Comment by dalbasal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dalbasal | Hacker News Reader

It's worth stepping back and considering the landscape of self driving.

First, the fact that it's within reach is amazing. It's one of those wierd cases where regular people instinctively put it in the "mars colony" category of futurism while sober insiders had to bring us back to a more optimistic view.

Now, there is a lot to worry about in the current landscape of giant tech companies, and this article is another example. But, there are things to awe at too.

Having self driving within reach... it's a result of massive effort. Amazing technology, and complexes of technology it is built on. This includes the manufacturing technology producing the cheap components.

All of this cam from (1) fairly blue sky intiatives (2) with extremely long and uncertain payback periods and (3) tremendous strategic money-where-your-mouths are foresight. When I realized what G where doing with street-view, I thought it was crazy. More a sign of overexuberance and too much money. Turns out, it was en route to maps dominance which was en route to transportation dominance (and phone dominance).

IDK if this is unprecedented, but it's fairly unrivaled in today's world. We don't see IBM or Intel, Toyota or McKesson thinking this big or this far. Definitely not banks or money businesses. Not cities or countries, generally.

I mean an equivalent in health/medicine would be taking the ideas from TED talks. A personalized health revolution. Nanobots or curing death like Aubrey de Grey keeps talking about.

I'm already hearing the "regulations" explanation. Medicine is restrained by surgeon generals, parliaments and national health setups. I don't think that argument holds at this scale. Self driving cars require re-rwriting our transport rules, and probably massive the physical infrastruucture. The technology will have sucked up billions decades before it makes a penny. The guiding idea is that "if we have a true self driving car, the other stuff will sort." Same applies to medicine. If it's better enough, it'll take.

It's hard to peer back and determine of something was inevitable or not, but I suspect self driving wasn't. It could have happened (could will happen? tenses are hard) decades later, if not for the fairly outrageous decisions of a small number of people.

> First, the fact that it's within reach is amazing. It's one of those wierd cases where regular people instinctively put it in the "mars colony" category of futurism while sober insiders had to bring us back to a more optimistic view.

I think a Mars colony is closer than self driving cars. You need basically strong AI for fully self-driving cars. You just need a ton of money and an incentive for Mars colonies. Most of the science for going to Mars is already there, as well as the tech. I don't think we even truly have the science for wide spread, all-weather, all-terrain self driving cars.

Yeah, self driving cars may work in Arizona but how about rush hour Amsterdam or New York? In my country it might work for long haul trucks on highways in the near future. But I dont see a use case beyond that.

And rush hour Amsterdam or New York are probably easy mode compared to rush hour Cairo or Delhi :)

To be fair, the chaos the traffic situation is probably inversely proportional to the labor cost of driving.

A lot of self-driving thought seems to go into deciding when to obey rigid rules and when to break them like everyone else.

We can't assume the pure chaos of Cairo or Delhi requires the same model. Self-driving might only need basic Roomba-level collision avoidance and basic pathfinding for a place where the humans navigate with the expectation that every object, moving or not, is a collision waiting to happen.

Think about how much of rules-based driving is about avoiding hitting people who aren't following the rules. If you start off assuming there are no rules, the model is simpler: everything the sensors pick up could come flying at you at any moment, so plan accordingly, and stop or slow down if you can't find a path that avoids an impact.

Hard to say what roadblocks will be there, 3 steps ahead. I suspect that if the US' easy cities become self-drivable, all cities will. But, maybe not.

In any case, I don't think we should be assuming infrastructure will remain the same. If self driving does replace driving, the infrastructure will change. Point problems (eg, computer can't handle these 43 tricky roads or intersections, those problems will be solvable be changing the road. It might just be adjusting so gns or minor parking rule changes.

There's a chicken-egg problem, which is why getting some of the way on existing infrastructure is smart. It also avoids scaring finance ministers, but ultimately infrastructure will meet driverless cars part way.

I suspect that "success" requires getting most of the way on existing infrastructure, especially to the degree that "self driving" is mostly for people who are well-off financially for a significant period.

