14 ms·

This isn’t like the game of Go where processing power eventually wins. Driving in a major city, based on intuition, social cues, and the ability to drop a plan

This isn’t like the game of Go where processing power eventually wins. Driving in a major city, based on intuition, social cues, and the ability to drop a plan and make a new one, is the definition of too complicated for a computer. We could have public transportation, but we just can’t imagine a world where someone doesn’t privately own a thing someone else rents.

monkaiju 3y ago
Couldnt agree more, well said
jncfhnb 3y ago
While Go is theoretically calculable with infinite processing power, that is not the lever with which the best algorithms have claimed dominance over others.
ghughes 3y ago
The problem here is that Cruise launched prematurely, not that automated driving is intractable.
- potatolicious 3y ago
  Agree it's not intractable (nearly any problem is tractable if you give yourself a long enough time horizon), but "premature" seems almost like an understatement? And this isn't just shade directly at Cruise, this seems to apply to all of the SDV companies out there. It's far from being ready for primetime. And speaking who was an early cheerleader of SDVs, and who continues to be highly supportive of their development, I'm increasingly skeptical that they are ready-enough to be tested en masse on public streets. The recent Cruise meltdown re: Outside Lands was pretty concerning. In a natural disaster (like the types that the Bay Area is highly prone to!) the idea is just that you'd have all of these unoccupied vehicles sitting in the middle of the street preventing evacuation and emergency access?!
  - jeffbee 3y ago
    Anybody who thinks escaping a natural disaster in a car is a good idea will probably die trying. The people who died in the Oakland firestorm died in their cars. Car traffic suffers from a catastrophe where throughput falls to zero in the face of even slight overload.
- acdha 3y ago
  Nobody is saying that it’s impossible but rather that it’s much harder that the people fundraising claim, and that companies shouldn’t be allowed to cut corners doing their alpha testing on public roads with little oversight and no compensation for the negative externalities they impose on the actual residents of the cities they’re being tested in.
barbazoo 3y ago
Many places are probably past the point where neighborhoods could be connected with public transit simply due to how they're laid out and how sparsely they are populated. Cities though I agree. Extreme individualism and convenience probably.
christiangenco 3y ago
> This isn’t like the game of Go where processing power eventually wins...[it's] the definition of too complicated for a computer. Isn't that sentiment how people used to think about computers playing Go, writing an essay, beating humans at Jeopardy, or transcribing spoken language? Betting on the side of "computers will never be able to X" seems like a generally bad bet. > We could have public transportation, but we just can’t imagine a world where someone doesn’t privately own a thing someone else rents. The concept of self driving cars isn't mutually incompatible with public transportation.
- lelanthran 3y ago
  > Isn't that framing what the sentiment used to be towards computers playing Go, No. I was a student in the mid-90s, and the position of everyone regarding Go was "We'll have enough compute power one day". It was only after AlphaGo hit the news with its wins that I started seeing this revisionist history of "They said the computer will never win at Go". To which I have to reply "No. They did not".
  - hotpotamus 3y ago
    XKCD is relevant as a historical reference in this case which is pretty neat. https://xkcd.com/1002/ https://xkcd.com/1002/
    - KineticLensman 3y ago
      Well played!
  - slug 3y ago
    I went to a talk given by computer experts on the game of Go about 10 years before AlphaGo and the consensus was that the solution space was so large[0] that it was impossible to solve by a computer, whatever its capability, in the foreseeable future, by the methods known at the time. We now know that AlphaGo followed a somewhat new approach, but I don't remember that being obvious or expected back then... [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_and_mathematics#Game_tree_complexity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_and_mathematics#Game_tree_c...
triceratops 3y ago
To be fair, if they crack automated driving it'll revolutionize public transport too. Imagine buses routed dynamically, and sized perfectly to match demand. Or other automated, private cars on the road yielding to public transit vehicles.
- jonathanlb 3y ago
  Fleet/swarm/traffic management would be an amazing thing to see. Imagine seeing vehicles automatically moving to the side of the road to let an emergency vehicle through. Or the subtle nudges and lane shifts to ensure traffic doesn't reach a standstill. It's a great use case for a hive mind ML/AI.
  - Cloudly 3y ago
    This mostly makes me worry about how it would be misused in my country. But I suppose if you have enough of a high trust society it could be fun
- potatolicious 3y ago
  > Imagine buses routed dynamically, and sized perfectly to match demand. We don't need self-driving to do this, and in fact many localities have already tried this with human drivers, and it's been an abject failure. Dynamic-dispatch public transit has been tried! The results have been low usage (because it turns out the predictability of a timetable and consistent route is a feature, and not a bug!), with high wait times and long trip times. Heck, the major ride hailing companies have done pilots on this front (ride hails as last-mile supplements to fixed-route public transport) and it's been a pretty thorough failure there as well. In urban planning circles there's the term "gadgetbahn" to derisively describe high-tech, flashy transit projects using unproven tech that ends up being far worse than normal proven technologies. Dynamic-routed public transit is like that, but with even less "gadget".
  - triceratops 3y ago
