7 ms·

When I see articles like this, I have this bet between Jeff Atwood and John Carmack in the back of my mind: https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-2030-self-driving

by kogus 4y ago

When I see articles like this, I have this bet between Jeff Atwood and John Carmack in the back of my mind: https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-2030-self-driving-car-bet/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-2030-self-driving-car-bet/

deleted 4y ago
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paxys 4y ago
I have been on Jeff's side of this bet since they announced it. Level 5 is simply too high of a bar to reach in the next few years, and in fact we are going about it the wrong way. We need smart roads more than smart cars. (Note that there's an escape hatch here, which is that the AI falls back to some human in a call center for guidance to get out of sticky situations. In my opinion that still doesn't qualify as level 5.)
- oblio 4y ago
  > We need smart roads more than smart cars. Then this is close to impossible :-) The existing road infrastucture maintenance burden is already crushing financially, imagine if we add smart roads to it.
  - dzhiurgis 4y ago
    I’d argue it would actually cut costs
  - michaelteter 4y ago
    This is a "road smell"; not unlike a code smell, it's when the current scenario has such awkward and ugly (and low chance of success) solutions that you must stop and consider the premise and original goal. In this case, the original goal is to get people from A to B. And, pardon the pun, but cars and roads are a dead end solution.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    I'm imagining it going up 2%. What's your imagination?
    - oblio 4y ago
      To give a simple example, the US spends a ton of infrastructure. Yet it doesn't even have really smart traffic lights like the Dutch do. https://youtu.be/knbVWXzL4-4?t=21 https://youtu.be/knbVWXzL4-4?t=21 Just think about any large scale governmental software project and amplify that 10-100x. That's what I imagine :-) > The design of the website was overseen by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and built by a number of federal contractors, most prominently CGI Group of Canada. The original budget for CGI was $93.7 million, but this grew to $292 million prior to launch of the website. While estimates that the overall cost for building the website had reached over $500 million prior to launch and in early 2014 HHS Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell said there would be "approximately $834 million on Marketplace-related IT contracts and interagency agreements," the Office of Inspector General released a report in August 2014 finding that the total cost of the HealthCare.gov website had reached $1.7 billion and a month later, including costs beyond "computer systems," Bloomberg News estimated it at $2.1 billion.
      - Dylan16807 4y ago
        > To give a simple example, the US spends a ton of infrastructure. Yet it doesn't even have really smart traffic lights like the Dutch do. That's not an example of what it would cost, though. > Just think about any large scale governmental software project and amplify that 10-100x. That's what I imagine :-) If I imagine the software costing ten million dollars, and then balloon it to a billion, I think that's still only half a percent of the annual road budget.
    - kuschku 4y ago
      If it doesn't go down 30% or more, most places will go bankrupt. Suburbs cost more in road maintenance than their entire taxes can return to the city.
- spookie 4y ago
  Same, I don't see it happening unless most cars in the road have the capabality of intercommunication to perform sensor fusion with other cars. This implies that everyone gets on board using the same protocol. As for smart roads, what would these imply? Bear in mind maintenance costs and the fact that asphalt is 100% recycled and reusable.
  - tmzt 4y ago
    Maybe something as simple as an active RF emitter in the reflective or similar spikes added to the road surface. It wouldn't require a networked infrastructure, or complex standards. Just something capable of penetrating feet of snow or inches of dirt and grime. The car would always have other sensors to fallback on, but this would reduce the amount of time that the DDT disengages due to inclement weather or other road hazards. Add to this emitters in cones and possibly emergency vehicles.
    - whoisburbansky 4y ago
      How does one power active RF emitters on miles and miles of road surface? The vast majority of surface level roadway doesn’t even have powered illumination in most places, which leads me to think the lowest hanging fruit for this type of thing would be something passive, like the RF equivalent of cats eyes.
