I am just wondering how many people have to die before it finally dawns on on us that the current approach is idiotic.
The supposed smart cars can't even talk to each-other directly 'without internet' to warn of a car pileup! They can't report to city traffic control about their condition.
We should be innovating in infrastructure instead - create standardised computer readable infrared road markings, equip each traffic light and each lamp post with a radio beacon, each crash barrier could have a radio marker, create PUBLIC maps of each city, have a central traffic control sypercomputer in each city provide directions to cars. Have each car painted with infrared markers so they recognise each-other. Provide cyclists with something these cars can recognise.
We could even make radar-reflective pants so that autonomous cars see them better.
the whoe traffic system needs to be looked at and brought to a new set of standards, whatever they may be. I am not sure what they are, but it should be clear to anyome with half a brain thay having a car use a camera to tell if the traffic light is red or green is idiotic.
untill a new system is ready, no car without AGI level ai will ever be safe
The only problem is that such collective approach conflicts with the way VCs work.
40k people are dying a year from cars, and the problem is that driverless electric cars are not the solution. They are the faster horse kind of innovation. If we were serious about reducing fatalities, improving health, and reducing pollution, the solution would be to drastically reduce the amount of miles driven per year and the number and the size of the cars. We need to encourage people to bike and walk and use public transportation. Autonomous trains would work extremely well and we don't have to worry about bicyclists. The zoning laws and car centric development of cities is the issue.
> The zoning laws and car centric development of cities is the issue.
Well, the main issue is that most of the cars on the road during the busiest hours have just 1 person in them.
I think when the dust finally settles, the main form of passenger transit in urban-ish areas will basically be something that looks like autonomous vans.
Unlike public transit today, they won't have predefined timetables, nor predefined startpoints and endpoints. They'll pick you up wherever you are, whenever you want, and drop you off wherever you want, but they might take a roundabout way to get there to pick up and drop off other passengers too.
If they usually have 2+ people in them at a time, we'll be able to use our existing infrastructure (roads) at a much higher throughout.
None or few of those options are particularly accessible (EDIT: for people who cannot walk/cycle long distances). Public transportation often is quite inaccessible while still claiming to be accessible (like the London Underground and the New York Subway). Central management of driverless cars could solve the problem in a more inclusive fashion and isn't just more of the same idea. We should still reduce the size of the vehicles, though.
EDIT clarification: Accessibility for wheelchair users, blind people, and anyone with ambulatory restrictions. Most stations are not wheelchair accessible to the train and having to go on much longer routes to compensate is not equal access. And many 'encouraging other use' initiatives block all cars, leaving these people in the lurch. Something that gave door-to-door access to everyone, equally, via a fleet of cars, could be superior.
Or 1m+ people if you count non Americans as people. I'm optimistic that self driving tech will be able to be repurposed to prevent accidents even if fitted to non electric non self driving vehicles. The switching to bikes etc. is a nice idea but probably won't happen in a hurry.
This seems to be the dominant opinion is here, that is, to approach this problem as we approached civil aviation and flying commercial planes.
To respond in a sentence: first, you have no proof that "investing in infrastructure" would actually yield working autonomous cars. Second, there are no proof either that the current approaches are doomed to fail.
To respond in details: everything that you propose doesn't seem to be able to solve the main challenges that self-driving cars are facing. These challenges are all about edge-cases, and responding safely to changing conditions and misbehaviors from other agents.
The response cannot be "let's add a ton of fragile electronics in all of the infrastructure" because this: will cost a ton of money to build and maintain, will break in weird ways over time and lead to cascading failures, and most importantly: it's dubious that it would even work at all.
The final comment about VCs is weird: a lot of actors in this field are not VC backed startups.
My opinion is: Tesla might have a working model that outperform human drivers in 10 years (50% confidence)
> These challenges are all about edge-cases, and responding safely to changing conditions and misbehaviors from other agents... The response cannot be "let's add a ton of fragile electronics"
Self driving car has failed to detect a person in the dark and killed her. It was demonstrated that Tesla autopilot fails to detect a child crossing the road. It confused a semi trailer and an underpass. You call that an edge case?
> The response cannot be "let's add a ton of fragile electronics in all of the infrastructure"
So instead we will add a ton of fragile electronics in every car. Instead of having 3 optimally positioned lidars monitoring an intersection, we will have 20 poorly positioned lidars on every car.
You don't need electronis, you can use paint. You can put QR codes that tell a car where it is in an underground parking lot. If we add a parrern to all clothing in infrared-only paint, that would help various AI detect people and tell them apart from surroundings. You can put a metal patterns on street signs that are detected by automotive radar.
> will cost a ton of money to build and maintain
And electronics in the cars will cost even more
> will break in weird ways over time and lead to cascading failures
You mean like the failure the main article is discussing right now?
> it's dubious that it would even work at all
And it's dubious this 'individual' approach will ever work. Every single argument you've made equally applies to the approach you are advocating.
Sounds like a lot of infra and related spend via taxes or muni debt for a tech outcome that’s a privacy and autonomy nightmare.
Build some trains, build some bike lanes, and leave the people alone who don’t want their transportation and the downstream reasons people use it taken over by tech.
Governance by a central cybernetic super computer and all the cybernetic hypothesis coming true. Good lord.
I think you hit the nail on the head with trains, because your parent is pretty much describing a modern train signaling system, down to the centralized supercomputer.
> create standardised computer readable infrared road markings, equip each traffic light and each lamp post with a radio beacon, each crash barrier could have a radio marker, create PUBLIC maps of each city, have a central traffic control sypercomputer in each city provide directions to cars. Have each car painted with infrared markers so they recognise each-other.
It is amazing how often tech savy folks can reinvent trains.
I think eventually major car manufacturers will work with the regulator to bring on new standards, and it will happen withing 15 years. Infrastructure upgrades will take another 15. Most startups that aim to solve self driving will either find a niche in that ecosystem or go extinct.
So I expect reasonable self driving cars to be common in depeloped nations in 2050, while AGI will be just as elusive.
In a similar vein, the correct solution to electric trucks is not giant batteries, it's simply overhead wires:
>>The supposed smart cars can't even talk to each-other directly 'without internet' to warn of a car pileup! They can't report to city traffic control about their condition.
- This by far in my opinion is the single most important attribute of any autonomous fleet of vehicles that is needed. There should be first of all a standard of communication via RFC defined for autonomous vehicles and drones. Any vendor manufacturing autonomous vehicles or drones should follow this standard of communication and be able to communicate to each other with the primary objective of avoiding collisions. This should be a RFC so that it works across vendors and is as standardized as TCP/IP. Communication medium can be over radio frequencies as well as the internet and can work as backup of each other but first there should be a established standard that all vendors adheres to.
