Hacker News Reader

Comment by intended | Hacker News Reader

This is my favorite thing to point out from the day we started talking about autonomous vehicles on tech sites.

If you took a Tesla or a Waymo and dropped into into a tier 2 city in India, it will stop moving.

Driving data is cultural data, not data about pure physics.

You will never get to full self driving, even with more processing power, because the underlying assumptions are incorrect. Doing more of the same thing, will not achieve the stated goal of full self driving.

You would need to have something like networked driving, or government supported networks of driving information, to deal with the cultural factor.

Same with GenAI - the tooling factor will not magically solve the people, process, power and economic factors.

View on HN

> You would need to have something like networked driving, or government supported networks of driving information, to deal with the cultural factor.

Or actual intelligence. That observes its surroundings and learns what's going on. That can solve generic problems. Which is the definition of intelligence. One of the obvious proofs that what everybody is calling "AI" is fundamentally not intelligent, so it's a blatant misnomer.

One of my favorite things to question about autonomous driving is the goalposts. What do you mean the “stated goal of full self driving”, which is unachievable? Any vehicle, anywhere in the world, in any conditions? That seems an absurd goal that ignores the very real value in having vehicles that do not require drivers and are safer than humans but are limited to certain regions.

Absolutely driving is cultural (all things people do are cultural) but given 10’s of millions of miles driven by Waymo, clearly it has managed the cultural factor in the places they have been deployed. Modern autonomous driving is about how people drive far more than the rules of the road, even on the highly regulated streets of western countries. Absolutely the constraints of driving in Chennai are different, but what is fundamentally different? What leads to an impossible leap in processing power to operate there?

> What do you mean the “stated goal of full self driving”, which is unachievable? Any vehicle, anywhere in the world, in any conditions? That seems an absurd goal that ignores the very real value in having vehicles that do not require drivers and are safer than humans but are limited to certain regions.

I definitely recall reading some thinkpieces along the lines of "In the year 203X, there will be no more human drivers in America!" which was and still is clearly absurd. Just about any stupidly high goalpost you can think of has been uttered by someone in the world early on.

Anyway, I'd be interested in a breakdown on reliability figures in urban vs. suburban vs. rural environments, if there is such a thing, and not just the shallow take of "everything outside cities is trivial!" I sometimes see. Waymo is very heavily skewed toward (a short list of) cities, so I'd question whether that's just a matter of policy, or whether there are distinct challenges outside of them. Self-driving cars that only work in cities would be useful to people living there, but they wouldn't displace the majority of human driving-miles like some want them to.

I mean, even assuming the technical challenges to self-driving can be solved, it is obvious that there will still be human drivers because some humans enjoy driving, just as there are still people who enjoy riding horses even after cars replaced horses for normal transport purposes. Although as with horses, it is possible that human driving will be seen as secondary and limited to minor roads in the future.

I'd apprecite that we dont hurry past the acknowledgement that self driving will be a cultural artifact. Its been championed as a purely technical one, and pointing this out has been unpopular since day 1, because it didn't gel with the zeitgeist.

As others will attest, when adherence to driving rules is spotty, behavior is highly variable and unpredictable. You need to have a degree of straight up agression, if you want to be able to handle an auto driver who is cheating the laws of physics.

Another example of something thats obvious based on crimes in India; people can and will come up to your car during a traffic jam, tap your chassis to make it sound like there was an impact, and then snatch your phone from the dashboard when you roll your window down to find out what happened.

This is simply to illustrate and contrast how pared down technical intuitions of "driving" are, when it comes to self driving discussions.

This is why I think level 5 is simply not happening, unless we redefine what self driving is, or the approach to achieving it. I feel theres more to be had from a centralized traffic orchestration network that supplements autonomous traffic, rather than trying to solve it onboard the vehicle.

Why couldn’t an autonomous vehicle adapt to different cultures? American driving culture has specific qualities and elements to learn, same with India or any other country.

Do you really think Waymos in SF operate solely on physics? There are volumes of data on driver behavior, when to pass, change lanes, react to aggressive drivers, etc.

Yeah exactly. It’s kind of absurd to take the position that it’s impossible to have “full self driving” because Indian driving is different than American driving. You can just change the model you’re using. You can have the model learn on the fly. There are so many possibilities.

Because this statement, unfortunately, ends up moving the underlying goal posts about what self driving IS.

And the point that I am making, is that this view was never baked into the original vision of self driving, resulting in predictions of a velocity that was simply impossible.

Physical reality does not have vibes, and is more amenable to prediction, than human behavior. Or Cow behavior, or wildlife if I were to include some other places.

Marketers gonna market. But if we ignore the semantics of what full self driving actually means for a minute, there is still a lot of possibilities for self driving in the future. It takes longer than we perceive initially because we don’t have insight into the nuances needed to achieve these things. It’s like when you plan a software project, you think it’s going to take less time than it does because you don’t have a detailed view until you’re already in the weeds.

To quote someone else, if my grandmother had wheels, she would be a bicycle.

This is a semantic discussion, because it is about what people mean when they talk about self driving.

Just ditching the meaning is unfair, because goddamit, the self driving dream was awesome. I am hoping to be proved wrong, but not because we moved our definition.

Carve a separate category out, which articulates the updated assumptions. Redefining it is a cop out and dare I say it, unbecoming of the original ambition.

Networked Autonomous vehicles?

"If you took a Tesla or a Waymo and dropped into into a tier 2 city in India, it will stop moving."

Lol. If you dropped the average westerner into Chennai, they would either: a) stop moving b) kill someone

Reply on news.ycombinator.com