The human toll is irrelevant to the conversation, what's relevant is whether risks taken are being taken knowingly - you cannot market a self driving vehicle whose functionality "is 2x better than any human being" while simultaneously stating in your legal language to protect yourself: don't take your hands off the wheel - that's bs.
The human toll is absolutely relevant to the conversation: this is about people dying now and in the future. It seems cruel to discuss it in a "I'll sacrifice X to save Y" later, but it can reasonably be reduced to that.
I think it's safe to assume that this will drastically reduce driving related injuries and deaths.
Is the life taken by auto pilot worth less than the life taken by the aggressive driver who takes out an innocent driver? No.
I hope we eventually save lives as in net improvement in current death totals by using these technologies but the risks are not well communicated, the marketing is entirely out of sync with the risks and the "martyrs" we create thus to me look like victims.
I think beliefs such as these is fueled by the extremely naive implication that each death will cause the learning algorithm to "improve itself" so every self driving thing out there is safer owing to that death..
Some number of people, N are willing to risk their lives to use autonomous vehicles they'll die as a result. It should be just as clear to person using autopilot the risks involved not misled with marketing fluff that doesn't come close to reality. Martyrs not victims
This assumes that the self driving tech will continue to increase in competence and will at some point surpass humans. I somehow find that extremely optimistic, bordering in on being naive.
Consider something like OCR or object recognition alone, where similar tech is applied. Even with decades of research behind it, it really cannot come any where close to a human in terms of reliability. I am talking about stuff that can be trained endlessly with any sort of risk. Still it does not show an ever increasing capability.
Now, machine learning and AI is only part of the picture. The other part is the sensors. This again is not anywhere near the sensors a human is equipped with.
From what we have seen in the tech industry in recent years is that trust in a tech by the people, even intelligent ones such as people who are investing in it, is not based on logic (Theranos, uBeam etc). I think such a climate is exactly what is enabling tests such as these. But unlike others, these tests are actually putting unsuspecting lives on line. And that should not be allowed..
Please note that I artfully omitted a due date on my assumption. There's so much money involved here and so much initial traction that it is indeed reasonable to think that tech can surpass a "normal" driver.
I'm also biased against human drivers, plenty of whom should not be behind the wheel.
I don't think it is reasonable at all to reach that conclusion based on the money involved...You just can't force progress/breakthrough just by throwing money at all problem..
>I'm also biased against human drivers, plenty of whom should not be behind the wheel.
So I think it would be quite trivial to drastically increase the punishment of dangerous practices if caught. I mean, suspend license or ban for life if you are caught texting while driving or drunk driving.
You're also ignoring a key point: we have "self-driving" cars right now, but they're not good enough yet. Computer hardware is getting cheaper day by day, and right now the limiting factor appears to be the cost of sensors.
Both are not true. It does not need money for a man to have a great breakthrough idea. It is also not possible to guarantee generation a great idea by just throwing more and more money at researchers...
The best thing is to build a system to analyze your driving and figure out if you are in that 40% of people and then let it drive for you. Maybe drunk drivers, for example. It can do this per ride: “oh you’re driving recklessly, do you want me to take over?”
EVERYTHING ELSE SHOULD BE A STRICT IMPROVEMENT. Taking over driving and letting people stop paying attention is not a strict improvement.
The argument should NOT be about playing with people’s lives now so im the future some people can have a better system. That’s a ridiculous argument. Instead WHY DON’T THE COMPANIES COLLABORATE ON OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE AND RESEARCH TO ALL BUILD ON EACH OTHER’S WORK? Capitalism and “intellectual property”, that’s why. In this case, a gift economy like SCIENCE or OPEN SOURCE is far far superior at saving lives. But we are so used to profit driven businesses, it’s not likely they will take such an approach to it.
What we have instead is companies like Waymo suing Uber and Uber having deadly accidents.
And what we SHOULD have is if an incremental improvement makes things safer, every car maker should be able to adopt it. There should be open source shops for this stuff like Linux that enjoy huge defensive patent portfolios.
Ain’t gonna happen I’m afraid.
Why not? That's how pioneers make progress, in new aircraft and spacecraft.
If people want to be on the bleeding edge, why not let them?
How can the cars improve if they are never allowed to drive?
The pioneers in this case are putting other people’s life at risk.
Wayne seems to demonstrate that improving self-driving cars without leaving a trail of bodies behind seems in the realm of possibility, so let’s measure Tesla against that standard.
They don't just say it in the legal language. The car is continually reminding the driver of it, as the article makes clear.