I think this is a bad idea. The potential for a malicious/incompetent/malfunctioning actor to wreck havoc becomes enormous.
Vehicles should assess and plan driving from first principles and physical sensory inputs. Networked inputs could be helpful as augmentation but it's not something one should rely on at all. Kind of like you shouldn't take a human showing/not showing a turn for a reliable signal of intent.
Seems to me you’ve just reinvented a city rail transportation system with modern signalling. Modern rail system can indeed drive fully autonomously if they are fully grade separated from street traffic.
That's a lot of effort, money, and infrastructure that could go into developing a healthy public transportation system instead of trying to stop all the cars from killing people.
You're describing exactly the kind of autonomous car development that was going on for the last 40 years. It went absolutely nowhere. It wasn't until tech got good enough and developers started treating vehicles as independent agents that any real progress has been made.
There is currently some kind of geomagnetic storm which is causing a lot of GPS tracks to be offset over the past few days. It's all over the running/cycling forums. Could be related, here's an example:
It couldn't possibly be GPS, right? Networks are unreliable, the cars must be able to reach a safe state if the network drops out. They appear to have stopped in the road. If these cars can't safely navigate their way to the side of the road using local sensors, they are wildly, hilariously unsuited for autonomous operation.
> at least a dozen autonomous Chevrolet Bolts from GM Cruise Automation were spotted blocking the intersection at Gough Street and Fulton Street for a couple of hours, according to reddit user seansinha.
There must be something weird about that intersection that is causing a bug.
You've nailed the dirty little secret of the AV industry. Everyone's safety model is underpinned by the ridiculous assumption that a human will be (a) reachable with very high reliability over shitty cellular networks; (b) able to correctly interpret complex situations with extremely limited information; (c) able to resolve safety-critical situations by making planner adjustments, without direct control over steering and acceleration.
> If these cars can't safely navigate their way to the side of the road using local sensors, they are wildly, hilariously unsuited for autonomous operation.
You are a lot more confident than me that this isn't the case.
Yeah they have Lidars for 10s of 1000s of $ mounted and should be able to go for certain distances without GPS. If a GPS outage was designed as failure mode. But it would perhaps be one of the later items on any engineer‘s priority list since it is so reliable.
But that aside, I'd really hope that these cars are using professional WAAS-capable GPS receivers. Short of a major X-class flare which knocks out the WAAS geostationary satellites, the entire point of the system is to correct for these kinds of disturbances to the GPS signals.
I'm not really seeing anything weird with GNSS. I have a continuously-operating receiver that writes its location into a database every second; I did a query over the last 30 days and there is no abnormal deviation in position. (My receiver is in a terrible location that can only see a tiny sliver of the sky, and is single-band, so I expect about a +/- 50cm deviation without RTK correction and that's what I'm seeing.)
I actually haven't looked at this data for quite a while. I didn't consider the start of the Ukraine war a good reason to start looking at my data, and I delete it after 30 days to save $$$ on block storage. Dumb. (I added some proper downsampling today so I can keep it forever at reasonable cost.)
Trusting my own data is always suspicious, so I clicked around randomly on the NYS Spatial Reference Network website (https://cors.dot.ny.gov/; the title of the page is "Shop", but accounts and RTK access are free). They operate a bunch of Continuously Operating Reference Stations and publish statistics about the accuracy. I do see a lot of reported GLONASS cycle slips today. I have no idea if that is normal or not; this is the first time I've ever dug that deeply into station stats. But overall, the position accuracy at the stations I spot-checked are within .5cm, which is normal. (Most use 4 constellations; GPS, GLONASS, Beidou, Galileo; on 2 bands. So even if GLONASS is broken today, one constellation is enough for good accuracy.)
If the government has degraded GPS accuracy today as many commenters think have happened, many people would have noticed. The reference stations have known positions; if GPS starts saying they're somewhere else, that's impossible and would be flagged. GPS being significantly degraded would probably be front page news; not just noticed by a few exercise tracking enthusiasts on Reddit. Or maybe it's all a big conspiracy and the US and Russia banded together to hack my database and the NYS spatial reference network. It could happen, I guess, but my non expert opinion is that GPS is fine right now.
WAAS has been available on consumer GPS devices since the mid 2000's and is not "professional" nor does it address reception/interference issus; WAAS provides semi-real-time position refinement data based off drift observed by ground stations within a certain range to compensate for things like atmospheric disruption of the signal. WAAS is built-in to the vast majority of receivers these days.
Multi-band GNSS is what helps address issues around reception like multipath and interference. Receivers used to be pretty expensive, and the number of L5 satellites wasn't that high until the last few years, but now can be found in even a number of consumer electronic devices, and the number of L5 satellites keeps going up (and as more satellites have L5 signals, things will get better.) Several Garmin sport devices have it now, for example. A quick search shows Maxim sells a multi-band GNSS chipset for $10.
There is really no excuse for any autonomous vehicle company to not be at least evaluating multi-band GPS receivers, if only to give more reliable position data in urban environs.
I'd be surprised if at least some aren't using RTK receivers, but this requires a base station within a certain range of the cars, or commercial service (such as that offered to farmers by John Deere.) RTK just isn't that expensive compared to even a single LIDAR unit.
Edit: they can tolerate at least some degree of GPS degradation and use dead reckoning / lidar data in some cases, according to this person: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31940167
I just read about a sunspot that recently doubled in size [0] and maybe launched a CME in our direction -- we don't really know due to a power outage at Stanford University that took the SDO offline [1], anyway food for thought, maybe it's coincidence.
It is worth noting however that the size, power consumption and antenna precision of a watch-sized or bicycle computer size GPS(+glonass, Galileo, beidou, qzss) receiver is considerably smaller than what should be in these vehicles.
I have not seen any mention of GPS service degradation in hobbyist drone enthusiast groups over the last week, some of whom use quite small GPS modules with serial connection to the flight controller for automated signal lost return to home features and such.
> Fine localization should be able to resolve without GNSS input (with caveats) and there are specific tested requirements to be able to tolerate a certain number of minutes of outage even in the absence of LIDAR before position accuracy degrades beyond acceptable limits.
That is most definitely not it, these vehicles have localization modules that rely on lidar point cloud matching, gps is generally only used for bootstrapping that process but is technically not even needed.
Could it be using a different protocol or CRC system that's more resistant to that type of issue perhaps? There must be some difference, otherwise it would just be more GPS, right?
But it's not great if now we've moved denial of service attacks into our real-world transportation infrastructure. It's not too different from truckers in Ottawa blocking all the streets and causing chaos. If this can happen by accident, it seems likely that a future version could result from being hacked.
The promises of self driving cars have always seemed weird to me. Sure, I would love to have a world where all cars are self driving. The security benefits seem large.