That said, we redo intersections because they have a lot of accidents all the time. I'm not sure why intersections that self-driving vehicles have particular problems with would be any different. I can also imagine having some sort of RF "beacon" that gets used for construction sites and the like to flag drivers that they need to take over manual control in a mile or whatever.

Self-driving cars will be in wide use long before every case is solved. There's lots of money to be made with autonomy that only works on well-maintained roads in regions with favourable climate.

Even highway driving in clear weather conditions that allows you to truly go hands off and read a book would be a huge win. For a lot of people, it's a large amount of the driving they do and I suspect it's where a lot of the worst accidents occur because of the speeds involved.

Of course, it doesn't get you to the futurist vision of self-driving cars in that you can't share cars and you need a licensed, sober human in the vehicle but it has the advantage of being very achievable in the fairly near-term while still being a really nice feature.

I can't help but think that self-driving cars is the penultimate American thing. They aren't effective or needed in properly built cities (think London) and they won't make THAT much good to the society eliminating taxi drivers. If we dig into the vision of what people want to achieve with them, it's mostly manifestations of American problems (poverty, systemic racism, homelessness, segregation, insular indifference to others' problems, crazy urban sprawl) which people don't want to confront directly, instead opting for "let's spend HUMONGOUS amount of money to keep everything more or less the same".

There is a solution for most problems people try to solve with self-driving cars: more cycling, better public transport, denser cities. Look at London: car use is heavily discouraged (20mph speed limit, congestion charge, expensive parking) and still the whole thing works like a charm.

> ...still the whole thing works like a charm.

I find dense cities don't work for everyone. Car towns are still nicer for the disabled, the elderly, and families with young children. Especially if stairs or snow enter the picture.

There is probably a way to build dense cities that work for people that need wheels and canes to function, but rebuilding cities to provide ramps, elevators, wide doors, and secure motor scooter parking is also expensive. There is also a last-mile problem for public trolleys and buses to be both available to the disabled and efficient for general use. That's why I think self-driving vehicles have a lot of promise. It probably makes more sense to have a larger fleet of smaller busses and then another set of small busses or vans for people who need a ramp up into the bus, locking mechanisms so their chair doesn't roll around, etc.

I'm going to have to firmly disagree on all points.

Car towns are the worst for the elderly. Most elderly don't feel comfortable driving but in the US, they're all but forced to do it to escape the house. Anywhere else, they can get out and socialize. Getting physical and mental exercise. You're also likely to find nicer single-floor homes (good condos with elevators) rather than "old people warehouses". As for snow, do you really want drivers with failing eyesight and reaction time to be driving on snow and ice? Or even shoveling out their car, for that matter?

I have young children. How many articles have we seen here about kids walking to school or childhood independence? Being car-bound makes that extraordinarily difficult or impossible. At this point, I struggle to think of an advantage of a "car town" for kids. Less time spent getting dressed in the winter, maybe? I suppose when they're older and even more "free range", I'll have to worry about how far they've gotten on the bus or train without me. I'll consider that being a victim of success though.

> Most elderly don't feel comfortable driving but in the US...

I'm talking about people who can't do stairs anymore. They're not walking a few blocks or driving cars. They're taking shuttles places or taking trips with the family. Shuttling the elderly around is cheaper and simpler in car towns. Scooting around NYC or downtown SF with Grampa in his wheelchair is rough. Rougher still when it's cold, raining, or hot. It's often bad for their health, even.

Car towns, maybe just because they are newer on average, are easier to deal with.

* basically never having to illegally park just to function

* car towns have plenty of bathrooms and indoor places to stop and relax

* elevators and handicap accessibility is much more common; dense cities are lousy staircases, steps, and narrow aisles

* keep gear in the trunk (changes of clothes, extra diapers, umbrellas, ponchos, picnic lunches, etc.)

