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Comment by samirparikh | Hacker News Reader

I work on self-driving cars. Imho, companies need to collaborate on certain aspects like perception instead of competing. The vehicle is basically blind beyond the range of the sensors or if you miss a detection. Collaboration on these issues will lead to faster progress instead of competing.

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Is there even a common set of reference tests ?

> Imho, companies need to collaborate on certain aspects like perception instead of competing.

I also work on self-driving cars. Why would I share technological innovations with another company?

So people don’t die.

This is an example where companies could put people over profits and share what they’ve learned to keep things safe. I don’t see a lot of research papers (I see none) coming out of Waymo, Tesla, Uber, or Cruise.

This is another form of collaboration. You could publish your innovations in some technical forum w/o code and it'll automatically drive the industry forward since SOTA results will be available.

Right now, no one really knows the performance of the Waymo system. Millions of miles doesn't mean a lot. I can do billions of miles in a parking lot with no cars or pedestrians. Even millions of miles on road doesn't say anything about the performance of the components.

Indeed it's economically worthy to have a safe market rather than a rushed one that will backfire.

Is there a business model for providing detection data to other fleets in real time? This is a stretch of the word "collaboration" but it could possibly prevent deaths while leaving the IP in the hands of the company.

That's the price we pay for the weakening of patents and the strengthening of trade secrets. Nobody knows how the newer stuff works.

It isn't unheard of in this space for safety considerations:

https://priceonomics.com/volvo-gave-away-the-most-important-...

But a safety belt doesn't drive the car for you.

No, but it similarly could've been used to increase the company in question's market share.

   Why would I share technological innovations with another company?

Because nobody has a real market until some of these problems are solved significantly better than current state-of-the-art?

Having some baseline collaboration on common components and safety systems could plausibly move the entire industry towards viability much faster, both on a safety and tech trajectory and for regulatory oversight. It's not a crazy idea.

Ethics

Isn't it ethically preferrable for Waymo to push their own, better, safer system, as far as they can, rather than to improve competitor systems in a lesser way by sharing their secret sauce that competitors can only partially implement?

You could do both.

Because they pay you for a license, might be one reason. Maybe some system (possibly backed by legislation) makes it easy for them to share technology without some companies being freeloaders and others being suckers.

Competition obviously is a powerful motivator, but sharing tech can reduce costs for everyone, at least in theory.

I would support laws that said, in effect, you can't compete on safety. Meaning, if one self-driving car[1] company comes up with the software equivalent of the seatbelt or the airbag I think they should not get exclusive right to implement it. They should have to share that with the other companies. I don't see how doing otherwise wouldn't put safety above profit.

So how do you compete? I don't know. Along other dimensions, I guess.

There is another aspect of this that I want to bring up: auto-autos should share data with each other and with the surrounding traffic infrastructure in real-time, for safety and for dynamic traffic-shaping. They should be able to cooperatively track pedestrians and non-automated vehicles. The cars and the roads and the signals and something like Waze should all be integrated and cooperating for maximum safety and efficient throughput with low latency. And they should all share experience (training data) of normal and exceptional events across the whole fleet (regardless of manufacturer.) Optimizing across the whole thing will be, uh, optimal. From this POV, non-cooperative behavior (due to the profit motive or just people being people) by any single actor will be seen as a bad-faith move and the network can be expected to route around it one way or another.

[1] Please, let's call them "auto-autos".

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