Driverless cars are stuck in a jam | Hacker News Reader

Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

economist.com

27 pointssien57 comments

I think researching autonomous cars but continously extracting and bringing the "easy" accomplishments to market, like automated parking, is the more successful strategy. This is what many traditional car manufacturers and to a lesser degree Tesla seem to be doing. Others like Waymo want to skip all intermediary steps and go straight for the big prize. That's a high risk strategy that may or may not pay off.

The problem is this is a dangerous strategy. As in dangerous to people’s lives. We know how distracted drivers are without any advanced features in cars today. The more “it does some things on its own” options you add, the more likely people are to over-rely on those features and assume the car is capable of more than it actually is, which leads to accidents. Tesla is a perfect example of this, with people assuming it’s Level 3ish capabilities are really Level 4 and then happily taking naps or watching movies in the drivers seat while the car plows into a stopped vehicle.

Waymo is doing the right thing for safety here by skipping 3 entirely.

Let's not pretend we care about life and safety, when we discuss a handful of lives while we glide over the 30,000 yearly deaths on the road in the US alone. The only truly safe thing to do with cars would be to ban them or to vastly increase licensing requirements.

Eh, I agree, BUT... lets not pretend that is immediately viable, either. Severely restricting license access in a country with often (varying by city) terrible public transit seems to be a recipe for disaster.

Your comment quips as if state officials have their finger over the button of restricting licenses, but choose not to merely for lack of care. It is far, far more complicated than you give it credit for. Or so, I imagine.

As HN sometimes forgets, the world exists beyond the lines of SF. Some places have terrible public transport.

To elaborate with an example: Germany has much stricter driver licencing (21 hours of theoretical courses, 9 hours or practical lessons with a certified instructor, practical and theoretical exam, and on top of that many people take more lessons to be able to pass the exams. And that's just for normal cars below 3.5 tons). Some small percentage of people try multiple times and never pass the exams.

These strict requirements are certainly a factor why we can have the Autobahn with no speed limit (on 50% of the total length) while still having significantly fewer road deaths than the US (4.2 vs 7.3 per billion kilometers traveled, 6.4 vs 14.2 per 100k vehicles).

But we can only do that in Germany because our public transit is at least passable and our cities and villages are built densely. Public transit could be much better, but in any place with at least 500 inhabitants you can live fairly comfortably without a car if you have to.

If it ends up being more sucessful (bringing progress faster than the other strategy), then it actually is less dangerous (even assuming your assessment of how many drivers are ignoring safety measures is correct) - because if it will bring full self-driving faster, it means it will be used faster instead of human drivers, and will cause less casualties than would have been caused by human driving during that period.

Why not make these "AI" merely driver assists/fallbacks, rather than actually taking over from the driver? That way, we can leverage the advantages of both humans and computers; namely, that computers are vigilant and never lose focus, but people are flexible and can easily react to new situations.

I'm thinking about stuff like Automatic Emergency Braking, lane-keeping (but only if you start drifting without signalling, or if there's another car in the way), driver inattention alerts (seat rumbles if you start to zone out), blind spot warnings as lights on the mirrors, impending stop ahead warnings, etc.

Notably, rudimentary versions of many of these already exist in new cars today. Going forward, just improve them, with better sensors and data, until the day comes that full self driving is a real possibility.

Driving on roads with human drivers, bikers, pedestrians, animals, freak weather events, maintenance and construction workers, and all manner of situations is - in reality - a problem of unbounded complexity. Unless we create infrastructure that radically reduces the complexity, like invisible “tracks” and banning as many variables as possible (other humans) then nothing short of AGI will get us close to the current below-average human driver.

Self driving cars is Silicon Valley hubris and hype at its finest. I genuinely feel proud about the computer scientists who have wrangled millions of dollars from investors, truly excellent work, I wish all engineers could get that kind of money. Hopefully the billions keep flowing.