But decreasing congestion? We already know how to do that, and in many ways it seems like a safer bet than some kind of technogy with large problems and even larger unknowns; public transport.
Cheap, well developed, reliable public transport will beat autonomous cars on throughput and resource use any day.
But you have to give up point to point, of course the overall throughput is better but the individual experience is (perceived) worse. This is why I love the idea of "public luxury" make sitting on a train or a bus nicer than sitting in a brand new mercedes.
Easy: If you have shitty public transport you are gonna have a shitty experience in it. If you have a well funded, well planned and embeded public transport system, you will have a good time.
But this costs more than just money — it costs space. And if you are doing it right it also costs you road space (busses and streetcars only make sense of they have their own uninterrupted lanes for the most part).
That depends how you look at it, though. To my mind, the extra walking distance with public transport is generally a plus, since it serves as a decent baseline of physical activity. Even a small amount of added walking can have a significant health benefit. If you add carrying groceries and walking uphill to that the effect quickly adds up. If I had a car or (god forbid) a personal driver I'm willing to bet I'd be significantly heavier and in worse shape, and consequently all the more unhappy in general.
That reminds me of the preference for white rice over more nutritious brown rice just because one is, well, white and the other isn't [1]. Similar with white flour I think.
We need to learn to appreciate things for what they're really worth to us (including their true costs) not just for what they look like.
_________________
Health problems come because of the polishing. Polishing rice into the sparkling white form that most people prefer has three major negative impacts on health.
The first is, polishing removes most of the vitamins and minerals that are vital to health. (...)
The second relates to diabetes, which is threatening to reach epidemic proportions in the Philippines over the next couple of decades. (...)
Finally, polishing rice also reduces its protein content, which can mean the difference between being well-nourished or malnourished.
(...) And, then, over the decades, the dominant culture defined brown rice as “dirty” and fit only for the poor, while white rice was seen as sophisticated and modern.
My frequent train has that option if you go first class but it still just goes from A to B and is pretty limited if you want to go to C, D or E off the train line. First class is also too expensive for most.
Is there anything to indicate that autonomous vehicles would even help with congestion? Why would they? If anything more people might take them at the worst hours (because it would be less annoying for them without the stress of dealing with bumper to bumper traffic).
Cheap, reliable, dense public transit with diverse "last mile" options is clearly a much better choice from the congestion, efficiency cost point of views.
Speaking as a guy in Europe where we generally have "good" public transport, I think you can only ever have ONE of those at the same time, with some exceptions.
Cheap fares? You get decrepit busses from the 80s and the timetable's just a suggestion (what my city used to have)
Well developed? Development isn't cheap so fares get expensive, busses are Mercs that run on CNG and the timetable's still just a suggestion - but you get live boards showing arrival times at least (what my city has today)
Reliable? You'll have to go to Switzerland or Japan to experience that, no other place truly has it. And those places aren't cheap... but they would count as having well developed route networks, so 2/3 for them I suppose.
> Cheap fares? You get decrepit busses from the 80s and the timetable's just a suggestion (what my city used to have)
I don’t think this is generally true... If it is true, then the I suspect government subsidize are a bigger factor in explaining the variance of public transit quality then fare price.
Take Reykjavík as an example. It has the most expensive public transit fare price in Europe (86% above the European average) and all you get are some buses every 30-60 min (with only a handful of lines running more frequently during rush hour), timetables from the 80s and a ticketing system that never actually works. It is safe to say that Reykjavík has an expensive, poorly developed and unreliable transit system.
I think a well funded transit system can actually accomplish all three pretty easily, as long as they are willing to sacrifice some convenience for private vehicles.
In Zürich, a monthly city ticket is around $50, and a monthly country wide public transport ticket is $340 (and really gets you almost everywhere). Annual tickets are slightly cheaper.
I would argue while not "very cheap", the prices are still reasonably cheap, especially when compared to reoccurring car costs.
Vienna, Austria: public transport costs 1 EUR per day without any limits. It is also extremely well developed and reliable. Most people, especially without kids don't even consider getting a car.
Most of the cost of a taxi is the driver. In the long term driverless taxis will be much cheaper. Access to affordable taxis will greatly improve mobility for the young, old, poor, disabled, etc. It will also enable many people who currently drive to ditch their car (saving lots of money) while having comparable mobility.
Of course driverless taxis will not help much with congestion. That will require different solutions.
>But decreasing congestion? We already know how to do that,
Anything, automation included, that allows things to flow more smoothly will decrease congestion for a specific number of vehicles on the road allowing roads/intersections/etc to flow closer to their ideal capacity. (This principal holds whether you're talking about cars or buses, train networks, industrial facilities, etc.)
For example, if self driving solves some decent fraction of the morons who can't seem to merge in the size space that the engineers specifically allocated because it was sufficient for that purpose or can't turn left even through sufficiently sparse cross traffic you've just alleviated a lot of congestion.
In practice transit networks are bounded by the daily peaks so you'll never not have traffic jams and packed subway cars at rush hour but efficiency improvements mean these conditions will exist for a smaller slice of the day.
I’ve lived in and frequently traveled to cities with what is considered the best public transportation in the world (Paris, NYC, London, HK, Singapore, Zurich, etc etc).
In almost all the above places, there have been frequent instances where I’ve had to use taxis and/or rent a car. And that was while living/staying in the core of these cities.
99.99% of places on earth aren’t nearly as densely populated as the ones above, so increase the need for cars proportionally if you ever want to go elsewhere.
We need both good public transport and autonomous vehicles. It’s not one or the other.
Whenever I see people citing public transport as a panacea for all problems, it’s typically a wealthy, single, childless, digital minimalist 20-something who lives in the core of the aforementioned cities, and never does much outside of it.
You ever wonder where the food you eat gets grown and how it gets delivered to that fast casual restaurant you love down the street? It’s not public transport.
"You ever wonder where the food you eat gets grown and how it gets delivered"
the argument is strange, they don't exactly deliver 40 tons of wheat to the bakery with a taxi. Noone is arguing against cargo and utility vehicles unless they can be substituted by railway (which could be better designed, etc)
> Cheap, well developed, reliable public transport will beat autonomous cars on throughput and resource use any day.
Remember, this is happening in a state with massive multiple public health crisis that go un-reported and has maps of human excrement in their inner-cities. The priorities here are completely in the wrong direction I agree.
For the municipiality a 6 lane street vs a two lane street with public transport and bicycle lanes can make the difference between neverending debt and prosperity. Places with good public transport and bicycle infrastructure and denser mixed use pay more tax revenue. Spread out urban sprawls and suburbs give the municipiality a lot of street surface to maintain, for very little tax revenue in return.
With all of the talk, usually around Teslas but I suppose it applies to all EVs, that I've seen over the years akin to, "Just imagine how safe driving will be when every vehicle is FSD and can talk to one another," I have to ask... shouldn't we anticipate seeing similar issues to this in that scenario?
