Comment by MarkMMullin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MarkMMullin | Hacker News Reader

As for Elon being one of the driving forces behind the transition to electric - Rock on Elon, nice damn job - as far as L5 AV - umm, you're so full of it you need to drag a septic tank - I'm just a little fella, and I do admire the primarily visual approach, but this all really boils down to 'You look, but you do not see' - I've been in an out of machine vision for a long time, and the one thing that's always been true is that we fail, and fail again, when we ignore the gigantic cognitive stack that is processing that visual data and making decisions based on it (and if we don't ignore it, we are forced to admit we can't handle it) . L1,L2, L3... yeah, sure, it's not that hard -I think 'Logan' got the freight trucks in 10 years spot on. L5 - I'll believe it when Elon and the Times author leave NYC for a late fall drive to check out a VT ski home, say about mid October - storm gone thru, cloudy/foggy night, poor visibility, and the only brains you got are in that car - better hope it knows that leaves get ripped down then and piled up in the twists and turns of backcountry VT roads - my guess is there will be a funeral, or it's gonna be a multi-day trip - the ability of a machine to go 'I have seen this before' has nothing at all to do with 'I understand what I am seeing and can draw rational inferences' My 2c, admittedly playing with midget systems, but the failure modes are pretty much the same

I think viable L5 somewhere in Arizona is different from L5 in New York, so autonomous vehicles will start spreading from places with good weather. But I don't think L5 is required for successful start of autonomous fleets. Advanced L4 with an option of remote 'driver' connecting for special cases driving (like car stuck or something), should be enough.

L5 is L5 - if the system can't tell, then it ain't L5 - and the driver 'connecting' won't work - it's basically 'please doze for three hours and then deal with a crisis within the blink of an eye' Pilots have enough trouble with this and they have 6DOF in a mostly isolated space - I do believe, but all my fun comes from learning about the spectacular levels of failure and hubris in much smaller systems :-) Think of it this way - if it's AZ, OK, I pick Flagstaff when the snows have just started to come and grease the road

Having been caught out in Tucson hailstorms with a 0% precipitation forecast, I'm not much impressed by "L5 for some regions, sometimes" myself.

L4, sure, map easy suburban spaces carefully and wake up your driver if things get weird. But L5 is intended to be human-parity, or at least have well-defined boundaries. It can give up and park until the snow stops, but if you're taking out the steering wheel it had better not stop more than humans do - and offer a "chance it anyway" button for if the snow isn't stopping.

Arizona is big, yes :) But on average it has better weather conditions, let's take smaller Phoenix area, L5 there won't have to deal with snow (I know it can get small amounts of snow, but don't think it's a problem). Driving in Alaska or Tibet mountains is different feat than driving on good roads of Arizona or south of Spain. So I think L5 can start developing in those favorable areas first. But if it works in 99.99% of times, it's ok to have remote drivers for 0.01%, of course it's not for situations when "it started to rain, get in control while car is doing 100 km/h", but for situations when car is stationary and can't understand what to do and need human brain to help it for a short time. If this will let me to use autonomous taxi 10 years earlier, I'm ok with it.

When the weather goes to shit, all L5-but-not-really cars on the road are now in a situation where they need a 'remote' driver.

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