The problem is that Uber needs self driving cars in order to make money, and Tesla firmly believes that their system is safer than human drivers by themselves (even if a few people who wouldn't have otherwise died do, others who might have died won't and they believe those numbers make it worth it).
The problem is that you cna only learn so much without actual practice.
I think we need to keep the human driver in control, but have the computers learning through that constant, immediate feedback.
And get rid of misleading marketing and fatal user experience design errors.
I don't know what is stopping them from simulating everything inside a computer.
Record the input from all the sensors when a car equipped sensors is driven through real roads by a human driver. Replay the sensor input, with enough random variations and let the algorithms train on it.
Continue adding to the library of sensor data by making the sensor car by driving it through more and more real life roads and in real life situations. Keep feeding the ever increasing library of sensor data to the algorithm, safely inside a computer.
Obviously they've already tried that, and it doesn't work. The map is not the territory.
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.
What I mean is that. Do not "teach" the thing in real time. Instead collect the sensor data from the cars a human is driving (and also collect the human input also), and train the thing on it, safely inside the lab.
You say, they have done it already. But I am asking if they have done it enough. And if that is so, how come the accidents such as these are possible, when the situation is pretty out of a text book in basic driving?
It also will not ensure exclusion of manual vehicles, so it won't create the exclusion necessary for the predictable driving environment.
Sounds like requiring exclusive access - I apologize if that was a misinterpretation.
If you have human and automated drivers in the same roads, the computers have to be able to cope with the vagaries of human drivers.
How can you then get away from '"beta testing" our self driving cars on roads with human operators' if that is their deployment environment?
This is the definition of a false dichotomy and it implicitly puts the onus on early adopters to risk their lives (!) in order to achieve full autonomy. Why not put the onus on the car manufacturer to invest sufficient capital to make their cars safe!? To rephrase what you said with this perspective:
> ...developing self-driving automobiles is so important that it's worth the implied cost of potentially tens of billions of investor dollars in order to perfect the technology, because that's what people do; make sacrifices to improve the world we live in so that future generations don't have to know the same problem.
This seems strictly better than the formulation you provided. How nuts is it that the assumption here is that people will have to die for this technology to be perfected. Why not pour 10x or 100x the current level of investment and build entire mock towns to test these cars in - with trained drivers emulating traffic scenarios? Why put profits ahead of people?
I generally agree with this philosophy but this is very optimistic, at least in the United States. This is a country where we can't even ban assault rifles let alone people from driving their own vehicles. You're going to see people drive their own vehicles for a very long time even if self driving technology is perfected.
And you need a fleet of rental cars so that people can actually get to their destination.
What's the relative cost of all that vs. pavement?
If the cars are electric, I'm less sure.
Though your train of cars would likely have such low passenger density that a series of buses would be just as good. Special lanes just for buses are already a thing.
Commuter rail systems run at 2 minute headways or less. Long-distance trains mostly don't but that's largely due to excessive safety standards - for some reason we regulate trains to a much higher safety standard than cars. Even then, the higher top speeds of trains can make up for a certain amount of waiting and indirect routing. (Where I live, in London, trains are already faster than cars in the rush hour).
> What's the relative cost of all that vs. pavement?
When you include the land use and pollution? Cars can be cheaper for intercity distances when there's a lot of similarly-sized settlements, but within a city they waste too much space. And once you build cities for people rather than cars, cars lose a lot of their attraction for city-to-city travel as well, since you're in the same situation of having to change modes to get to your final destination.
That "some reason" is physics. According to a quick Google search, an average race car needs 400m of track length from 300 km/h to 0 km/h. A train will require something around 2500m, over 5x the distance, to brake from the same speed. Trains top out at -1.1m/s² deceleration, an ordinary car can get -10m/s² deceleration.
Part of the reason why is also that in a car, people are generally using their seatbelts - which means you can safely hit the brakes with full power. In a train, however, people will be walking around, standing, taking a dump on the loo - and no one will be using a belt. Unless you want to send people literally flying through the carriages, you can't go very much over that 1 m/s² barrier.
Because of this, you have the requirement of signalling blocks spaced in a way that a train at full speed can still come to a full stop before the next block signal. Also: a train can carry thousands of people. Have one train derail and crash into e.g. a bridge or crash with another train and you're looking with way, way, way more injuries and dead people than even a megacity could support, much less in a rural area.
Compare the above to hop in my car, drive to the freeway, turn on self-driving, turn off self-driving once i get off the freeway, find parking near where i'm going and walk in.
As a society, we've done alot more in the name of convenience.
