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Comment by giansegato | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand the general tenor and sentiment of the comments here. I've taken dozens of self-driving cars rides in SF in the last few months. They were magical, and _they work_.

It blows my mind that the general defeatist tone is "it can't be done", while it's literally happening right now. It took a bajillion dollars and decades of work, but we're past the tipping point now.

Sure, regulation must happen, it's not like a chat bot where screwing up is worst case scenario being canceled for a week. Lives are on the line. But outright "it's impossible and must be stopped" is literally against progress.

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I'm with you on this.

Yes, Tesla's FSD sucked and they generated a lot of bad reputation, both for themselves and the industry. But FSD v12 (end-to-end ML) - their latest release, is leaps and bounds ahead of v11. I only used to use v11 on relatively empty highways, like cross-country road trips.

With v12, I leave it on 95% of the time - their cameras see more than I do, and process things quicker than I can. The onus is still on me to pay attention, and I do. Yes, there would be idiots who don't. But then again, there are idiot drunk drivers as well.

I am beginning to believe that in a year, Tesla v12 will be really really good, and safer on the road than an average human driver. It probably already is. I haven't researched the stats.

But the current state of the art is Waymo - at this point, a Waymo is actually safer than human drivers. People need to take a few rides in them to believe it - its almost a solved problem to navigate on city roads.

I excited for what the future holds.

I think this is why they are moving into robotics. They're close enough to solving autonomous driving that they've sign-posted that it's a tractable problem for everyone else. We can reasonably expect the other major manufacturers to catch up and once the technology is widespread and EVs are the norm, Tesla has much less of a competitive edge in their core market.

There will be tipping points where it's consistently better than humans so long as there's someone supervising, and then again when it's better without someone supervising. Beyond that point it's just incremental changes.

I jumped into my co-workers Tesla to go to lunch. I asked him if he ever uses the self-driving feature. He turned it on and in less than a second, the car veered directly into the middle turning lane. I watched him yank at the wheel and disable the self-driving mode, explaining, "It's good but sometimes it does that".

It's hard to look at a system where you have "AI" directly causing human deaths and not have a knee-jerk reaction that it can't be done and should be regulated out of existence, even if it's objectively safer than humans. It's an emotional position but as they say it's nigh impossible to reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.

It's the cars themselves that are dangerous. Whether people or robots are driving them. We used to have sensible regulation to ensure safety, which was unfortunately repealed, resulting in millions of avoidable deaths:

"...this restricted the speed (of horse-less vehicles) to 2mph in towns & 4mph in the country. The Act also required three drivers for each vehicle – two to travel in the vehicle and one to walk ahead carrying the infamous red flag."

https://law-school.open.ac.uk/blog/red-flag-act

What you are describing is essentially anecdata in the grand scheme of things. Yes, there are absolutely scenarios and situations where FSD is a solved problem. The issues that relative that all of the situations that occur across the country (and across the world) daily, the percentage of daily miles driven where FSD can perform flawlessly is likely less than 5% of total miles.

FSD can be done, IMO, but it can't be done today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdJ1ETCC6fY

Are you attempting to use a single video as proof that FSD is 100% reliable in all driving situations globally?

That video creates more questions than it answers.

You asserted that, "the percentage of daily miles driven where FSD can perform flawlessly is likely less than 5% of total miles".

If FSD can operate in situations such as the one in the video, you are wrong by at least an order of magnitude. And FSD does not have to perform flawlessly to perform better than humans.

Except that without a lot more information on that vehicle we don't know if it is optimized for a very specific scenario (low speed driving in crowded areas), or if it could perform similarly on a highway at 65MPH during snow or rain.

There are TONS of examples of FSD working well in various scenarios online. Having worked in video analytics/AI for the last 15 years I have seen all kinds of demo video that is essentially highlight reels, while the evidence of the product utterly failing is not released.

It's not about if it can be done or not. Waymo is very impressive, and they continue to expand their scope. Good on them. But their sensor suite is very expensive.

BlueCruise is not self-driving. Neither is Tesla's Full Self Driving; despite the name, read their letter to the CA DMV.

Both of those systems will absolutely ignore stationary vehicles in the path of travel when travelling at highway speeds.