I mean yeah, there will be different manufacturers so it's not like every car in a city could come to a standstill. And I'm also speaking from a place of ignorance, so please correct me if I'm off-base. But isn't this kind of a thing (mass stoppages of entire fleets) a cause for concern as we see increased FSD adoption?
Of course it's a cause for concern. It's a perfectly reasonable concern. It's just about certain that early fleets will have big outages for dumb reasons, just like major websites do. The question will be how frequent those are, how dangerous they are, and how effective the mitigations will be as everything matures.
As with many of things related to self-driving cars, the target doesn't have to be "perfection" so much as "better than people on average". Human drivers do dumb things in large groups all the time, like highway pileups in bad weather, or rubbernecking traffic jams. I don't think all the humans on earth ever stopped driving at the same time, though, so...that'll be a first :p
> As with many of things related to self-driving cars, the target doesn't have to be "perfection" so much as "better than people on average".
I have an issue with that argument, because it's typically being used together with highly disingenuous statistics (like Teslas our FSD has less accidents per mile than normal drivers) to give the impression that autonomous driving is anywhere close to being "better than people on average". This is just not the case at least not in any region with a broad variety of weather conditions.
> Human drivers do dumb things in large groups all the time, like highway pileups in bad weather, or rubbernecking traffic jams.
Considering that most autonomous driving doesn't even work in really bad weather, I'd argue that humans are still much better despite the pileups.
>>the target doesn't have to be "perfection" so much as "better than people on average".
You see, I completely disagree with this assumption. They should be perfect or they shouldn't be allowed on the road at all.
You wouldn't accept a bread slicer that sometimes erroneously slices off your fingers, as long as it does so less frequently than people slice their own fingers on average, would you?
I feel like a lot of people have kind of wisened up about this hypothetical future anyway, now that we're seeing FSD in practice. Sure, some problems would be eliminated by all cars being self driving, and the roads being tailored to that use case. But then, at the same time, trains literally run on tracks and they still have conductors.
If a core goal is really to make thoroughfares safer and reduce traveler injuries/fatalities, we seem to be ignoring or discounting some pretty obvious options, like minimizing car traffic
This vision where we all get around in low-passenger-count autonomous robot cages on existing roadways is just one possible future but we seem to fixate on it. At the end of the day the car is a tool but we've allowed it to burrow into the collective psyche
What about making cities walkable, bikeable, segway-able, wheelchair-able, scooter-able, whatever, with proven public transportation options like trains or buses running fixed routes for longer commutes? Much more energy efficient, way easier than autonomous cars, and conducive to much more livable urban areas imo
It will take some effort to change habits and expectations and revamp infrastructure but surely that's as worthwhile as all the time and money going into FSD?
Regarding trains anyway, a) there have been autonomous trains for decades and the numbers are increasing. b) there are 100x as many professional drivers as train conductors in the US - so it's easy to see why the focus on driving. That's where the money is.
The answer is going to look like: freeway and maybe roadway driving is autonomous while drivers are expected to takeover for irreconcilable issues. There can be no other way outside of someone actually factually creating general AI.
Given the list of things that could go horribly wrong with self driving vehicles, incidents like these are only a minor, harmless inconvenience.
The more immediate concern is self driving vehicles that are clearly not ready to be on public roads being allowed to test (or not being pulled off the roads).
We could have the same fear with all these satellites being shot up into space. Couldn't they all start raining down on earth with some poor calculations or coding mistakes in the course-correction software?
I don't know enough about this stuff to know if this is a realistic thing or just the premise of a bad sci-fi movie.
Every new technological advance brings with it new possibilities for human creativity, and sharing if experience and knowledge.
And new ways for us to better destroy ourselves and each other.
Imagine, say, a pandemic like lockdown, but now only authorised vehicles may travel at certain times, or at all, and that software is buggy, or gets hacked, or used malevolently by one or another political faction.
>>>>>Imagine, say, a pandemic like lockdown, but now only authorised vehicles may travel at certain times, or at all,
No need to imagine. This was de facto policy for quarantine in most south american countries.
You couldnt drive unless:
- you were a doctor or politician, then only if
- the weekday corresponded to the last digit of your plate, then if,
- only before x time, like 10pm,
- etc.
Now I wonder how is this talking to each other done? Is it some centralized cloud service? Or some type of extremely complicated mesh? Both seem to have quite critical risk factors. It is not unseen for clouds to go down and self-organizing mesh networks might not be the stablest things, or even risk free...
I suppose I could've clarified, I'm not necessarily looking at it from the perspective of the safety of people in the vehicles.
Right now it's just a small fleet of driverless taxis. Doesn't this demonstrate the potential for it to be, say, every single Honda in the city? Why even limit it to a city? A single manufacturer's critical infrastructure has some kind of fault (malice, shit code, hardware failure - dealer's choice!) and suddenly Fords stop running nationwide, or internationally.
Then I start thinking of the impact to emergency vehicles caused by a cavalcade of stopped cars, and other similar issues.
Again, I need to point out that I'm not trying to be sensationalist or hyperbolic. I'm ignorant here and am genuinely curious how viable these types of scenarios could be. It's clear that it can happen, I'm just curious to what extent.
Stopping in the middle of the road might be dangerous depending on the situation.
If there's something weird about the location where they are stuck -- maybe somebody is jamming GPS or whatever -- then they should at least be able to pull over using local sensors, right?
On the other hand, if there's some effect that is tripping up their sensors -- maybe some odd geometry that, for whatever bizarre reason, looks like a wall to them -- this pretty embarassing, but probably an inevitable growing pain for this technology.
I saw a version of this myself at Geary and Mason around midnight on June 20th[1]. That it happened again but at a larger scale ten days later is deeply concerning.
Given I had no clue what state the vehicles were in, and that they'd start moving without indication, it felt pretty damn worrying.
Aiden, malicious disgraced hacker gets into the networks of, Joel, his successful rival's self-driving taxi company, Kaarr. Joel and Aiden were CIA hackers, but fell out over their mutual love of Klara. Joel takes Klara to the heights of the elite, but she still pines for Aiden. In revenge, Aiden hacks into Kaarr's networks and makes all the cars into murderbots, locking his rival Joel inside as the killing commences. At the end of the night, all the Killer Kaarrs are set to drive into the ocean, killing a traumatized Joel. But there's only one problem, Klara is locked inside a Killer Kaarr too. Can Aiden reverse his sadistic code in time to save Klara? Can Joel escape to stop the killing? Find Out, Halloween 2024!