The point is driving is a freedom and getting rid of it in this country will be hard. I'd imagine self driving vehicles having more prevalence in China where the government can control what destinations you have access to and monitor your trips.
Many states (red) won't ban them for a very long time.
the impact on freedom to travel will have to be secured and decentralized without any government kill switches.
Which states? Maybe a few in New England, but I don't see that happening anywhere else. Counties perhaps, but there are rural areas pretty much everywhere, and people are going to want the freedom to drive their own vehicle.
We are asking that self driving cars be ALLOWED if the user chooses, even IF the safety is in doubt. This is because of just how extremely important this issue is.
In comparison, the economic impact/benefit of banning assault rifles is negligible (and definitely not transformative) even if I personally think it is the morally right thing to do. (Maybe we can make the case later if school security and active shooter drills become prohibitively expensive and/or annoying)
So people will relocate to avoid traffic? Why doesn't this happen today? Suppose San Francisco decided to not enforce self driving laws to protect small businesses and preserve community infrastructure and culture. Now suppose Phoenix (only picked because they've been progressive with self driving technology) does enforce self driving laws, would you expect a mass exodus from San Francisco to Phoenix?
Right now Phoenix is not even on the map for most of us. If they did something like this (at the right time), then it might be.
Why would the less-risky drivers move to self-driving cars first? Wouldn't some of the higher-risk demographics (e.g. the elderly) make the move first since they have more incentive to do so?
> Second, cities that go to self driving only will have a huge advantage in infrastructure utilization and costs as roads are used more efficiently (with smoother traffic) and parking lots/garages become a thing of the past. Residents will just push for it if it means not being stuck in traffic anymore.
I think self-driving cars will be really cool and reduce traffic accidents once they're perfected, but a lot of these assumptions don't make sense. Unless a critical mass switches to car-sharing, autonomous cars and no parking will make rush hour worse because now each car will make the round trip to work twice a day instead of just once. Also, what happens to the real-estate where the parking lots are now? The financially sound thing to do will probably be converting these lots to more offices/condos/malls. So urban density will increase - increasing traffic.
Even if autonomous cars radically improve traffic flow, I suspect we'll just get induced demand [1]. More people will take cars instead of public transit and urban density will increase until traffic sucks again.
Elderly aren't usually considered higher risk. The young kids are, enthusiasts are, people who drive red sports cars are.
> Unless a critical mass switches to car-sharing, autonomous cars and no parking will make rush hour worse because now each car will make the round trip to work twice a day instead of just once.
Autonomous cars should be mostly fleet vehicles (otherwise you have to park it at home).
Isn't that just like in most of the major world cities where taxis are the norm rather than the exception? It isn't weird for a taxi in Beijing to make 5-6 morning commute rounds. But even then, there are a lot of reverse commutes to consider.
> The financially sound thing to do will probably be converting these lots to more offices/condos/malls.
While density can increase, convenient affordable personal transportation also allows the opposite to occur. Parks, nice places, and niche destinations, are also possible.
Think of it this way, once traffic is mitigated, urban planning can apply more balance to eliminate uneven reverse commute problems. There will still be an incentive to not move, but movement in itself wouldn't be that expensive (only 40 kuai to get to work in Beijing ~15km, I'm sure given the negligible labor costs, autonomous cars can manage that in the states).
Peopl I’ve said it before, and I’ll repeat it till eventually the tide turns on HN and elsewhere.
You will not have full autonomy unless you control the road itself.
At which point you are better off just making it mass transit.
Also, people are terrible at detecting objects directly in front of them and just like computers, the human brain can be cheated, overloaded, inept or inexperienced leading to an accident.
Now we have cars with lane assist, smart breaking, auto pilot features and that's only in the past 5-10 years.
Of all the places where technology can save lives, its definitely in vehicles/transportation.
How many optical illusions do you usually see in the roads while driving, that can result in an accident?
I am not even talking about the "people are terrible at detecting objects directly in front of them" part.
I mean, how can you be a human being and say this? If we were "terrible at detecting objects directly in front of us", we would have been predated out of existence a long time ago..
Check out this article, it is easy to never see a bike you're on a collision course with. https://singletrackworld.com/2018/01/collision-course-why-th...
Last time I checked, I could move my eyes, up and down, side to side. I could also rotate my whole head, that also up and down and side to side.
And I am a human being.
You may consider humans as bad drivers but Tesla's autopilot is even worse than that:
It can't even look in one direction!
I'm not claiming Tesla's system is currently better than a human, just that there is plenty of potential for a machine to outperform humans perceptually. As it is, Tesla's system isn't exactly the gold standard.
