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Comment by gfodor | Hacker News Reader

The dynamic by all these commentators has always seemed to be predicated on the idea that self driving vehicles somehow either need to be universally useful for all driving tasks or they will stay in the lab. In reality the way this stuff is going to roll out is incrementally. Due to the prevalence of on-demand driving services now, self driving vehicles can be deployed literally just-in-time for routes that are known to be safe under current conditions.

It's perfectly reasonable that once an existence proof is shown for one single commonly taken route in America to be handled autonomously (as it already has been) that that is all the foothold needed to start to deliver real economic benefits from the technology, and hence will align incentives for it to, eventually, be perfected.

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Yeah, this. I've argued with lots of people about this, how self driving cars are never going to happen because solving all the problems is too hard.

And yet over the last years we've had improved cruise control, steering assist, emergency stopping, lane following. And now we're getting technology that can't drive in a lot of places but looks useful you a quick routine drive to a local shop on a quiet simple road for example.

It will gradually get more and more useful. One day you'll be thinking why don't we have driverless cars, only driver assist and then realize that you've not actually had to drive yourself for 2 years...

AI is the same. We'll not suddenly invent a general purpose AI like in the movies and books. Instead we'll slowly add features to the tools we have today one by one, until one day we realize that the accumulation of years of small enhancements has made something indistinguishable from AI

To be fair, there was a flurry of non-good news about autonomous cars about 2 or 3 months ago. Actual bad news, in the sense that things had been overhyped prior.

But hey, these things change fast. I have a Dreyfusian[0] prior on autonomous agents (some people think we're on the way to have robotic soccer referees) -- I'm skeptic about what currently passes for reinforcement learning, for one -- but I'm not above changing my mind. Suddenly even.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Dreyfus%27s_views_on_ar...

That sounds an incredibly risky strategy, are you commenting from direct knowledge or just taking a wild guess?

There's literally no such thing as "known to be safe" on a road, a crash could happen right in front of any of these cars, the car promptly kills its occupants through a mistake and then that's the end of self-driving cars for a decade.

Just commenting about the "one crash will kill the industry" part - I've heard this repeated many times over the last 20 years (way before self-driving cars were close to viable). I've repeated it myself.

But it looks like we're wrong. First of all, there have been crashes with even Tesla's autopilot, and it didn't seem to affect anything.

For another, this same logic would've probably meant that driving itself would never have become popular in the first place, or would've been set back many decades because of car crashes. That doesn't seem to have been the case.

I'm not saying these things can't kill an industry, but I think people are pretty tolerant of even unthinkable dangers beforehand, if the incentive is high enough.

Well said.

Though possibly a bigger backlash could come when a self driving car kills someone in a situation where there are only 2 bad options to choose from. Being that with a human driver nothing was pre-planned people move on. But with a self driving car where such situations have to be decided in advance the backlash could be much more significant.

To expand on your thought... I think "one crash will kill the industry" would have been true if this industry had continued to behave in a cowboy caution-to-the-wind (see early Tesla, Uber) fashion. But it really does seem like cooler heads have been prevailing. There's been (at least the appearance of) openness about various incidents, post-mortems, and plenty of lobbying of both the political and marketing varieties. I think this industry, for better or for worse, has made a nest for itself that will be able to absorb a good amount of setbacks, even of the mortal variety.

No, I think it's the other way around.

People driving have accidents all the time right now that could have been avoided if proper automation was in charge.

At some point if you have an accident and kill someone, and it can be shown in court that if you'd been using the easily available technology that person would still be alive, people will start being prosecuted for gross negligence or worse.

By that logic, why aren't we already prosecuting drivers of older, less safe vehicles? Why don't we mandate that every single car on the road has a breaking system straight from a sports car(while you can still buy cars with drum brakes today).

Surely, if you only bought a more expensive vehicle, you could have saved a life! /s

On the contrary this is an extremely risk-averse strategy since it allows the deployment of autonomous cars to be done in a way deliberately minimizes accident risk on a granular basis. In any deployment scenario of autonomous vehicles there are probabilities of crashes given the inputs to the system: the route, the weather, the behavior of other drivers, etc. When I said "known to be safe" I was using shorthand for "given an extensive array of inputs like route, vehicle condition, time of day, weather, known traffic patterns, prior trip logs, etc, does this route have a sufficiently low Bayesian prior of probability of failure to reach the destination safely to justify the use of an autonomous vehicle, and if so, which combination of system/configuration/etc minimizes the risk?"

Consider the alternative: autonomous cars theoretically get no production use and then suddenly go "on sale" for any buyer to use them in whatever route or condition they want. This would result in an extremely chaotic situation where suddenly there is no opportunity for gradual production deployment to slowly find the edges of their capabilities (which in some cases could result in accidents) -- instead the whole buyer-base of autonomous cars would be exposed to those edge cases, in full, from the moment the cars became available.

edit: Also I'm not sure what you are asking about direct knowledge: I'm stating observations of reality that self driving cars are already being rolled out incrementally in places/routes that they are best suited to.

Exactly and with ride sharing services is how it will happen incrementally.

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