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> Things like traffic signals that actively communicate their status to nearby robot cars (more than just a red lamp that can be occluded by weather, other vehicles, or mud on the camera lens). Or lane markings that are more than just reflective paint, but can be sensed via RF. Rules around temporary construction that dictate the manner of signage and cone placement that the robot cars can understand. The cones might have little transponders in them, I don't know.

The problem you then face is that any of those could be forged / faked without some kind of way of securely validating the message in some way. You could cause absolute chaos by driving down the road broadcasting false messages. It's a little harder to hack and modify traffic light signals, for example. But we've also seen hackers screw up Tesla cars by sticking stuff on the back of their car to deliberate mislead it based on vision.

> any of those could be forged / faked without some kind of way of securely validating the message

Any reason routine crypto methods would not solve this? Seems like one of the easier parts to me.

Who controls the signing keys and the whole signing process? What about key revocation if someone steals the key? Will a municipality in Texas really be willing to not be allowed to create a new stoplight without approval from the federal agency in charge of the keys? What’s to stop someone stealing a “real” stoplight from bumfuck nowhere and putting it in the middle of the 101 at rush hour? What about replay attacks? What about signal jamming? Etc. etc.

You raise some genuine possible concerns but generically I'd probably tend to just say, "laws will stop them" just like they already stop someone deliberately endangering lives by placing a real fake stop light in the middle of the 101 at rush hour.

The real concern would be whether someone can engineer a terrorist level mass scale attack but as long as it requires physical tampering that adds up to a tremendous amount of work. So if the signalling is largely burned into fixed infastructure it eliminates a lot of that or at least sets the bar high enough that its probably more work than various other types of attack that are likely to be just as impactful.

> You could cause absolute chaos by driving down the road broadcasting false messages

Even without self-driving cars, an "attacker" can go into a theater and yell "fire" and cause a stampede.

They can get a high-viz vest and clipboard, and stand in intersections directing cars to take detours they don't need and holding up traffic.

My point here is that society has a lot of trust baked in. We trust people don't just yell "fire" without reason. Just because it's FSD cars doesn't mean people will start broadcasting the equivalent of "fire" constantly. It's already easy to cause accidents.

Those attacks don't scale. They're also tied to a person or people who need to be physically present, making it possible to arrest them.

The consequences of potential attacks on centrally-orchestrated traffic are a lot more severe. Hack the control node, and you can stop traffic nation-wide. Or cause mass accidents that overwhelm first responders. And they can be executed by anyone, anywhere in the world, for a cost within range of many medium-size corporations (let alone nation states).

I won't comment on the challenges of the approach Tesla et al. are currently taking, but I don't think central control is the panacea commenters in this thread are making it out to be (and I'm personally glad this isn't the route we're pursuing).

An attacker can already do this, at scale. Whether it be overriding traffic lights to show green in all directions, or taking down critical air traffic control systems.

It’s like arguing that we can’t possibly build autonomous cars because then someone might turn it into an autonomous bomb.

Keep in mind that solving this is “worth” about 40,000 lives a year in the US - nearly $1 trillion in economic damages a year in life and property.

Bad things can always be done with good tools. As always, you provide layers of protection that make sense and in the end must rely on the underlying fabric of civilization to persevere.

> The problem you then face is that any of those could be forged / faked without some kind of way of securely validating the message in some way. You could cause absolute chaos by driving down the road broadcasting false messages.

Sounds like a job for...blockchain.

What value would blockchain bring to solving this problem?

> You could cause absolute chaos by driving down the road broadcasting false messages.

I’ve personally tested creating a fake toad sign and my tesla reads it as a real sign just fine.

I wonder what happens to autopilot on a 70mph freeway when it encounters a 5mph limit sign…

Bad bad things. I've had my Tesla on a highway either lose GPS precision and believe I was on an adjacent local road..

It immediately reduced speed from 60mph to 25mph .. aggressively.

This falls into a pattern of Tesla autopilot/NoA where it just doesn't seem to have much memory or foresight.