Sometimes you'll see multiple white lines, or lanes that appear to vere off due to dirt on the road. A bit of litter looks like a person, a kid looks like they might run out.
A lot of times I find I'm searching for something and can't see it but it was in my visual field. I think this worsens with age.
No. None of those qualify as brain being cheated.
That is the only thing I was responding in the start of this discussion. Essentially the person was saying human brain can be cheated just like a computer.
I am saying, No. Not just like a computer. Human brains does not get cheated so easily like a computer. Claiming that is outrageous and shows you have no idea of what you are talking about...
Actually, one thing that I was curious about regarding this incident -- they say that authorities had to wait for a team of Tesla's engineers to show up to clean up burning mess of batteries. Luckily for everyone else trying to get somewhere on 101 that day, Tesla's HQ isn't too far away. What if next time one drives into a barrier it happens in a middle of Wyoming? Will the road stay closed until Tesla's engineers can hitch a ride on one of Musk's Falcons?
And $879B in USA per year.
It is thus very important.
For the 1.3 million people and their loved ones and to 20-50 million injured EVERY YEAR, yeah, it's really that important.
Is it ready today? No. We're in pretty violent agreement on that.
Will we get there? I don't see much reason to doubt that we will, eventually. It may require significant infrastructure changes.
It's pretty clear Waymo/Uber are pushing the envelope too hard, without adequate safeguards, but "only be acceptable if it were you and Mr. Musk...on Tesla's private proving grounds" is probably not pushing the envelope enough.
Even Waymo is "unleashing their stuff onto unsuspecting public" by driving them on public roads - lots of innocent bystanders potentially at risk there.
Both Waymo and even Uber do not pretend that their systems are ready for public use and at least allegedly have people who are paid to take over (granted, in Uber's case it's done as shadily as anything else Uber does). Tesla sells their half-baked stuff to everyone, with marketing that strongly implies that they can do self-driving now, if only not for those pesky validations and regulations. I think there's quite a bit of a difference.
A lot of deaths and injuries on the road happen in countries with bad infrastructure and rather cavalier attitude to rules of the road. Fixing those could save more people sooner than SDVs that they won't be able to afford any time soon. Not to consider that an SDV designed in the first world (well, Bay Area's roads are closer to third world, but still...) aren't going to work too well when everyone around drives like a maniac on a dirt road.
Not to say that SDVs wouldn't be neat, when they actually work, but this is a very SV approach, throwing technology to create overpriced solution to problems that could be solved much cheaper, but in a boring way that doesn't involve AI, ML, NN, and whatever other fashionable abbreviations.
Whose lives are we sacrificing? In the case of the Uber crash in Tempe and this Tesla crash in California, the people who died did not volunteer to risk their lives to advance research in autonomous vehicles.
I highly respect individuals who choose to risk their lives to better the world or make progress, like doctors fighting disease in Africa and astronauts going to space, but at the same time, I think this must always be a choice. Otherwise we could justify forcing prisoners to try new drugs as the first stage of clinical trials. Or worse things. Which is why there are extensive vetting before approval for clinical trials is given.
I do think that, once the safety of autonomous vehicles have been proven on a number of testbeds, but before they are ready for deployment, it is justifiable to drive them on public roads. Maybe without safety drivers. But until then, careful consideration should be given to their testing.
Uber should not have been able to run autonomous vehicles with safety drivers where the safety driver could be allowed to look away from the road for several seconds while the car was moving at >30mph. The car should automatically shutoff if it is not clear whether the safety driver is paying attention. And there should be legislation that bans any company that fails to implement basic safeguards like this from testing again for at least a decade, with severe fines. Probably speeds should also be limited to ~30mph for the first few years of testing while the technology is still so immature, as it is today.
Similarly, Tesla should not be allowed to deploy their Autopilot software to consumers before they conduct studies to show that it is reasonably safe. Repeated accidents have shown that Level 1 and Level 2 autonomous vehicles, where the car drives autonomously but the driver must be ready to intervene, is a failed model unless the car actively monitors that the driver is paying attention.
Overall I think justifying the current state of things by saying that people must be sacrificed for this technology to work is ridiculous. Basic safeguards are not being used, and if we require them, maybe autonomous vehicles will take a few years longer to reach deployment, but that thousands of lives could become tens.
