I am more fearful of trolls, tricking the technology. I doubt, that the software / hardware will have a common sense, like we humans have. Its this common sense that keeps us alive in unexpected scenarios, like when the paint on the road is missing.

What's stopping people from destroying yield signs and other safety critical road infrastructure now? Sometimes common sense helps, but it you're out to cause chaos, there's a ton of things you can do today that would cause crashes - but most of the time, people don't.

If you destroy a yield sign, maybe it will eventually cause some problems, or maybe not. We could imagine a world in which destroying smart infrastructure could pretty instantaneously and reliably cause massive traffic jams, which seems like it would appeal more to certain trolls and perhaps protestors.

We could also imagine a world in which more subtle attacks could reliably and fairly quickly cause injury/fatality accidents, which might appeal to terrorists.

I think this type of "stress testing" of destroyed or modified signage would be an obvious direction for AV development once the basics are down. With HD mapping and other technology used to augment what is gathered by their sensors, AVs are eventually overall going to be better at handling unexpected scenarios at the road compared to humans

You can cause horrible traffic jams now by throwing a few mattresses or a bunch of caltrops onto the highway at the right time of day.

Then imagine the jam flowing around the blockage without stop-starts due to the automated vehicles networking and managing traffic.

The future needs self-throwing mattresses.

If you destroy a yield sign, the system will immediately know because all the cars previously recorded it.

So presumably every self-driving vehicle is going to be constantly streaming all sorts of information in their purview to a central hub?

That is a privacy nightmare without regulation on scrubbing extraneous information, done before upload: for example blocking out of pedestrian data; not just faces but clothing and gait, and probably also any data captured through windows.

It would be ideal to have a limited view of just the roads and signage, and have a retention plan that gradually keeps less and less historical data.

For accident review more of the data might be required, so vehicles should keep the last 24 hours of raw data.

Self-driving vehicles should be implemented with the same care Apple has given Touch ID and Face ID in regards to protecting sensitive data.

Having a central database capable of being scraped and process to determine where any person is at any given time is a non-starter. Care needs to be taken to scrub all extraneous data from the fleet's network.

A lot of things should be implemented in a particular way, but most aren't. Decades of practical experience show that, unless forced by regulations, auto manufacturer will pick the cheaper and more profitable option over the safe option every single time.

If I had to choose between privacy of my location or the convenience of a self driving car, I’d choose the car. Every single time.

Convenience wins out over privacy for me. It’s the same for the billions that elect to use Facebook. I don’t care if Tesla’s knows I visited the supermarket.

I wish there was a way for individuals to make that decision for themselves alone.

As a pedestrian being observed by AVs, your [valid] choice has a significant impact on my ability to choose privacy over convenience.

Tell that to guy that had smartwatch and his wife noticed he had high heart rate somewhere at night where he should be doing something else.

I don't have link for the story. But idea behind this is not that one should not cheat on his wife because he will get caught. To be really a human and be honest, one must not have an urge to cheat on his wife(husband) because he loves her. If someone has dirty thoughts and only thing that is preventing a person from fulfilling that is that "Tesla will know"...

People should be able to cheat, they also should be caught, but being good only because you are constantly watched?

This argument looks like "because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say".

I think this might be the story

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2019/12/14/fitbit-jane-s...

This argument is about that you have to make concessions - tradeoffs.

You have a choice to not use the autonomous car, to not use the apple watch, to choose a privacy-conscious internet carrier.

Real world trade offs please...

If there are only autonomous cars that track your position how are you going to make trade off?

Right now I don't have Facebook but no one in my family or friends is contacting me. Why? Because I don't have Facebook. This is my trade off. Real trade off would be if I could select different provider and still be in contact with my family and friends. Right now it is monopoly degrading my quality of life. If I would have different options that I could for example pay for but they would not use my data as tracking that would be different.

If there would be way to pick your autonomous car provider by price/privacy it can be trade off.

If it is one option that you can use or not use it is not about trade off. I am not native English speaker but trade off for me is when you have multiple options to choose. No that you have all or nothing....

Did you read the comment?

The problem is self-driving vehicles implemented with fleet data that vacuums up everything will spy on everyone, not just the driver.

They need to be implemented with on-board redaction.

Otherwise there is no choice for anyone, the companies or the ruling party can do facial or gait recognition on pedestrians and other drivers, and scrape license plates of of all parked and driving cars from the data stored in the cloud.