    > in fact many localities have already tried this with human drivers, > and it's been an abject failure. For the product being delivered (low speed, low latency, available only in specific areas), public transit is criminally expensive. I'm not surprised people prefer driving in suburban areas. If it was 1/10th price, or free, it becomes a lot more attractive. Free is impossible if you have to pay salaries to human drivers. Driverless vehicles don't have to be 4-seater cars. They can be much smaller, like the Smart Car, or a single person enclosed three-wheeler.
r3trohack3r 3y ago
> we could have public transportation > we can’t imagine a world where someone doesn’t privately own I love public transportation and my favorite cities are ones that have the best public transportation. But most of what I like about it is great when “visiting,” not living. When I’ve lived in cities that had great public transportation it was occasionally nice; I could go downtown and get drunk without worrying about/coordinating transportation. But commute times on public transport are absolutely dreadful. Unless you win the lottery and your frequent destinations are along a single route with few stops, you’re transferring and waiting for a bunch of other folks. And cities where public transport works well are densely packed, making getting downtown from the edges any other way difficult too. Unless you’re talking about converting privatized point-to-point travel to public transportation, which sounds absolutely awesome and autonomous driving might bring closer to being a reality, I’d say I’m rather fond of going directly to my destination and back in less than 10min of drive time. Edit: realizing from the comments here that many people’s experience with using a vehicle and public transport is a daily commute. I work from home and I don’t drive during “rush hour” when, for some reason, society pays to migrate an entire city full of knowledge workers from their home to a computer. Living in the suburbs and not participating in daily commute culture looks a lot like “winning the lottery.” An example of how I use my car: I choose to go to the grocery store with the best supply chains in my area and it adds ~5 minutes to my drive compared to the one that’s “walkable” as long as it’s not rush hour. I place my order on my phone, pull up, open my trunk, a store employee puts the groceries in, and I drive home. That’s a hard baseline to compete with, especially for anyone who has a family they have to coordinate this around. I’d much rather stick my kids in a car seat and do the above than whatever the equivalent would be with public transportation.
- prmoustache 3y ago
  > Unless you’re talking about privatized point-to-point travel for public transportation, I’d say I’m rather fond of going directly to my destination and back in less than 10min of drive time. This is usually a driver's fantasy. How many times I have waited in a place or been at the office only for people to arrive late complaining of the traffic or not being able to find a place to park? I think most people want to use individual transportation because of the feeling of control it gives them. They can choose an alternate route, honk, hate and insult other road users, aren't bond to a schedule, choose where they park. Most of the time if you take into account the time it takes to go to their car, exit parking or find parking, they aren't faster or only negligibly so [1]. But they don't feel it because they are feeling they are always active compared to the passive act of sitting in a bus/tramway/subway. The only users of individual transportation that are on average really faster than public transports in a city with a decent public transport system are motorcycle/moped users and cyclists, and mostly because the former tend to park illegally on the sidewalk. [1] exception is nighttime driving
russdill 3y ago
Regulators are playing way too fast and loose in this case, but given the number of human drivers that collide with firetrucks - just drop the "for a computer" from your definition.
olliej 3y ago
Beating Go required dramatically improved algorithms. Simply increasing processing power was not sufficient. I think Chess would be a better example - IBM was able to beat Kasparov with the Deep Blue super computer simply through hardware upgrades to essentially the same model. That system was searching 200 million moves per second, whereas with improved search algorithms modern (and better) chess engines beat GMs at orders of magnitude fewer moves per second on simple PCs.
- acdha 3y ago
  I think the deeper point is that Go is a well-defined problem: it’s simple, the rules are fixed, and there’s no question of being able to determine success. Driving a car has multiple problems which are all much broader, and some of your goals are at odds with each other (e.g. driving slower makes everyone safer but the owners won’t be satisfied & some situations like merges or unprotected turns may be intractable without a safety risk; you need to respond to police / fire fighters / construction flaggers but not pranksters or carjackers, etc.) Nobody said you couldn’t solve Go without AGI. It’s still open for debate whether that’s true of driving.
intrasight 3y ago
>too complicated for a computer Too complicated for most humans too. I've seen human drivers t-boned by fire trucks and ambulances. Have had near misses myself a couple times. The solution is not "intuition and social cues" but better technology and instrumentation and especially Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication (V2V) which all emergency vehicles (and eventually all vehicles) should have.
martythemaniak 3y ago
I don't think you understand what public transportation is. Public transport is a local monopoly where profitable routes are used to subsidize unprofitable routes in order to guarantee base level of price and service to all residents. Public transport is not linked to any particular ownership or operating model, nor to any specific vehicle type. Sometimes agencies own and operate a fleet directly, other times they contract out operators and sometimes contract out whole fleets. Self-driving vehicles are just another tech they'll have to incorporate the way they have been incorporating shared bicycles or scooters. In the long term, large bespoke expensive vehicles (busses, trains) requiring special operators and infrastructure will not be able to economically compete with mass-produced Autonomous EVs, so they'll replace much of today's fleets. Thinking that AEVs and public transit are at odds with each other is nonsense.
