8 ms·

I remain convinced that "real" self driving (as in: go ahead and sleep in the backseat) will never happen without changes to road infrastructure and possibly so

I remain convinced that "real" self driving (as in: go ahead and sleep in the backseat) will never happen without changes to road infrastructure and possibly some sort of segregation between robot-driven cars and people-driven cars. Things like traffic signals that actively communicate their status to nearby robot cars (more than just a red lamp that can be occluded by weather, other vehicles, or mud on the camera lens). Or lane markings that are more than just reflective paint, but can be sensed via RF. Rules around temporary construction that dictate the manner of signage and cone placement that the robot cars can understand. The cones might have little transponders in them, I don't know. But without a massive leap forward in AI capability, our current road system—optimized for human drivers over the past century—is not going to work. If we can't make the cars just as smart as an alert and capable driver, then maybe we need to meet halfway and make the roads a littler "dumber" (simpler) to accommodate the robots.

highwaylights 4y ago
What if we just, you know, walk a bit more instead? Or even cycle? I hear great things.
- actionablefiber 4y ago
  The pattern of zoning and development that the U.S. has used for the past 70 years assumes that nobody wants to walk or cycle anywhere and that they feel so strongly about it that they want cities to be built such that people will die if they attempt to do so. I grew up in a neighborhood where the elementary school was about half a mile away... on the other side of a five lane highway with no crosswalk and no sidewalk on the other side. Zero chance to assert your independence as a kid. Zero chance to live responsibly as an adult. A part of the reason people wish they had FSD so badly is because they want to be rescued from this fundamental failure of NA-style urban planning that necessities driving, all the time, across both short and long distances.
  - 8jef 4y ago
    Good point
  - pm90 4y ago
    This is changing though. Cities are getting bikes and bike lanes. They’re building dense developments close to transit. ebikes + protected bike lanes + TOD might be the solution.
    - actionablefiber 4y ago
      I certainly hope so, and I've since moved to a place that is much more friendly for cycling; however if you go back to where I'm from (which for the purposes of this topic really could be one of any untold hundreds of counties in the U.S.), there are no signs of improvement or change. It's just the largest urban cores that seem to slowly be getting it. There is a breathtakingly large amount of suburban sprawl where the conversation about this topic is completely broken, and for the people willing to admit there even is a problem, they believe that the solution is one more lane, or one more stop sign, or just educating drivers a little bit better and nobody wants to talk about things like traffic calming, or upzoning, or cycle paths or anything else that makes anything other than car trips safe and desirable.
- caymanjim 4y ago
  Clearly you live in a large city and find everything you want there.
  - na85 4y ago
    I mean there's a reason for the slow and steady trend of North Americans leaving small towns for big cities.
    - mandeepj 4y ago
      > I mean there's a reason for the slow and steady trend of North Americans leaving small towns for big cities I heard the other way - people leaving cities for suburbs
      - 8jef 4y ago
        Suburbs needs to be close to big cities to be considered as such.
  - rsynnott 4y ago
    This is a bit of an oddity of US urban planning. The US has maybe 10 big to very big cities, where people can get around on foot, and then a host of what are called cities in the US but are essentially just collections of shopping centres, office parks, industrial estates, vaguely near each other. It doesn't work like that in most countries; small cities and towns are navigable on foot and public transport.
    - iainmerrick 4y ago
      Public transport often means buses, though, so self-driving AI is still very relevant there. If you could replace double-decker buses that arrive every 15–30 minutes with self-driving minibuses that arrive every 3–5 minutes, that would be great! (for everyone except the bus drivers who lose their jobs)
      - 4y ago
Twirrim 4y ago
> Things like traffic signals that actively communicate their status to nearby robot cars (more than just a red lamp that can be occluded by weather, other vehicles, or mud on the camera lens). Or lane markings that are more than just reflective paint, but can be sensed via RF. Rules around temporary construction that dictate the manner of signage and cone placement that the robot cars can understand. The cones might have little transponders in them, I don't know. The problem you then face is that any of those could be forged / faked without some kind of way of securely validating the message in some way. You could cause absolute chaos by driving down the road broadcasting false messages. It's a little harder to hack and modify traffic light signals, for example. But we've also seen hackers screw up Tesla cars by sticking stuff on the back of their car to deliberate mislead it based on vision.
- zmmmmm 4y ago
  > any of those could be forged / faked without some kind of way of securely validating the message Any reason routine crypto methods would not solve this? Seems like one of the easier parts to me.
  - alasdair_ 4y ago
    Who controls the signing keys and the whole signing process? What about key revocation if someone steals the key? Will a municipality in Texas really be willing to not be allowed to create a new stoplight without approval from the federal agency in charge of the keys? What’s to stop someone stealing a “real” stoplight from bumfuck nowhere and putting it in the middle of the 101 at rush hour? What about replay attacks? What about signal jamming? Etc. etc.
    - zmmmmm 4y ago
      You raise some genuine possible concerns but generically I'd probably tend to just say, "laws will stop them" just like they already stop someone deliberately endangering lives by placing a real fake stop light in the middle of the 101 at rush hour. The real concern would be whether someone can engineer a terrorist level mass scale attack but as long as it requires physical tampering that adds up to a tremendous amount of work. So if the signalling is largely burned into fixed infastructure it eliminates a lot of that or at least sets the bar high enough that its probably more work than various other types of attack that are likely to be just as impactful.
rightbyte 4y ago
What you are describing is essentially railway system.
- ok_dad 4y ago
  It’s almost as if we should invest in public transportation and try to reduce cars rather than make a train car for each individual!
  - 8jef 4y ago