With just Lidar I imagine this is less of a problem, but at least pedestrians in that case will still need to be redacted for gait recognition.

My first comment wasn't about your regard to personal privacy, it was with regards to everyone's. One person's data is mostly worthless; everyone's is priceless.

Also FWIW Apple has a good track record with privacy, it's all opt-in.

Edit: Health data is also end-to-end encrypted (accessible by your devices only, Apple servers don't have keys, if you forget your passcode you lose the data); https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT202303

>> If I had to choose between privacy...

That sounds like it's taken right out of an Orwell story.

You already make this tradeoff - you have a bank account instead of hiding your money in a mattress. You're probably browsing the web from a normal internet connection, not a VPN, or some alternative?

Yes, and I have some control over that which I exercise regularly. Not enough control, but what I have I use proactively.

I'm also active in trying to wrestle more control of the data being collected on me.

And I am not willing to give up my privacy for your convenience and not happy with those who'd willingly give up theirs in a way that sweeps mine up with it.

> That is a privacy nightmare

I don't want to disappoint, but the future will have no privacy whatsoever.

There will be privacy until the singularity, don't worry.

Continued encroachments on privacy and personal autonomy may indeed deteriorate them, even cripple our ability to protect those rights, but simply worrying about that doesn't mean I must go gentle into that good night.

> That is a privacy nightmare without regulation on scrubbing extraneous information, done before upload: for example blocking out of pedestrian data; not just faces but clothing and gait, and probably also any data captured through windows.

If you can be photographed legally in a public place, what's going to protect your privacy in public?

I feel like this is almost like trying to resist the allure of drones in war. It’s too easy to do and too hard to stop. It takes almost global consensus.

Any number of parties could lawfully and unobtrusively start slurping up all sorts of data which is in a kind of plain view, and nobody would really be the wiser.

> So presumably every self-driving vehicle is going to be constantly streaming all sorts of information in their purview to a central hub?

That's a terrible design.

The obvious way is that the sign/beacon itself pings a server every 5 minutes, and when that stops you know it's broken.

And it will play a helpful message like "Recalculating route: 3 self-driving fatalities registered at this location."

If there is a central database with all the signs, you don't need a physical sign on the edge on the road for AV to notice it, they already know it is "there" from that DB

Bear in mind that's not how the traffic law works anywhere right now. You are only required to obey signs and markings which are actually there. And traffic signs get removed all the time for works, I honestly can't imagine that every action like that would be recorded in some central database that all cars could query.

So what happens when a road sign legitimately changes? Does the system use the previous values recorded or the new value?

Im also curious how situations will be handled where there are two speed signs: the regular posted speed and a temporary speed for construction. How does it know which to obey.

The permanent signs would already be in the database. The signs you'd worry about would be temporary, for road works or accidents, but perhaps these locations could be made electronically available.

Ideally we get to a point where we’re at least publishing signage to a database so that cars don’t have to rely on visual cues both human and automated.

I personally don’t think it’s possible to make automated cars work well without a ton of infrastructure support.

The law doesn't require you to follow a sign that's not there. In fact I'd argue that doing so can be dangerous in some situations(and obviously advised in others). A car should only ever follow what it can actually see, which makes the whole idea almost daft, since computer image recognition is still so poor.

Your car wishes to inform you that there's a sign for McDonald's where they're having a sale 2 for 1 quarter pounder with cheese.

If it's such a busy location to cause a big jam, how did the vandals get away with destroying it? In out of the way places, it won't cause a big jam.

Few places are busy in the middle of the night.

>What's stopping people from destroying yield signs and other safety critical road infrastructure now?

People do destroy yield signs and other safety critical road infrastructure now. I've known more than one person with an appropriated road or safety sign as a home decoration.

People tag signs on the freeway, to the point where caltrans still has razor wire over some of the signs. It's already happening.

Nothing and it happens all the time. This is something that a human driver familiar with the road will notice and it will be unlikely to cause an accident. An out-of-towner might get into an accident. An automated vehicle would ideally not even be looking at signs and just operating from its stored data.

That's an absolutely crazy idea. You are only required by law to follow signs that are actually there, full stop, a car should never rely on some built in database of data. I cannot imagine a database of signs that would be constantly up to date and somehow distributed to all cars on the road.

> I cannot imagine a database of signs that would be constantly up to date and somehow distributed to all cars on the road.