trimbo 3y ago
> This isn’t like the game of Go where processing power eventually wins It turns out transportation is not a zero sum game. There's no "AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol" watershed moment for AV. Instead we progressively work towards a good-enough level of AV driving that minimizes the risks compared to human drivers. Transit will always have accidents and deaths, even for public transportation, and we try to reduce that risk over time with new solutions. Personally I'd like to see the evidence that Cruise and Waymo are riskier than human drivers in SF. My anecdata is that they drive by my house every 5-10 minutes during the day and are the best drivers on my street. Just yesterday, a Cruise slowed down nicely to edge into the other lane while I was getting into my car on the street. Most humans (including Muni drivers) speed past, inches from me. In the case of this accident, sounds like the fire truck hit the Cruise. That actually happens a lot with non-AV cars. Emergency vehicles go into a red light expecting the green side to stop and they don't. So let's learn from it. Did the truck have its siren going? Could the Cruise car see the truck around the corner (it was at Turk and Polk)? Could the truck see the Cruise? What could the Cruise detect that could have indicated the truck was coming?
marcosdumay 3y ago
At the same time, other companies have cars self-driving around cities for years outside of the headlines. I imagine after we all start just using an app to summon one of those cars to go around, there will still be people quick to call self-driving impossible every time something interesting happens. (Reminds me of solar energy.)
Wowfunhappy 3y ago
> Driving in a major city, based on intuition, social cues, and the ability to drop a plan and make a new one, is the definition of too complicated for a computer. It's also too complicated for humans, though. They get into accidents all the time. I feel like we're holding computer drivers to a higher standard than the humans we already allow to drive. The computers are absolutely going to make mistakes, and some of them will have catastrophic results, but, uh...
- hot_gril 3y ago
  I can buy that good self-driving cars are safer on average than human drivers, but not the Cruise ones.
  - krupan 3y ago
    Which evidence/data tells you that cruise cars are not safer than humans?
    - hot_gril 3y ago
      The incident where a bunch of Cruise cars near the Outside Lands concert in SF randomly stopped moving until they were manually reset, people I know in SF saying they drive erratically, and also this incident to a lesser extent. Humans don't make these kinds of mistakes (or faint at the wheel) this often.
      - krupan 3y ago
        In each of those incidents, how many people were hurt and how badly?
        hot_gril 3y ago
        I don't know. It's telling enough to me that they drive horribly. I would look at stats instead if they were known and if there were a statistically meaningful number of Cruise cars, but there are only 100-300 in SF.
screye 3y ago
That's the kicker. We've had a solution for ages. I've spent a good decade trying to poke holes into "why 'acthually' public transportation can't work in the US", and I've come out of it even more confused. The US has all the hallmarks of country that's well suited for public transit. Urban housing shortages, open space, flat land, pockets of density, overdue infrastructure overhaul, you name it. It is really THAT simple. There's so much low hanging to pick off and best-of-all, public transit spending goes back into the pockets of That being said, you can't convince a person to like anything if they're reasoning from a place of comfort. I'm a broken record, but hearing an American praise European cities while simultaneously doing everything in their power to stop their city from ever becoming that, is the sort of hypocrisy that cannot be solved through convincing, logic or education. Lastly, public transit also needs a strong police force, and there is some much needed 'cognitive dissonance' that YIMBYs need to figure out if they're going to convince those holding out. _________ Prevention is better than a cure. Driverless electric cars are here to save the automobile industry at the expense of the environment, climate and public safety.
ericbarrett 3y ago
The thing that gets me about self-driving vehicles is they just stop and block the road when they're confused (unsolvable situation, network disconnect, etc.) We can snicker at Cruise's meltdown during Outside Lands, but I keep thinking of the videos of people driving out of the Paradise fire, or more recently the Maui fire. One confused vehicle could kill dozens, hundreds, even thousands of people behind it.
wpietri 3y ago
For sure. We often drive robotically, with our minds on a conversation, a podcast, or a daydream. That makes it easy to think a robot could really do it. But then there are the moments where driving requires our full attention, our knowledge of the world, or our ability to quickly read social situations and social signals. As the article shows, a system that works 99% of the time won't cut it. Ditto the recent story where a robot car drove into wet cement. Or a zillion other edge cases, some of which will be fatal.
RichardCA 3y ago
It's like the article a few days ago about the Air France 447. We expect a competent pilot to form a situational awareness model, but then discard that model when confronted with novel information. Sometimes they have to do this in a matter of minutes, other times it's just a few seconds, in the worst case sub-second accuracy is needed. It remains an unsolved problem in both the human and machine worlds.

