3 ms·

I agree with your overall vision. But there's a lot being swept under the rug in saying, "These are (usually pretty minor) technical challenges, and I haven't

by scarmig 13y ago

I agree with your overall vision. But there's a lot being swept under the rug in saying, "These are (usually pretty minor) technical challenges, and I haven't heard one yet that we won't be able to overcome with today's technology." It comes close to a "sufficiently advanced compiler" or "just an implementation question." Autocars are going to be held to a much higher standard than human drivers. This sucks, is irrational, and is unfair, but thems the breaks. Given that media and social environment, a single fatal car crash will cause a firestorm that could delay widespread introduction of driverless cars for years. People are terrified of new technology: see the shit show about a Tesla catching on fire, or the people who think people wearing Google Glass deserve to get assaulted. We absolutely have to tread carefully here.

andrewfong 13y ago
I suspect the higher standard question will be resolved in a couple of ways: * NTSB review: Airplanes face higher scrutiny than automobiles (despite the lower overall casualty rate). Part of the reason people have grown comfortable with air travel nonetheless is because the NTSB analyzes what went wrong after each crash and recommends (mandates) certain changes. Moreover, as far as government agencies go, the NTSB does its job reasonably competently and independently. * Gradual introduction: It's unlikely fully self-driving cars will be introduced all at once. What's more likely is the gradual automation of certain driving functions (sort of like cruise control, automatic parking, and other feature sets). I think any system that hands off control from a robot to a human introduces its own safety risks, but you might see something like a dedicated autonomous lane on a freeway with special parking areas where humans can safely resume control for driving in the city. There's also augmented driving where a car is primarily human driven, but will do things like pre-charge brakes and give advanced warning to a human diver when it believes the human is about to screw up. * Economies of scale: Large business organizations will probably get comfortable more quickly with autonomous cars than individual consumers. If FedEx and UPS support policies like "no left turns," they'll probably be among the first to get on board with fully automated trucks. And you'll certainly see some support for the insurance business, if autonomous vehicles really do result in lower overall accident rates.
- pyre 13y ago
  UPS employees are unionized, and driving routes (vs. working in the warehouses) is a sought-after position that is one of the benefits of seniority (as I understand it). I expect that they might have issues rolling out a computerized delivery fleet.
  - jfoster 13y ago
    So they'll just get replaced. Amazon and Google do seem keen to get into that space.
    - jrockway 13y ago
      Also why the airlines go bankrupt approximately once per career. The gross revenue per flight is the same as time increases, but pay raises for seniority decrease the profit as the workforce ages. (Not making a value judgement here. Airline pilots have a tough job and do it well, and deserve to be well-paid. But the industry is not as nice as me.)
      - mikeash 13y ago
        It's not like they're forced to pay their workers more as they age. The ones with unions may be forced to do so by their contract, but non-union airlines are hardly immune from bankruptcy. Airlines go bankrupt because it's a cut-throat business with extreme competition, which drives profits to zero. An airline customer will switch carriers for as little as a $5 savings on the cost of a multi-hundred-dollar ticket. There is essentially zero customer loyalty. If you can't convince customers to pay more, and all possible cost-cutting measures have already been implemented, then you have no room. In an ideal world, a business could survive forever in an environment like that. In the real world, business is variable, and with no margin, you can't build any resiliency. A couple of bad years is enough to screw you.
  - tomkarlo 13y ago
    Fedex drivers aren't. That doesn't matter as much when there aren't real alternatives, but it can become critical if technology starts to drastically reduce the need for labor. That's part of what happened to the American auto industry during the 80's.
omarhegazy 13y ago
Autocars are going to be held to a much higher standard because they should be held to a higher standard. On one end, autocars will be held to a higher standard because of cultural fear of incredibly rapid technological progression. That fear is entirely rational; the bigger the change, the more potential failures, the bigger the risk that there are some hidden faults that no one predicted. Big changes require more prediction than incremental changes, and more prediction = higher risk that you're wrong. Saying you're 95% sure of just one thing isn't scary, saying that the all of these new, undealt-with-before elements all each have 95% chance of being fine is a much scarier combination, and the chance that just one prediction goes wrong that fucks up the rest of the sequence of predictions, messing up the system as a whole, that chance gets higher. On another end, a fatally incorrect judgment by a Google Car goes into the database of encountered events that they have. The database that other Google Cars learn from. Which means the error could potentially compound. And other Google Cars will make the same mistakes, in higher frequencies. So there has to be some high standard to make sure false positives don't set about a positive feedback loop in the way the Cars perceive database history.

