If navigating the world were that easy we wouldn't be (non-A)GI. The bulb on the end of our spine doesn't use 1/5th of our oxygen (or whatever huge amount it is) intake because it makes our foreheads look sexy.

An auto-auto (I'm using that term unabashedly for "self-driving cars", you can too) has to be able to perceive and understand that the car in the next lane with the mattress poorly tied down might, at any moment, suddenly become two large moving objects. And so on.

If we set it up right the whole fleet will learn from the experiences of each member, likely in near-realtime. More than just traffic conditions, this will help with things like emergency response.

(We should be making self-driving nerf golfcarts with a top speed of maybe 15kph. Duh! We could make those today and sell a million and then incrementally make f'ing sportscars and sh!t.)

That bulb is there because of politics, and because speak sounds sexy. There are many animals capable of navigating the world even better than us (most fly, for obvious reasons) that don't have anything near the size of our brains.

We don't employ orangutans as chauffeurs. ;-P

On second thought I bet you could make a decent auto-auto out of a dog's brain... https://villains.fandom.com/wiki/Rat_Things_(Snow_Crash)

>- lidar at night works just fine at night

Yes, let’s rely on a single sensor.

> - plenty of cities with no or very little snow

But plenty of city have plenty of snow. So perhaps not a deal breaker in a limited set of circumstances.

> - construction zones: blacklisting, remote monitoring & manual mapping, detection of cones, barriers, re-painted lanes

Why should we add to already high construction costs just because the self driving tech isn’t up to snuff?

>- self-driving cars with 360 degree view and plenty of patience and no distraction are safer for bicyclists than manually driven cars

Citation?

Why shouldn't surrounding infrastructure adapt a bit for self-driving cars? Look at everything that had to change for railroads, cars, and airplanes.

If railroads were invented today they would never be allowed. They can't stop for miles? You have to teach everyone everywhere to stay off the tracks? How's that supposed to work?

It's good that our safety standards are a lot higher today for new tech, but perhaps there are a few common sense rules that could be taught, rather than requiring perfection?

Honestly? Because I see self driving cars as expensive toys for rich people[1], and I don’t feel like spending tax dollars or making other concessions to subsidize that.

I think the analogy to railroads is a bit tenuous. There are immediate benefits to connecting two sufficiently separated points with a rail line. A single stretch of properly marked and instrumented roadway is relatively worthless[1].

[1] Trucking being a potential exception.

You do realize horseless carriages were also expensive toys for rich people when they were first introduced?

Yes, and the infrastructure we ended up building for them has made horrible changes to most cities and had extreme negative effects on the environment

You also have night vision and radar to detect metal objects. Plus sound which is still barely utilized besides Doppler.

Ultimately humans cannot match the senses of an automated car, the problem is in processing and integrating. Which we are pretty far away from solving in a general case.

I'm not so sure about that. For one thing, unless they've changed a lot more than I think they have since the last time I got to fool with one myself, the sensors have very limited range. Take a look at the screens displaying "what the car sees" in this self-promotion video from Waymo:

https://youtu.be/B8R148hFxPw?t=148

What the car is in essence doing is driving by GPS and maps while staring at its feet. It is not as bad as driving with your eyes closed, but it's not that much better.

Further, some of the infrastructure it is relying on, like lane markings, are very poorly maintained.

> plenty of cities with no or very little snow

But what happens that rare day it snows? Hundreds of deads? Cars get recalled for much less than that.

Drive it in manual mode like we do right now? I mean even an autonomous car that could handle 80% of normal driving just fine would be great. And by 80% I'm talking about driving on a freeway without crashing into a barrier in broad daylight.

Gonna suck for those people who don't own cars and are relying on the fleets of privately-owned pseudo-taxis.

There have been a bunch of prototype self driving cars driving in snow. I'm not sure it's fundamentally a much different problem to self driving in general. eg https://www.engadget.com/2018/05/08/waymo-snow-navigation/

Sure they may perform worse in snow but humans do too.