monkaiju 3y ago

Couldnt agree more, well said

jncfhnb 3y ago

While Go is theoretically calculable with infinite processing power, that is not the lever with which the best algorithms have claimed dominance over others.

ghughes 3y ago

The problem here is that Cruise launched prematurely, not that automated driving is intractable.

potatolicious 3y ago
Agree it's not intractable (nearly any problem is tractable if you give yourself a long enough time horizon), but "premature" seems almost like an understatement? And this isn't just shade directly at Cruise, this seems to apply to all of the SDV companies out there. It's far from being ready for primetime. And speaking who was an early cheerleader of SDVs, and who continues to be highly supportive of their development, I'm increasingly skeptical that they are ready-enough to be tested en masse on public streets. The recent Cruise meltdown re: Outside Lands was pretty concerning. In a natural disaster (like the types that the Bay Area is highly prone to!) the idea is just that you'd have all of these unoccupied vehicles sitting in the middle of the street preventing evacuation and emergency access?!
- jeffbee 3y ago
  Anybody who thinks escaping a natural disaster in a car is a good idea will probably die trying. The people who died in the Oakland firestorm died in their cars. Car traffic suffers from a catastrophe where throughput falls to zero in the face of even slight overload.
acdha 3y ago
Nobody is saying that it’s impossible but rather that it’s much harder that the people fundraising claim, and that companies shouldn’t be allowed to cut corners doing their alpha testing on public roads with little oversight and no compensation for the negative externalities they impose on the actual residents of the cities they’re being tested in.

barbazoo 3y ago

Many places are probably past the point where neighborhoods could be connected with public transit simply due to how they're laid out and how sparsely they are populated. Cities though I agree. Extreme individualism and convenience probably.

