112064813/http://this.deaki...
geuis 4y ago
You're describing exactly the kind of autonomous car development that was going on for the last 40 years. It went absolutely nowhere. It wasn't until tech got good enough and developers started treating vehicles as independent agents that any real progress has been made.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
vassilevsky 4y ago
I totally agree. We should start with the infrastructure.
dogman144 4y ago
Sounds like a lot of infra and related spend via taxes or muni debt for a tech outcome that’s a privacy and autonomy nightmare. Build some trains, build some bike lanes, and leave the people alone who don’t want their transportation and the downstream reasons people use it taken over by tech. Governance by a central cybernetic super computer and all the cybernetic hypothesis coming true. Good lord.
- throwaway0a5e 4y ago
  >Sounds like a lot of infra and related spend via taxes or muni debt for a tech outcome that’s a privacy and autonomy nightmare. That unfortunately puts it right in line with every other tech-heavy thing taxpayers have have to pony up for this century.
  - dogman144 4y ago
    Indeed. I raise issue with the unthinking advocacy here, as if civil society is just a canvas for engineers to paint over. It’s the only thing I hate about this industry. It’s UX-oriented as long as tech is part of the UX. I may sound like a Luddite but I recall being able to go out in NYC without needing to QR-code scan my way through daily life.
- runarberg 4y ago
  I think you hit the nail on the head with trains, because your parent is pretty much describing a modern train signaling system, down to the centralized supercomputer. > create standardised computer readable infrared road markings, equip each traffic light and each lamp post with a radio beacon, each crash barrier could have a radio marker, create PUBLIC maps of each city, have a central traffic control sypercomputer in each city provide directions to cars. Have each car painted with infrared markers so they recognise each-other. It is amazing how often tech savy folks can reinvent trains.
hcks 4y ago
This seems to be the dominant opinion is here, that is, to approach this problem as we approached civil aviation and flying commercial planes. To respond in a sentence: first, you have no proof that "investing in infrastructure" would actually yield working autonomous cars. Second, there are no proof either that the current approaches are doomed to fail. To respond in details: everything that you propose doesn't seem to be able to solve the main challenges that self-driving cars are facing. These challenges are all about edge-cases, and responding safely to changing conditions and misbehaviors from other agents. The response cannot be "let's add a ton of fragile electronics in all of the infrastructure" because this: will cost a ton of money to build and maintain, will break in weird ways over time and lead to cascading failures, and most importantly: it's dubious that it would even work at all. The final comment about VCs is weird: a lot of actors in this field are not VC backed startups. My opinion is: Tesla might have a working model that outperform human drivers in 10 years (50% confidence)
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  > These challenges are all about edge-cases, and responding safely to changing conditions and misbehaviors from other agents... The response cannot be "let's add a ton of fragile electronics" Self driving car has failed to detect a person in the dark and killed her. It was demonstrated that Tesla autopilot fails to detect a child crossing the road. It confused a semi trailer and an underpass. You call that an edge case? > The response cannot be "let's add a ton of fragile electronics in all of the infrastructure" So instead we will add a ton of fragile electronics in every car. Instead of having 3 optimally positioned lidars monitoring an intersection, we will have 20 poorly positioned lidars on every car. You don't need electronis, you can use paint. You can put QR codes that tell a car where it is in an underground parking lot. If we add a parrern to all clothing in infrared-only paint, that would help various AI detect people and tell them apart from surroundings. You can put a metal patterns on street signs that are detected by automotive radar. > will cost a ton of money to build and maintain And electronics in the cars will cost even more > will break in weird ways over time and lead to cascading failures You mean like the failure the main article is discussing right now? > it's dubious that it would even work at all And it's dubious this 'individual' approach will ever work. Every single argument you've made equally applies to the approach you are advocating.
HelixEndeavor 4y ago
That's a lot of effort, money, and infrastructure that could go into developing a healthy public transportation system instead of trying to stop all the cars from killing people.

runarberg 4y ago

Seems to me you’ve just reinvented a city rail transportation system with modern signalling. Modern rail system can indeed drive fully autonomously if they are fully grade separated from street traffic.