Really depends on where you are. I agree I can't imagine it in the USA, but in the Netherlands, where every square metre is documented, attributed and zoned (yes including the leftover grassy triangle bits between highway ramps, everything). We could totally do that if necessary.

I don't know if documenting all the traffic signs would be the right solution. If anything I would imagine this database to include way more virtual traffic signs than are actually there. Not for the legal traffic rules, but virtual ones that would be nice if they existed and everybody in the flock held to them.

Point is that worldwide there is a huge variety in the quality of roads, the quality of signage, driving culture and attitude, and the general predictability of the environment. Some places will lend themselves more naturally to the first forms self-driving cars will take than other places that are more "free form".

I don't think that's crazy. Why shouldn't local authorities, state DOTs, and the national DOT be obligated to also update a database that self driving cars use? They already have such databases for their own records, usage, and analysis. In a world in which SDCs are normal that is how you would expect it to work.

It's a bigger expectation to suppose that the car will perceive the environment better than a person would and make correct on-the-fly decisions about traffic signs when snow obscures the sign and a little bit of ice and muck obscures its cameras ever-so-slightly, making some of the sensors go half-berserk.

>>It's a bigger expectation to suppose that the car will perceive the environment better than a person would and make correct on-the-fly decisions about traffic signs when snow obscures the sign and a little bit of ice and muck obscures its cameras ever-so-slightly, making some of the sensors go half-berserk.

Then it should do the same a person is required to do in that scenario - slow down and exhibit caution. Otherwise you will get a car that confidently drives forward because it "knows" a sign is there. If the sensors can't cope with that then the car shouldn't be on the road at all, period.

>>Why shouldn't local authorities, state DOTs, and the national DOT be obligated to also update a database that self driving cars use?

Because the same local authorities don't even have the budget, time or competency to fix the most minor issues with our roads. Potholes go unfixed for weeks, there's no budget for cleaning, for salting, for repair of missing signs, lamp posts or simply for review whether existing signage is actually appropriate after changes they make. But yet the same authorities should be tasked with real time updates to some database of signage? I'm sorry, but I'm just trying to be realistic here - we can write legislation to require authorities to do something, but in real world that's just not going to happen reliably enough to trust it. I know I wouldn't.

The obvious counterpoint to "operating from stored data" is an accident or construction causing a lane to be closed, or a child chasing a ball across the road.

In the hypothetical world in which self driving cars are the norm and not the exception detours would be in the system so that SDCs would not need to read signs. Even now a lot of traffic maps get updated to show detours, delays, and temporary closures due to accidents.

FWIW I am a near-term self-driving car skeptic and have been for a long time. I just think that these are not the kind of issues that really pose a major obstacle whereas drunk people wandering across the street are.

We will nano-tag alcohol and keep a database of all wandering drunks, for self-driving cars to either avoid them or take them home!

I’ve seen intersections where people have went offroad in an accident and knocked down stop signs and people know when approaching that it should be there. Would a car?

The only way I can see that working is if there is some kind of geographic location of various stops and the like, but at that point, you need consistent connectivity to obtain that kind of data, right? May work in larger towns and cities, but what about rural areas?

We’ve had offline GPS units for decades. You could easily have a database of every stop sign, and it would fit on an SD card.

The yield signs could be backed up with an an official map all cars read from as well.

And then let that ‘official map’ from Google charge $100/month subscription fee.

You have to actually go out there and physically do the act.

In a wired world the distance to everything is zero. If you can find an 'in', you can carry out this attack in any place in the world, from the comfort of your nerd cave or barracks.

They do that very often. I once drove the wrong way on a one-way street because some troll had changed the arrow's direction.

Fortunately there was almost no traffic.

Signs get vandalized or stolen all the time here in Uruguay. Mostly vandalized.

Still better than humans, humans kill 3000 people using vehicles every day, and most of those aren't even trying

Yeah but if the system is designed in the wrong way, hackers could kill millions in a single moment. Admittedly, this danger already exists as in all modern cars between driver and car there is a layer of (hackable and wireless network connected) software.

Hackers could hijack a missile and kill a lot of people too.

This is why we have security. And honestly modern cars are so computerized already I think your argument applies to them as much as autonomous cars.

“We’re already doomed” isn’t a good reason to not be concerned about new ways to be doomed.

Yes, we have security. Yes, cars can (probably) already be hacked, perhaps even en-mass rather than in targeted ways.