> But their sensor suite is very expensive.

Very true, but the cost trend for these sensors over the past 10 years has been very good and expected to continue.

World doesn't end at SF borders, nor does it revolve around it.

I can come up with tons of corner cases where I simply won't risk life of me and my whole family just because some tech bro said so on the internet. And you know, tons of corner cases that I sometimes experience all over the world sum up into some major percentage.

By all means be a betatester, but don't force it down the throats of unsuspecting non-tech users who often trust what manufacturers claim.

> [...] I simply won't risk life of me and my whole family just because some tech bro said so on the internet.

There isn't the option to take no risk - there are over a million deaths a year[0] from regular road traffic crashes.

Region-restricted automated taxi services like Waymo are already looking pretty safe compared to human drivers, though there is a lot of selection bias (good conditions, well-mapped US cities, ...).

[0]: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-traffi...

I se 30K on the interweb (US). Where did the million come from?

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-traffi...

> Every year the lives of approximately 1.19 million people are cut short as a result of a road traffic crash. Between 20 and 50 million more people suffer non-fatal injuries, with many incurring a disability.

(for disclosure, if anyone is confused about JoeAltmaier's reply: the above link wasn't initially in my original comment - I had edited it in shortly before refreshing and seeing their reply)

Ah I was looking at US fatalities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

Further, those two stats are irreconcilable? There are not enough countries in the world to add up to nearly 2M deaths per year, given that the top rates are in the US and Russia. Who else has as many cars? Even China and India can't contribute much because of the dearth of cars.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

China and India do contribute a fair amount.

This sort of risk analysis is always baffling to me. I live in a big city. It feels like there is some near miss collision to me almost every week. 99.99% of the time it's because of human drivers, not automated systems.

It's virtually guaranteed that in your lifetime you'll have a collision or near miss with a human. And no, it doesn't take "special conditions", it could be a perfectly sunny day and a clear road and someone will do something crazy.

So that's what we put up with on a daily basis, deep threats to human life by human drivers, our safety standards on letting humans drive so low as to be utterly comical. And yet all the handwringing is done over incredibly rare situations where an AI system screws up and its human driver also screws up at oversight.

You don't understand human psychology, nor few simple facts per se.

I choose how I behave in various situations. I know I am way above average driver with most kms driven in real wheel drive bmw, keep my distances, do defensive driving etc. I pick scenarios, I choose how I do the 'battles'. If somebody else does something stupid and 'unique', I trust myself way way more than some 'ai' being in beta test, its not just reaction time but experience, massive amount of anticipation where I see bad drivers and I overtake them before they do something stupid etc.

Maybe its emotional, but I am highly logical person and don't let emotions interfere with decisions much. Still, no. I kept saying "in 10 years" but this goalpost is basically moving as time moves, so I understood its in "maybe in my retirement" category and stopped expecting mass adoption earlier.

Surprise me world, I would love that. But I am being realistic, not bullish just because it would be so nice to have robo cars and taxis.

> World doesn't end at SF borders, nor does it revolve around it.

Funnily enough his "they just work" mentality does end at SF borders though...as recent as 2 weeks ago.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/17/seven-waymo-robotaxis-bloc...

> Six Waymo robotaxis blocked traffic moving onto the Potrero Avenue 101 on-ramp in San Francisco on Tuesday at 9:30 p.m. (...) While routing back to Waymo’s city depot that evening, the first robotaxi in the lineup came across a road closure with traffic cones. The only other path available to the vehicles was to take the freeway, according to a Waymo spokesperson. (...) the company is still only testing on freeways with a human driver in the front seat. (...) After hitting the road closure, the first Waymo vehicle in the lineup then pulled over out of the traffic lane that was blocked by cones, followed by six other Waymo robotaxis.

Also gotta point out, the article uses such a disingenuous way to put it. The Waymo didn't "pull[ed] over out of the traffic lane that was blocked by cones" the car stopped in the lane of travel and put it's flashers on as evidenced by the video at the top of the article.

A lot of people don't understand there's Waymo, and then there's everybody else, and everybody else is at least 5-10 years behind Waymo.

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