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Anyone ever think about what a nightmare driverless cars will be if they actually work? Right now our crumbling infrastructure is loaded with traffic. Imagine i

• mindvirus 4y ago
  Of course, like anything there will be major societal changes. But consider a few brighter possibilities: * Cars are all electric, since the one downside major downside (a long time to charge versus gas) is reduced if they can go charge themselves. So less pollution and noise. * The number of cars may increase, but so will the capacity of roads due to faster speeds and higher density. So a city could possibly only have a couple of car accessible roads. * Parking can also get denser, as cars can presumably park themselves and coordinate. So you could build a few massive parking garages (for example) to serve thousands of cars, or require them to park outside of the city.
  • gpm 4y ago
    > Cars are all electric [...] So less [...] noise Tire noise dominates at speeds above roughly 30 kph (20 mph), so on reasonably fast roads not really. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Propulsion-noise-the-tyre-road-noise-and-the-total-A-weighted-level-from-a-passenger-car_fig4_266205731 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Propulsion-noise-the-tyr... Of course, self driving cars might also mean slower cars, because the drivers are less impatient, and if that is true then noise would go down. On the flip side, self driving cars might end up meaning faster cars because they can coordinate better, increasing noise levels.
    • mejutoco 4y ago
      I honestly cannot imagine self-driving cars until trains never crash and trucks are automated.
  • JohnFen 4y ago
    > The number of cars may increase, but so will the capacity of roads due to faster speeds and higher density. As someone who enjoys walking and biking, this strikes me a serious negative, not a positive.
• reb 4y ago
  And thus the motor vehicle takes his rightful place at the top of the food chain: King of the concrete jungle. May he reign forever, tire never, and render his enemies unto the road.
• agumonkey 4y ago
  It was supposed to improve allocation (less people trying to find a parking spot etc) but I guess it may trigger the usual perverse effect.
  • astrange 4y ago
    The "usual perverse effect" of policies (aka "risk compensation") almost never happens, people just say it's going to happen and then it doesn't. This is a disease of the soul caused by reading Freakanomics which makes you think everything that's counterintuitive must actually be true.
• user3939382 4y ago
  Cars that never have a driver could be much smaller. Eventually what we need for this scenario in congested areas is a driving decision protocol that's based on consensus with neighboring cars, some kind of leader election algorithm, etc. If all cars were full self driving they could in some situations drive at super high speeds as a swarm, you wouldn't even need stoplights.
  • akiselev 4y ago
    I love your optimism. I predict the GP is correct though, since everyone will want one of those Mercedes megavans to set up a comfortable bed or office while stuck in traffic. There's no way I'm going to sleep or work in a tiny self driving smartcar. Since they'll autopark or circle anyway, their size no longer becomes a limiting factor for most people.
    • syntheweave 4y ago
      I'll save money and get there faster on a bicycle. There won't be any human drivers, so they will all yield to me even if I treat them like slalom poles.
      • throwaway2037 4y ago
        There won't be any human drivers, so they will all yield to me even if I treat them like slalom poles. I genuinely laughed when I read your post, but there is some truth to it. Most of these posts here are "doomers". Ignoring that for a moment, no one (except you) has talked about pedestrians or bicyclists. One "hack" that sounds great as a walker/rider: In a world of 99% self-driving cars, just walk/ride anywhere you want. Literally, casually cross a ten lane expressway. All the self-driving cars will bow dutifully to you! This thought experiment sounds like a performance art dream. Do you remember the artist who created a Google maps traffic jam in London by filling a wagon with mobile phones and walking slowly? Ref: https://www.simonweckert.com/googlemapshacks.html https://www.simonweckert.com/googlemapshacks.html Another thing: You can sabotage self-driving cars by putting traffic cones everywhere. Or sit in the middle of a major intersect with ten of your friends and read the newspaper (or pick your nose!). The passengers will be furious, and the self-driving cars won't know what to do.
• lallysingh 4y ago
  I guess it's the season of AI fear. Humans don't rarely drive to their endurance levels now, so why would removal of a rarely-used limit affect much? 8 hours (4+4) spent in commuting, driving or not, is an entire life. This isn't a realistic concern, but something pulled out of a cyberpunk novel. Cars can park away from you and come back to pick you up. This should alleviate parking problems, and reduce parking-space-search based congestion on the street. Learning to drive was never that hard.