A horror/gore/race film with lots of body horror as people are alternatively hit, crushed, bonked, exploded, and otherwise tortured by cute little electric cars with really tinted windshields and choice camera angles. Think the hokey rubbery special effects of The Thing with a lot of cell phones and car-centric jump scares.
From a customer's perspective, it isn't clear that a software taxi driver is in any way better than a human taxi driver, particularly with (human) driver assist preventing collisions and all the other warnings provided by a modern car.
In both cases someone else is driving for the customer. With a human driver (plus driver assist braking and collision warnings) you have the most flexible, sophisticated intelligence on Earth driving. With a robotaxi you have something inferior. But maybe it's a lot cheaper, right?
The robotaxi can only compete on price because that's its only advantage.
If you own a car that drives itself, that's a different story. Everybody can see the value proposition.
We would have to look at the cost of the hardware and maintenance and fallback remote operators and the R&D investment to evaluate whether a robotaxi fleet is indeed cheaper. How much cheaper is it, exactly? 5%? 10%? 15%?
Would you pay a little more to have the most flexible, sophisticated intelligence on Earth (human brain + driver assist) or would you want to save a few dollars and risk having some dumb piece of software strand you in the middle of the road somewhere?
We all use Google Maps or Apple Maps when driving and most of us have seen these systems do boneheaded things. Just imagine the dumb things a robotaxi could do.
It's hard for a normal person to be excited about this. I don't know a single person who is excited by robotaxis.
> From a customer's perspective, it isn't clear that a software taxi driver is in any way better than a human taxi driver
The taxi driver having 0% chance of raping or stealing you would be prominent a clear win.
Or really any of many many other issues you could have with an actual human person with a specific world view and social position interacting with you. Not even considering if you yourself have specific shortcommings (fear of social interactions etc.)
It wouldn't be fair to pit a perfect human against the self driving car, there are many other stuff to be consided outside of the sheer driving competence.
> The taxi driver having 0% chance of raping or stealing you would be prominent a clear win.
I find it interesting that this gets mentioned so much - I’ve done some moderate googling for cases of rape by a cab driver in Berlin and the last case that went to court was in 2013 - and even that is not a classic case of premeditated rape (+) There is one case later where a passenger raped a taxi driver and one where two rapists pretended to be Uber drivers - they could not have easily pretended to be taxi drivers in Germany since the cars need to have very specific signage and equipment.
Now, this doesn’t mean that no rape occurred - after all not every rape case gets reported - but it certainly indicates that the risk of being raped in a taxi in Berlin is low.
Things may be different in the US, but even there my initial assumption is that the risk gets overestimated since this is the kind of crime that gets overrepresented in the news.
(+) the passengers didn’t want to pay the fare and threatened the driver who then pulled out a gun and forced them to have sex as payment. Still rape, no question, but not a premeditated rape case.
Those are also all reasons for competing on price from the perspective of the fleet operator — robos (should) be able to run longer and cheaper than these pesky humans.
I am hopeful we will see improved safety but rather skeptical that will come in urban robo fleets ahead of highway longhaul cargo.
If I can hire a robotaxi, I never need to own a vehicle larger than what I need to commute; I can just fill up a rented vehicle with whatever cargo I'm hauling, let the taxi chauffeur the kids to school, etc.
Today's auto fleets are idle 95% of the time, because everyone overspecs capacity for the worst case. Marginal level 4 self-driving is sufficient to disrupt this. The savings in being able to downsize personal vehicles and hand off logistics to a third party are huge for individuals and also improve land use - hunting for parking space disappears, and every parking lot can subsequently downsize too.
If you thought drivers on the road are bad now, this is is a sneak peek of the dystopian future where other drivers on the road drive like they are a support ticket for Facebook or Google. If your situation isn’t covered by the preprogrammed logic, you’re out of luck with nobody to talk to. Self driving vehicles belong on rails.
The technology will get there, but it hasn’t yet. In the meantime, if the technology fails, someone needs to be available and able to intervene immediately.
Rails are too restrictive for real life. I trust a self driving fleet to respond immediately to an emergency by stopping. Maybe causing a disruption but very little loss of life or property.
Until we do a better job of solving these issues, we need to have backup drivers available in these vehicles, or, the vehicles should be operating in places where dumb breakdowns don’t block ambulances and fire trucks.
Rails are too restrictive for real life? I'm not sure what you are trying to say here... Rails are widely used for real life around the globe. In many, many places rails significantly out perform cars to the point that people choose not to own cars.
Readit News
The supposed smart cars can't even talk to each-other directly 'without internet' to warn of a car pileup! They can't report to city traffic control about their condition.
We should be innovating in infrastructure instead - create standardised computer readable infrared road markings, equip each traffic light and each lamp post with a radio beacon, each crash barrier could have a radio marker, create PUBLIC maps of each city, have a central traffic control sypercomputer in each city provide directions to cars. Have each car painted with infrared markers so they recognise each-other. Provide cyclists with something these cars can recognise.
We could even make radar-reflective pants so that autonomous cars see them better.
the whoe traffic system needs to be looked at and brought to a new set of standards, whatever they may be. I am not sure what they are, but it should be clear to anyome with half a brain thay having a car use a camera to tell if the traffic light is red or green is idiotic.
untill a new system is ready, no car without AGI level ai will ever be safe
The only problem is that such collective approach conflicts with the way VCs work.
Well, the main issue is that most of the cars on the road during the busiest hours have just 1 person in them.
I think when the dust finally settles, the main form of passenger transit in urban-ish areas will basically be something that looks like autonomous vans.
Unlike public transit today, they won't have predefined timetables, nor predefined startpoints and endpoints. They'll pick you up wherever you are, whenever you want, and drop you off wherever you want, but they might take a roundabout way to get there to pick up and drop off other passengers too.
If they usually have 2+ people in them at a time, we'll be able to use our existing infrastructure (roads) at a much higher throughout.
EDIT clarification: Accessibility for wheelchair users, blind people, and anyone with ambulatory restrictions. Most stations are not wheelchair accessible to the train and having to go on much longer routes to compensate is not equal access. And many 'encouraging other use' initiatives block all cars, leaving these people in the lurch. Something that gave door-to-door access to everyone, equally, via a fleet of cars, could be superior.
To respond in a sentence: first, you have no proof that "investing in infrastructure" would actually yield working autonomous cars. Second, there are no proof either that the current approaches are doomed to fail.
To respond in details: everything that you propose doesn't seem to be able to solve the main challenges that self-driving cars are facing. These challenges are all about edge-cases, and responding safely to changing conditions and misbehaviors from other agents. The response cannot be "let's add a ton of fragile electronics in all of the infrastructure" because this: will cost a ton of money to build and maintain, will break in weird ways over time and lead to cascading failures, and most importantly: it's dubious that it would even work at all.
The final comment about VCs is weird: a lot of actors in this field are not VC backed startups.