But: one the big advantages of machine learning in cars is that every car can learn from the experiences of every other car. That makes them monocultures. Monocultures are fragile. You find the weakness of one, you find the weakness of all.

I want the benefits of the former without the risks of the latter. I don’t know if that’s even possible.

> I want the benefits of the former without the risks of the latter. I don’t know if that’s even possible.

That's where competition comes in. Just like AMD vs. Intel or OSX vs. Windows. If you find a weakness in one, you don't necessarily find a weakness in the other.

Hence, finding a weakness in Tesla doesn't mean it will work against Waymo or Uber.

To the extent that there is competition, there is an identical loss of opportunity to learn from each other’s mistakes.

I am sorry, what? Which missile system can be hacked and launched remotely? This is a ridiculous claim.

Cars are already getting hacked. The whole point of the post is to highlight how car manufacturers have no concern or competence for security, is will be like the boeing scandal but much worse.

At best, youre conflating two vastly different things - Boeing engineers and car manufacturers.

At worst, youre a troll. Cars are no where being hacked at the scale or magnitude that affected the numbers involved in the Boeing fumble. No where near. Not even remotely close.

I'll bite. Aside from Tesla owners, I do not know anyone in my life today whose vehicle connects to the Internet. Of course, I mean to say I don't see how your comparison to present day is accurate.

>Aside from Tesla owners, I do not know anyone in my life today whose vehicle connects to the Internet

When did the whole OnStar botnet start? I think it's earlier than 2010.

I wasn't aware of that. I suppose that would count as the car, but doesn't most car hacking occur when the component has access to i.e the CAM bus?

Why do you think OnStar doesn't have access to the can bus https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10008228

pretty much all cars with modern head units connect to the internet for things like traffic data and software updates.

as of 2017 it is no longer legal to sell a car with no backup camera, and 99.9% of cars implement that with a digitized head unit that, wait for it, connects to the internet.

thus, very new-manufacture cars in 2020 do not connect to the internet, bluetooth, sometimes wifi, etc.

There was the Jeep a few years ago... https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-hig...

My 2017 Ford connects to wifi.

Come on, you know missiles are locked down with way more security than consumer vehicles.

> Hackers could hijack a missile and kill a lot of people too.

That's a sunken cost fallacy. Only because other things are hackable as well doesn't mean there is no danger.

> And honestly modern cars are so computerized already I think your argument applies to them as much as autonomous cars.

I've said that in my comment above as well, but it was in an edit before you replied so I guess you didn't refresh before submitting the comment.

> That's a sunken cost fallacy. Only because other things are hackable as well doesn't mean there is no danger.

It's really not a sunken cost fallacy. It's good evidence that the "think of the terrorists" angle is overblown. There are plenty of other problems with self-driving cars, but not that one.

And plenty of other problems with missiles before that one too. As the news dramatically reminded us recently, the number one cause of non accidental casualties in plane is being shot down by the military, by a very large margin before terrorism. Similarly it is not hard to guess that car related casualties due to terrorism is never going to be significant compared to others. Terrorism overall is not a big issue, despite we like to think that our main problems are caused by a few malignant individuals.

I think what they meant by "tricking" the cars is to paint roads in a deceiving way to make cars meander into lakes or something like that, not hacking everyone's cars.

It doesn't even have to be malicious. I was driving through Germany recently and some roadworks on a highway meant we were using temporary contraflow lanes, and even with my big fancy human brain, I was sometimes struggling to decide which of the layers of permanent/temporary lane markings I should observe.

Sounds like a great case for computers. They can communicate with each other and all make the same decisions. Even if it's "wrong", it'll be safer if they all make the same wrong decision than a bunch of people coming to different conclusions and demonstrating it only by putting 3,000 pounds of steel where they think it should go.

But cars will recognize that something changed and validate it.

This presumes a car with logical abilities that would negate the need for infrastructure to "meet it halfway."

Like a lot of technologies. Nuclear plants still happened.

There is no evidence that automated driving systems are any safer than human drivers, or that they ever will be.

> or that they ever will be

Eventually being better than humans seems like it's obviously going to happen. Not driving drunk, not getting distracted, and not sleeping at the wheel alone are advantages enough that I would be amazed if the balance doesn't eventually fall in favor of the self-driving car. Self-driving cars don't even have to be particularly good drivers to be better than the average human, given how much the human average is dragged down by recklessness.

While I would love for self-driving cars to be a thing, the AI to detect tired, distracted, drunk or sleeping drivers could be in every car way, way before self-driving cars will be a thing.