christiangenco 3y ago

> This isn’t like the game of Go where processing power eventually wins...[it's] the definition of too complicated for a computer. Isn't that sentiment how people used to think about computers playing Go, writing an essay, beating humans at Jeopardy, or transcribing spoken language? Betting on the side of "computers will never be able to X" seems like a generally bad bet. > We could have public transportation, but we just can’t imagine a world where someone doesn’t privately own a thing someone else rents. The concept of self driving cars isn't mutually incompatible with public transportation.

lelanthran 3y ago
> Isn't that framing what the sentiment used to be towards computers playing Go, No. I was a student in the mid-90s, and the position of everyone regarding Go was "We'll have enough compute power one day". It was only after AlphaGo hit the news with its wins that I started seeing this revisionist history of "They said the computer will never win at Go". To which I have to reply "No. They did not".
- hotpotamus 3y ago
  XKCD is relevant as a historical reference in this case which is pretty neat. https://xkcd.com/1002/ https://xkcd.com/1002/
  - KineticLensman 3y ago
    Well played!
- slug 3y ago
  I went to a talk given by computer experts on the game of Go about 10 years before AlphaGo and the consensus was that the solution space was so large[0] that it was impossible to solve by a computer, whatever its capability, in the foreseeable future, by the methods known at the time. We now know that AlphaGo followed a somewhat new approach, but I don't remember that being obvious or expected back then... [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_and_mathematics#Game_tree_complexity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_and_mathematics#Game_tree_c...

triceratops 3y ago

To be fair, if they crack automated driving it'll revolutionize public transport too. Imagine buses routed dynamically, and sized perfectly to match demand. Or other automated, private cars on the road yielding to public transit vehicles.

jonathanlb 3y ago
Fleet/swarm/traffic management would be an amazing thing to see. Imagine seeing vehicles automatically moving to the side of the road to let an emergency vehicle through. Or the subtle nudges and lane shifts to ensure traffic doesn't reach a standstill. It's a great use case for a hive mind ML/AI.
- Cloudly 3y ago
  This mostly makes me worry about how it would be misused in my country. But I suppose if you have enough of a high trust society it could be fun
potatolicious 3y ago
> Imagine buses routed dynamically, and sized perfectly to match demand. We don't need self-driving to do this, and in fact many localities have already tried this with human drivers, and it's been an abject failure. Dynamic-dispatch public transit has been tried! The results have been low usage (because it turns out the predictability of a timetable and consistent route is a feature, and not a bug!), with high wait times and long trip times. Heck, the major ride hailing companies have done pilots on this front (ride hails as last-mile supplements to fixed-route public transport) and it's been a pretty thorough failure there as well. In urban planning circles there's the term "gadgetbahn" to derisively describe high-tech, flashy transit projects using unproven tech that ends up being far worse than normal proven technologies. Dynamic-routed public transit is like that, but with even less "gadget".
- triceratops 3y ago
  > in fact many localities have already tried this with human drivers, > and it's been an abject failure. For the product being delivered (low speed, low latency, available only in specific areas), public transit is criminally expensive. I'm not surprised people prefer driving in suburban areas. If it was 1/10th price, or free, it becomes a lot more attractive. Free is impossible if you have to pay salaries to human drivers. Driverless vehicles don't have to be 4-seater cars. They can be much smaller, like the Smart Car, or a single person enclosed three-wheeler.

r3trohack3r 3y ago

> we could have public transportation > we can’t imagine a world where someone doesn’t privately own I love public transportation and my favorite cities are ones that have the best public transportation. But most of what I like about it is great when “visiting,” not living. When I’ve lived in cities that had great public transportation it was occasionally nice; I could go downtown and get drunk without worrying about/coordinating transportation. But commute times on public transport are absolutely dreadful. Unless you win the lottery and your frequent destinations are along a single route with few stops, you’re transferring and waiting for a bunch of other folks. And cities where public transport works well are densely packed, making getting downtown from the edges any other way difficult too. Unless you’re talking about converting privatized point-to-point travel to public transportation, which sounds absolutely awesome and autonomous driving might bring closer to being a reality, I’d say I’m rather fond of going directly to my destination and back in less than 10min of drive time. Edit: realizing from the comments here that many people’s experience with using a vehicle and public transport is a daily commute. I work from home and I don’t drive during “rush hour” when, for some reason, society pays to migrate an entire city full of knowledge workers from their home to a computer. Living in the suburbs and not participating in daily commute culture looks a lot like “winning the lottery.” An example of how I use my car: I choose to go to the grocery store with the best supply chains in my area and it adds ~5 minutes to my drive compared to the one that’s “walkable” as long as it’s not rush hour. I place my order on my phone, pull up, open my trunk, a store employee puts the groceries in, and I drive home. That’s a hard baseline to compete with, especially for anyone who has a family they have to coordinate this around. I’d much rather stick my kids in a car seat and do the above than whatever the equivalent would be with public transportation.

