We don't have 100% autonomous trains yet, yet we're supposed to have self driving cars next year?!

nothing new under the sun wrote:

As for the old dude who said it wouldn't happen in his lifetime, maybe he doesn't plan on living much longer?

That was the shocking thing. This wasn't some random dude. It was a guy who worked on self-driving cars for one of the Japanese car companies.

I totally see how self driving cars can be safer and was wondering when they would really be operational.

nothing new under the sun wrote:

My question is, how long until humans are not allowed to drive?

Sounds like we're a long way away from that if we have to get to level 5 but level 4 should only be 4 years away.

Level 5 is where society could really change. And I think car-ownership would really change. Unless cars are totally a vanity thing, a lot less cars would needed. A car could just come pick you up and you don't have to pay anything for a driver.

I'm less concerned about when self driving cars become commonplace and more concerned with when they outlaw manually driven cars in the name of "safety".

You've got 20, at worst 30 years, until AI rolls over everything. Stuff will begin changing sooner than that, but you already see that. The next car or the one after that, that you buy? You may want to think that one over very carefully.

Where's my flying car? wrote:

Dennis T Reynolds wrote:

Hey Disco, you realize planes have autopilot right?

An airplane autopilot is not the equivalent of Level 5 autonomous driving. For the foreseeable future airplanes will fly with a highly trained pilot ready to take over from an autopilot when necessary. That's despite the skies having many fewer obstacles than the roads, having an active air traffic control system, less constricted path of movement, etc.

Gary was concerned about hacking. We have plenty of planes with computer controlled, electronic automatic equipment that has never been hacked. That's what I was getting at.

Seems like DiscoGary is winning again.

0/10.

Hi disco gary!

wejo wrote:

The premise is a) they could be safer than humans driven cars and

b) would free up a lot of our time and make transportation more efficient.

As for a) Humans text and drive, distracted drive, drunk drive, make errors in judgement etc, so I can see how a computer driven car doesn't have these problems and could be safer.

The question is when do we get to self-driven cars being safer than humans? You and the guy I talked to last year don't think that is anywhere near. Elon Musk thinks it's very soon. If it's so soon why do trains have engineers?

The premise is that they only have to be safer than human drivers. If there are 10,000 collisions with only human drivers and 3,000 with self driving cars vs 20,000 total collisions the year without self driving cars, then the advantage is obvious. Aiming for perfection is insanity. Increased adoption will also improve the driving capability of the car while simultaneously making the roads more predictable and therefore increasing safety overall.

Why don't they start simpler, with cargo ships, farm equipment, or long haul trucks that just go cross country?

Maybe have them run like drones?

Considering that every major corporation has been hacked, that hundreds of millions of computers have been hacked into to the extent that they constantly require updates to get rid of viruses that are operating on them, and that hacking into a car has been shown to be very easy already, we should absolutely worry about this making self-driving cars unsafe and not knowing whether they are safe at any moment. I understand as well that human drivers very often like to mess with the self-driving cars in the experiments around the country, knowing that they can always push their way ahead of them because of the cars' rules on following distance and so forth, and to pass them often because they go slower. Individual cities have different de facto driving rules; in the example in Pittsburgh, the first car gets to take a left turn in front of oncoming traffic when the light turns green--but not the self-driving cars. In Chicago, many go through the red light so that you know not to go ahead immediately when the light turns green. Watch out if you have a car that does not adjust to local conditions.

so whats your argument? that for those reasons autonomous cars will never happen? sure there are challenges but do you really think those are insurmountable?

xcvxcvxv wrote:

Considering that every major corporation has been hacked, that hundreds of millions of computers have been hacked into to the extent that they constantly require updates to get rid of viruses that are operating on them, and that hacking into a car has been shown to be very easy already, we should absolutely worry about this making self-driving cars unsafe and not knowing whether they are safe at any moment.

We should be very worried about corporations as they are obviously not safe.

The Dingo^3 wrote:

Can_I_Get_An_Amen? wrote:

They are no where close to proving that self-driving cars are safer than human drivers.

This is blatantly false. Tesla has millions (billions?) of miles of self-driving car data that do show they're "safer" than human drivers.