  • donmcronald 4y ago
    > 8 hours (4+4) spent in commuting, driving or not, is an entire life. This isn't a realistic concern, but something pulled out of a cyberpunk novel. What if that time is spent sleeping? Maybe you don't even need a house, so you'll have more money to spend on a nice car.
    • lallysingh 4y ago
      That just digs deeper into cyberpunk distopia.
      • trgn 4y ago
        lol It's really uncanny, every time, there it is, man must submit to the technology rather than have technology submit to us. Because a self-driving car is advanced technology, therefore men must move with self-driving cars. Even if that literally includes having to live out of your car.
        • TeMPOraL 4y ago
          Indeed this is how it works. Or, more accurately, man has to use the new technology to keep up with other men, as those who don't get outraced by those to do. The end result is a ratchet of progress. It's ironic how people in software don't notice it, despite the fact that our industry caused several such shifts, and we're all living with (and whining about) the consequences. Myself I didn't notice it for close to two decades since first learning to code. The realization came to me with age - I'm at the point where I have more disposable income than free time, so all the "wonderful" self-service software enabled now grates and irritates me to no end.
• tenebrisalietum 4y ago
  Gosh, if it gets to the point where cars never stop circling because there's no parking ... we could like, make the cars bigger, and longer, and then people can just hop on and off as needed ... maybe even make a few of them go underground and such. Could even give them a cool name - like Timed Rides Around In the Near Streets or something like that. If we put these things on rails then they would even cause far less wear and tear on the road.
  • yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
    Yes, if cars continue to just massively decline in performance and quality of life, become entirely a shared resource, and lose all their advantages, than they could rival trains.
    • tenebrisalietum 4y ago
      If the road is full and cars are circling because there is nowhere to park, then performance doesn't matter, quality of life is already low, and cars no longer have advantages.
• dpkirchner 4y ago
  I suspect a lot of people won't want to own self-driving cars, especially if you're right and people forget how to drive themselves. We could drastically reduce the amount of parking we need, at least within cities, meaning there probably won't be many cars idly circling blocks. Personally, I'd be down for a driverless Uber-like service.
  • runnerup 4y ago
    This also implies that some nontrivial amount of the driving on roads will be cars with no humans in them, which may also be worse than the status quo.
    • dpkirchner 4y ago
      It's possible. I wonder if we would see as many idle/empty self-driving cars as we do idle/empty human-driven cabs and Ubers/etc. I could see a self-driving system being a lot more efficient because it doesn't have to keep a car on the road for a driver's entire shift.
      • Ekaros 4y ago
        I think we will see more. If just keeping them running circles around blocks with most expected demand is nearly same cost it will happen. Specially if they are EVs with automatic charging.
        • JohnFen 4y ago
          Damn. I never thought of SDCs as being particularly dystopic, but this would be squarely in that area.
  • JohnFen 4y ago
    > I suspect a lot of people won't want to own self-driving cars If it involves the car having a data link to someone else's server, then I have no interest whatsoever in self-driving vehicles.
• baremetal 4y ago
  [flagged]
  • Ekaros 4y ago
    Or drive circles around the block... At current parking rates might be the cheaper option. And it probably doesn't consume that much power when all the cars are doing it and whole thing is gridlocked.
• nuancebydefault 4y ago
  Once you buy the self driving car, you will want it to be on the road as much as possible, you want return on investment. What will happen is: Companies will buy fleets of self driving cars. The best self driving cars will be too expensive for most people to buy. People will just pay one of those companies for transportation services. The transportation - serving companies who will use the cars in the most efficient way will survive. They will use AI to optimize the usage of the fleets. Regulators (governments) will tax the companies per km / time interval / peak hours. People will pay more if they want to travel alone or want to travel in a straight line. They will pay more if they want more exact timing. Roads will be safer because they will communicate with the cars and the cars will communicate with other cars. There will be manned vehicles that will help relieve any obstructions. In other words, given proper tax rules, transportation will regulate itself in effective and efficient ways.
  • onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
    Shortly after we get self-driving cars widely available, most municipalities will have trolly busses that run the grid so that the most you need to wait is like 2 minutes. At which point, a substantial amount of people aren't going to pay $20 to get from A to B when you can get there slightly slower for $2.
    • Ekaros 4y ago
      Even individual companies will drive it to the bottom. Humans out of picture they will drive price to few percentage of margins. Or if we get VC money involved beyond that.