    - sgtnoodle 4y ago
      I don't think adding RF emitters / magnets to the road surface actually solves any problems. A driver needs to know the trajectory of the road several seconds into the future. At useful speeds, that's on the order of 100 meters. Either you dynamically generate a map in a local reference frame, or you localize within a static map in a global reference frame. RF beacons won't provide enough resolution to be useful for dynamic mapping beyond a couple of meters. RF beacons may incrementally help with localization within a global map by providing additional observations for a localization filter, but no one doing global mapping is asking for that since they're already using lidar to do it. I think useful "smart" road infrastructure would necessarily be horribly complicated, since the point of it would be to offload otherwise necessary complexity from the vehicles using the road. Perhaps the road could track the real time kinematics of all the cars on the the road using some combination of cameras, lidar, UWB, etc. It could then communicate that information via RF to the vehicles that want to receive it, along with local mapping information. The automotive industry has been excited about "vehicle-to-vehicle" comms for the past 15 years aka V2V. Technically, all the standards that have emerged from the industry's efforts seem lame and nothing interesting has come of it. The FCC granted a chunk of 5Ghz spectrum for automotive DSRC use, and have subsequently taken back most of it for lack of use. It's still allocated for automotive, but it's now in the hands of the cell modem providers to do something useful with it.
- winrid 4y ago
  > We need smart roads more than smart cars. Ah yes, trains. :)
  - michaelteter 4y ago
    There's such an (exciting!) opportunity for us to create automated people mover systems that connect small and large systems to get people from very close to A to very close to B. The design and engineering activities involved in solving this would be very enjoyable work, and the human benefits when (eventually) operational would be huge. Every solution would need to be custom for its city/region, but one of the common ideas is concentric circles of trains, spaced at appropriate(ly large) distances, with trains running between in perpendicular direction. Basically wheels and spokes. The wheel trains could stay in motion always, only slowing at connection points where the perpendicular trains would temporarily turn and run in parallel. Both trains would slow, cars would connect, passengers would come and go, and then trains would separate. Perpendicular train curves back in for its perpendicular direction of travel, and "wheel" train picks up speed and heads for the next spoke connection. Obviously any problem causes the joined trains to slow, even to a stop if necessary (to prevent human harm). There are so many different possibilities here, but ultimately I think it should be possible for a human to walk 5-10 minutes to some station, get on some people mover, and eventually get out of another people mover within 5-10min walking distance of their ultimate destination... all without ever setting foot outside of a train aside from start/end points.
    - mrsuprawsm 4y ago
      So, Europe?
      - michaelteter 4y ago
        I can only speak of Netherlands from experience, and it is not what I mean. I don't expect anywhere else has done what I have envisioned. The usual challenge is that the cities are old and organically structured. So the possible paths for public transport are limited; and there's very little space for big interchanges. But what exists is way, way better than nothing. With trains, metros, trams, and buses (and walking), you can get around quite well. It just can take a long time due to timing mismatches between modes. When the tram comes only once every 15 min, and your metro drops you without enough time to walk (or run!) to the tram, it means you now wait 15min for the next one. When I was commuting to work in Amsterdam via tram+metro, it took me at minimum 30 minutes with walk+tram+metro+walk. If I rode my bike, it was the same. But if timings didn't work out well, the public transport option could be +25 min longer... so 55min. And on cold sh*tty rainy days (half of winter), the metro would be jammed with people such that you might need to stand and wait for the next one. The bike option was always possible, but it's no fun to ride in cold rain with wind. In summary, it was better than 60 minutes of bumper to bumper driving commute in Dallas/Fort Worth, but it had much room for better alternatives... if one could go greenfield.