Idiot of the day. Of course Tesla says that. Phillip Morris said cigarettes were safe too. Independent study or go home.

The only reason this is even discussed is it remains in the nerd sphere. As soon as the general public is widely aware of it, it will immediately say hands on the wheel or gtfo the road. If you are too bourgeois to drive your own vehicle, get a limo. If you're just too lazy, then ride the bus.

drones are nice weapons wrote:

Xanax wrote:

If someone wanted to kill you I'm sure they would find an easier way than waiting until you got in a self-driving car and hacking it.

Wrong. If I wanted to kill DG (I don't) I'd definitely prefer the clean, almost untraceable way of hacking his car than the bloody, dirty, risky way of gunning him down or strangle him.

(Although I suspect the violent leftist thugs he challenges wouldn't forgo the pleasure of strangling him slowly.)

Unless you're one of the most competent "hackers" in the world, AND have inside knowledge of how the software is structured, that crime would not be untraceable. So no, this would not be a common way for people to try to kill someone.

They will be over an order or magnitude safer that current cars so logically all the cars should be self driving. its safer. also trains weren't build on the same infrastructure from the get go so its harder to automate them 100% now.

FredGSanford wrote:

Why don't they start simpler, with cargo ships, farm equipment, or long haul trucks that just go cross country?

Maybe have them run like drones?

Cargo ships most likely prevent a much different and bigger challenge, that probably doesn't offer the same profits (ship crews could be expensive but in the grand scheme, are there hundreds of millions of customers for that tech? No).

Farm equipment is mostly autonomous already, at least on bigger farms.

Automating long haul trucks is the focus of some companies already, and they have some functioning prototypes out there in 18-wheelers.

I'm definitely not discogary. I can add that it's not often I find common ground with his posts.

Knowing this, feel free to reread if you were interested in discussing any of the points!

A note on the progress of these things: first hand I can say they are terrible to bike with.

Echion wrote:

2. While it does increase "safety" and accessibility (which is the only reason aside from $ this nonsense is happening) there are major human issues as the car's decisions are based off programing.

The base algorithms may be devised by humans, but there are layers-upon-layers of abstraction through machine learning that determine the cars actual decisions. Of course it won't be perfect (there will be many different ML models tried, I'm sure) but the cars aren't operating on a bunch of human-written if-statements.

Echion wrote:

3. Hacking is a very real and very possible catastrophy. I'm 100% confident I can hack one a single one. If someone can one day access the decision-making program for these things, imagine how easy it would be to run a city into chaos when the fleet of 10-20, now, becomes 100 or more.

Hacking is a real possibility for any piece of software. You might be able to hack one now because they haven't focused on securing them.

People are letting their sci-fi fantasies of hacking run wild. I don't hear you guys freaking out about the possibility that airplanes get hacked, or that the nuclear weapons facilities get hacked and deploy the weapons. Sure, there's always a possibility, but we shouldn't let that slim possibility stand in the way of something that could have boundless benefit to society.

Dennis T Reynolds wrote:

Where's my flying car? wrote:

An airplane autopilot is not the equivalent of Level 5 autonomous driving. For the foreseeable future airplanes will fly with a highly trained pilot ready to take over from an autopilot when necessary. That's despite the skies having many fewer obstacles than the roads, having an active air traffic control system, less constricted path of movement, etc.

Gary was concerned about hacking. We have plenty of planes with computer controlled, electronic automatic equipment that has never been hacked. That's what I was getting at.

Gary is conspicuously silent about this...

You can only hack something if it is connected to another computer or to the internet. Hacking a car could occur if malicious code was introduced into the vehicle's computer during a software update (vehicles on the road today get software updates all the time). It could also occur if the vehicle was connected to the internet. Some vehicles on the road today are connected to the internet. so, hacking is already an issue.

The real safety improvement that autonomous vehicles could provide is the ability of vehicles to communicate with each other and know what other vehicles are going to do before they do it. It would also help traffic congestion by having vehicles slow down before approaching an area where traffic is building to help maintain a slower speed rather than stop and go accordion driving.

The other issue is cost. Very few people are going to want to pay more for autonomous driving features. The main push for autonomous driving is going to come from ride sharing companies to try to eliminate the cost of drivers. But that is level 5 technology that is a long way off.