> Self-driving cars don't even have to be particularly good drivers to be better than the average human, given how much the human average is dragged down by recklessnes

Tell that to the jury when your self driving car runs into the side of school bus full of kids (which will happen given any reasonable adoption).

Self driving cars would have to be held to an almost insanely high standard to be “winnable lawsuit” proof.

If we (society) took an air traffic safety approach, e.g., analyzing each crash, root causing it, and working to address it, one can imagine a day where self-driving cars are very safe. (I’m sure that day is a long way off still.)

These lawsuits alright happen. Right now.

A car manufacturer can already be sued for things that go wrong, in a car, but the world keeps spinning.

Nope, they already lobbied that car owner is responsible for failures of the self driving system.

Such lawsuits are a net detriment to society. It's why light airplane design remains stuck in the 1960s, and why vaccine companies are protected from lawsuits.

I disagree that it's obvious. Even a mediocre driver can do things like change lanes in heavy traffic. The nut of the problem is a social one. You have to signal your intention and then figure out when someone else is going to let you in. The basic human ability to form a picture that includes the intentions of the other human beings around them is part of the "Strong AI problem" and may never be solved, ever.

From Tesla's latest Vehicle Safety Report:

> In the 4th quarter, we registered one accident for every 3.07 million miles driven in which drivers had Autopilot engaged. For those driving without Autopilot but with our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 2.10 million miles driven. For those driving without Autopilot and without our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 1.64 million miles driven. By comparison, NHTSA’s most recent data shows that in the United States there is an automobile crash every 479,000 miles.

It's pretty unsurprising that at least augmenting human attention and input with machine attention and input reduces accidents. I agree that the cross-over point in time for full automation being safer than human drivers is a total unknown though.

Autopilot tends to be engaged on freeways / motorways where accidents are much lower than driving through town. If you do the stats properly Tesla's autopilot is probably more crash prone than just having a human drive.

There were some stats that if you compare model S deaths to other luxury cars in the same price range they are about 3x higher for the S. Death rates in luxury cars are much lower than the average vehicle.

I think self driving tech will cut roads deaths eventually but it needs more work.

The vast majority of the data I'm able to find on road types covers only fatalities, not accidents... but New York has accident rates per road type (and junctions!) for several years[1], and their rates are very roughly 1 accident per 300k-500k for rural roads, and 1 per 500k-1m for "[fully] controlled access" (which I read as highways, with divided being by far the lowest rate).

So even if it's just on highways, Autopilot is still out-performing humans by 2-3x, if not more.

On average, ignoring better luxury car rates mentioned elsewhere, and that I have no clue if this is representative. I would be surprised if broader data was so much worse that it would reverse the relationship though.

[1] https://www.dot.ny.gov/divisions/operating/osss/highway/acci...

It is not. Or maybe it is. We don't know:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/lanceeliot/2019/06/09/tesla-aut...

Still, there is IMHO a sampling error that makes the comparison not fully accurate.

The pool of "all vehicles" traveling on the road, comprises very old cars and pickup/trucks/vans, and all kind of drivers, including teens (or however inexperienced drivers) and older people that may be more likely to have slower response times or some other condition, like (say) poorer vision.

Besides the fact that Tesla's are at the most a few years old and being on the pricy end (which should imply that they are properly maintained), they are "sport cars" (in the sense that they have very good handling and breaking) and they are driven (I believe) by a certain subset of drivers, relatively young but with no or very few inexperienced drivers.

To play devil's advocate slightly, you could pretty easily argue that self-driving tech is most useful to apply to the lower-safety brackets, which pull down that average.

So even if it's not as good as the healthy-and-wealthy bracket that might be safer, if it's better than the average then it'd be potentially significantly better than the non-healthy-and-wealthy. In that light this seems like a massive win.

Yep, only that the lower-safety bracket cannot afford it, not today nor - presumably - in a near future.

And - to be fair - think "Sabrina" (the movie with Audrey Hepburn), really rich people traditionally had professional drivers (chauffers) which maybe had an even lower rate of accidents.

Those figures are not as good as you seem to suggest.

First of all. Tesla counts the number of miles for every Tesla being involved in an accident. The other figure you quote is for all miles driven by motor vehicles before getting involved in an accident. Given that accidents tend to involve two or more vehicles the number of miles traveled before an accident involving a Tesla without autopilot or safety measures would be closer to 820.000 miles.