by kogus 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

paxys 4y ago

I have been on Jeff's side of this bet since they announced it. Level 5 is simply too high of a bar to reach in the next few years, and in fact we are going about it the wrong way. We need smart roads more than smart cars. (Note that there's an escape hatch here, which is that the AI falls back to some human in a call center for guidance to get out of sticky situations. In my opinion that still doesn't qualify as level 5.)

oblio 4y ago
> We need smart roads more than smart cars. Then this is close to impossible :-) The existing road infrastucture maintenance burden is already crushing financially, imagine if we add smart roads to it.
- dzhiurgis 4y ago
  I’d argue it would actually cut costs
- michaelteter 4y ago
  This is a "road smell"; not unlike a code smell, it's when the current scenario has such awkward and ugly (and low chance of success) solutions that you must stop and consider the premise and original goal. In this case, the original goal is to get people from A to B. And, pardon the pun, but cars and roads are a dead end solution.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  I'm imagining it going up 2%. What's your imagination?
  - oblio 4y ago
    To give a simple example, the US spends a ton of infrastructure. Yet it doesn't even have really smart traffic lights like the Dutch do. https://youtu.be/knbVWXzL4-4?t=21 https://youtu.be/knbVWXzL4-4?t=21 Just think about any large scale governmental software project and amplify that 10-100x. That's what I imagine :-) > The design of the website was overseen by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and built by a number of federal contractors, most prominently CGI Group of Canada. The original budget for CGI was $93.7 million, but this grew to $292 million prior to launch of the website. While estimates that the overall cost for building the website had reached over $500 million prior to launch and in early 2014 HHS Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell said there would be "approximately $834 million on Marketplace-related IT contracts and interagency agreements," the Office of Inspector General released a report in August 2014 finding that the total cost of the HealthCare.gov website had reached $1.7 billion and a month later, including costs beyond "computer systems," Bloomberg News estimated it at $2.1 billion.
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      > To give a simple example, the US spends a ton of infrastructure. Yet it doesn't even have really smart traffic lights like the Dutch do. That's not an example of what it would cost, though. > Just think about any large scale governmental software project and amplify that 10-100x. That's what I imagine :-) If I imagine the software costing ten million dollars, and then balloon it to a billion, I think that's still only half a percent of the annual road budget.
  - kuschku 4y ago
    If it doesn't go down 30% or more, most places will go bankrupt. Suburbs cost more in road maintenance than their entire taxes can return to the city.
spookie 4y ago
Same, I don't see it happening unless most cars in the road have the capabality of intercommunication to perform sensor fusion with other cars. This implies that everyone gets on board using the same protocol. As for smart roads, what would these imply? Bear in mind maintenance costs and the fact that asphalt is 100% recycled and reusable.
- tmzt 4y ago
  Maybe something as simple as an active RF emitter in the reflective or similar spikes added to the road surface. It wouldn't require a networked infrastructure, or complex standards. Just something capable of penetrating feet of snow or inches of dirt and grime. The car would always have other sensors to fallback on, but this would reduce the amount of time that the DDT disengages due to inclement weather or other road hazards. Add to this emitters in cones and possibly emergency vehicles.
  - whoisburbansky 4y ago
    How does one power active RF emitters on miles and miles of road surface? The vast majority of surface level roadway doesn’t even have powered illumination in most places, which leads me to think the lowest hanging fruit for this type of thing would be something passive, like the RF equivalent of cats eyes.
  - sgtnoodle 4y ago
    I don't think adding RF emitters / magnets to the road surface actually solves any problems. A driver needs to know the trajectory of the road several seconds into the future. At useful speeds, that's on the order of 100 meters. Either you dynamically generate a map in a local reference frame, or you localize within a static map in a global reference frame. RF beacons won't provide enough resolution to be useful for dynamic mapping beyond a couple of meters. RF beacons may incrementally help with localization within a global map by providing additional observations for a localization filter, but no one doing global mapping is asking for that since they're already using lidar to do it. I think useful "smart" road infrastructure would necessarily be horribly complicated, since the point of it would be to offload otherwise necessary complexity from the vehicles using the road. Perhaps the road could track the real time kinematics of all the cars on the the road using some combination of cameras, lidar, UWB, etc. It could then communicate that information via RF to the vehicles that want to receive it, along with local mapping information. The automotive industry has been excited about "vehicle-to-vehicle" comms for the past 15 years aka V2V. Technically, all the standards that have emerged from the industry's efforts seem lame and nothing interesting has come of it. The FCC granted a chunk of 5Ghz spectrum for automotive DSRC use, and have subsequently taken back most of it for lack of use. It's still allocated for automotive, but it's now in the hands of the cell modem providers to do something useful with it.
winrid 4y ago
> We need smart roads more than smart cars. Ah yes, trains. :)
- michaelteter 4y ago
  There's such an (exciting!) opportunity for us to create automated people mover systems that connect small and large systems to get people from very close to A to very close to B. The design and engineering activities involved in solving this would be very enjoyable work, and the human benefits when (eventually) operational would be huge. Every solution would need to be custom for its city/region, but one of the common ideas is concentric circles of trains, spaced at appropriate(ly large) distances, with trains running between in perpendicular direction. Basically wheels and spokes. The wheel trains could stay in motion always, only slowing at connection points where the perpendicular trains would temporarily turn and run in parallel. Both trains would slow, cars would connect, passengers would come and go, and then trains would separate. Perpendicular train curves back in for its perpendicular direction of travel, and "wheel" train picks up speed and heads for the next spoke connection. Obviously any problem causes the joined trains to slow, even to a stop if necessary (to prevent human harm). There are so many different possibilities here, but ultimately I think it should be possible for a human to walk 5-10 minutes to some station, get on some people mover, and eventually get out of another people mover within 5-10min walking distance of their ultimate destination... all without ever setting foot outside of a train aside from start/end points.
  - mrsuprawsm 4y ago
    So, Europe?
    - michaelteter 4y ago
      I can only speak of Netherlands from experience, and it is not what I mean. I don't expect anywhere else has done what I have envisioned. The usual challenge is that the cities are old and organically structured. So the possible paths for public transport are limited; and there's very little space for big interchanges. But what exists is way, way better than nothing. With trains, metros, trams, and buses (and walking), you can get around quite well. It just can take a long time due to timing mismatches between modes. When the tram comes only once every 15 min, and your metro drops you without enough time to walk (or run!) to the tram, it means you now wait 15min for the next one. When I was commuting to work in Amsterdam via tram+metro, it took me at minimum 30 minutes with walk+tram+metro+walk. If I rode my bike, it was the same. But if timings didn't work out well, the public transport option could be +25 min longer... so 55min. And on cold sh*tty rainy days (half of winter), the metro would be jammed with people such that you might need to stand and wait for the next one. The bike option was always possible, but it's no fun to ride in cold rain with wind. In summary, it was better than 60 minutes of bumper to bumper driving commute in Dallas/Fort Worth, but it had much room for better alternatives... if one could go greenfield.