AbrahamParangi 4y ago

Even without knowing when AGI will get here, I know it will be faster than solving the collective action problem.

ClumsyPilot 4y ago
I think eventually major car manufacturers will work with the regulator to bring on new standards, and it will happen withing 15 years. Infrastructure upgrades will take another 15. Most startups that aim to solve self driving will either find a niche in that ecosystem or go extinct. So I expect reasonable self driving cars to be common in depeloped nations in 2050, while AGI will be just as elusive. In a similar vein, the correct solution to electric trucks is not giant batteries, it's simply overhead wires: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/29/uk-to-study-using-overhead-wires-to-power-long-haul-trucks.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/29/uk-to-study-using-overhead-w...
imtringued 4y ago
We are not that far away from implementing negative interest on cash.

zaroth 4y ago

> I am just wondering how many people have to die before it finally dawns on on us that the current approach is idiotic. I was going to say about 30,000 per year in the US, but it’s actually up above 40,000 per year now. [1] - https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/early-estimate-2021-traffic-fatalities https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/early-estimate-2021-tra...

ecshafer 4y ago

40k people are dying a year from cars, and the problem is that driverless electric cars are not the solution. They are the faster horse kind of innovation. If we were serious about reducing fatalities, improving health, and reducing pollution, the solution would be to drastically reduce the amount of miles driven per year and the number and the size of the cars. We need to encourage people to bike and walk and use public transportation. Autonomous trains would work extremely well and we don't have to worry about bicyclists. The zoning laws and car centric development of cities is the issue.

ghusbands 4y ago
None or few of those options are particularly accessible (EDIT: for people who cannot walk/cycle long distances). Public transportation often is quite inaccessible while still claiming to be accessible (like the London Underground and the New York Subway). Central management of driverless cars could solve the problem in a more inclusive fashion and isn't just more of the same idea. We should still reduce the size of the vehicles, though. EDIT clarification: Accessibility for wheelchair users, blind people, and anyone with ambulatory restrictions. Most stations are not wheelchair accessible to the train and having to go on much longer routes to compensate is not equal access. And many 'encouraging other use' initiatives block all cars, leaving these people in the lurch. Something that gave door-to-door access to everyone, equally, via a fleet of cars, could be superior.
- arrrg 4y ago
  If we could reduce car infrastructure to the point where only people who need a car for the transportation to be accessible would use it that would be a dream. I don’t get the accessibility angle at all. It’s a non-issue because you will have a very hard time finding people who have issues with exceptions for accessibility. That would still reduce the need for car infrastructure massively. The thing is, we need to start building the future right now, right here and massively. That means public transportation centric development (= building public transport to nowhere and letting the area develop alongside the walksheds with appropriate mixed use zoning) and actually being brave enough to re-structure existing solutions along those lines. That all isn’t magic, we just need to do it. We know it works, it doesn’t require any technological breakthroughs.

la64710 4y ago

>>The supposed smart cars can't even talk to each-other directly 'without internet' to warn of a car pileup! They can't report to city traffic control about their condition. - This by far in my opinion is the single most important attribute of any autonomous fleet of vehicles that is needed. There should be first of all a standard of communication via RFC defined for autonomous vehicles and drones. Any vendor manufacturing autonomous vehicles or drones should follow this standard of communication and be able to communicate to each other with the primary objective of avoiding collisions. This should be a RFC so that it works across vendors and is as standardized as TCP/IP. Communication medium can be over radio frequencies as well as the internet and can work as backup of each other but first there should be a established standard that all vendors adheres to.

varjag 4y ago
I think this is a bad idea. The potential for a malicious/incompetent/malfunctioning actor to wreck havoc becomes enormous. Vehicles should assess and plan driving from first principles and physical sensory inputs. Networked inputs could be helpful as augmentation but it's not something one should rely on at all. Kind of like you shouldn't take a human showing/not showing a turn for a reliable signal of intent.
- la64710 4y ago
  Yes this is augmentation only but it is essential to have. This is what replaces a driver to driver communication part. Like two drivers at a four way crossing sometimes signaling each other. BTW being opinionated is fine but no need to downvote
  - varjag 4y ago
    Say what? I didn't downvote you.
- shagie 4y ago
  Gonna recommend Car Wars by Cory Doctorow - https://web.archive.org/web/20170112064813/http://this.deakin.edu.au/culture/car-wars https://web.archive.org/web/20170112064813/http://this.deaki...