prmoustache 3y ago
> Unless you’re talking about privatized point-to-point travel for public transportation, I’d say I’m rather fond of going directly to my destination and back in less than 10min of drive time. This is usually a driver's fantasy. How many times I have waited in a place or been at the office only for people to arrive late complaining of the traffic or not being able to find a place to park? I think most people want to use individual transportation because of the feeling of control it gives them. They can choose an alternate route, honk, hate and insult other road users, aren't bond to a schedule, choose where they park. Most of the time if you take into account the time it takes to go to their car, exit parking or find parking, they aren't faster or only negligibly so [1]. But they don't feel it because they are feeling they are always active compared to the passive act of sitting in a bus/tramway/subway. The only users of individual transportation that are on average really faster than public transports in a city with a decent public transport system are motorcycle/moped users and cyclists, and mostly because the former tend to park illegally on the sidewalk. [1] exception is nighttime driving

russdill 3y ago

Regulators are playing way too fast and loose in this case, but given the number of human drivers that collide with firetrucks - just drop the "for a computer" from your definition.

olliej 3y ago

Beating Go required dramatically improved algorithms. Simply increasing processing power was not sufficient. I think Chess would be a better example - IBM was able to beat Kasparov with the Deep Blue super computer simply through hardware upgrades to essentially the same model. That system was searching 200 million moves per second, whereas with improved search algorithms modern (and better) chess engines beat GMs at orders of magnitude fewer moves per second on simple PCs.

acdha 3y ago
I think the deeper point is that Go is a well-defined problem: it’s simple, the rules are fixed, and there’s no question of being able to determine success. Driving a car has multiple problems which are all much broader, and some of your goals are at odds with each other (e.g. driving slower makes everyone safer but the owners won’t be satisfied & some situations like merges or unprotected turns may be intractable without a safety risk; you need to respond to police / fire fighters / construction flaggers but not pranksters or carjackers, etc.) Nobody said you couldn’t solve Go without AGI. It’s still open for debate whether that’s true of driving.

intrasight 3y ago

>too complicated for a computer Too complicated for most humans too. I've seen human drivers t-boned by fire trucks and ambulances. Have had near misses myself a couple times. The solution is not "intuition and social cues" but better technology and instrumentation and especially Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication (V2V) which all emergency vehicles (and eventually all vehicles) should have.

martythemaniak 3y ago

I don't think you understand what public transportation is. Public transport is a local monopoly where profitable routes are used to subsidize unprofitable routes in order to guarantee base level of price and service to all residents. Public transport is not linked to any particular ownership or operating model, nor to any specific vehicle type. Sometimes agencies own and operate a fleet directly, other times they contract out operators and sometimes contract out whole fleets. Self-driving vehicles are just another tech they'll have to incorporate the way they have been incorporating shared bicycles or scooters. In the long term, large bespoke expensive vehicles (busses, trains) requiring special operators and infrastructure will not be able to economically compete with mass-produced Autonomous EVs, so they'll replace much of today's fleets. Thinking that AEVs and public transit are at odds with each other is nonsense.