    But for people, in the same way as for parcels, power, cable, fiber-optic, there's the last mile problem. Europe has almost solved it with high speed trains and efficient city transit. Then, it solves nothing for all those folks living in rural areas and having to drive f-150s.
    - pm90 4y ago
      > Then, it solves nothing for all those folks living in rural areas and having to drive f-150s. Fortunately thats not a lot of people. When electricity was being rolled out, Westinghouse and Edison didn’t bellyache about not being able to provide electricity to rural areas. They electrified all the cities. Rural areas will just never be able to pay for modern infrastructure. And… thats ok, its not a lot of people.
      - JaimeThompson 4y ago
        Perhaps the urban areas should grow their own food?
        ok_dad 4y ago
        I think the point was that in rural areas they'll still use cars or something, because it's way more efficient for the low density there. In cities, you would switch away from cars as much as possible. I don't think the commenter meant we'd "abandon the hicks" or something rude like that; the rural folks who farm and do other important jobs are a crucial part of our society for sure.
zmmmmm 4y ago
I wonder if all the "hype" from the Ubers and Googles about imminent self-driving is not actively harmful in that it is probably sucking out the oxygen from any perceived need to implement these things.
- ItsMonkk 4y ago
  This is mostly what I believe to be the case, and as I argue here[0], it doesn't even make any sense. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31968482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31968482
killdozer 4y ago
`possibly some sort of segregation between robot-driven cars and people-driven cars.` just build out public transit at that point, what's the difference.
throwaway123989 4y ago
> I remain convinced that "real" self driving (as in: go ahead and sleep in the backseat) will never happen without changes to road infrastructure and possibly some sort of segregation between robot-driven cars and people-driven cars. Yep, I talk to people working in traffic engineering, and their mindset is always building new road tech and road-side and cloud infra to support autonomous driving. They have no expectation of fully autonomous vehicle without road and infrastructure assistance. And from historical perspective, the coming of automotive and the replacement of horse and other animal carts, are exactly facilitated by the road transformation; which has been the single largest scale infrastructure in human history. It makes no sense that an even bigger transformation of the vehicle would require less drastic road transformation.
- RC_ITR 4y ago
  Which is funny because everything sort of comes back to trains. The very marginal benefits of laying road vs track more or less disappear when automation in play. Is is really worth maintaining the ability to go off road/track when you’re not even driving anymore?
  - glitchc 4y ago
    Exactly. All edge cases disappear when you lay tracks on the road.
  - dreamcompiler 4y ago
    Yes. You bring up a great point: With some infrastructure improvements we could have "virtual" trains. Vehicles would talk to each other on the highway and organize into closely-spaced convoys. Only the lead vehicle would need an active human driver; the rest could follow at extremely close distances--drafting off each other--and would not need a human driver (or their human drivers could go off-duty). The point of using asphalt rather than rails is that it makes it easy to switch between individual car mode and automated virtual train mode. This idea is not new and it mostly applies to freight convoys but I think it also has merit for ad hoc passenger car convoys on long highway trips.
dogmatism 4y ago
> optimized for human drivers over the past century Are our roads really? Most in cities over a certain age are just haphazard relics of times gone by, and don't get me started on "stroads" which are good for nobody
capitalsigma 4y ago
You can get a self driving car ride and sleep in the back in Arizona, from Waymo. If you're on a special list, it sounds like you can do it in SF today with Cruise. Your claim is manifestly false.
FireBeyond 4y ago
> Things like traffic signals that actively communicate their status This is a thing in Europe, and even some US cities - my Audi has traffic sign recognition and when at a compatible intersection knows what the light is at (by radio, not by light), and how long until it changes (will show a countdown in seconds til the next light change).
pas 4y ago
massive AI leap? but we can ask language models about how to drive through an intersection and it will list the steps correctly (and wildly incorrectly at other times) what's missing is combining this kind of "human concept relations" model (language, rules, minimal reasoning, text encoded human preferences) with perception, and safety (which means that the model should know that if other cars are driving just fine in front then it's unlikely that the road is on fire, or that the low certainty crack in the road is okay if two other cars already went over it unimpeded, if the road marks and the signs are inconsistent, but other vehicles have formed a slow but consistent pattern of traffic then that's the local ruleset, and so on) it's still a very hard problem. and the required amount of compute is still bonkers, the required amount of data and training is still absolutely huge, and the whole problem of safely disengaging, handling the asleep/drunk passengers (likely target audience after all)... are all hard problems too :)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ruh-roh 4y ago
> If we can't make the cars just as smart as an alert and capable driver, then maybe we need to meet halfway and make the roads a littler "dumber" (simpler) to accommodate the robots. This aspect of FSD has always fascinated me and I'm a little surprised it doesn't get more discussion. Meeting halfway. At what point could/would/should FSD influence the environment around it? For example - a poorly painted road sign*. Tesla/Waymo could say "We cannot support L5 FSD on this road until you fix this sign." If it meant a step forward in autonomy, Tesla/Waymo could even offer to share the cost of that improvement! There are a million reasons why implementation of that would be problematic. Costs and incentives would be all over the place. But I am more interested in the framing: The machines are the ones that need to adapt. Which is essentially hoping for continued hardware improvements or a spaghetti mess of if/else statements. ie "do this weird thing if you see this other weird thing in front of you". Can we get rid of the weird thing and avoid the engineering challenge altogether? * Yes, this is an overly simple example. Some environment changes could be so large that they would require a full redesign of a city/buildings/traffic patterns. But surely there are classes of improvements where some are easier than others.

