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Comment by ars | Hacker News Reader

> when pedaless cars are declared.

That won't happen till General AI. How would you do something as simple as drive the car onto a lift to change the oil without pedals and a steering wheel?

Or there is a concert and you need to drive onto the grass to park?

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Solving a couple tiny problems really doesn't require human-level general intelligence. At the very worst you'd have a touchscreen with simple overrides.

People talk as if there's some infinite number of unique edge cases when driving a dang car, but there simply isn't that much you actually do with a vehicle. Real deal no-drivers-license-required automated vehicles are coming pretty soon; maybe not in 5 years, but definitely within 20.

Been hearing that line, verbatim, since I was a kid. "Cars will be self-driving long before you'd ever need to learn driving. You won't need that skill, just like we never needed horse-riding." Well, I've had a driving license for decades, but apparently the marketing slogan still manages to impress people. P.T.Barnum would be proud.

I remember hearing this as a kid. But it was mostly speculation, it would be insane to believe it to the extent that one even starts to plan for it.

We are in a completely different situation today.

My guess is people will change their expectations of what they can do with a car. Maybe it will not work on unusual terrain anymore. Maintenance procedures might also change and involve remote controls or other specialized types of control.

I have a lot of trouble envisioning that. I definitely would not want a car that I can't take off road as needed. At least half the people on the street where I live have one truck among other cars and many cars are parked in lawns. How quickly do you think perceptions about this could change?

The only thing I can think that would sell me on the idea is a really low price point, e.g. sub-$10k to get a new, driverless, road-only vehicle. But I would only want that in addition to a "real" car.

Noone will have cars any more. Especially not just parking around in a residential street. It's just so inefficient. You haul one via your app and that's it.

I doubt that. Cars are, besides being a transportation means, also a moving trunk, and that makes them non-interchangable to a degree.

The vast majority of car users take their vehicles at least slightly off road. I don't mean running a jeep through the Rubicon Trail, just simple common stuff like parking in a snow-covered lot at a ski resort with a human attendant pointing you where to park. How is a self-driving car ever going to handle that short of AGI?

You plan the path on a high resolution map on the center console. When decision speed is a non issue this is a quite nice interface because you can double check the entire path before the wheels turn.

"(6) It is easier to move a problem around (...) than it is to solve it."

In other words, now you need a hi-res, current map to show. Where does the data for that come from? (Oh wait, don't tell me: Magic!)

The cameras of the self driving car of course. I assume converting these inputs into maps that are usable enough for this purpose is much easier than driving a car in city conditions. So _if_ we get self driving cars we also get live updated maps of the surrounding circle with a radius ~20m.

Which can now see behind corners, underground and over terrain. Magic, I say, pure magic!

Not that people actually driving cars off the road are capable of this now. I'd often wish for a remote control when parking in constricted spaces.

They are not - but then you're back to driving, although using the touchscreen. Completely different from the original proposition "tell the car where to go, it will do the rest". You're just exposing a different control API to the human controlling the car (a.k.a. driver), that's hardly driverless.

TL;DR: "remote control" != "self-driving"

Correct - but the starting point here was already 'take this path', not 'go to that location on the grass'.

Come to think about it - even 'just park somewhere' is remarkably complicated. I don't quite understand why self-driving cars should need external high quality maps and can't make do with onboard cameras as human drivers do.

But then the parking requires either a high-quality database of valid and off-limits parking locations, or the ability of the car to read the signs on parking lots and generally be able to distinguish private from public parking.

Which is sort of my point: lots of things that seem simple to a human (but actually consist of many rules from various domains, not all of them explicit or universal) are thus handwaved away as "a few minor issues," even though every single of them is at least an UX friction point, and in sum they're significant blockers on the path to actual driverless vehicles. Since Minsky started meddling with AI, the hype always considers "70% there" as "done." AIchilles and the turtle, so to speak ;)

> drive the car onto a lift

There will be an app for that?

Hey, James Bond was driving from the backseat with a Nokia 9000 (?) a few movies ago.

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