I don't know if you live in such a city, but I can tell you that in mine the rare days it snows circulation is extremely chaotic, with people having slow paced crashes all over the place, and I'd wager AI is good enough to do that as well.

My understanding is that AI has different failure modes. If it doesn't see the road, it might not realise it doesn't see the road and just go off road. It's not necessarily going to react like a reasonable human.

I see your point, and it's indeed valid : I do remember a tesla crash where the autopilot simply followed an old line on the road instead of the regular one, thinking all was fine until it hit a column, killing the passenger.

But in this specific case of snow, I think this could be handled in a decent way by AI, as I would not expect snow conditions to be too hard to detect. Even something like "grip is not good enough for autopilot/snow detected on/around the road, stop on the side or slow down to the point of being impossible to have a fatal car crash until driver takes over" would be good enough.

Self-driving cars may be safer than manually driven cars in certain contexts.

What's missing from AI is reliability. It's brittle, it works well in some situations and not at all in others.

Which is a problem, because you can never be sure how well it's working for you.

There's no anti-Dunning-Kruger-function to say "I'm sorry Dave, I can't handle this, you should take over" - partly because that's not something you want to experience driving into a hail storm at 70mph on a freeway if you're asleep, but also because it would require a level of domain-specific AI self-awareness that is barely on the radar in most domains.

Unfortunately any AI systems will encounter the verification dilemma, the more powerful an AI system becomes, the less verifiable it would be.

Verification is easy, just like with humans. It's called a driver's license. And since the AI does not tire and can probably be sped up, you can put it through hundreds of thousands of hours of driving quickly in a good simulator with adversarial and normal situations, then rate it at various tasks. Just like we should do with human drivers, but fail to.

Explanation is harder. But we probably shouldn't care, even in courts people cannot often explain what and why they did while driving, or they just lie. The thing is, for liability purposes you have to ensure it is not a series defect and that a good human driver would not be able to handle it

In the world of investments, that would be called buzzwordily as “back testing”.

But is it sufficient to answer _why_ the machine chose to act a certain way given a certain set of instantaneous input criteria?

No. But, as the parent post said, we don't always know why a human driver chose to act a certain way either. So that shouldn't be a blocker.

But we evolved to have empathy to help understand how humans act in the cases we don't have complete or good information.

This is why "crazy" people make us so uneasy. They don't fit our mental models for how a human should act. Would you be comfortable driving with a road full of unpredictable "crazies"?

I wonder if we'll ever have the same level of trust with AI as humans if it is still being used at a black box level.

Bad AI will suffer from the Dunning-Kruger effect and overestimate its abilities, while good AI will suffer from Imposter Syndrome and underestimate its abilities.

A standardized QR code printed on cones to say "construction ahead do this" seems relatively simple compared to correctly interpreting the construction site. Would also produce automatically labeled training data

And then someone runs over the cone and 100 following cars crash into construciton workers at full speed. The core issue of automated driving isn't solving any of the 1000 simple driving tasks. It's creating an entire distributed system that is inherently robust against errors, failures or manipulation.

If I just wanted to drive around a city I’d grab a smart car. I have taxis to take me home at night when I’m drunk and the busses have stopped running. This solves a problem only rich people have: traffic is tedious. The rest of us just take public transit and listen to podcasts or music to bypass it.

From my perspective the idea of a self driving taxi is the opposite of public transit in the worst possible way: pay more so fewer people have a job and you’re even more lonely and alienated than before. If I indulge I’m just making myself and everyone around me more miserable, and no amount of marketing will convince me otherwise.

The area where I’d appreciate this the most is the country where uber and lyft haven’t reached yet, and that’s precisely the environment where self driving cars will take the longest to reach. We’ll see.

Plus, I can’t wait to see the game of “beat the shit out of the corporate empire’s self driving car for fun when drunk”.