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No, it doesn't have to be 'almost perfect'. Significantly better than what we have now (people with emotions and imperfect decision-making, ranging from 19 year

No, it doesn't have to be 'almost perfect'. Significantly better than what we have now (people with emotions and imperfect decision-making, ranging from 19 year-old newbie drivers, 45 year old over-confident CEOs with their SUVs driving in the city to 82 year old drivers who can barely walk so would rather drive) is already a HUGE improvement. "self-driving cars is" not the same as "anti-gravity technology". People - including many innocent people - get killed every day because of reckless driving or human mistakes. People-driven cars also needs more infrastructure - more signs, more roadblocks / infrastructure, cluttering up the city, making it less human-friendly. Cars clog up the city, because people don't want to drive too far to work. Concerning safety and making cities more livable, I only see upsides for autonomous cars. People can work in their cars coming from outside the city. The cars are safer and more reliable. There's less cluttering in the city (e.g. an intersection with 10 signs for each corner), because cars can also communicate in non-visual ways. Plus we've made significant headway and it's not a fantasy anymore. "anti-gravity technology"... is just a random technology. A solution looking for problems to solve, I suppose. With positive and negative consequences.

Aeolun 4y ago
> "anti-gravity technology"... is just a random technology. A solution looking for problems to solve, I suppose. If cars drive above people instead of next to them that would also solve that problem.
semi-extrinsic 4y ago
I'm saying, an AI significantly better than what humans can do today, is just as much a fantasy as anti-gravity technology. People get injured and killed every day because they don't have anti-gravity tech and are trying to lift or move heavy objects. You can make all the same arguments. And most of the "people are stupid" problems with cars are better solved by other tech like driver monitoring - Volvo is already deploying this. Self driving cars/buses is just a fairytale used by Tesla/Uber/etc. tech bros to try and defend their valuations.
- kugelblitz 4y ago
  > I'm saying, an AI significantly better than what humans can do today, is just as much a fantasy as anti-gravity technology. I think this is a key thing where we have differing opinions. I believe an AI taught to drive safely will be significantly better than humans at it. It's not a general purpose AI, just one that is taught to be better at driving. An AI doesn't get distracted as easily. They don't look to the sides for 2 seconds while driving 125 mph on the freeway. They don't check their emails while on a busy city road. They don't need 1-2 seconds to react to a baby stroller emerging from a line of parked cars. My mind has slowly accepting the idea that "specific purpose AI" is already here. Working with an "AI-infused" coding assistant (Github Copilot), it took me a few weeks to get used to. But now I feel it can complete some of my coding assignments at a junior coder level (good effort, but I still need to check the work, sometimes it's non-sense, but many times it's pretty good). I can already off-load some of my routine work to this assistant.
  - cutemonster 4y ago
    > an AI taught to drive safely will be significantly better than humans at it. That would depend on which human you have in mind. Some are 100 x more dangerous than others. (See the link below.) Or 100 x safer depending on what you consider normal You don't happen to know about any statistics about fatalities per 1 billion vehicle-km for (partly) self driving cars? To compare with https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic... Edit: i found: > Overall, autonomous vehicles (AVs) were involved in more crashes: 9.1 crashes per million miles traveled, compared to 4.1 for conventional cars. However, compared to injuries experienced in traditional vehicle collisions, the ones involving injury were minor. https://1800injured.care/self-driving-car-accident-statistics/ https://1800injured.care/self-driving-car-accident-statistic... If that's reliable info, then they'll eventually get better than an average human in the US (or are already). And in some countries, they could be an amazing improvement -- see the insane amount of fatalities, in some countries (Wikipedia link above).
belorn 4y ago
"Significantly better than what we have now" is the hard problem to fix. We can fix autonomous driving today if we give them dedicated roads not shared with humans (no cars, no bikes, no pedestrians). Works perfectly fine with dedicated tunnels under cities. An emotional and imperfect decision-making 19 years old can pass a driving exam where they drive around for 45 minutes in a mixed traffic environment without the inspector being forced to take control of the car. This is kind of absolute minimum standard is one that autonomous cars struggle with, especially when people try to make it cheap by removing radar and lidar. What we have made slight headway on is that under very strict environments, with more restrictions on the driving than human drivers has to follow, with expensive sensors, and with a extremely good access to maps and information, then some autonomous transportation is possible. They still causes accidents and people will still get killed. It is debatable if they will kill less people than if human drove under similar restricted environment with access to equally expensive hardware and information, but it is some progress.
- thelock85 4y ago
  Couldn’t agree more. The quest for self-driving cars seems to be a capitalistic endeavor to offer the convenience of chilling in your car, and platform for all the services one could consume in the time they’d otherwise be driving. If safety was the first principle, then traffic science and urban planning would lead the way until systems are simple enough for self driving cars to take over. It doesn’t seem we are in the place (in the US) where this type of private-public collaboration can take place at meaningful scale. I’m not knocking all of the brilliant work that has been done but peddling self-driving cars for safety (not saying OP is doing that) just seems like a version of “making the world better (to be rich).”

