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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

This shows much the same info as Chris Urmson's TED talk in 2015.[1] Simplified for a non-technical audience, cleaner graphics, and without Urmson's clips of the vehicle encountering such things as someone in a powered wheelchair chasing a turkey with a broom. The tech video is more informative. It shows more of how sensing and planning interact. "Fences" appear in the graphics showing the keep-away area for a moving obstacle such as a bicycle.

Waymo is going at this right. They sense as much as they can, build a detailed 3D model of the world, and only use machine learning to help classify objects. Classifier failures aren't too serious; the obstacle still gets avoided, but you might not get as smooth a ride as the behavior prediction won't be as good. Compare Tesla's self-driving videos.

[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_urmson_how_a_driverless_car_...

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The bit with the person in a wheelchair chasing a duck with a broom is great. And it illustrates simultaneously two things: there is no hope that an AI driver will ever understand everything that is going on around it. But fortunately, you don't have to understand exactly a broom-wielding duck-chasing wheelchair rider to drive carefully around it.

> the person in a wheelchair chasing a duck with a broom is great. And it illustrates simultaneously two things: there is no hope that an AI driver will ever understand everything that is going on around it

I don't see what grounds you can have for saying that. We don't know if we'll be able to develop human-level AI (or beyond).

Another point is that I'm sure there are lots of unusual circumstances that human drivers sometimes face that they're poor at getting a clear snap-judgement of -- of what it is they're seeing and of how it will move (and thus how they'll need to react to it).

There's still the issue that self-driving cars are too courteous compared to normal drivers. I wonder how/if they'll fix that. Imagine sitting in a self-driving car that can't "push" itself through traffic; or imagine sitting in a car behind that car ...

I actually live in the greater Phoenix area and go to school at ASU, so I see Waymo and Uber autonomous around everywhere. I frequently see these things handle aggressive rush hour traffic with university pedestrians jumping out into the middle of traffic. They stay safe, but they clearly have a sense of when to go for it.

I’m also thinking of how human drivers will quickly learn to exploit this and get a feel of how to push the algorithm to get a slighgood advantage. Like, advancing a bit and stopping or getting a bit closer in order to merge in front of a self driving car.

On the other hand, the self-driving car has a lot of cameras, good for collecting evidence, which may scare human drivers.

Maybe, but there are quirks you can exploit. Getting hit in the back of your car, for example, usually means fault is with the car behind.

People already do this with real drivers.

Now imagine if you kept encouring the same timid driver and everyone knew how to cut in front of them.

Changing lanes is a normal and necessary part of driving. I'm continuously amazed by people on the internet who talk about "cutting in front" like it's something only other people do, or who are apparently proud of preventing others from getting into the lanes they need to be in.

Maybe not timid, but considerate?

Making the car more aggressive is not rocket science. The trouble is that this is where the safety benefit of self-driving cars will start to diminish. If you watch Chris Urmson's 2016 presentation at SXSW, he tells that the only accident Waymo had on a public road was when their car tried to push in front of a bus.

Self-driving cars may win out there because they have full circle sensing and can track many objects at once. They may be better at getting into a hole than humans delayed by head-turning time.

Another advantage self-driving cars have is reliable range rate. Humans are terrible at judging the speed of approaching objects. But radars are great at that.

The reflexes and attention on the self-driving car are going to be dramatically better; if there is a safe opening, the self driving car will be much better at exploiting it than a human would.

I hope this will overcome the "advantage" that humans gain by exploiting unsafe openings.

I mean, as is, I'm not a particularly aggressive driver; I lose some car-lengths because of that, and personally? I think that's okay.

If you clicked just for that anecdote about the powered wheelchair, like me, it happens right after 11:13

What's your prediction for when a company will have a self-driving technology good enough to make a profit?

2022.

the aerial shots made me wonder if there will be telephone pole/stoplight or building mounted cameras to augment sensing capabilities in dense areas.

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