My opinion is: Tesla might have a working model that outperform human drivers in 10 years (50% confidence)
Self driving car has failed to detect a person in the dark and killed her. It was demonstrated that Tesla autopilot fails to detect a child crossing the road. It confused a semi trailer and an underpass. You call that an edge case?
> The response cannot be "let's add a ton of fragile electronics in all of the infrastructure"
So instead we will add a ton of fragile electronics in every car. Instead of having 3 optimally positioned lidars monitoring an intersection, we will have 20 poorly positioned lidars on every car.
You don't need electronis, you can use paint. You can put QR codes that tell a car where it is in an underground parking lot. If we add a parrern to all clothing in infrared-only paint, that would help various AI detect people and tell them apart from surroundings. You can put a metal patterns on street signs that are detected by automotive radar.
> will cost a ton of money to build and maintain
And electronics in the cars will cost even more
> will break in weird ways over time and lead to cascading failures
You mean like the failure the main article is discussing right now?
> it's dubious that it would even work at all
And it's dubious this 'individual' approach will ever work. Every single argument you've made equally applies to the approach you are advocating.
I was going to say about 30,000 per year in the US, but it’s actually up above 40,000 per year now.
[1] - https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/early-estimate-2021-tra...
Build some trains, build some bike lanes, and leave the people alone who don’t want their transportation and the downstream reasons people use it taken over by tech.
Governance by a central cybernetic super computer and all the cybernetic hypothesis coming true. Good lord.
That unfortunately puts it right in line with every other tech-heavy thing taxpayers have have to pony up for this century.
> create standardised computer readable infrared road markings, equip each traffic light and each lamp post with a radio beacon, each crash barrier could have a radio marker, create PUBLIC maps of each city, have a central traffic control sypercomputer in each city provide directions to cars. Have each car painted with infrared markers so they recognise each-other.
It is amazing how often tech savy folks can reinvent trains.
So I expect reasonable self driving cars to be common in depeloped nations in 2050, while AGI will be just as elusive.
In a similar vein, the correct solution to electric trucks is not giant batteries, it's simply overhead wires:
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/29/uk-to-study-using-overhead-w...
Deleted Comment
- This by far in my opinion is the single most important attribute of any autonomous fleet of vehicles that is needed. There should be first of all a standard of communication via RFC defined for autonomous vehicles and drones. Any vendor manufacturing autonomous vehicles or drones should follow this standard of communication and be able to communicate to each other with the primary objective of avoiding collisions. This should be a RFC so that it works across vendors and is as standardized as TCP/IP. Communication medium can be over radio frequencies as well as the internet and can work as backup of each other but first there should be a established standard that all vendors adheres to.
Vehicles should assess and plan driving from first principles and physical sensory inputs. Networked inputs could be helpful as augmentation but it's not something one should rely on at all. Kind of like you shouldn't take a human showing/not showing a turn for a reliable signal of intent.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Garmin/comments/vo17e2/the_magnetic...
> at least a dozen autonomous Chevrolet Bolts from GM Cruise Automation were spotted blocking the intersection at Gough Street and Fulton Street for a couple of hours, according to reddit user seansinha.
There must be something weird about that intersection that is causing a bug.
You are a lot more confident than me that this isn't the case.
Tesla cars „can” drive you „safely” without connection to the network.
Some say that discard of lidar was a huge mistake by Elon, but he knows very well that this is not the way to go forward.
https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/communities/space-weather-enthusia...
But that aside, I'd really hope that these cars are using professional WAAS-capable GPS receivers. Short of a major X-class flare which knocks out the WAAS geostationary satellites, the entire point of the system is to correct for these kinds of disturbances to the GPS signals.
I actually haven't looked at this data for quite a while. I didn't consider the start of the Ukraine war a good reason to start looking at my data, and I delete it after 30 days to save $$$ on block storage. Dumb. (I added some proper downsampling today so I can keep it forever at reasonable cost.)
Trusting my own data is always suspicious, so I clicked around randomly on the NYS Spatial Reference Network website (https://cors.dot.ny.gov/; the title of the page is "Shop", but accounts and RTK access are free). They operate a bunch of Continuously Operating Reference Stations and publish statistics about the accuracy. I do see a lot of reported GLONASS cycle slips today. I have no idea if that is normal or not; this is the first time I've ever dug that deeply into station stats. But overall, the position accuracy at the stations I spot-checked are within .5cm, which is normal. (Most use 4 constellations; GPS, GLONASS, Beidou, Galileo; on 2 bands. So even if GLONASS is broken today, one constellation is enough for good accuracy.)
If the government has degraded GPS accuracy today as many commenters think have happened, many people would have noticed. The reference stations have known positions; if GPS starts saying they're somewhere else, that's impossible and would be flagged. GPS being significantly degraded would probably be front page news; not just noticed by a few exercise tracking enthusiasts on Reddit. Or maybe it's all a big conspiracy and the US and Russia banded together to hack my database and the NYS spatial reference network. It could happen, I guess, but my non expert opinion is that GPS is fine right now.
Multi-band GNSS is what helps address issues around reception like multipath and interference. Receivers used to be pretty expensive, and the number of L5 satellites wasn't that high until the last few years, but now can be found in even a number of consumer electronic devices, and the number of L5 satellites keeps going up (and as more satellites have L5 signals, things will get better.) Several Garmin sport devices have it now, for example. A quick search shows Maxim sells a multi-band GNSS chipset for $10.
There is really no excuse for any autonomous vehicle company to not be at least evaluating multi-band GPS receivers, if only to give more reliable position data in urban environs.
I'd be surprised if at least some aren't using RTK receivers, but this requires a base station within a certain range of the cars, or commercial service (such as that offered to farmers by John Deere.) RTK just isn't that expensive compared to even a single LIDAR unit.
Edit: they can tolerate at least some degree of GPS degradation and use dead reckoning / lidar data in some cases, according to this person: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31940167
[0] https://scitechdaily.com/auroras-incoming-giant-sunspot-has-...
[1] https://interestingengineering.com/a-huge-solar-eruption
I have not seen any mention of GPS service degradation in hobbyist drone enthusiast groups over the last week, some of whom use quite small GPS modules with serial connection to the flight controller for automated signal lost return to home features and such.
EDIT: Appears GPS/IMU/LIDAR is sufficient, my mistake. TIL.
Edit: Looks like someone ex-Cruise confirmed this ITT
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31940167
> Fine localization should be able to resolve without GNSS input (with caveats) and there are specific tested requirements to be able to tolerate a certain number of minutes of outage even in the absence of LIDAR before position accuracy degrades beyond acceptable limits.
Deleted Comment
https://www.jammer-store.com/gj6-all-civil-gps-signal-jammer...
This happens with a certain frequency in aviation
Relying purely on GPS (for self driving) won't work.