highwaylights 4y ago

What if we just, you know, walk a bit more instead? Or even cycle? I hear great things.

actionablefiber 4y ago
The pattern of zoning and development that the U.S. has used for the past 70 years assumes that nobody wants to walk or cycle anywhere and that they feel so strongly about it that they want cities to be built such that people will die if they attempt to do so. I grew up in a neighborhood where the elementary school was about half a mile away... on the other side of a five lane highway with no crosswalk and no sidewalk on the other side. Zero chance to assert your independence as a kid. Zero chance to live responsibly as an adult. A part of the reason people wish they had FSD so badly is because they want to be rescued from this fundamental failure of NA-style urban planning that necessities driving, all the time, across both short and long distances.
- 8jef 4y ago
  Good point
- pm90 4y ago
  This is changing though. Cities are getting bikes and bike lanes. They’re building dense developments close to transit. ebikes + protected bike lanes + TOD might be the solution.
  - actionablefiber 4y ago
    I certainly hope so, and I've since moved to a place that is much more friendly for cycling; however if you go back to where I'm from (which for the purposes of this topic really could be one of any untold hundreds of counties in the U.S.), there are no signs of improvement or change. It's just the largest urban cores that seem to slowly be getting it. There is a breathtakingly large amount of suburban sprawl where the conversation about this topic is completely broken, and for the people willing to admit there even is a problem, they believe that the solution is one more lane, or one more stop sign, or just educating drivers a little bit better and nobody wants to talk about things like traffic calming, or upzoning, or cycle paths or anything else that makes anything other than car trips safe and desirable.
caymanjim 4y ago
Clearly you live in a large city and find everything you want there.
- na85 4y ago
  I mean there's a reason for the slow and steady trend of North Americans leaving small towns for big cities.
  - mandeepj 4y ago
    > I mean there's a reason for the slow and steady trend of North Americans leaving small towns for big cities I heard the other way - people leaving cities for suburbs
    - 8jef 4y ago
      Suburbs needs to be close to big cities to be considered as such.
- rsynnott 4y ago
  This is a bit of an oddity of US urban planning. The US has maybe 10 big to very big cities, where people can get around on foot, and then a host of what are called cities in the US but are essentially just collections of shopping centres, office parks, industrial estates, vaguely near each other. It doesn't work like that in most countries; small cities and towns are navigable on foot and public transport.
  - iainmerrick 4y ago
    Public transport often means buses, though, so self-driving AI is still very relevant there. If you could replace double-decker buses that arrive every 15–30 minutes with self-driving minibuses that arrive every 3–5 minutes, that would be great! (for everyone except the bus drivers who lose their jobs)
    - 4y ago