    • opportune 4y ago
      Yeah, I think a lot of people don’t recognize that SDC technology can eventually be applied to busses or smaller transit vans. You can get fancy with dynamic routing (with my fleet of busses and customers asking me to take them from A to B, how do I route the busses to serve the most customers the fastest?) but even just running a SDBus on a fixed route could be pretty convenient. It would basically take us back to the “streetcar suburb” paradigm.
• opportune 4y ago
  I see self driving cars as a backwards compatible way for us to reimagine infrastructure. Right now, SDC is operating in the real world, in non-trivial environments (San Francisco), without special road infrastructure to make them work. It’s beautifully backwards compatible, at the cost of not being generalized (the service areas are extensively mapped). Once SDC take off we’ll likely start getting infrastructure and rules to support them. Think standards for communicating position locally - ie car A broadcasts its position and route to cars B, C, D within 200m, special road infrastructure to make lanes and corners more manageable for SDC, rules against aimless circling. There’s already a carrying cost in the form of gas or electricity plus wear incentivizing aimless driving, also the opportunity cost of not actively moving someone or something, but we can probably introduce some kind of toll or tax on a SDC operating with no humans inside it to further disincentivize this. A very useful thing about SDC, and something I think people forget about rideshare and taxis, is that they let people move around independently without needing parking for those trips. In dense cities like SF and NYC that’s hugely useful. A single rideshare or SDC can move 10 people on custom routes without any of those people needing to find and pay for parking, and without using any parking infrastructure. That’s great because it disincentivizes wasting more space on parking in aggregate. Over time this should let us build denser. Of course, public transit could obviate all these concerns, and I’m a big believer in funding way more public transit than we do already, but it will take a lot of time and political will to make that happen in the US. And it still does not offer the flexibility of SDC and rideshare. SDC is fully compatible with existing infrastructure and may give us a way to morph into public transit more smoothly with things like dynamically routed SDBusses and a reduction of parking infrastructure leading to denser urban environments that more easily support public transit. I think we can solve the “spending too much time on the road doing nothing” problem with congestion pricing, which we should really be doing already.
  • pc86 4y ago
    I've never been to a major city, especially NYC or SF, and thought "man this would be great if it was just a little denser."
    • renewiltord 4y ago
• crazygringo 4y ago
  Maybe. On the other hand, ride sharing could mean less cars overall and less car ownership. Electric cars mean fewer or no emissions. Totally automated traffic management could enable vastly higher throughput, and otherwise congested roads could have dynamic tolls applied so people won't use them unless they really need to. Delivery vehicles can batch shopping pickups and dropoffs to use less vehicles than currently. If problems arise, they can be fixed through policy and incentives. Otherwise, traditional economic incentives for efficiency continue to apply.
  • rrradical 4y ago
    Tires emit a fair amount of micro plastics. There's no such thing as zero emission cars. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/11/car-tires-pollution-microplastic/617216/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/11/car-tire...
    • apendleton 4y ago
      All the more reason to shift to a pay-per-use model rather than the high-fixed-cost model of car ownership, which incentivizes uses your car for as many trips as possible once you've made the initial expenditure to buy the thing. If these get good enough and cheap enough that significant numbers of people can get away with ditching their cars, those people will probably end up in a situation where transit (including kinds with no tires) will be cheaper on a per-trip basis where it's practical, and robocars will make sense for the remainder.
      • ChatGTP 4y ago
        All the more reason Americans should just try learn and adapt to public transport.
        • hnav 4y ago
          public transport as implemented in Asia and Europe, especially for last (couple) mile sort of uses is an antiquated idea in a world of self-driving. In a city like San Francisco you could literally ban cars in downtown and have the local transit authority run something like Uber pool of cars that fit 4 passengers comfortably and do point 2 point transit with optimized routing 24/7. The reason buses/trains are so large is to amortize a bunch of things, not the least of which is the driver.
• baloki 4y ago
  Honestly I think by that point owning one won’t even be a thing. You’ll rent it from the manufacturer on demand or via a subscription with your subset of features enabled just for your trip. They won’t park, they’ll just move from one job to the next (like taxis and ubers).
  • calvinmorrison 4y ago
    I think that's naiive. There's a reason why taxis aren't couriers. There will certainly be specialization. There will still be buses, with AI drivers instead of humans, to get a lot of people from A to B, there will be delivery vans, with maybe delivery robots, maybe there will be taxi's, long haul, etc.