Given that even Russian pilots in Ukraine have been found to be using GPS, it looks like that would not even be necessary.
https://www.globaldefensecorp.com/2022/06/21/exposed-capture...
What it's not is, a huge multi-car multi-injury accident. So I don't mind it much more than if all the traffic lights in the area were out.
But decreasing congestion? We already know how to do that, and in many ways it seems like a safer bet than some kind of technogy with large problems and even larger unknowns; public transport.
Cheap, well developed, reliable public transport will beat autonomous cars on throughput and resource use any day.
But this costs more than just money — it costs space. And if you are doing it right it also costs you road space (busses and streetcars only make sense of they have their own uninterrupted lanes for the most part).
We need to learn to appreciate things for what they're really worth to us (including their true costs) not just for what they look like.
_________________
Health problems come because of the polishing. Polishing rice into the sparkling white form that most people prefer has three major negative impacts on health.
The first is, polishing removes most of the vitamins and minerals that are vital to health. (...)
The second relates to diabetes, which is threatening to reach epidemic proportions in the Philippines over the next couple of decades. (...)
Finally, polishing rice also reduces its protein content, which can mean the difference between being well-nourished or malnourished.
(...) And, then, over the decades, the dominant culture defined brown rice as “dirty” and fit only for the poor, while white rice was seen as sophisticated and modern.
[1] https://ips-dc.org/why_billions_eat_unhealthy_riceand_should...
Dead Comment
Cheap, reliable, dense public transit with diverse "last mile" options is clearly a much better choice from the congestion, efficiency cost point of views.
> well developed
> reliable
Speaking as a guy in Europe where we generally have "good" public transport, I think you can only ever have ONE of those at the same time, with some exceptions.
Cheap fares? You get decrepit busses from the 80s and the timetable's just a suggestion (what my city used to have)
Well developed? Development isn't cheap so fares get expensive, busses are Mercs that run on CNG and the timetable's still just a suggestion - but you get live boards showing arrival times at least (what my city has today)
Reliable? You'll have to go to Switzerland or Japan to experience that, no other place truly has it. And those places aren't cheap... but they would count as having well developed route networks, so 2/3 for them I suppose.
I don’t think this is generally true... If it is true, then the I suspect government subsidize are a bigger factor in explaining the variance of public transit quality then fare price.
Take Reykjavík as an example. It has the most expensive public transit fare price in Europe (86% above the European average) and all you get are some buses every 30-60 min (with only a handful of lines running more frequently during rush hour), timetables from the 80s and a ticketing system that never actually works. It is safe to say that Reykjavík has an expensive, poorly developed and unreliable transit system.
I think a well funded transit system can actually accomplish all three pretty easily, as long as they are willing to sacrifice some convenience for private vehicles.
In Zürich, a monthly city ticket is around $50, and a monthly country wide public transport ticket is $340 (and really gets you almost everywhere). Annual tickets are slightly cheaper.
I would argue while not "very cheap", the prices are still reasonably cheap, especially when compared to reoccurring car costs.
Of course driverless taxis will not help much with congestion. That will require different solutions.
Anything, automation included, that allows things to flow more smoothly will decrease congestion for a specific number of vehicles on the road allowing roads/intersections/etc to flow closer to their ideal capacity. (This principal holds whether you're talking about cars or buses, train networks, industrial facilities, etc.)
For example, if self driving solves some decent fraction of the morons who can't seem to merge in the size space that the engineers specifically allocated because it was sufficient for that purpose or can't turn left even through sufficiently sparse cross traffic you've just alleviated a lot of congestion.
In practice transit networks are bounded by the daily peaks so you'll never not have traffic jams and packed subway cars at rush hour but efficiency improvements mean these conditions will exist for a smaller slice of the day.
In almost all the above places, there have been frequent instances where I’ve had to use taxis and/or rent a car. And that was while living/staying in the core of these cities.
99.99% of places on earth aren’t nearly as densely populated as the ones above, so increase the need for cars proportionally if you ever want to go elsewhere.
We need both good public transport and autonomous vehicles. It’s not one or the other.
Whenever I see people citing public transport as a panacea for all problems, it’s typically a wealthy, single, childless, digital minimalist 20-something who lives in the core of the aforementioned cities, and never does much outside of it.
You ever wonder where the food you eat gets grown and how it gets delivered to that fast casual restaurant you love down the street? It’s not public transport.
the argument is strange, they don't exactly deliver 40 tons of wheat to the bakery with a taxi. Noone is arguing against cargo and utility vehicles unless they can be substituted by railway (which could be better designed, etc)
https://www.tescoplc.com/updates/2021/how-tesco-is-turning-t...
Remember, this is happening in a state with massive multiple public health crisis that go un-reported and has maps of human excrement in their inner-cities. The priorities here are completely in the wrong direction I agree.
For the municipiality a 6 lane street vs a two lane street with public transport and bicycle lanes can make the difference between neverending debt and prosperity. Places with good public transport and bicycle infrastructure and denser mixed use pay more tax revenue. Spread out urban sprawls and suburbs give the municipiality a lot of street surface to maintain, for very little tax revenue in return.
A good introduction on that part is the strong towns playlist by the youtube channel Not Just Bikes: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=y_SXXTBypIg
I mean yeah, there will be different manufacturers so it's not like every car in a city could come to a standstill. And I'm also speaking from a place of ignorance, so please correct me if I'm off-base. But isn't this kind of a thing (mass stoppages of entire fleets) a cause for concern as we see increased FSD adoption?
As with many of things related to self-driving cars, the target doesn't have to be "perfection" so much as "better than people on average". Human drivers do dumb things in large groups all the time, like highway pileups in bad weather, or rubbernecking traffic jams. I don't think all the humans on earth ever stopped driving at the same time, though, so...that'll be a first :p
I have an issue with that argument, because it's typically being used together with highly disingenuous statistics (like Teslas our FSD has less accidents per mile than normal drivers) to give the impression that autonomous driving is anywhere close to being "better than people on average". This is just not the case at least not in any region with a broad variety of weather conditions.
> Human drivers do dumb things in large groups all the time, like highway pileups in bad weather, or rubbernecking traffic jams.
Considering that most autonomous driving doesn't even work in really bad weather, I'd argue that humans are still much better despite the pileups.
You see, I completely disagree with this assumption. They should be perfect or they shouldn't be allowed on the road at all.
You wouldn't accept a bread slicer that sometimes erroneously slices off your fingers, as long as it does so less frequently than people slice their own fingers on average, would you?