In that figure of 479.000 miles commercial traffic is also included. Commercial traffic makes up around 60% of all accidents. We cannot translate this to miles per accident comparable to Tesla, because commercial traffic tends to drive more miles than passenger vehicles do, but there are far less of them, etc. Another big category that needs to be excluded from the general figure is motor cycles, that generous source of donor organs, to make it comparable. Passenger vehicles in general are more safe than the overal figure and thus closer to Tesla's figure.

Second point is that Teslas are hardly part of the second hand or n-hand market yet. It is even a question if Tesla will tracks that data in those markets. In those markets you will see more young people as drivers (something to do with income). They are responsible for a majority of the traffic accidents involving passenger vehicles (something to do with tendencies to discount the future and to overestimate their own capabilities).

Third point is that the really good figure comes from auto pilot, but that only works in places and under conditions that are already far less accident prone like highways under normal weather conditions.

The good news from the figures is that enabling the safety measures make Tesla drivers better drivers: From 1.6 miles to 2.1 miles roughly a 25% increase in miles traveled before an accident. That would lead us in the direction of mandating level-2 automation in all new cars for more safety rather than trying to push for level-5 for some brands.

> First of all. Tesla counts the number of miles for every Tesla being involved in an accident. The other figure you quote is for all miles driven by motor vehicles before getting involved in an accident. Given that accidents tend to involve two or more vehicles the number of miles traveled before an accident involving a Tesla without autopilot or safety measures would be closer to 820.000 miles.

You're doing that the wrong way, aren't you?

If 479k is total miles across an average of two cars, then the single-car equivalent, the number you'd compare to the Tesla numbers, is 240k.

It doesn't really make sense to adjust the Tesla numbers to do the comparison, but if you did you'd be doubling them, not halving them.

> We cannot translate this to miles per accident comparable to Tesla, because commercial traffic tends to drive more miles than passenger vehicles do, but there are far less of them, etc.

Neither of those reasons makes them incomparable.

Just the opposite of GP's opinion, I think basing the statistics solely on Telsa will half the figure rather than doubling it. Suppose the average interval of accident is t and the average speed of car is v, as Telsa cars only represent a small portion of all vehicles, we have

    - Only Telsa: distance_travelled / num_accidents = v t / 1
    - Two cars involved, but counted as one accident : distance_travelled / num_accidents = 2 v t / 1

That's a nice bit of advertising, but; They cheat. When the car detects an unusual or difficult situation developing it prompts the driver to take over. This means that all the really tricky bits of driving are done by the human and all the easy bits are done by the machine..

There was a competing study done against cars with similar price/age/safety equipment that didn't have the auto pilot option and Tesla caused considerably more accidents.

It also lets them blame the driver for their failure. Tesla is more than happy to share the cars data logs to “prove” it wasn’t the fault of Tesla... remember though, according to Tesla marketing the driver is only there because the lawyers say so....

Am I correct in thinking that most people use autopilot in the most boring parts of or most boring drives?

It seems to me that knowing the autopilot isn't 100% perfect is a good reason to not rely on it in more dangerous or complicated scenarios (construction, roads with poor markings, school areas).

I haven't followed too closely here though, just curious if that is a reasonable hypothesis.

This is garbage analysis.

When you are comparing numbers. You compare like-to-like. Tesla specifically prohibits engaging Autopilot in difficult situations and encourages during long boring straight drives.

Humans have been failing to drive safely for longer than we've had computers, and neither has been around for very long.

It's far too soon to claim we've hit peak performance.

There is a lot of evidence that technology tends to improve over time.

Hardware eventual fails, software eventually works.

Bacteria in a sealed container will reproduce until all resources are consumed. Then they drop to anemic levels or die out entirely. Humans live in a relatively closed system. And modern technology sits atop a very fragile foundation. All that to say past evidence does indicate technology generally gets better, but not necessarily forever.

No we don't.

We live on a planet around a midlife star. The amount of resources available to us over the next 10,000 years is staggering.

Humans haven't proven the ability to live sustainably on one planet. Sustainably utilizing resources beyond the planet is far from certain.

For the record, I don't really like this thread, but GP's point does not hinge on using up other planets sustainably...

Autopilot is evidence that automated systems are already better than humans today. The edge cases scare people but on aggregate the stats show is superior to people. This sort of tech is only going to keep getting better.

Look up "Ergodicity".

