I'm no expert but 2030 isn't very far away and I'd think that 2030 consumer level tech will be based off what is cutting edge today.
Can someone school me on how a level 5 system might work in a snow storm on icy roads at highway speeds in 2030?
Can someone school me on how a level 5 system might work in a snow storm on icy roads at highway speeds in 2030?
I'm with Jeff, self driving cars have been just a few years away for well over a decade now. I think it's one of those cases where the last 10% of the problem takes 90% of the effort. If we built cities and the road infrastructure around self driving capability that might work, but currently cities aren't built that way and that wouldn't meet the definition of Level 5 anyway.
I think that's a fallacy. We allow humans to injure and kill each other in "accidents" with limited liability because we are human; I can't be expected to 100% reliably decide in a fraction of a second what to do when a car cuts me off, so if I hit it, or avoid it and hit another vehicle or pedestrian, I don't go to jail.
But a computer can be expected to make that decision fast enough; if it can't, it's because the designers or programmers made errors that the manufacturer missed because they rationally calculated they were not worth catching or fixing.
There's some level of safe driving it's unreasonable to expect from self-driving cars – but it's not the same level as humans.
I don't think this expectation is reasonable. It makes sense only if you conceive of humans as flawed computers. But certainly it is an expectation people have, including a large segment (if not majority) of HN readers, and this expectation is absolutely slowing development and adoption of the technology.
From a practical/logical sense this is true, but I'm not sure it would work out that way. People would never accept FSD cars with accident/injury rates comparable with humans. FSD would have to be at least 10x better than human drivers, maybe more. Psychologically we are much more risk averse to when not in control. It's why people are afraid of elevators but not stairs, despite a 50x difference in safety.
Historically computers go from "barely able to do X", to "better than any human could ever be" very quickly. I'm with Carmack on this bet.
And it may very well be right; most people way overestimate how good they are at driving in very adverse conditions.
We already have things like this “what if I had a beer and need to drive mom to the hospital” say those with a enforced breathalyzer.
They are hoping to be 2x or 3x as good, and the amount of lives saved by that should be enough to influence lawmakers and the public.
Cities have fast roads too.
> humans struggle with those sorts of extreme conditions too
People drive in a wide range of weathers. If you need to check the weather in a major city every day to see if your will drive itself, your car is not self driving (IMO). If that weather happens more than 5-10% of days every year, that’s not an “extreme condition”.
In a snow storm on icy roads it’s safe to assume the speeds would be as slow as safety dictates, just as the speeds should also be for humans in the same conditions.
Also, computerized traction control is amazing, especially with electric drive and no transmission lag. When driven by a human it’s not infallible, but if the car doesn’t have the flawed yet behaviors that humans sometimes have, it could be pretty competent. They’ll have to get it to the point of being able to do without lane lines too of course.
Level 5 implies "all conditions" so it follows an autonomous system should be able to safely operate along side human drivers. If a level 5 system cant keep up it would become a major hazard to non autonomous vehicles.
But, what you describe does not meet the basic criteria for doing it safely.
Regularly flowing at highway speeds in those conditions does not imply doing it safely, as much as you and those drivers might like it to.
We read about pileups from time to time and the consequences of these are not trivial.
A car should be able to see better than a human in those conditions, and at an appropriate speed it could be reasonably safe. It probably won't go at the speed limit, but a human can't safely drive at the speed limit either.
I am genuinely curious to what technology, based on my assumption it grew out of today's tech, a car would need to have onboard to safely operate at L5 under all conditions.