5 ms·

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

by 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 4y 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.
jjulius 4y ago
>... completely redesigning our vehicle infrastructure... The eternal pessimist within me looks at how difficult it is to get anything with infrastructure accomplished, both at a reasonable pace and reasonable cost, in the US and can't help but expect this sort of thing to not play out as wonderfully as that sounds.
stouset 4y ago
You are completely ignoring the existence of pedestrians, bicycles, animals, construction, fallen trees, rain, snow, ice, and on and on and on. We are nowhere near a future where cars exist in hermetically sealed tubes, completely walled off from the rest of existence.
- Turskarama 4y ago
  With the rate AI has improved over just the last year, I expect a lot of these problems to go from "impossible to solve" to "trivial" pretty quickly at some point within (pessimistically) the next 5 years.
- freeone3000 4y ago
  We can, and have, crested such tubes at various times in the past. While expensive and require dedicated fixed routes, they can also move lots of people very quickly with nearly no congestion. A shame we can never build these anymore.
  - stouset 4y ago
    Congratulations, you’ve reinvented a metro subway but with extra steps.
ehnto 4y ago
Well I hadn't yet thought about a possible outcome of driverless cars being better mass transit, that makes sense to me though. Once personal ownership is removed, and as atomicity is slowly reduced in exchange for efficiencies/cheaper rates to the customer, certaim areas would be analogous to mass transit.
Schroedingersat 4y ago
My brother in christ, it's called a driverless metro. It has existed for decades and isn't even slightly like a google owned surveillance drone "accidentally" causing delays for ts competition. Excommunicating humans from all public space and drawing a moat of monopoly owned robo taxis around every block and every destination isn't a utopia, it's a complete nightmare.
- zsz 4y ago
  I remember the day when the car I'd been driving in college finally broke down sufficiently that the various repairs exceeded the value of the car. By that time, I'd been working for well over a year, and my 18 mile / 25 minute commute by car was, for that one day, affected as follows: 1. I was working at NCEP at the time, which was still located in Camp Springs (off 495 Branch Avenue exit 5), which was about a mile away from the last stop of the green line metro. Walking a mile isn't bad, but it does add about 15 minutes to the trip. 2. Because of the way the green line is set up, taking the metro from college park to branch ave is in effect a 45-60 minute ride (nearly from one end of the line to the other end, even though the distance around the beltway is only about 15 miles, or less; the problem is, the green line makes a huge detour through DC). 3. This was compounded by the fact that I had to get to the metro station in greenbelt first. I could either walk there, which would have taken about an hour, or I could ride a bus--which, as it turned out, took 50 minutes to traverse the same ~4 mile distance. Why? Because a) it had to worm its way through the labyrinthine neighborhood of Greenbelt, with very frequent stops. In short, what took 25 minutes door to door on any given day before ended up taking ~two hours on the way to work. And for reasons I can no longer remember, getting back home ended up taking twenty minutes longer. In other words, a total commute time of ~50 minutes (max) was turned into a ~4.5 hour commute due to having to rely on public transportation. I also remember the specific reason why I went and bought a new car that same weekend (fortunately this happened on a Friday): it was the realization, upon arriving at home (after said ~2.5 hour commute), that I had forgotten my apartment keys at work.
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    Bad busses that snake because there aren't enough routes and get stuck behind broken driverless cars are bad. This isn't news. Nor does it mean you shouldn't male a good transit system instead.

by dgunay 4y ago

ilyt 4y 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.

jjulius 4y ago

>... completely redesigning our vehicle infrastructure... The eternal pessimist within me looks at how difficult it is to get anything with infrastructure accomplished, both at a reasonable pace and reasonable cost, in the US and can't help but expect this sort of thing to not play out as wonderfully as that sounds.

stouset 4y ago

You are completely ignoring the existence of pedestrians, bicycles, animals, construction, fallen trees, rain, snow, ice, and on and on and on. We are nowhere near a future where cars exist in hermetically sealed tubes, completely walled off from the rest of existence.

Turskarama 4y ago
With the rate AI has improved over just the last year, I expect a lot of these problems to go from "impossible to solve" to "trivial" pretty quickly at some point within (pessimistically) the next 5 years.
freeone3000 4y ago
We can, and have, crested such tubes at various times in the past. While expensive and require dedicated fixed routes, they can also move lots of people very quickly with nearly no congestion. A shame we can never build these anymore.
- stouset 4y ago
  Congratulations, you’ve reinvented a metro subway but with extra steps.

ehnto 4y ago

Well I hadn't yet thought about a possible outcome of driverless cars being better mass transit, that makes sense to me though. Once personal ownership is removed, and as atomicity is slowly reduced in exchange for efficiencies/cheaper rates to the customer, certaim areas would be analogous to mass transit.

Schroedingersat 4y ago

My brother in christ, it's called a driverless metro. It has existed for decades and isn't even slightly like a google owned surveillance drone "accidentally" causing delays for ts competition. Excommunicating humans from all public space and drawing a moat of monopoly owned robo taxis around every block and every destination isn't a utopia, it's a complete nightmare.

zsz 4y ago
I remember the day when the car I'd been driving in college finally broke down sufficiently that the various repairs exceeded the value of the car. By that time, I'd been working for well over a year, and my 18 mile / 25 minute commute by car was, for that one day, affected as follows: 1. I was working at NCEP at the time, which was still located in Camp Springs (off 495 Branch Avenue exit 5), which was about a mile away from the last stop of the green line metro. Walking a mile isn't bad, but it does add about 15 minutes to the trip. 2. Because of the way the green line is set up, taking the metro from college park to branch ave is in effect a 45-60 minute ride (nearly from one end of the line to the other end, even though the distance around the beltway is only about 15 miles, or less; the problem is, the green line makes a huge detour through DC). 3. This was compounded by the fact that I had to get to the metro station in greenbelt first. I could either walk there, which would have taken about an hour, or I could ride a bus--which, as it turned out, took 50 minutes to traverse the same ~4 mile distance. Why? Because a) it had to worm its way through the labyrinthine neighborhood of Greenbelt, with very frequent stops. In short, what took 25 minutes door to door on any given day before ended up taking ~two hours on the way to work. And for reasons I can no longer remember, getting back home ended up taking twenty minutes longer. In other words, a total commute time of ~50 minutes (max) was turned into a ~4.5 hour commute due to having to rely on public transportation. I also remember the specific reason why I went and bought a new car that same weekend (fortunately this happened on a Friday): it was the realization, upon arriving at home (after said ~2.5 hour commute), that I had forgotten my apartment keys at work.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  Bad busses that snake because there aren't enough routes and get stuck behind broken driverless cars are bad. This isn't news. Nor does it mean you shouldn't male a good transit system instead.