geuis 4y ago

You're describing exactly the kind of autonomous car development that was going on for the last 40 years. It went absolutely nowhere. It wasn't until tech got good enough and developers started treating vehicles as independent agents that any real progress has been made.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

vassilevsky 4y ago

I totally agree. We should start with the infrastructure.

dogman144 4y ago

Sounds like a lot of infra and related spend via taxes or muni debt for a tech outcome that’s a privacy and autonomy nightmare. Build some trains, build some bike lanes, and leave the people alone who don’t want their transportation and the downstream reasons people use it taken over by tech. Governance by a central cybernetic super computer and all the cybernetic hypothesis coming true. Good lord.

throwaway0a5e 4y ago
>Sounds like a lot of infra and related spend via taxes or muni debt for a tech outcome that’s a privacy and autonomy nightmare. That unfortunately puts it right in line with every other tech-heavy thing taxpayers have have to pony up for this century.
- dogman144 4y ago
  Indeed. I raise issue with the unthinking advocacy here, as if civil society is just a canvas for engineers to paint over. It’s the only thing I hate about this industry. It’s UX-oriented as long as tech is part of the UX. I may sound like a Luddite but I recall being able to go out in NYC without needing to QR-code scan my way through daily life.
runarberg 4y ago
I think you hit the nail on the head with trains, because your parent is pretty much describing a modern train signaling system, down to the centralized supercomputer. > create standardised computer readable infrared road markings, equip each traffic light and each lamp post with a radio beacon, each crash barrier could have a radio marker, create PUBLIC maps of each city, have a central traffic control sypercomputer in each city provide directions to cars. Have each car painted with infrared markers so they recognise each-other. It is amazing how often tech savy folks can reinvent trains.

hcks 4y ago

This seems to be the dominant opinion is here, that is, to approach this problem as we approached civil aviation and flying commercial planes. To respond in a sentence: first, you have no proof that "investing in infrastructure" would actually yield working autonomous cars. Second, there are no proof either that the current approaches are doomed to fail. To respond in details: everything that you propose doesn't seem to be able to solve the main challenges that self-driving cars are facing. These challenges are all about edge-cases, and responding safely to changing conditions and misbehaviors from other agents. The response cannot be "let's add a ton of fragile electronics in all of the infrastructure" because this: will cost a ton of money to build and maintain, will break in weird ways over time and lead to cascading failures, and most importantly: it's dubious that it would even work at all. The final comment about VCs is weird: a lot of actors in this field are not VC backed startups. My opinion is: Tesla might have a working model that outperform human drivers in 10 years (50% confidence)

ClumsyPilot 4y ago
> These challenges are all about edge-cases, and responding safely to changing conditions and misbehaviors from other agents... The response cannot be "let's add a ton of fragile electronics" Self driving car has failed to detect a person in the dark and killed her. It was demonstrated that Tesla autopilot fails to detect a child crossing the road. It confused a semi trailer and an underpass. You call that an edge case? > The response cannot be "let's add a ton of fragile electronics in all of the infrastructure" So instead we will add a ton of fragile electronics in every car. Instead of having 3 optimally positioned lidars monitoring an intersection, we will have 20 poorly positioned lidars on every car. You don't need electronis, you can use paint. You can put QR codes that tell a car where it is in an underground parking lot. If we add a parrern to all clothing in infrared-only paint, that would help various AI detect people and tell them apart from surroundings. You can put a metal patterns on street signs that are detected by automotive radar. > will cost a ton of money to build and maintain And electronics in the cars will cost even more > will break in weird ways over time and lead to cascading failures You mean like the failure the main article is discussing right now? > it's dubious that it would even work at all And it's dubious this 'individual' approach will ever work. Every single argument you've made equally applies to the approach you are advocating.

HelixEndeavor 4y ago

That's a lot of effort, money, and infrastructure that could go into developing a healthy public transportation system instead of trying to stop all the cars from killing people.