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Comment by ebikelaw | Hacker News Reader

All journalists covering the self-driving car beat are basically required to ignore Waymo so they can continue writing “When will cars drive themselves? Experts say nobody knows” articles. If you ignore Waymo it’s a race; if you include Waymo it’s not.

This article makes the further error of assuming “AI” is required for self-driving cars, rather than just a shitload of code.

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Nobody has self-driving cars, not even Waymo. Every "self-driving car" has "disengagements" (a euphemism for "it stopped working") periodically every few thousand miles. That's simply unacceptable and needs to be sorted out. If a human driver was performing a panic stop for no reason or hitting a pedestrian or another car every 3 months or so we would take away their license.

Waymo is doing better than almost everyone else, a testament to their skill and their rigor, but they are still a long distance away from truly autonomous vehicles. The temptation is to say "well, they are so close, I'm sure they'll finish up the niggling details", but the reality is that the stuff they are failing at are some of the hardest remaining problems and will probably require at least as much work as they've put in already, if not significantly more, to tackle. I think we'll end up with self-driving cars eventually but probably not on a time scale of within the next 5-10 years, more likely it'll take that long or longer for the technology to reach maturity and then yet another decade plus for it to start seeing practical application.

It's the classic problem of truly appreciating magnitude and scale. Humans are amazing at it within a very narrow realm, and then terrible beyond that narrow range.

This is the sad realization I had about brain-computer interfaces towards the end of my research. 99.9% is NOT good enough when the stakes are life and death and the factors within events that the environment throws at you are basically independent and continuous.

At least with self driving cars we can enforce some hard boundaries. In BCIs implementing boundaries is tantamount to denying the user of their free will.

The cars that have been driving around Phoenix certainly seem self driving. Humans also drive imperfectly and that doesn't mean they don't exist.

see

>A select group of Arizonans has been shuttling around the Phoenix area in self-driving cars for the past year, providing insight into the future of the technology. http://ktar.com/story/2105890/waymo-early-rider-program-prov...

I repeat this again and again, and am always surprised that nobody else likes to raise the unfair comparisons.

I am willing to assume that waymo/Tesla etc have found the holy Grail, and made a driverless car safer than the average current human driver on the road. I'm not convinced that we should still allow these driverless cars on the road with no human backups. Not because of expectations or liability, but because the benchmark is wrong. We should compare them to a human assisted by the same driverless technology being used passively to prevent accidents. And it's not clear if a driverless car with no human backup is safer than a human assisted by the same technology.

Interesting. Maybe instead of humans intervening in the AI, the AI should intervene in the human's driving.

That sort of already happens with lane assist, auto parallel parking, brake warnings, adaptive cruise control, etc.

This. Flipping the semantics around because Marketing thinks it will attract more customers is disingenuous at best, murderous at worst.

Is part of Waymo's perceived success in that they are more conservative with deploying their technology? I.e. it is tested at lower speed, on specific routes, in specific weather etc.?

>> “When will cars drive themselves? Experts say nobody knows” articles.

Nobody knows because it has yet to happen. We have all seen demos and studies but that doesn't convince anyone not involved in the tech. Cars will be capable of driving themselves when I see one, sans humans, ask to merge in front of me on the highway. It will happen when I see one navigate the lineup to the ferry I take every week. It will happen when I see one accurately obey hand signals from a human directing traffic. Not youtube vids. It will happen when I see it with my own eyes. Just like electric cars, we will have to see them on the roads playing the game we all play every day. Until that tipping point, driverless remains a myth that happens in a faraway place.

So put them on the road. Let's give it a try. Maybe it works. Maybe it doesn't and people die and they sue. That's been part of driving since day one. Roll the dice. I'm sick of the endless debates.

> So put them on the road. Let's give it a try. Maybe it works. Maybe it doesn't and people die and they sue. That's been part of driving since day one. Roll the dice. I'm sick of the endless debates.

Well I'd certainly hope that there is a high level of confidence that they don't kill people BEFORE they're put on the road with other people.

All we need is that they don't kill more people than average human drivers do per passenger-mile. Assuming ride-sharing we could even let them be a little more deadly than human drivers and still save lives.

>> Assuming ride-sharing

Don't. Cost isn't stopping people today from ridesharing. Carpooling won't become cool just because there is no driver, in fact I could see it becoming less cool as you will be much more alone with strangers. Many people today would be uncomfortable on a bus at night without a third party present (ie the driver, or at least many other strangers).

Think about all the extra traffic from autodriver cars doing jobs that today are too expensive. And the double-commute possibility. Your car takes you to work, drives itself home to park/recharge, then drives back to pick you up at the end of the day. Any 2-way trip could become 4-way, doubling the per-trip traffic. Or, rather than pay for parking while you shop downtown, you ask your car to drive around in circles until you are ready to go home.

Carpooling has already become much more practical with Lyft Line, etc. No driver would mean even cheaper rides. Also, there's no reason your car couldn't park itself at work...or rent itself out (via Lyft/Uber) while you're at work. Assuming we get to that level of tech.

If cars which require no effort whatsoever to operate and cost significantly less than taxis are on the market, it's a safe bet that being slightly less dangerous per passenger mile will kill far more people than are currently killed on the roads due to more, longer car journeys. That's before we even get into the fact a car which is slightly less likely to cause a fatal accident than the average human driver on an accidents per mile basis is a lot more likely to cause a fatal accident than the average sober, careful and experienced human driver, the complications of estimating fatality rates from small test drive samples and the potential for new bugs to cause massive accident spikes.

Of course if people make more journeys, i.e. become more mobile, you could argue that the increased number of deaths should be balanced against life-hours of drivers freed up while also improving quality of life of passengers at the same time, i.e. it might still be QALY-neutral or even positive.