by scarmig 13y ago

andrewfong 13y ago

I suspect the higher standard question will be resolved in a couple of ways: * NTSB review: Airplanes face higher scrutiny than automobiles (despite the lower overall casualty rate). Part of the reason people have grown comfortable with air travel nonetheless is because the NTSB analyzes what went wrong after each crash and recommends (mandates) certain changes. Moreover, as far as government agencies go, the NTSB does its job reasonably competently and independently. * Gradual introduction: It's unlikely fully self-driving cars will be introduced all at once. What's more likely is the gradual automation of certain driving functions (sort of like cruise control, automatic parking, and other feature sets). I think any system that hands off control from a robot to a human introduces its own safety risks, but you might see something like a dedicated autonomous lane on a freeway with special parking areas where humans can safely resume control for driving in the city. There's also augmented driving where a car is primarily human driven, but will do things like pre-charge brakes and give advanced warning to a human diver when it believes the human is about to screw up. * Economies of scale: Large business organizations will probably get comfortable more quickly with autonomous cars than individual consumers. If FedEx and UPS support policies like "no left turns," they'll probably be among the first to get on board with fully automated trucks. And you'll certainly see some support for the insurance business, if autonomous vehicles really do result in lower overall accident rates.

pyre 13y ago
UPS employees are unionized, and driving routes (vs. working in the warehouses) is a sought-after position that is one of the benefits of seniority (as I understand it). I expect that they might have issues rolling out a computerized delivery fleet.
- jfoster 13y ago
  So they'll just get replaced. Amazon and Google do seem keen to get into that space.
  - jrockway 13y ago
    Also why the airlines go bankrupt approximately once per career. The gross revenue per flight is the same as time increases, but pay raises for seniority decrease the profit as the workforce ages. (Not making a value judgement here. Airline pilots have a tough job and do it well, and deserve to be well-paid. But the industry is not as nice as me.)
    - mikeash 13y ago
      It's not like they're forced to pay their workers more as they age. The ones with unions may be forced to do so by their contract, but non-union airlines are hardly immune from bankruptcy. Airlines go bankrupt because it's a cut-throat business with extreme competition, which drives profits to zero. An airline customer will switch carriers for as little as a $5 savings on the cost of a multi-hundred-dollar ticket. There is essentially zero customer loyalty. If you can't convince customers to pay more, and all possible cost-cutting measures have already been implemented, then you have no room. In an ideal world, a business could survive forever in an environment like that. In the real world, business is variable, and with no margin, you can't build any resiliency. A couple of bad years is enough to screw you.
- tomkarlo 13y ago
  Fedex drivers aren't. That doesn't matter as much when there aren't real alternatives, but it can become critical if technology starts to drastically reduce the need for labor. That's part of what happened to the American auto industry during the 80's.

omarhegazy 13y ago

Autocars are going to be held to a much higher standard because they should be held to a higher standard. On one end, autocars will be held to a higher standard because of cultural fear of incredibly rapid technological progression. That fear is entirely rational; the bigger the change, the more potential failures, the bigger the risk that there are some hidden faults that no one predicted. Big changes require more prediction than incremental changes, and more prediction = higher risk that you're wrong. Saying you're 95% sure of just one thing isn't scary, saying that the all of these new, undealt-with-before elements all each have 95% chance of being fine is a much scarier combination, and the chance that just one prediction goes wrong that fucks up the rest of the sequence of predictions, messing up the system as a whole, that chance gets higher. On another end, a fatally incorrect judgment by a Google Car goes into the database of encountered events that they have. The database that other Google Cars learn from. Which means the error could potentially compound. And other Google Cars will make the same mistakes, in higher frequencies. So there has to be some high standard to make sure false positives don't set about a positive feedback loop in the way the Cars perceive database history.