Twirrim 4y ago

> Things like traffic signals that actively communicate their status to nearby robot cars (more than just a red lamp that can be occluded by weather, other vehicles, or mud on the camera lens). Or lane markings that are more than just reflective paint, but can be sensed via RF. Rules around temporary construction that dictate the manner of signage and cone placement that the robot cars can understand. The cones might have little transponders in them, I don't know. The problem you then face is that any of those could be forged / faked without some kind of way of securely validating the message in some way. You could cause absolute chaos by driving down the road broadcasting false messages. It's a little harder to hack and modify traffic light signals, for example. But we've also seen hackers screw up Tesla cars by sticking stuff on the back of their car to deliberate mislead it based on vision.

zmmmmm 4y ago
> any of those could be forged / faked without some kind of way of securely validating the message Any reason routine crypto methods would not solve this? Seems like one of the easier parts to me.
- alasdair_ 4y ago
  Who controls the signing keys and the whole signing process? What about key revocation if someone steals the key? Will a municipality in Texas really be willing to not be allowed to create a new stoplight without approval from the federal agency in charge of the keys? What’s to stop someone stealing a “real” stoplight from bumfuck nowhere and putting it in the middle of the 101 at rush hour? What about replay attacks? What about signal jamming? Etc. etc.
  - zmmmmm 4y ago
    You raise some genuine possible concerns but generically I'd probably tend to just say, "laws will stop them" just like they already stop someone deliberately endangering lives by placing a real fake stop light in the middle of the 101 at rush hour. The real concern would be whether someone can engineer a terrorist level mass scale attack but as long as it requires physical tampering that adds up to a tremendous amount of work. So if the signalling is largely burned into fixed infastructure it eliminates a lot of that or at least sets the bar high enough that its probably more work than various other types of attack that are likely to be just as impactful.

rightbyte 4y ago

What you are describing is essentially railway system.

ok_dad 4y ago
It’s almost as if we should invest in public transportation and try to reduce cars rather than make a train car for each individual!
- 8jef 4y ago
  But for people, in the same way as for parcels, power, cable, fiber-optic, there's the last mile problem. Europe has almost solved it with high speed trains and efficient city transit. Then, it solves nothing for all those folks living in rural areas and having to drive f-150s.
  - pm90 4y ago
    > Then, it solves nothing for all those folks living in rural areas and having to drive f-150s. Fortunately thats not a lot of people. When electricity was being rolled out, Westinghouse and Edison didn’t bellyache about not being able to provide electricity to rural areas. They electrified all the cities. Rural areas will just never be able to pay for modern infrastructure. And… thats ok, its not a lot of people.
    - JaimeThompson 4y ago
      Perhaps the urban areas should grow their own food?
      - ok_dad 4y ago
        I think the point was that in rural areas they'll still use cars or something, because it's way more efficient for the low density there. In cities, you would switch away from cars as much as possible. I don't think the commenter meant we'd "abandon the hicks" or something rude like that; the rural folks who farm and do other important jobs are a crucial part of our society for sure.

zmmmmm 4y ago

I wonder if all the "hype" from the Ubers and Googles about imminent self-driving is not actively harmful in that it is probably sucking out the oxygen from any perceived need to implement these things.