There are lots of places where the variables are constrained enough that the current state could be useful. An AI shunt truck would be super useful and a much easier problem than a self driving car. We don't even have those yet and nobody seems to be trying to make them or similiar. I think most of the reason is there's no chance of hockey stick growth for niche commercial applications so VCs don't care.

It's not of unbounded complexity, though.

That doesn't imply it's not complex, it is very complex, but it's way, way off being a problem whose solution maps to any other problem, i.e. only solvable by general AI.

Remember also, the goal is not dealing perfectly with every possible situation. The goal (at first) is dealing slightly better with the average predictable situation than the average human driver.

> The goal (at first) is dealing slightly better with the average predictable situation than the average human driver.

The average human driver is terrible at driving. The goal should be higher; i.e., to be slightly better than the top 10% of human drivers. One of those skills will be refusing to drive when the weather is too bad.

I totally agree, just the absolute minimum and the initial goal is matching or slightly surpassing that level. Once that happens I guess you'd expect it to get much better pretty quickly as well, which is good.

On the other hand we do let the worst human drivers (that don't immediately kill someone in the first hour of driving) onto roads too. The same low bar should be applied to autonomous cars as they are still scaling up. The bar should be raised as their percentage of the overall fleet increases. This treats them as a collective of junior drivers that we expect to improve with time.

> a problem of unbounded complexity

A loosely used term here. Especially in terms of it's practical meaning, not theoretical. In this sense, both Dota and Starcraft II were also problems of unbounded complexity, and Alphastar is doing pretty good there.

> nothing short of AGI will get us close to the current below-average human driver

What are you basing this assumption on? Most prominent scientists in this field don't seem to be agreeing with it. It is by no means self-evident or backed by any substantial direct evidence.

More generally, I just can't understand this attitude you have. How does your thinking process work here, what is that attitude good for and where is it coming from?

Here we have world's brightest people trying to tackle a very important and useful problem, it's hard to know when it will be tackled, but it seems it will be eventually. Some people are disagreeing about when it will happen (perhaps you think it will not be for a 100 years), but at least they are doing something and are making progress. Investors similarly know that it is a hard problem and no one knows when it will be done, but they want to give their money for this problem. And here you are just complaining about the whole situation? What would you have all these actors do, just do nothing? Stop making these cars? Stop trying to solve the problem, stop bringing the progress forward? Or what, working on it in secret and never telling anyone so that god forbid any one person would ever happen to see their presentation and build a faulty (a too optimistic) view on the current state of the technology? Where is your negativity and sarcasm coming from?

Starcraft bot and a self driving car are not even remotely close to the same problem

Starcraft involves an actively hostile, adapting opponent. Daily traffic generally does not and when it does they are liable for any resulting damages, not you.

> Here we have world's brightest people trying to tackle a very important and useful problem,

No you don't, but world's best paid people are working in it for sure =D

The "AI industry" has a problem. Every few weeks there comes a "big name AI researcher" and call solving another "world's biggest problem," but a 5 minute research into his claim would, yet again, reveal just a hello world on opencv.

This is from where the negativity towards the ai industry is coming from.

Saying that you have "world's brightest people" sounds like a big stretch to an industry outsider, and plainly funny to people with some solid level of computer literacy.

I haven't heard of any anecdotes in the form of a big new breakthrough being a HelloWorld in opencv, and I think that any such cases can be more readily blamed on the media and bloggers inflating the actual research papers or results than actual scientists and engineers. But let's say you have experienced such episodes.

So now what, what is your point, what is your goal, what is your vision for this field? What would you have happened better? To just complain about it? Should they stop working on self-driving cars? Should they stop sending press-releases, should they stop selling cars with this functionality, what is it that you want? Do you want them to be paid less? I actually don't understand. What would be your best scenario for this field that would be better than what is going on right now (that big players and many of the brightest (and yes well-paid) data scientists are working on making a safe self-driving car a reality, while many investors are believing in it and are voting with their dollars)?