For example the car is driving itself on the highway, it knows it's been on the highway, for 20 minutes. I am not even in the exit lane, it knows what lane I am in. How could it think I am suddenly on the local road below the highway based solely on the GPS pin movement in the span of a second, without having moved to the exit lane and gone down the exit ramp?

For an example of lack of foresight - the car will happily speed towards an obvious semi-distant slowdown right until it needs to aggressively break from 60mph down to 30mph as it approaches following distance of the nearest car. I also find it can get really weird in stop&go traffic, not easing into speed, down to a stop very well as if it has only GO or STOP.

> For example the car is driving itself on the highway, it knows it's been on the highway, for 20 minutes. I am not even in the exit lane, it knows what lane I am in. How could it think I am suddenly on the local road below the highway based solely on the GPS pin movement in the span of a second, without having moved to the exit lane and gone down the exit ramp?

Oh wow. This happens often with a car-mounted GPS (or on a phone) and it's pretty annoying. Sometimes the GPS instructs you to do a U-turn at the next available fork in the road, and it takes a moment to understand what's going on.

But in a self-driving car it's terrifying! And absurd.

This is, of course, something that regular old meat intelligence is susceptible to as well. Remove stop signs, and you’ll cause accidents.

ADS Mode B (used everywhere for airplanes) already works this way, and there is no authentication or signing whatsoever. It's a single global broadcast frequency (1090MHz).

> I remain convinced that "real" self driving (as in: go ahead and sleep in the backseat) will never happen without changes to road infrastructure and possibly some sort of segregation between robot-driven cars and people-driven cars.

Yep, I talk to people working in traffic engineering, and their mindset is always building new road tech and road-side and cloud infra to support autonomous driving. They have no expectation of fully autonomous vehicle without road and infrastructure assistance.

And from historical perspective, the coming of automotive and the replacement of horse and other animal carts, are exactly facilitated by the road transformation; which has been the single largest scale infrastructure in human history.

It makes no sense that an even bigger transformation of the vehicle would require less drastic road transformation.

Which is funny because everything sort of comes back to trains.

The very marginal benefits of laying road vs track more or less disappear when automation in play.

Is is really worth maintaining the ability to go off road/track when you’re not even driving anymore?

Exactly. All edge cases disappear when you lay tracks on the road.

Yes. You bring up a great point: With some infrastructure improvements we could have "virtual" trains. Vehicles would talk to each other on the highway and organize into closely-spaced convoys. Only the lead vehicle would need an active human driver; the rest could follow at extremely close distances--drafting off each other--and would not need a human driver (or their human drivers could go off-duty). The point of using asphalt rather than rails is that it makes it easy to switch between individual car mode and automated virtual train mode.

This idea is not new and it mostly applies to freight convoys but I think it also has merit for ad hoc passenger car convoys on long highway trips.

> With some infrastructure improvements we could have "virtual" trains. Vehicles would talk to each other on the highway

I think the idea is to get rid of the roads and have the robo vehicles travel instead on tracks. That increases fuel efficiency and bypasses a lot of AI challenges.

Not only that. Overhead electrical solves a lot of the mining/environmental impact of batteries.

It’s the low-key case that Elon will be remembered poorly (like Robert Moses’ rapidly degrading legacy) for

1) Having the wrong vision for EVs (but successfully executing non it anyway)

2) Making space travel cheap (thereby increasing the amount of carbon energy dedicated to it) without really improving an average human’s quality of life

Plus messing up astronomy and maybe helping bring about Kessler syndrome. Good point about overhead electrical.

I wonder if all the "hype" from the Ubers and Googles about imminent self-driving is not actively harmful in that it is probably sucking out the oxygen from any perceived need to implement these things.

This is mostly what I believe to be the case, and as I argue here[0], it doesn't even make any sense.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31968482

What you are describing is essentially railway system.

It’s almost as if we should invest in public transportation and try to reduce cars rather than make a train car for each individual!