ItsMonkk 4y ago
This is mostly what I believe to be the case, and as I argue here[0], it doesn't even make any sense. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31968482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31968482

killdozer 4y ago

`possibly some sort of segregation between robot-driven cars and people-driven cars.` just build out public transit at that point, what's the difference.

throwaway123989 4y ago

> I remain convinced that "real" self driving (as in: go ahead and sleep in the backseat) will never happen without changes to road infrastructure and possibly some sort of segregation between robot-driven cars and people-driven cars. Yep, I talk to people working in traffic engineering, and their mindset is always building new road tech and road-side and cloud infra to support autonomous driving. They have no expectation of fully autonomous vehicle without road and infrastructure assistance. And from historical perspective, the coming of automotive and the replacement of horse and other animal carts, are exactly facilitated by the road transformation; which has been the single largest scale infrastructure in human history. It makes no sense that an even bigger transformation of the vehicle would require less drastic road transformation.

RC_ITR 4y ago
Which is funny because everything sort of comes back to trains. The very marginal benefits of laying road vs track more or less disappear when automation in play. Is is really worth maintaining the ability to go off road/track when you’re not even driving anymore?
- glitchc 4y ago
  Exactly. All edge cases disappear when you lay tracks on the road.
- dreamcompiler 4y ago
  Yes. You bring up a great point: With some infrastructure improvements we could have "virtual" trains. Vehicles would talk to each other on the highway and organize into closely-spaced convoys. Only the lead vehicle would need an active human driver; the rest could follow at extremely close distances--drafting off each other--and would not need a human driver (or their human drivers could go off-duty). The point of using asphalt rather than rails is that it makes it easy to switch between individual car mode and automated virtual train mode. This idea is not new and it mostly applies to freight convoys but I think it also has merit for ad hoc passenger car convoys on long highway trips.

dogmatism 4y ago

> optimized for human drivers over the past century Are our roads really? Most in cities over a certain age are just haphazard relics of times gone by, and don't get me started on "stroads" which are good for nobody

capitalsigma 4y ago

You can get a self driving car ride and sleep in the back in Arizona, from Waymo. If you're on a special list, it sounds like you can do it in SF today with Cruise. Your claim is manifestly false.

FireBeyond 4y ago

> Things like traffic signals that actively communicate their status This is a thing in Europe, and even some US cities - my Audi has traffic sign recognition and when at a compatible intersection knows what the light is at (by radio, not by light), and how long until it changes (will show a countdown in seconds til the next light change).

pas 4y ago

massive AI leap? but we can ask language models about how to drive through an intersection and it will list the steps correctly (and wildly incorrectly at other times) what's missing is combining this kind of "human concept relations" model (language, rules, minimal reasoning, text encoded human preferences) with perception, and safety (which means that the model should know that if other cars are driving just fine in front then it's unlikely that the road is on fire, or that the low certainty crack in the road is okay if two other cars already went over it unimpeded, if the road marks and the signs are inconsistent, but other vehicles have formed a slow but consistent pattern of traffic then that's the local ruleset, and so on) it's still a very hard problem. and the required amount of compute is still bonkers, the required amount of data and training is still absolutely huge, and the whole problem of safely disengaging, handling the asleep/drunk passengers (likely target audience after all)... are all hard problems too :)

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ruh-roh 4y ago

> If we can't make the cars just as smart as an alert and capable driver, then maybe we need to meet halfway and make the roads a littler "dumber" (simpler) to accommodate the robots. This aspect of FSD has always fascinated me and I'm a little surprised it doesn't get more discussion. Meeting halfway. At what point could/would/should FSD influence the environment around it? For example - a poorly painted road sign*. Tesla/Waymo could say "We cannot support L5 FSD on this road until you fix this sign." If it meant a step forward in autonomy, Tesla/Waymo could even offer to share the cost of that improvement! There are a million reasons why implementation of that would be problematic. Costs and incentives would be all over the place. But I am more interested in the framing: The machines are the ones that need to adapt. Which is essentially hoping for continued hardware improvements or a spaghetti mess of if/else statements. ie "do this weird thing if you see this other weird thing in front of you". Can we get rid of the weird thing and avoid the engineering challenge altogether? * Yes, this is an overly simple example. Some environment changes could be so large that they would require a full redesign of a city/buildings/traffic patterns. But surely there are classes of improvements where some are easier than others.