  • ajcp 4y ago
    I completely agree they can change our relationship with vehicles. Let's look beyond a subscription service though and think how it can be part of a stand-alone auto insurance policy, or offered by your apartment complex as part of your monthly rent, or the HOA and paid for as part of your dues the same as landscaping is. SDCs will be services that are offered as part of a larger relationship/service.
    • isquaredr 4y ago
      Interesting take. Would my HOA be controlling utilization and maintenance? If the car has a flat tire or my neighbor monopolizes the usage, would the larger relationship/service be responsible for fixing the issue?
      • ajcp 4y ago
        Sure it would, just as any other service provided for by your condo/HOA fees or what have you. BTW I think having a HOA do anything beyond landscaping is probably more of a headache than it's worth, but still... I think the possibility is more around SDCs becoming not simply a business to individual customer service or subscription, but rather SDCs being offered by organizations the individual customer is already a member of as part of that organizational offering. This can begin at large and wealthy retirement communities first (like Sun City Grand in Phoenix), but there's no reason why it couldn't be implemented elsewhere or why an organization that is already setup to handle customer and vehicle relationships can't offer it as well. Think AARP or your auto insurance company.
• adrr 4y ago
  If cars could talk to each other you'll get better utilization of the road because you could cut follow distance to a few feet.
  • isquaredr 4y ago
    Sounds good in theory. I’m not optimistic about all the car makers cooperating on an industry standard, though. Plus the failure scenario seems pretty catastrophic to overall throughput. I hope some bright thinker figures those problems out; it does seem like a great opportunity
    • tshaddox 4y ago
      It doesn't seem like you'd need an "industry standard" beyond the actual rules of the road. In the same way that normal human-operated cars with better visibility can change lanes on the highway more safely and efficiently, any improvements in sensor ability, reaction times, etc. in self-driving cars (and even automatic safety features for human-operated cars) should make traffic safer and more efficient.
      • ntr-- 4y ago
        what do the actual rules of the road say the braking point should be for an 8 person minivan with 5 passengers in dry weather? what about 8 passengers in the wet at night with ice on the roads? old argument i know, but if a human gets that wrong and plows a pedestrian they wear the consequences, will an auto manufacturer do the same? my guess is no, and the result of that is that even if we can get a majority of cars to be self driving they are probably not going to be pushing the limits of road capacity any time soon like GP suggests, more likely they will continue to drive super conservatively and fail fast like the videos in the linked article.
  • Gordonjcp 4y ago
    No, because physics is not affected.
    • 4y ago
• SergeAx 4y ago
  On the other hand, we will see a sharp decline in human-driven cars on the streets. Who would do it themself anyway? At every moment we will have on the streets exactly the number of cars to serve current demand. They will not clog curb parking places - there's no point for driverless car just to stay there for nothing. They will not roam free - there's no point for that too. They will stay in the cheapest, ergo most inaccessible for humans places waiting for orders.
• elif 4y ago
  Actually my experience with self driving cars is the exact opposite. After giving control over to an AI, suddenly I don't care at all about saving 3 minutes by picking the perfect lane, getting the best spot on every merge, maxing out the speed limit threshold where the local police will pull me over. That kind of gamification with no tangible reward actually generates the anxiety. When you're no longer the player, there's no more anxiety about those weird time optimizations. If streets are "clogged" it saves me a few pennies and gives me less reason to worry about a human cutting across to risk my life for no reason. It's actually kinda relaxing. But you are wrong about one thing: AI have a fear of death. Every aspect of their training is hyper focused on a paranoid level of death avoidance. When I picked up my father from the airport last month, I did your worst nightmare, my car circled the terminal for about an hour while I jammed out to progressive rock. 90% of the time I was in bumper to bumper on a closed access road with no entrance or exit. From a traffic perspective it was irrelevant whether I was there or not. On the 10% when I reached the terminal on the loop, surprise, I was blocked by loading cars in front of me... The same blockage the car behind me would face.
  • Gordonjcp 4y ago
    Why can't you just drive like that yourself?
• rodgerd 4y ago
  > Anyone ever think about what a nightmare driverless cars will be if they actually work? The scenario you outline was part of Mega-City One's landscape in the 2000AD/Judge Dredd comics: cars on the road all day every day, with people living out of their perpetually moving RVs; something similar was depicted for Termight in the Nemesis the Warlock series.