But for people, in the same way as for parcels, power, cable, fiber-optic, there's the last mile problem. Europe has almost solved it with high speed trains and efficient city transit. Then, it solves nothing for all those folks living in rural areas and having to drive f-150s.

> Then, it solves nothing for all those folks living in rural areas and having to drive f-150s.

Fortunately thats not a lot of people.

When electricity was being rolled out, Westinghouse and Edison didn’t bellyache about not being able to provide electricity to rural areas. They electrified all the cities.

Rural areas will just never be able to pay for modern infrastructure. And… thats ok, its not a lot of people.

Perhaps the urban areas should grow their own food?

I think the point was that in rural areas they'll still use cars or something, because it's way more efficient for the low density there. In cities, you would switch away from cars as much as possible. I don't think the commenter meant we'd "abandon the hicks" or something rude like that; the rural folks who farm and do other important jobs are a crucial part of our society for sure.

I’m going to guess you don’t live in Europe? Plenty of cars here.

But it is solving the last-mile problem

> Things like traffic signals that actively communicate their status

This is a thing in Europe, and even some US cities - my Audi has traffic sign recognition and when at a compatible intersection knows what the light is at (by radio, not by light), and how long until it changes (will show a countdown in seconds til the next light change).

> optimized for human drivers over the past century

Are our roads really? Most in cities over a certain age are just haphazard relics of times gone by, and don't get me started on "stroads" which are good for nobody

> If we can't make the cars just as smart as an alert and capable driver, then maybe we need to meet halfway and make the roads a littler "dumber" (simpler) to accommodate the robots.

This aspect of FSD has always fascinated me and I'm a little surprised it doesn't get more discussion. Meeting halfway. At what point could/would/should FSD influence the environment around it?

For example - a poorly painted road sign*. Tesla/Waymo could say "We cannot support L5 FSD on this road until you fix this sign." If it meant a step forward in autonomy, Tesla/Waymo could even offer to share the cost of that improvement!

There are a million reasons why implementation of that would be problematic. Costs and incentives would be all over the place. But I am more interested in the framing: The machines are the ones that need to adapt. Which is essentially hoping for continued hardware improvements or a spaghetti mess of if/else statements. ie "do this weird thing if you see this other weird thing in front of you". Can we get rid of the weird thing and avoid the engineering challenge altogether?

* Yes, this is an overly simple example. Some environment changes could be so large that they would require a full redesign of a city/buildings/traffic patterns. But surely there are classes of improvements where some are easier than others.

massive AI leap? but we can ask language models about how to drive through an intersection and it will list the steps correctly (and wildly incorrectly at other times)

what's missing is combining this kind of "human concept relations" model (language, rules, minimal reasoning, text encoded human preferences) with perception, and safety (which means that the model should know that if other cars are driving just fine in front then it's unlikely that the road is on fire, or that the low certainty crack in the road is okay if two other cars already went over it unimpeded, if the road marks and the signs are inconsistent, but other vehicles have formed a slow but consistent pattern of traffic then that's the local ruleset, and so on)

it's still a very hard problem. and the required amount of compute is still bonkers, the required amount of data and training is still absolutely huge, and the whole problem of safely disengaging, handling the asleep/drunk passengers (likely target audience after all)... are all hard problems too :)

You can get a self driving car ride and sleep in the back in Arizona, from Waymo. If you're on a special list, it sounds like you can do it in SF today with Cruise. Your claim is manifestly false.

`possibly some sort of segregation between robot-driven cars and people-driven cars.` just build out public transit at that point, what's the difference.

What if we just, you know, walk a bit more instead?

Or even cycle? I hear great things.

The pattern of zoning and development that the U.S. has used for the past 70 years assumes that nobody wants to walk or cycle anywhere and that they feel so strongly about it that they want cities to be built such that people will die if they attempt to do so. I grew up in a neighborhood where the elementary school was about half a mile away... on the other side of a five lane highway with no crosswalk and no sidewalk on the other side. Zero chance to assert your independence as a kid. Zero chance to live responsibly as an adult.