Edit: I read in another comment that the Tesla car at least "alarms at you when you take your hands off the wheel". In that case I think what Tesla is doing is much more reasonable. (Not Uber, though.) Although I still feel like it is going to be hard to react to dangerous situations when the system operates correctly almost all the time (even if you are paying attention and have your hands on the wheel). But I'm not sure what the correct policy should be here, because I don't fully understand why people use this in the first place (since it sounds like Autopilot doesn't save you any work).
Cars should just be phased out in favor of mass transit everywhere.
Yes, you can live without the convenience of your car. No really, you can.
Now think about how you would enable that to happen. What local politicians are you willing to write to, or support, in order to enable a better mass transit option for you? And how would you enable more people to support those local politicians that make that decision?
This is the correct solution, since the AI solution of self-driving cars isn't going to happen. Their high fatality rates are going to remain high.
Maybe, but unless you can change the laws of nature, you can't build a mass transit system that can serve everyone full-time with reasonable efficiency and cost-effectiveness, and that's just meeting the minimum requirement of getting from A to B, without getting into all the other downsides of public vs. private transportation in terms of health, privacy, security, etc.
Let's see what that imagination can craft.
Achieving 24/7 mass transit, available with reasonable frequency for journeys over both short and long distances, would certainly require everyone to live in big cities with very high population densities. Here in the UK, we only have a handful of cities with populations of over one million today. That is the sort of scale you're talking about for that sort of transportation system to be at all viable, although an order of magnitude larger would be more practical. All of those cities have long histories and relatively inefficient layouts, which would make it quite difficult to scale them up dramatically without causing other fundamental problems with infrastructure and logistics.
So, in order to solve the problem of providing viable mass transit for everyone to replace their personal vehicles, you would first need to build, starting from scratch or at least from much smaller urban areas, perhaps 20-30 new big cities to house a few tens of millions of people.
You would then need all of those people to move to those new cities. You'd be destroying all of their former communities in the process, of course, and for about 10,000,000 of them, they'd be giving up their entire rural way of life. Also, since no-one could live in rural areas any more, your farming had better be 100% automated, along with any other infrastructure or emergency facilities you need to support your mass transit away from the big cities.
The UK is currently in the middle of a housing crisis, with an acute lack of supply caused by decades of under-investment and failure to build anywhere close to enough new homes. Today, we're lucky if we build 200,000 per year, while the typical demand is for at least 300,000, which means the problem is getting worse every year. The difference between home-owners and those who are renting or otherwise living in supported accommodation is one of the defining inequalities of our generation, with all the tensions and social problems that follow.
But sure, we could get everyone off private transportation and onto mass transit. All we'd have to do is uproot about 3/4 of our population, destroy their communities and in many cases their whole way of life, build new houses at least an order of magnitude faster than we have managed for the last several decades, achieve total automation in our out-of-city farming and other infrastructure, replace infrastructure for an entire nation that has been centuries in development... and then build all these wonderful new mass transit systems, which would still almost inevitably be worse than private transportation in several fundamental ways.
And that's not taking into account the fact that bicycle is a very viable way to move around in cities < 200 000 inhabitants.
I have actually never owned a car, I just rent some once in a while to go out somewhere where regular transports don't get me. I have lived in Sweden, France and Spain, in 10 cities from 25 000 to 12 million inhabitants. Never felt restricted. I actually feel much more restricted when I drive because I have to worry about parking, which is horrible in both Paris and Stockholm. Many people I know, even in rural Sweden or France, don't own a car because it is just super costly and the benefit is not worth it. It's very much a generation thing tough because my friends are mostly around 26-32 whereas nearly all the person I know over 35 owns a car, even if they don't actually have that much money and sometimes complain about it.
To provide a viable transport network, operating full-time with competitive journey times, without making a prohibitive financial loss or being environmentally unfriendly, you need a critical mass of people using each service you run. That generally means you need a high enough population density over a large enough urban area that almost all routes become "main routes" and almost all times become "busy times".
No, I can't. Don't presume to tell other people what they need to live their lives.
I lived car free in a small industrial UK city, we couldn't manage that with kids (too expensive for one).
Bus seats are awful, why?, because they're made vandal resistant (and hard wearing). They're too small for a lot of people now as well. So you need to remodel buses IMO; your going to need to be hotter on vandals, so change the approach of the courts. Things bifurcate across areas of society like that: Supermarkets, houses, zoning, etc. all are designed with mass car ownership as a central tenet.
A laudable goal doesn’t give anyone the right to kill people by taking unnecessary risks. The reason that Tesla and Uber do what they do the way they do, instead of a more conservative approach is an attempt to profit, not save lives. If you don’t have to spend lives to make progress, but choose to do so for economic experience, there’s s word for that: evil.