I have no suggestions for you

> Unless we create infrastructure that radically reduces the complexity, like invisible “tracks” and banning as many variables as possible

This is the road Chinese companies chose. Biggest interest are from public transport companies. Most work with very simple directional radio beacon and obstacle detection (not obstacle avoidance.) Works as an experiment in a few cities.

The interest from the state is a very distant hope to automate low speed traffic in cities, after the state lost all hope to fix local driving habits (https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=chinese+drivers). Second to it is also a distant hope to do something with road congestion if traffic will be forcefully directed by some capacity optimising computer program.

My own take on that would've been trying to automate high speed highways instead. Some cars are quite capable of 150kph+, but most of drivers aren't. China has the biggest network of elevated/isolated expressways in the world, and adding computer guidance should be the easiest option out of all others.

Humans also fail at those things and we get accidents. We do not need perfect cars that deal with every conceivable situation in the best way possible. We only need them to deal about as good as your average human driver.

Yes, self-driving software will be much dumber than a human, but it has the advantage of constant attention, lower reaction times and the ability to access more data. Perhaps their failure modes will be different due to that, but as long as the accident rate and severity is comparable that's good enough. You also need to factor in the value and lifetime-hours gained by freeing up human drivers from the task.

> nothing short of AGI will get us close to the current below-average human driver.

If people try to climb icy 20% inclines with summer tires every winter is that the result of general intelligence or just zombie mode driving? The correct choice for an autonomous car in that situation would be to refuse or look for alternatives instead of doing the dumb thing.

I'm a cheap SOB so I can't read the whole article, but I am really looking forward to a time when a city center no longer allows human operated vehicles.

A time when streets have no lights, lanes or direction of traffic.

A time when during certain times of the day a street can dynamically change from one way to two way and back to one way traffic, all based on the collaborative hive mind of self driving cars.

Cars constantly talking to eachother, the network and making thousand of tiny decisions about what lane to occupy, where to turn in order to expedite their own trip and that of their nearby neighbor.

I read the whole thing without even realizing there was a paywall by CTRL-ALT-R (reader mode in FF) and then CTRL-R (reload).

It is stunning to me that we can more easily imagine a city center with a collaborative hive mind of self driving cars than we can one with no cars at all.

Why do we want that future so badly?

What is your vision?

Just what he said... A city with no cars at all.

I hope in 100 years you're right. I hope in 20 years I'm right.

A hivemind of spacious boxes on wheels, linked to make a sort of snake. Each fitted with seats and things to hold on to. They run along fixed routes in regular intervals.

They could transport thousands of people per hour safely around a town of any size.

And as ‘snake’ is not an ideal word, I’d suggest the word ‘tram’. Has a nice ring to it.

A variation could be ones that don’t run on tracks but normal wheels. Rest still applies. Shall we call those ‘busses’?

Bike lanes, access for business and residents keep the rest alive.

Bonus points of we plant lots of trees and build little fountains.

I believe /u/gherkinnn has painted a picture that represents both of our desired futures.

As a German I am not at all looking forward to GPs vision. But I'm used to huge pedestrian zones, walking to the supermarket, and more recently effortlessly zooming through inner cities on electrical kick-scooters (and the pick-up and drop-off anywhere model seems to work fairly well around here). The only transformation I'm hoping for are more electrical cars to reduce noise and pollution, other than that I'm fairly content with our city center design.

But of course that's a huge culture disconnect to the US. Germany may be a country of car manufacturers, and we love driving cars, but the US has designed their cities around cars in a way probably no other country has.

Because cars are great? You get where you want to go quickly, can carry a bunch of stuff with you, and are protected from the elements. Walking, by contrast, sucks. Here in DC, it’s pleasant outside for like 4 months out of the year. For five months out of the year, the daily low is below freezing or the daily high is above 80. That’s true in Amsterdam zero months out of the year.