A part of the reason people wish they had FSD so badly is because they want to be rescued from this fundamental failure of NA-style urban planning that necessities driving, all the time, across both short and long distances.

Good point

This is changing though. Cities are getting bikes and bike lanes. They’re building dense developments close to transit. ebikes + protected bike lanes + TOD might be the solution.

I certainly hope so, and I've since moved to a place that is much more friendly for cycling; however if you go back to where I'm from (which for the purposes of this topic really could be one of any untold hundreds of counties in the U.S.), there are no signs of improvement or change. It's just the largest urban cores that seem to slowly be getting it. There is a breathtakingly large amount of suburban sprawl where the conversation about this topic is completely broken, and for the people willing to admit there even is a problem, they believe that the solution is one more lane, or one more stop sign, or just educating drivers a little bit better and nobody wants to talk about things like traffic calming, or upzoning, or cycle paths or anything else that makes anything other than car trips safe and desirable.

Clearly you live in a large city and find everything you want there.

I mean there's a reason for the slow and steady trend of North Americans leaving small towns for big cities.

> I mean there's a reason for the slow and steady trend of North Americans leaving small towns for big cities

I heard the other way - people leaving cities for suburbs

Suburbs needs to be close to big cities to be considered as such.

This is a bit of an oddity of US urban planning. The US has maybe 10 big to very big cities, where people can get around on foot, and then a host of what are called cities in the US but are essentially just collections of shopping centres, office parks, industrial estates, vaguely near each other.

It doesn't work like that in most countries; small cities and towns are navigable on foot and public transport.

Public transport often means buses, though, so self-driving AI is still very relevant there.

If you could replace double-decker buses that arrive every 15–30 minutes with self-driving minibuses that arrive every 3–5 minutes, that would be great! (for everyone except the bus drivers who lose their jobs)

Typically in cities the biggest constraint on bus frequency is bus congestion at bus stops (and to a lesser extent congestion in bus lanes), not number of buses. To the point where banning cash on buses can meaningfully increase system throughput, as it decreases lag time at bus stops. This can be alleviated with planning where people have to transfer to get anywhere (moving buses out of chokepoints) but in practice people don't like that.

Actually, I suspect this makes self-driving a particularly _bad_ solution for city buses; getting into the bus stops takes some manoeuvring, particularly when there are other buses there.

One place that self-driving buses could be interesting (and indeed there are already a couple of systems like this) is on fully/near-fully segregated lines, where they don't have to deal with human-operated traffic. Another would be small towns, but you're looking at full magic level 5 at that point.

I think a lot of those problems are solvable in principle, although unfortunately it’s probably not practical and incremental enough to actually happen...

I’m envisaging a system of minibuses, either AI-driven or at least dynamically directed by a central control system. People would use a phone app to book journeys; the app would tell them where to get on and where to transfer, and the central control system would optimise the fleet to get everyone where they need to go.

With much smaller buses, and electronic tap-in rather than cash payments, stops should be fast enough that buses can just queue up in order at each stop, hopefully mitigating the parking difficulties you mentioned (modulo breakdowns, medical emergencies, etc). Likewise, if transfers are fast and easy, hopefully they’d be less objectionable to travellers.

Requiring a phone isn’t ideal as it limits accessibility and privacy. There could also be pre-printed tickets, with QR codes that you scan at the bus stop to see the route info.

Why minibuses and not just taxis? I suspect there’s a good balance to be made between efficient road usage (buses) and efficient routing for each traveller (cars).

I’m also envisaging that if this system were to take off, personal cars could be gradually removed from city centres! Again, that makes life easier for the AI vehicles.

This is all pie-in-the-sky stuff, I know; but I do feel like there are ways we could radically improve city transport mostly using existing roads, rather than building new rails or tunnels.

That's literally the point of cities. Living outside of a city has its tradeoffs.

Semi-rural. Everything I need is within walking distance. I can take a very short car trip for larger groceries or have them delivered inexpensively.