Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

One way to help prevent a winner-take-all situation is to have more open protocols for some of the hard problems. An example that I feel needs to be done right now: an open protocol for signaling intent.

Today we have left and right blinkers, brake lights, the horn, and some 'body' language when you use the whole vehicle to show your intent. But with fully autonomous cars, we could be giving out signals that are rich with information.

"My exit is soon, I'd like to change to the right hand lane everybody!"; "People up ahead of me seem to be stopping suddenly, watch out as I may need to do the same!"; "The right lane is blocked at 43.718045, -79.507663, pass the word back to everyone so they are prepared".

If we can build an open protocol for how cars can share this rich information, then as more and more cars are autonomous, the roads will improve continuously. Even non-autonomous cars could start listening to this data and sharing it with the drivers.

On the other hand, if we don't build an open protocol then we could start to see, for example, all the Waymo cars helping each other out- but not helping the Teslas or the GMs. There's a winner-take-all effect in action.

Highly agree.

While reading this article, I had a paranoid convergence of ideas.

I was reading another article the other day about stock trading strategies, and how some particular strategies only work if a small number of people are using them; once they go mainstream, they lose their advantage.

The example used was a whole lot of funds jumping into a particular strategy, which then effectively killed the strategy's effectiveness, and everybody lost.

My paranoid fear is something similar in autonomous vehicles; a vicious cycle of systems reacting to each other, because they're not able to communicate directly.

Like when you're walking towards someone, and you both try to step to the side to let the other pass, but you step to the same side; then you correct by stepping the other way, but so does the other person.

I wonder if there is an economic/academic term for this? Vicious Cycle?

Tragedy of the commons?

Feedback loops and vicious cycles are more accurate, I'd say: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuous_circle_and_vicious_ci...

Also if anyone's interested, the article I was referring to is this: http://www.mauldineconomics.com/the-10th-man/black-monday

Perhaps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadlock#Livelock

Already solved for aircraft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_collision_avoidance_sy...

Good point. Should have thought of that!

Work for legally standardizing vehicle-to-vehicle communications has been going on for years, both by the US and the EU: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-vehicle

I wonder if typical car manufacturers who sell cars to other people will really be able to capture this data, technologically speaking.

It's way too much data to send over LTE, so you need to have a bunch of disk space to store it, and then you need your users to be OK with you abusing their WiFi in the middle of the night to send gigabytes of data back, which they won't, because we have data caps.

Whereas if you operate a fleet, you can just connect a data transfer cable to the car every night and dump all the data.

Obviously you can compress the data; maybe throw away the vision and point cloud data, and just keep the object locations, but is control with already recognised objects the real problem here, or is it the actual recognition part?

You'd like the short story 'Human Readable' by Cory Doctorow: http://craphound.com/walh/Cory_Doctorow_-_With_a_Little_Help...

Problem with this is the number of split-second decisions that are made on the road. How can we establish all the connections and pass on all these messages in these 'split-seconds'? Failure to do so can be catastrophic and cause all kinds of confusion.

You can't rely on that, so don't. Self-driving cars should drive defensively too, even if for them that may mean half a second rather than two seconds.

This is much less useful data than the map data and fleet positioning data mentioned in the article, for which the advantage due to network effects is very large.

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