> than the average sober, careful and experienced human driver

But ultimately we do accept the fatality rates caused by all drivers and not just the good ones as a cost of having individual transportation. If we didn't only teetotalers would be allowed to operate cars to remove one risk factor. And we also accept the risk of inexperienced drivers because we have to teach them eventually, the same reasoning can be applied to autonomous cars (just substitute teaching with data gathering)

The total distance driven also does not just depend on technology alone but on urban planning. AVs may change that dramatically over time.

True, there are QALY arguments for even unreliable SDVs (and also for other things like abolishing speed limits or allowing people to continue to operate older vehicles currently deemed unroadworthy if they can't afford better), but they're dependent on how you adjust for quality and at best orthogonal to standard safety arguments.

> But ultimately we do accept the fatility rates caused by all drivers and not just the good ones as a cost of having individual transportation. If we didn't only teetotalers would be allowed to operate cars to remove one risk factor. And we also accept the risk of inexperienced drivers because we have to teach them eventually, the same reasoning can be applied to autonomous cars (just substitute teaching with data gathering)

We don't accept the fatality rates caused by all drivers; we confiscate the licenses of or jail bad drivers on a regular basis, and we certainly don't permit drivers being taught to operate commercially. Driver accountability for accidents is part of the social contract that permits individual transportation despite its cost; an corollary of that is that the accident rate is higher than we believe it should be, and that some degree of negligence is involved in the current level of accidents which it would seem unreasonable to exonerate corporations from if they were to replicate them using software. And on a purely practical basis, if you estimate SDV safety based on narrowly beating the mean accident rate across all drivers in tests, and then early commercial adoption tends to be replacing experienced commercial drivers who drive the most miles with the fewest incidents first, you're certainly going to push that accident rate up in the short run even without additional miles driven.

> And on a purely practical basis, if you estimate SDV safety based on narrowly beating the mean accident rate across all drivers in tests, and then early commercial adoption tends to be replacing experienced commercial drivers who drive the most miles with the fewest incidents first, you're certainly going to push that accident rate up in the short run even without additional miles driven.

Uber could be skewing statistics in similar ways.

Anyway, this is all handwavy speculation. What I'm trying to get at is that the overton window for AV behavior may be surprisingly large, especially if they exhibit their worst behavior in the learning years when the fleets are still small. For some metrics possibly even larger than that for humans.

No, that's a wrong benchmark. We shouldn't compare driverless cars with the average human driver. We should compare them with the average human driver assisted by the best technology (which is say waymo's driverless software running passively to prevent accidents).

You’re incorrectly assuming that a solution to the problem of self-driving a car is a superset of the problem of passive accident avoidance.

If the software is in active control pretty much everything that goes into that is different from software that is deciding if and when to emergency brake.

To put it another way, a self-driving system will become safer than human drivers, not because it knows how/when to emergency brake really well, but because it won’t have to emergency brake as frequently as a human does.

Sure, I understand that a driverless system might prevent accidents by strictly maintaining safe distances. But the benchmark still can't be unaided human, rather a human aided by the best assistive technology that can be built (say by the same company).

That's an irrelevant benchmark except for people who pay premium to have the safest ride in the world.

Everyone else performs a tradeoff along multiple axes including price, convenience and safety. Not needing a driver, freeing up time and lowering prices increase utility which could even justify a slight increase in risk. But even if we don't want to increase risk then a self-driving system still only has to be as good as humans on average to result in no net-increase of deaths per passenger mile while still increasing overall utility.

And more simply, it is silly to expect the maximum possible value to be the minimum requirement.

Let's agree to disagree. But if we allow driverless cars on the road (with no backup), it should come after emergency braking, lane keeping assist, side collision assist etc have become mandatory. Just like airbags are mandatory now, and we enforce fuel efficiency on new cars but not existing cars.

Just to add. In a world where airbags are not mandatory,(autopilot+airbag) driverless technology would be safer than the average human (without airbags) on the road. So, you would be arguing for legalizing driverless cars completely overlooking that the gains are not because of driverless-ness but because of airbags. This holds true now too, almost all gains by driverless-ness can be had by emergency braking, lane keeping assists, side collision warning, and pedestrian detection etc.

And people will die anyways. It would be the biggest miracle on earth I think if those things ended up being perfect (at least, the ones that work.. not Uber, obviously).

So it's all a numbers game. What's acceptable, and what we can improve on.

I had a famous cancer researcher at a world famous cancer treatment hospital tell me (paraphrasing) “we won’t ever see the kinds of breakthroughs we saw in the past because we were reckless back then, foolish even. It was the Wild West.”

I’m not saying I want the highways to be a Wild West for self driving cars, but it’s worth admitting it would probably accelerate the pace of innovation.

> Maybe it works. Maybe it doesn't and people die and they sue.

Jesus... Let's kill people because you're sick of the debate on whether self driving cars will work.

Living around the Mountain View area, this is one of those moments where I'm like "Oh, the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed."

I've been driving next to these cars for the past 7 years. A number of my friends & former coworkers have ridden in them; a couple of them work on them. They've stopped for me at pedestrian crosswalks. I've gotten stuck behind them, driving 25mph on El Camino. I've waved them on to make a left in front of me (I'm still not entirely sure how they do that, but I think that if they detect that the driver at the intersection is stopped and has not gone within any reasonable time period, they creep out and eventually go if no movement is detected). I saw one last week attempt to switch lanes, find that the car behind it had sped up and it was no longer safe to make the lane change, turn off its blinker, pull ahead in its own lane, and then make the lane change safely several cars up.

They are on the road, and they work pretty well. I trust them a lot more than cars that say "Student Driver Onboard", or even the average Californian driver.

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