Aeolun 4y ago

> "anti-gravity technology"... is just a random technology. A solution looking for problems to solve, I suppose. If cars drive above people instead of next to them that would also solve that problem.

semi-extrinsic 4y ago

I'm saying, an AI significantly better than what humans can do today, is just as much a fantasy as anti-gravity technology. People get injured and killed every day because they don't have anti-gravity tech and are trying to lift or move heavy objects. You can make all the same arguments. And most of the "people are stupid" problems with cars are better solved by other tech like driver monitoring - Volvo is already deploying this. Self driving cars/buses is just a fairytale used by Tesla/Uber/etc. tech bros to try and defend their valuations.

kugelblitz 4y ago
> I'm saying, an AI significantly better than what humans can do today, is just as much a fantasy as anti-gravity technology. I think this is a key thing where we have differing opinions. I believe an AI taught to drive safely will be significantly better than humans at it. It's not a general purpose AI, just one that is taught to be better at driving. An AI doesn't get distracted as easily. They don't look to the sides for 2 seconds while driving 125 mph on the freeway. They don't check their emails while on a busy city road. They don't need 1-2 seconds to react to a baby stroller emerging from a line of parked cars. My mind has slowly accepting the idea that "specific purpose AI" is already here. Working with an "AI-infused" coding assistant (Github Copilot), it took me a few weeks to get used to. But now I feel it can complete some of my coding assignments at a junior coder level (good effort, but I still need to check the work, sometimes it's non-sense, but many times it's pretty good). I can already off-load some of my routine work to this assistant.
- cutemonster 4y ago
  > an AI taught to drive safely will be significantly better than humans at it. That would depend on which human you have in mind. Some are 100 x more dangerous than others. (See the link below.) Or 100 x safer depending on what you consider normal You don't happen to know about any statistics about fatalities per 1 billion vehicle-km for (partly) self driving cars? To compare with https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic... Edit: i found: > Overall, autonomous vehicles (AVs) were involved in more crashes: 9.1 crashes per million miles traveled, compared to 4.1 for conventional cars. However, compared to injuries experienced in traditional vehicle collisions, the ones involving injury were minor. https://1800injured.care/self-driving-car-accident-statistics/ https://1800injured.care/self-driving-car-accident-statistic... If that's reliable info, then they'll eventually get better than an average human in the US (or are already). And in some countries, they could be an amazing improvement -- see the insane amount of fatalities, in some countries (Wikipedia link above).

belorn 4y ago

"Significantly better than what we have now" is the hard problem to fix. We can fix autonomous driving today if we give them dedicated roads not shared with humans (no cars, no bikes, no pedestrians). Works perfectly fine with dedicated tunnels under cities. An emotional and imperfect decision-making 19 years old can pass a driving exam where they drive around for 45 minutes in a mixed traffic environment without the inspector being forced to take control of the car. This is kind of absolute minimum standard is one that autonomous cars struggle with, especially when people try to make it cheap by removing radar and lidar. What we have made slight headway on is that under very strict environments, with more restrictions on the driving than human drivers has to follow, with expensive sensors, and with a extremely good access to maps and information, then some autonomous transportation is possible. They still causes accidents and people will still get killed. It is debatable if they will kill less people than if human drove under similar restricted environment with access to equally expensive hardware and information, but it is some progress.

thelock85 4y ago
Couldn’t agree more. The quest for self-driving cars seems to be a capitalistic endeavor to offer the convenience of chilling in your car, and platform for all the services one could consume in the time they’d otherwise be driving. If safety was the first principle, then traffic science and urban planning would lead the way until systems are simple enough for self driving cars to take over. It doesn’t seem we are in the place (in the US) where this type of private-public collaboration can take place at meaningful scale. I’m not knocking all of the brilliant work that has been done but peddling self-driving cars for safety (not saying OP is doing that) just seems like a version of “making the world better (to be rich).”