Hacker News Reader

Comment by bloorp | Hacker News Reader

Yeah... Just yesterday I was driving at night, through road construction, with a torrential downpour, and nowhere to pull off, and it was freaking scary. And I remember just thinking, "This kind of thing happens to me maybe a few times a year and there's no way in 30 years that we're going to trust autonomy with this"

View on HN

but isn't that part of the point? I doubt any automated system would consider driving in those conditions 'safe', so it would deal with the situation by pulling over to a safer spot and stop driving. Humans make terrible risk decisions in cases like that - continuing to drive in horrible snowstorms, etc, when the risks a way higher than our already-risky roads in normal conditions.

By not having the human make that decision, you save lives, even if some people arrive home late.

It does raise the point of 'rescue' in certain dangerous conditions like winter storms. Extreme rain in the dark can probably normally be waited out, but snowstorms and other road-closure type conditions probably warrant a different proactive rescue type response if we'll have riders with no driving ability in self-driving cars.

"Not driving in the insane conditions when humans are foolish to do so anyway" would IMHO allow routine drives in good weather in known terrain without roadworks, about half the year. Which is a great and magnificent improvement, in all honesty - that is, once we can get the marketing types to cool down from their current hype "it drives itself, full autonomy, everything and a pony*!!!!!!!"

I think this is a critical point. We need to reign in the customer's expectations that have already been set too high. They're already expecting to just get in and go anywhere while watching things on their phone or reading a book... soon. We already see this with people posting videos of sitting in the passenger seat while their Tesla rips down the highway in traffic.

Like anything it should be a graduated phase in. It will handle some of the conditions some of the time, and in time it will get better. It would be like me being frustrated I can't carry on a conversation about philosophy with my Google Home. "... but you said I could talk to it and ask it questions!!!"

Expecting a conversation on philosophy would be completely understandable - if the vendor sold it to you with the tagline "it has all the parts it needs for a philosophic conversation!" Google Home doesn't do that, Tesla does. (Musk doesn't even try to weasel around it: says "full self-driving features", Tesla marketing materials repeat. That is, in my opinion, a blunt lie.)

Self-driving cars can automatically check weather before starting the planned route and drive and avoid those situations.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com