trimbo 3y ago

> This isn’t like the game of Go where processing power eventually wins It turns out transportation is not a zero sum game. There's no "AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol" watershed moment for AV. Instead we progressively work towards a good-enough level of AV driving that minimizes the risks compared to human drivers. Transit will always have accidents and deaths, even for public transportation, and we try to reduce that risk over time with new solutions. Personally I'd like to see the evidence that Cruise and Waymo are riskier than human drivers in SF. My anecdata is that they drive by my house every 5-10 minutes during the day and are the best drivers on my street. Just yesterday, a Cruise slowed down nicely to edge into the other lane while I was getting into my car on the street. Most humans (including Muni drivers) speed past, inches from me. In the case of this accident, sounds like the fire truck hit the Cruise. That actually happens a lot with non-AV cars. Emergency vehicles go into a red light expecting the green side to stop and they don't. So let's learn from it. Did the truck have its siren going? Could the Cruise car see the truck around the corner (it was at Turk and Polk)? Could the truck see the Cruise? What could the Cruise detect that could have indicated the truck was coming?

marcosdumay 3y ago

At the same time, other companies have cars self-driving around cities for years outside of the headlines. I imagine after we all start just using an app to summon one of those cars to go around, there will still be people quick to call self-driving impossible every time something interesting happens. (Reminds me of solar energy.)

Wowfunhappy 3y ago

> Driving in a major city, based on intuition, social cues, and the ability to drop a plan and make a new one, is the definition of too complicated for a computer. It's also too complicated for humans, though. They get into accidents all the time. I feel like we're holding computer drivers to a higher standard than the humans we already allow to drive. The computers are absolutely going to make mistakes, and some of them will have catastrophic results, but, uh...

hot_gril 3y ago
I can buy that good self-driving cars are safer on average than human drivers, but not the Cruise ones.
- krupan 3y ago
  Which evidence/data tells you that cruise cars are not safer than humans?
  - hot_gril 3y ago
    The incident where a bunch of Cruise cars near the Outside Lands concert in SF randomly stopped moving until they were manually reset, people I know in SF saying they drive erratically, and also this incident to a lesser extent. Humans don't make these kinds of mistakes (or faint at the wheel) this often.
    - krupan 3y ago
      In each of those incidents, how many people were hurt and how badly?
      - hot_gril 3y ago
        I don't know. It's telling enough to me that they drive horribly. I would look at stats instead if they were known and if there were a statistically meaningful number of Cruise cars, but there are only 100-300 in SF.

screye 3y ago

That's the kicker. We've had a solution for ages. I've spent a good decade trying to poke holes into "why 'acthually' public transportation can't work in the US", and I've come out of it even more confused. The US has all the hallmarks of country that's well suited for public transit. Urban housing shortages, open space, flat land, pockets of density, overdue infrastructure overhaul, you name it. It is really THAT simple. There's so much low hanging to pick off and best-of-all, public transit spending goes back into the pockets of That being said, you can't convince a person to like anything if they're reasoning from a place of comfort. I'm a broken record, but hearing an American praise European cities while simultaneously doing everything in their power to stop their city from ever becoming that, is the sort of hypocrisy that cannot be solved through convincing, logic or education. Lastly, public transit also needs a strong police force, and there is some much needed 'cognitive dissonance' that YIMBYs need to figure out if they're going to convince those holding out. _________ Prevention is better than a cure. Driverless electric cars are here to save the automobile industry at the expense of the environment, climate and public safety.

ericbarrett 3y ago

The thing that gets me about self-driving vehicles is they just stop and block the road when they're confused (unsolvable situation, network disconnect, etc.) We can snicker at Cruise's meltdown during Outside Lands, but I keep thinking of the videos of people driving out of the Paradise fire, or more recently the Maui fire. One confused vehicle could kill dozens, hundreds, even thousands of people behind it.

wpietri 3y ago

For sure. We often drive robotically, with our minds on a conversation, a podcast, or a daydream. That makes it easy to think a robot could really do it. But then there are the moments where driving requires our full attention, our knowledge of the world, or our ability to quickly read social situations and social signals. As the article shows, a system that works 99% of the time won't cut it. Ditto the recent story where a robot car drove into wet cement. Or a zillion other edge cases, some of which will be fatal.

RichardCA 3y ago

It's like the article a few days ago about the Air France 447. We expect a competent pilot to form a situational awareness model, but then discard that model when confronted with novel information. Sometimes they have to do this in a matter of minutes, other times it's just a few seconds, in the worst case sub-second accuracy is needed. It remains an unsolved problem in both the human and machine worlds.