* buckling a tired kid in a car is safer and more convenient than dragging them across intersections

* a screaming kid in a car is nicer all around than a screaming kid on a train

* getting around a dense town with luggage is rough: cabs don't stop, big/extra suitcases on buses is rough, and there are stairs everywhere

The math changes, of course, if everyone in your party is old enough, healthy enough, and responsible enough to carry their own gear. Some families with kids are in this category. But most families aren't that way, at least through different seasons.

You're missing many advantages of self-driving.

1. Better safety - I find it very likely that self-driving cars will reduce the amount of traffic incidents. Algorithm will likely act more stable than human driver.

2. Better fuel consumption - again, more optimised driving patterns.

3. Better convenience - you can drink and drive(well, car will drive), you can sleep and drive, you can work and drive.

4. Better transport - self-driving trucks don't need breaks, are not likely to be overworked and will likely not block motoways taking over another truck going 2 km/h slower (yey European highways!).

5. Better vehicle utilization - we will be able to reduce total number of vehicles and all the congestion, environment pollution and money that comes with it.

While solution you mentioned really improve quality of life in cities, they do not ultimately solve issues inherent to car transport, where car transport is actually preferred/best solution.

Good public transport systems provide even better benefits for points 1 (accidents involving subways are probably still going to be rarer than for self-driving cars), 2 (you don't even need fossil fuels for subways / trams), and 5. Arguably you don't lose much on point 3 either, except that you may have to walk a few minutes to/from the nearest stop (which is probably good from a public health standpoint anyway).

I agree that this only applies in cities though, and public transport may not help much in rural areas.

As an American one of the things I'm optimistic for is that cheaper, more available per trip transportation makes more housing viable for people that don't want a car.

If that happens, it's a way out of the car trap that we are currently in, directly, but also because more people living without cars will lead to more infrastructure for people living without cars.

Tens of thousands of people die every year in vehicular incidents in the US. Who knows how many more are significantly affected health-wise and otherwise in their life from such incidents. With self-driving cars, those numbers would plummet. It has nothing to do with your other claims, however I would say that it fits the Americanized "because we can!" fantasy.

Denser cities don't help that much, because you'd still have the massive scope of inter-city travel. The whole of Great Britain is only a couple hundred miles long in its longest axis, so it's not an applicable model.

> better public transport

The Seattle Metro area is working on that. Building out just a few mass transit lines here, not nearly enough, is going to take until 2050.

By which time the built lines will already be far over capacity.

> more cycling

I love cycling, but Seattle is built on hills. A lot of them. Very steep ones. Also it rains, rather frequently, up to 150 days of the year.

Electric bikes help solve the hill problem, harder to solve the issue of everyone going around smelling like a wet dog. Tech companies may offer on site showers, but a lot of other companies don't care enough about their employees to bother.

But even with all that aside (I am a huge fan of mass transit), let's take a look at driving between metros. Right now mass transit between metros typically involves going from one city center to another. So in a world of amazing quality mass transit, it is a trip to DT of your home city, a ride to another city, then a trip to your final destination.

Replace that with on call self driving cars. Picked up at home, and get dropped off close to your destination in another city. Within that city, and within your own city, use mass transit.

With the light rail Seattle is building out, my commute from one of the surrounding cities consists of driving to a park and ride transfer station (because even though I live on a main thoroughfare, mass transit isn't coming anywhere near me in my entire lifetime!), then taking mass transit in to the city.

If I avoid rush hour, my travel time to city is 15 to 20 minutes.

An autonomous car picking me up and taking me into the city makes a lot of sense. Indeed, I'd prefer if all the money (and decades of work!) being spent connecting the cities around Seattle was instead spent building incredible high quality mass transit within Seattle, and the surrounding cities.

At that point, serious change to the layout of cities could happen. Transit could get ran everywhere, huge parking lots removed, lots of housing built close to work, and people who want to would be able to live close to work, helping ease congestion.

Self driving cars make that possible.

The technology that is being built in America needs to be built up around the, unfortunate, fact that we have suburbs. You cannot relocate the majority of the country's populous. There are 700k people in Seattle, and 3 million in the surrounding urban area!

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