If a core goal is really to make thoroughfares safer and reduce traveler injuries/fatalities, we seem to be ignoring or discounting some pretty obvious options, like minimizing car traffic
This vision where we all get around in low-passenger-count autonomous robot cages on existing roadways is just one possible future but we seem to fixate on it. At the end of the day the car is a tool but we've allowed it to burrow into the collective psyche
What about making cities walkable, bikeable, segway-able, wheelchair-able, scooter-able, whatever, with proven public transportation options like trains or buses running fixed routes for longer commutes? Much more energy efficient, way easier than autonomous cars, and conducive to much more livable urban areas imo
It will take some effort to change habits and expectations and revamp infrastructure but surely that's as worthwhile as all the time and money going into FSD?
The more immediate concern is self driving vehicles that are clearly not ready to be on public roads being allowed to test (or not being pulled off the roads).
The only way for either of these things to get better is through real-world experience.
Until there is a emergency vehicle thats unable to get through.
https://youtu.be/ifTIuA8Dq58
Some genius 10x'er forgets to carry the 1 or something, and all of a sudden an entire city full of cars all collide with pedestrians all at once.
I don't know enough about this stuff to know if this is a realistic thing or just the premise of a bad sci-fi movie.
And new ways for us to better destroy ourselves and each other.
Imagine, say, a pandemic like lockdown, but now only authorised vehicles may travel at certain times, or at all, and that software is buggy, or gets hacked, or used malevolently by one or another political faction.
No need to imagine. This was de facto policy for quarantine in most south american countries.
You couldnt drive unless: - you were a doctor or politician, then only if - the weekday corresponded to the last digit of your plate, then if, - only before x time, like 10pm, - etc.
The better approach is decentralized, with each car built to always fend for itself without a server, imho.
Right now it's just a small fleet of driverless taxis. Doesn't this demonstrate the potential for it to be, say, every single Honda in the city? Why even limit it to a city? A single manufacturer's critical infrastructure has some kind of fault (malice, shit code, hardware failure - dealer's choice!) and suddenly Fords stop running nationwide, or internationally.
Then I start thinking of the impact to emergency vehicles caused by a cavalcade of stopped cars, and other similar issues.
Again, I need to point out that I'm not trying to be sensationalist or hyperbolic. I'm ignorant here and am genuinely curious how viable these types of scenarios could be. It's clear that it can happen, I'm just curious to what extent.
If there's something weird about the location where they are stuck -- maybe somebody is jamming GPS or whatever -- then they should at least be able to pull over using local sensors, right?
On the other hand, if there's some effect that is tripping up their sensors -- maybe some odd geometry that, for whatever bizarre reason, looks like a wall to them -- this pretty embarassing, but probably an inevitable growing pain for this technology.
Given I had no clue what state the vehicles were in, and that they'd start moving without indication, it felt pretty damn worrying.
[1]: https://twitter.com/Smerity/status/1539144641206882304
"Murderbot mode". Or rather, transitioning into it. But they got stuck, which is why you're still alive.
"Coming Halloween, 2024! Killer Kaarr!.
Aiden, malicious disgraced hacker gets into the networks of, Joel, his successful rival's self-driving taxi company, Kaarr. Joel and Aiden were CIA hackers, but fell out over their mutual love of Klara. Joel takes Klara to the heights of the elite, but she still pines for Aiden. In revenge, Aiden hacks into Kaarr's networks and makes all the cars into murderbots, locking his rival Joel inside as the killing commences. At the end of the night, all the Killer Kaarrs are set to drive into the ocean, killing a traumatized Joel. But there's only one problem, Klara is locked inside a Killer Kaarr too. Can Aiden reverse his sadistic code in time to save Klara? Can Joel escape to stop the killing? Find Out, Halloween 2024!
A horror/gore/race film with lots of body horror as people are alternatively hit, crushed, bonked, exploded, and otherwise tortured by cute little electric cars with really tinted windshields and choice camera angles. Think the hokey rubbery special effects of The Thing with a lot of cell phones and car-centric jump scares.
In both cases someone else is driving for the customer. With a human driver (plus driver assist braking and collision warnings) you have the most flexible, sophisticated intelligence on Earth driving. With a robotaxi you have something inferior. But maybe it's a lot cheaper, right?
The robotaxi can only compete on price because that's its only advantage.
If you own a car that drives itself, that's a different story. Everybody can see the value proposition.
We would have to look at the cost of the hardware and maintenance and fallback remote operators and the R&D investment to evaluate whether a robotaxi fleet is indeed cheaper. How much cheaper is it, exactly? 5%? 10%? 15%?
Would you pay a little more to have the most flexible, sophisticated intelligence on Earth (human brain + driver assist) or would you want to save a few dollars and risk having some dumb piece of software strand you in the middle of the road somewhere?
We all use Google Maps or Apple Maps when driving and most of us have seen these systems do boneheaded things. Just imagine the dumb things a robotaxi could do.
It's hard for a normal person to be excited about this. I don't know a single person who is excited by robotaxis.
The taxi driver having 0% chance of raping or stealing you would be prominent a clear win.
Or really any of many many other issues you could have with an actual human person with a specific world view and social position interacting with you. Not even considering if you yourself have specific shortcommings (fear of social interactions etc.)
It wouldn't be fair to pit a perfect human against the self driving car, there are many other stuff to be consided outside of the sheer driving competence.
I find it interesting that this gets mentioned so much - I’ve done some moderate googling for cases of rape by a cab driver in Berlin and the last case that went to court was in 2013 - and even that is not a classic case of premeditated rape (+) There is one case later where a passenger raped a taxi driver and one where two rapists pretended to be Uber drivers - they could not have easily pretended to be taxi drivers in Germany since the cars need to have very specific signage and equipment.
Now, this doesn’t mean that no rape occurred - after all not every rape case gets reported - but it certainly indicates that the risk of being raped in a taxi in Berlin is low.
Things may be different in the US, but even there my initial assumption is that the risk gets overestimated since this is the kind of crime that gets overrepresented in the news.
(+) the passengers didn’t want to pay the fare and threatened the driver who then pulled out a gun and forced them to have sex as payment. Still rape, no question, but not a premeditated rape case.
With robotaxi you get a driver that:
Of course it has tons of problems of its own, but it's not like price is the only advantage over human driver.I am hopeful we will see improved safety but rather skeptical that will come in urban robo fleets ahead of highway longhaul cargo.
Today's auto fleets are idle 95% of the time, because everyone overspecs capacity for the worst case. Marginal level 4 self-driving is sufficient to disrupt this. The savings in being able to downsize personal vehicles and hand off logistics to a third party are huge for individuals and also improve land use - hunting for parking space disappears, and every parking lot can subsequently downsize too.
https://www.wired.com/story/cruise-fire-truck-block-san-fran...
Until we do a better job of solving these issues, we need to have backup drivers available in these vehicles, or, the vehicles should be operating in places where dumb breakdowns don’t block ambulances and fire trucks.