• rtsao 4y ago
  I recall many years ago Jonathan Hall (economist at Uber) describing a "traffic apocalypse" caused by empty self-driving cars flooding city streets. I think the notion was the operational cost of self-driving cars was so low that wasteful (empty car) usage would skyrocket without anyone directly paying the cost of time/road use. Today, the mean number of people per car on the road is at least 1, but with empty AVs that could plummet to <1. I believe this scenario was discussed as an argument for congestion pricing, serving as a vital solution to the tragedy of the commons exacerbated by self-driving cars.
  • Disruptive_Dave 4y ago
    HOV lanes for 1+ passenger cars.
  • prawn 4y ago
    I've never forgotten a Hacker News comment about the same idea - might have predated Uber even. If parking costs increase, and self-driving cars can recharge cheaply, then we'll see them slowly navigating streets en masse while waiting for their next gigs. Like a molasses taxi rank oozing around with no urgency.
    • medellin 4y ago
      I already had this experience where i had to wait 30 minutes for someone to come pickup a car. Driving it around was cheaper than parking it for 30 minutes
      • Firmwarrior 4y ago
        haha, I experienced this myself. My friend fell on some hard times, and it was actually a net financial gain for me to have him sleep on my couch and pay for his food, since he'd drive me to/pick me up from work in downtown Seattle and save me $30/day on parking (or 60+ minutes a day in crappy bus commuting)
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
• q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 4y ago
  > Imagine if the max amount of driving a human can endure is removed entirely as a final constraint on the total utilization rate of this infrastructure and is replaced with a relentless driving machine that never tires or gets frustrated and has no fear of death. Sure! An entire class of accidents and injuries will be entirely gone, saving countless lives. Insurance will get cheaper for everyone. Cities will be able to adapt and grow more quickly, since traffic management can finally happen in realtime and at scale. Pollution will plummet. Cars can get smaller and smaller, focusing only on having a safe space for passengers and eliminating all the extra "driver" nonsense. With so many cars on the road, you'd always be able to catch a ride, anywhere, anytime. Each car could have a delicious sandwich compartment, so that it's always doing double-duty for carrying both passengers and sandwiches. (Every car would have a couple drones it could dispatch to pick up and deliver sandwiches, so that passenger trips can go on uninterrupted.) People will forget how to drive entirely, of course, so there will be no going back. The whole thing will feed on itself, and we'll enter a golden era of cheap transportation and ever-faster sandwich delivery.
  • johnnymorgan 4y ago
    Ok you lost me at the first part but then came in for the win with the sandwich compartment and drone delivery. I for one welcome our autonomous sandwich delivery overlords. Joking aside I'm more curious on the negative aspect of self driving vehicles as I'm not entirely convinced they will explode into the market quite the way it's been pitched. In the long run however you can't ignore the productivity increases and the cultural changes that will come with it being a net positive. Governance and ownership is the sticky point for me.
  • ramblenode 4y ago
    There may be sandwiches but there will definitely be ads.
• thegabriele 4y ago
  Surely all these points are food for thoughts, but it seems that in this scenario we solved the energy cost/production problem first
• Jeff_Brown 4y ago
  Easy to solve: Price time on the road quadratically.
• WalterBright 4y ago
  > and is replaced with a relentless driving machine that never tires or gets frustrated and has no fear of death. Listen, and understand! That relentless driving machine is out there! It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop... ever, until you are dead! FTFY
• robomartin 4y ago
  > Anyone ever think about what a nightmare driverless cars will be if they actually work? Actually, yes. However, my take is a bit different from yours. The future driverless car will not at all look like a Tesla. It will be a moving office or comfortable room for family trips. This does not mean it has to be massive. Something of the size of a modern minivan could be fantastic if you did not have to worry about driving at all. In other words, I actually see future driverless cars giving us more time rather than taking it away by being stuck on traffic paying attention to stay in a lane, press the brake or accelerator. As for people forgetting how to drive. Well, maybe in one or two more generations? Nobody really likes driving. People either need to go from point A to point B or want to (vacations, eating out, etc.). I enjoy driving, not on the street, on the race track. I do that with some frequency. Driving on the street is boring, dangerous, time consuming and stressful. I hate that kind of driving. I can't wait until I don't have to do it any more.
