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Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

I think we will soon be in a situation where self driving cars are better than humans for 10% of driving scenarios(highway, gridlock commute, some parking, ...) but nearly useless in others. I think the acceptance for half decent AI will be much lower than it is for poor human drivers, and the hardest parts of autonomous driving is still a very long way out.

That's probably fine though, if the automation can reliably discover when the environment changes. Especially since perhaps a majority of the time spent driving is in the very few "easy" scenarios.

Human drivers are probably happy to drive 10% of the commute time for the next 2-4 decades.

What this means however is that the dream of completely autonomous Ubers and transport trucks is probably much further out than some might hope.

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>if the automation can reliably discover when the environment changes.

That sounds about right. The ability to read/write/etc. while driving on the highway would actually be a huge win for a lot of people. And, equally important, it seems achievable in, perhaps, a single digit number of years.

But there would need to be an unambiguous mode change from "you can do Facebook now" to "you're driving" with plenty of time to make that shift.

This isn't as sexy as roboUber, shared cars, etc. but I'm inclined to agree that getting the last 10% of the way to unsupervised self-driving in essentially all situations is going to take a very long time.

On the highway on-ramp you engage auto pilot. When you are 5,2, and 1/4 mile away from the off ramp you get a warning that auto pilot is preparing to disengage.

If you do not accept and manually turn off auto-pilot, it slows down safely to a stop in the break-down lane.

That's exactly how Volvo's Drive Me project is supposed to work.

http://www.volvocars.com/intl/about/our-innovation-brands/in...

Ubers and transport trucks can do fixed routes, so that should be relatively easy to automate.

Driving a known "autonomous safe" route, or map region, and simply not driving if the conditions aren't ok (it's snowing, there is construction in the area so maps or lanes are poor etc) works. But that's basically taking the "mostly autonomous"-level driving, and just adapting either the environment and/or the restrictions/schedule/routes to that.

Uber could probably also just have defensive systems that simply park the car and wait for a human driver to arrive, if there is a problem. It's good business for them to have 3 cars per driver. It still doesn't approach the interesting problem though, which is autonomous driving on a human level (Autonomous Uber without backup drivers, in an entire city). That I think is far away.

Rather than a fallback driver having to physically enter the car, maybe they could take the drone pilot approach and control it remotely. There would be the latency to overcome, but the built in crash avoidance might be good enough for a relatively short/slow distance to exit the exceptional situation.

That's actually a really interesting idea - hand off driving to a remote person when the conditions are bad.

But would a car's connectivity and latency allow for that to be safe?

Edit: If not there would still be some form control needed for the passenger.

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