Those benefits would also be true in something like a Messerschmitt car: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messerschmitt_KR200

If we can build electric versions of this that don't need huge crumple zones because they don't crash and don't have to share the road with huge vehicles that do crash, then that might be an appropriate vehicle for cities with inclement climates. But designing cities around todays cars definitely seems to have been a mistake.

Walking sucks in a city designed for cars. Needing to walk past row after row of parking spaces, or taking a half-mile detour to get to the nearest crosswalk. Intersections are designed to avoid slowing cars down, which increases the danger of every crossing.

Walking is fantastic in cities that are designed for walking. Walking by a different shop every dozen steps, rather than every quarter mile. Crossing the street at any location, or even having the street repurposed for walking in.

Yes, snow is annoying. You bundle up with a coat and boots, and then it doesn't matter anymore. The fundamental difference is in how a city is designed.

No, walking sucks everywhere. I live in Annapolis which was designed in the 1600s and is not designed for cars: https://images.app.goo.gl/5zQ8QnR5EPEJggYJ6. It’s great when the weather is nice. But trudging uphill holding a kid or lots of groceries in 90 degree weather is less pleasant than driving straight up to an Applebee’s.

The alternative to cars isn't walking in a car based city, it's a combination of any of the following modes:

subways, light rail, bus rapid transit, bikeshare bikes, personally owned bikes, electric assist personal vehicles (bikes, scooters, wheelchairs), pedestrianized walkways shaded by trees, humane public space, higher density life leading to lower transit time

People have non-car based cities where it's really hot. I was just in Taipei where it's 90F+ and 80%+ most of the year which has most of the things I described. And also where it's really cold. I haven't been to Copenhagen, but it's snowy for a solid three to four months of the year and people use their public transit infrastructure (cycling included) year round.

I'm all for progress, I dislike driving (and I do own a car), but that sounds like streets that would have no pedestrians or cyclists. I don't think it would work well in cities.

> Cars constantly talking to eachother, the network and making thousand of tiny decisions about what lane to occupy, where to turn in order to expedite their own trip and that of their nearby neighbor.

How do you imagine making such system secure against malicous actors? I don't think it's possible, it would just open huge door for terrorism.

Would it be any different from how it is now? Right now roads and people around them are also vulnerable to terrorists that might want to drive dangerously or just outright ram into other vechicles or pedestrians.

But not on a large scale. If a terrorist finds a security hole, he controls all the cars.

The information should be treated as advisory. The same as turn indicators are now for example, we do not blindly rely on them as source of truth.

But yes, it is not easy since malicious data may cause more trouble than accidentally incorrect data.

It probably should not be a forwarding network either, only short range p2p communication, that would hopefully limit the scope of any attack.

But from en engineering point of view, we are looking forward to the time when cheap Sobs and people of low intelligence just dissaper.

We want people to be in constant communication, and just understand what is right to do and not do anything wrong.... We are sick of people using software in ways other than intended...

Solving a problem by just removing the variable is not exactly a solution...

> people of low intelligence just dissaper.

What recent practical trend or phenomenon in the world in general makes you think that the society is moving in that direction?

Not the OP, but the most recent trend that scares me is 2FA economy choices, the way they let corporations abuse people and the advanced social engineering they encourage.

I hated the old banking 1 site devices and still look forward to U2F, but the behavior going on with SMS makes me wonder if anyone from my generation will be able to participate in their own finances when they retire without getting fleeced both legally by specialists for the slightly infirm and illegal con-artists.

In some countries government has stepped in to make more standardized digital systems that at least allow elders to safely use low interest bank accounts.

A different but similar example for those with specific non-age related defecits is the state of online Casino regulation in the UK..

(I think countries with virtually no regulation are safer for people with gambling problems than the UK, since the UK creates a great deal of certainty for those exploiting the irrational in exchange for tax revenue to lower rates for the rational.)