• NikolaNovak 4y ago
  Not to say I'm a current enthusiast of self driving cars, but I assume many of the issues you outlined would get better rather than worse. Ownership of car will become continually less rational with hyper effective rented transport. With fewer cars overall parking should be much better especially on busy areas. Cars of the far off future may be more predictable and thus more rational when traffic increases. Networked cars open up a lot of possibilities. None of this is coming soon as far as I'm aware mind you. I just don't think the end game of self driving vehicle is bleak - just the long mid game :)
  • rightbyte 4y ago
    > Ownership of car will become continually less rational with hyper effective rented transport. Why? Attrition on a car is mainly miles based. Sharing a car won't make it last more miles. Not accounting for vandalism.
    • Gigachad 4y ago
      Storage of cars is extremely expensive
    • NikolaNovak 4y ago
      I love cars and I love driving them (I used to take mine rallying and on the track etc). But even today, even in north America, they're barely rational. Most people don't mentally add up the purchase price plus insurance plus gas plus maintenance etc. And the inconvenience of garage and parking and clearing driveway and snow etc etc. The reason we have them is convenience. Public transit in North America with our huge suburbs is on average crap. I firmly believe that for modern generation, car is increasingly a liability not pleasure. So if we / they can exchange it for a self riding car that magically shows up when needed but also magically buggers off when not, we / they will.
• cmsj 4y ago
  What I'm hearing is that I should do a self-driving startup whose fleet heads out in the morning to take all of the prime parking spots in the city and then have an app for people to bid in auctions for access to the spaces come prime shopping/restaurant/bar hours!
  • bityard 4y ago
    Please sir, where do I send my money?
  • peterleiser 4y ago
    There were companies that enabled "selling" the parking space that you currently occupy, but cities successfully argued that on-street parking specifically (and city-owned parking generally) belongs to the city and these companies were issued cease and desist orders.
• mrshadowgoose 4y ago
  > Cars instructed to circle the block in areas with no parking clogging the streets. You'll need a self driving car yourself to even get a spot since you'll never defeat all the robot vultures. Why do you think this would happen? Self-driving cars are poised to dramatically improve parking overall. One can be dropped off exactly at their destination, and the car can then go elsewhere. Even an elsewhere of "somewhere 5 minutes away" is a large amount of potential parking in a typical urban environment. Additionally, any existing parking lot that chooses to only accept self-driving vehicles instantly gets additional capacity: self-driving cars could cooperatively pack/unpack themselves into space efficient configurations. And if your counter is "a minority of selfish entitled people", the answer to that is "laws and regulations". Self-driving cars will have to follow the laws of wherever they're driving. If your "circling the block" apocalypse comes to pass, the mitigation would literally be a law/regulation that self-driving cars would have to obey.
  • hackernewds 4y ago
    also commercially it is not in the benefit of the car to waste fuel circling around, instead of parking
    • glaucon 4y ago
      Where I live the electricity costs of having an EV 'just drive around until I call you' would be an order of magnitude cheaper than paying for parking.
      • chroma 4y ago
        Electricity isn't the only cost of operating an EV. There's wear and tear on the drivetrain, suspension, and tires. And every mile driven slightly increases the chance of a collision. That's why insurance companies charge more for vehicles that are driven more miles per year.
      • iknowstuff 4y ago
        A natural consequence of this is congestion pricing like in London. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congestion_pricing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congestion_pricing
• shahbaby 4y ago
  I'd love to see a black mirror episode on this.
• dgunay 4y ago
  I think it's important to realize that part of the reason self driving cars are so hard is because there is a necessary period of coexistence with human drivers. In your hypothetical future, where no humans manually drive anymore, it opens up the possibility of completely redesigning our vehicle infrastructure without having to worry about the training and compliance of a mixed human/AI population on the road. My optimistic hope is that with fully automated vehicles, mass transit wins out on sheer efficiency in order to negate the wasteful deadheading inherent in personal vehicles.
  • ilyt 3y ago
    Good fucking luck making company A driverless cars communicate company B to cooperate...
  • chongli 4y ago
    Even in that hypothetical future the cars would still have to deal with pedestrians, road workers, construction, weather, road damage, flooding, and many other random situations that are much more complicated than just staying in your lane and maintaining a two car lengths gap from the car in front. How does a self driving car deal with a blizzard with white-out conditions or a complete loss of traction due to ice? Yes, humans get into a lot of accidents in these conditions but as a percentage of the time the rate is still remarkably low. If you want to eliminate large classes of those adverse situations then the best approach we have right now is to switch to rail transport. Public transit is truly the way to go!
    • EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
      Those policepersons randomly waving hands and emitting incomprehensible shouts on Manhattan crossroads ... AI will replace openai CEO before it can handle that.
      • red-iron-pine 4y ago
        they're due to be replaced: huge capital drain on the company. Esp. for folk making decisions based on reports generated by (mostly) automated systems.
• SequoiaHope 4y ago
  Something I’ve realized is that people have been saying this for a long time. I used to write them off as over the top worries of uninformed people. More recently as Elon Musk’s failure to deliver has been made clear, I’ve realized that I was myself taken in by a lot of hype. Now when I go back and look at some of the cyclical content around self driving cars that has been around for years, I realize that a lot of it makes sense. The most damning criticism is that automobile-focused infrastructure sucks, and self driving cars won’t change that. We need to invest in traditional forms of transit. But in a world with cheap money (the last decade) and winner-take-all mentality, we get huge investment in individualized technology like self driving cars instead of better urban design and transport infrastructure.
• recursivecaveat 4y ago
  This was tested empirically by giving people access to a chauffeur temporarily. Not having to personally drive your car nearly doubles vehicle miles: http://www.joanwalker.com/uploads/3/6/9/5/3695513/mustapha_et_al_-_final_transportation.pdf http://www.joanwalker.com/uploads/3/6/9/5/3695513/mustapha_e... The study is a pretty small sample though, so I would take it with a grain of salt.
• iknowstuff 4y ago
  Eh you don't really see people commuting for 4h en masse in places with excellent trains. Also don't forget pedestrians exist
  • Gigachad 4y ago
    Self driving cars will completely collapse when pedestrians are factored in. You'll just walk out on the street and expect all the cars to stop. You don't do it now because someone inattentive could kill you. But when the tech works well, all car traffic will just be locked in stand still. Hopefully we can use this moment to purge inner city areas of cars.
• psychomugs 4y ago
  This is Jevon's Paradox: increased efficiency increases usage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
• BurningFrog 4y ago
  The solution to this is the same as for human driven traffic: Road Pricing When a scare resource is given away for free, it becomes overused. Somehow we have a hard time seeing that for road access, but it's true anyway.
  • tap-snap-or-nap 4y ago
    Corporations want all the rights an individual wants but no social, ethical and financial responsibility towards the humans they are meant to serve. It is time we rethink the concept of corporate personhood and legal protections an individual's get for acting via such entities, as they are getting compensated generously, the risks they take are miniscule to the entitlements they actually enjoy for their decisions and their consequences on the society.
    • yanderekko 4y ago
      Corporate personhood really has nothing to do with the idea that scarce resources should be allocated via prices.
  • Salgat 4y ago
    This isn't even necessary; between fuel and wear & tear on the vehicle, you'll be paying a small fortune for those daily 8 hour commutes.
    • BurningFrog 4y ago
      Well, this ensures a non-zero price. It's very unlikely that it happens to be the optimal price.
• explaininjs 4y ago
  Good news! Nobody is around to give you a hard time for chucking a brick through an unoccupied car's window. (Group parking spots are typically better monitored than streets.)
• Salgat 4y ago
  What will really happen is that ownership of vehicles will dramatically drop, as it's cheaper to simply rent an automated vehicle to get to your destination. This means a lot less waste, as you have far less vehicles sitting around being utilized maybe one or two hours a day. Folks aren't going to be interested in daily 8 hour drives if the wear and tear on the vehicle is going to force them to buy a new car every 3-5 years, on top of the fuel cost (even electricity). Same goes for if you're renting, since you won't want to pay a small fortune on your daily commute.
  • harambae 4y ago
    This seems much closer to the reality. With LiDAR's, imaging radar's, a host of other sensors, more custom calibration and crazy high development costs, these autonomous vehicles are going to be the price of a Lamborghini for a long time. The idea that A/V's like this will clog streets across America because every worker will keep 2 in their garage is unlikely.
• anshumankmr 4y ago
  >replaced with a relentless driving machine that never tires or gets frustrated and has no fear of death. Listen, and understand. That car is out there. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you ̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶d̶e̶a̶d̶ reach your destination.
• kortilla 4y ago
  Congestion tax will solve that in a hurry
• dusted 4y ago
  While I immensely enjoy driving "the human way", I think a total-ai roadsystem would be much more efficient and do away with the clogging.. A lot of clogging comes from humans being terrible at merging and driving in general.
• mrjin 4y ago
  If the current approach does not change, we'll never ever see that day.
• Haga 4y ago
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