> and not do anything wrong

What is a "wrong" thing to do? Do you mean "follow the procedure"? Something moral or ethical or cultural or legal? Something "stupid"? [What is "stupid"? Have you done something "stupid" or "wrong" with the mind that you were doing "right" or "correct"?]

> We are sick of people using software in ways other than intended

Are you talking about something other than the Law Of Unintended Consequences? Should DARPA have anticipated US election influence through Facebook when DARPA developed the Internet? Would that have been considered science fiction at the time?

I am asking as an engineer.

http://archive.is/Xhoqw

https://outline.com/y8F3b8

The Key quotes:

> Mr Urmson now talks of self-driving cars appearing gradually over the next 30 to 50 years. Firms are increasingly switching to a more incremental approach, building on technologies such as lane-keeping or automatic parking. A string of fatalities involving self-driving cars have scotched the idea that a zero-crash world is anywhere close. Markets are starting to catch on.

> The most general point is that, like most technologies, what is currently called “AI” is both powerful and limited. Recent progress in machine learning has been transformative. At the same time, the eventual goal—the creation in a machine of a fluid, general, human-like intelligence—remains distant. People need to separate the justified excitement from the opportunistic hyperbole. Few doubt that a completely autonomous car is possible in principle. But the consensus is, increasingly, that it is not imminent. Anyone counting on AI for business or pleasure could do worse than remember that cautionary tale.

Is there any work being done on remote controlled cars?

I was thinking the other day that I would pay for a service delivering a car for me on-demand, for me to drive, (don’t need a self-driving car when I can drive) and then just leave wherever I am when I’m done. It seems it should be more or less practical to deliver such a service using remote controlled cars.

Why do you need a remote controlled car for that? There are many car sharing services in major cities already. Between zipcar, turo, enterprise carshare, getaround, etc. there are plenty of micro rentals available. And I think most people would prefer Uber or Lyft to driving themselves inside a city these days.

But to directly answer your question, I’m only aware of this for trucks with Starsky Robotics.

I want it delivered to my door on demand. To schedule a slot in car pool or book a rental I need to pick-up somewhere is out of the question. (Also the whole “pool” things sounds way to social, just want to pay someone and get going)

I don’t live in a city, so would need to take the train or bus to the city to pickup a cheap rental as it is.

Don’t think we have Uber or Lyft here but my assumption was that they are mostly useful as a taxi replacement to get around within a city.

My use case are more focused on removing the need to have a car in the garage but keep the freedom drive on short notice to run errands and take trips. Perhaps drive to work but take the train home after a beer in the evening.

Having remote controlled cars was simply a way to optimize costs. Should be cheaper to have drivers located offshore somewhere than tied to a particular car.

Ok, I see. You've basically described a business model that is completely non-viable. The overhead of owning the car, getting it to you, then getting it back to a central hub would force the price past a point people in your situation are willing to pay. Remote control is not much cheaper than having an actual driver in terms of operating cost (they need to be close enough that latency is not an issue), and much more expensive in terms of hardware, software, and liability insurance.

You'd have to price the service high enough to cover at least an additional $50k in hardware, software, and data per vehicle, lowest minimum wage within 500 miles for the time required to get it to and from you, vehicle operating costs for the distance to get it to and from you, and added insurance because few companies are going to say remote control driving is safe. There's also the regulatory component since I don't think most places allow remote driving.

For me it’s competing with leasing a car. If it can be cheaper than that I’d consider it.

But yeah, perhaps I’m overestimating the cost of real drivers

As a counter-point I think large parts of driving have already been automated. We aren't far from long lines of semi trucks following each other through Kansas and then a human hops into them at the next depot to park and unload it.

Paywalled

Paywall bypassed by CTRL-ALT-R (reader mode in FF) and then CTRL-R (reload).

I'm on a tablet. Anyway somebody else has kindly provided an outline link.

I wish paywalled articles were flagged in the title with an indication as to whether the OP had provided an alternative.

I think this was discussed recently, can't remember the conclusion as to why it isn't.

Works fine with no script.

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