Autopilot doesn't need to be 2x or 10x better than a human driver -- it needs to be 100x or 1,000x better, or nobody (sane) should touch it.

The problem is not that autopilot is superior than your own driving in the vast majority of the cases! The problem is the 1 in a million times when it makes a trivial mistake that virtually no human would, and kills you instantly. Like driving under an obvious semi-trailer, and shearing your torso off.

An understandable example: You have two games of chance, both with identical 5/6 chance of winning.

One game, you'll play immediately (and as often as possible). The other, you would never play, not even once.

How is that possible? Both have identical 5/6 chances of winning? But, one is "ergotic", meaning that the odds hold over the long term as often as you play, and one is "non-ergotic", meaning that as soon as you lose, you're finished.

One is a single dice roll.

The other is Russian Roulette.

Self-driving cars are Russian Roulette. One "mistake" on the part of the system, and you're dead. The fact that the "stats" prove that it is safer, overall, don't change the fact: you and your family are dead.

People die all the time from driving under a semi-trailer. Look up "Underride". Over 200 people die every year from underride crashes in the US, so this isn't a mistake made only by autopilots. In other words, if we switched to self-driving cars and three people died every week when the autopilot drove into a semi-trailer, that would be a big improvement.

So, your family would be ok that your car sheared you off in a quirk unnecessary accident, so long as the overall stats were better than average?

Non-ergotic stats are not comparable to ergotic (group) stats.

Given 100 individuals who would have died in everyday accidents all would prefer a 99% chance of survival.

Given a population of a million all would prefer a 1 in a million chance of death under a semi to a 1 in 10k chance of being smeared in a more average fashion.

Your argument is the same one used against seat belts with people advocating a strictly inferior survival strategy to prevent a rare misadventure.

Let's say your autodrive system replaces 100,000 driver-hours.

Let's say those driver-hours would have resulted in 3 deaths of others (in vehicles or pedestrians) but your autodrive results in 1 different death (which wouldn't have occurred with the human drivers).

Your stats are no comfort at all to the loved ones of your victim.

It's like the Trolley Problem but the humans are unidentifiable.

The trolley problem challenges people who don't consider choosing not to act equally an active choice or intuitively feel that action is different than inaction.

I would always pick the most valuable to me side and pull the switch or leave it be to bring about the better end result. Given the availability of self driving vehicles that reduce mortality choosing to drive oneself and kill more people is an unethical choice that will be as little comfort to the 3 victims as the one.

  I would always pick the most valuable to me side

Of course, when you know nothing about the would-be victims. But on a pure numbers theoretical basis, you autodrive veers out away from the three killers fleeing police by driving on the wrong side of the road in favor of running down two kids in a crosswalk.

Real life is complicated.

Where did I say I would decide value purely by number of people?

Why did you include the fact that they were killers fleeing police? Are, you supposing that I will somehow infer this in the 2 seconds I have to react or you just positing completele nonsense to muddy the waters with emotions?

Pedanticaly one would virtually never choose to hit pedestrians instead of cars because pedestrians don't have crumple zones or air bags.

The big question is should cars prioritize the owners health or the greater good and If the latter what is the greater good.

I don't think people will turn on a product that might decide to kill them to save a school bus so it's simplified to minimizing chance of fatalities while protecting the owner absolutely even if this risks others.

It's essentially unheard-of that one's own failure to use a seatbelt results in injury or death to some other party hit by the flying driver/passenger who was unbelted. That's the appropriate analogy.

That’s not how it works for humans though. “Other drivers are terrible. I am above average. Other drivers underride. I don’t”

Do you not fly in airplanes? People make tradeoffs like this ALL the time. It's why the term "freak accident" even exists. People trade off freak accidents against convenience and quality of life, let alone a _higher_ rate of non-freak accidents.

You are overcomplicating things. Every minute of drive time is Russian roulette with on average very low chances of losing.

The only thing that matters is the overall odds there is no inherent mathematical difference between the 2 scenarios.

There is no difference to prefer more likely death in common scenario to less likely death in a stupider scenario.

If you believe otherwise you ought to explicate with numbers.

That doesn't sound like a proper set of assumptions - that human accidents will be fender benders while self driving will be chunk-salsa worthy. The cumulative fatality risk applies to both parties. Humans will die in fatal accidents that no Self Driving car would do.

The 1000x better demand is more a stupid human illusion of control thing like fearing flying more than a road trip of equal distance.

Please don't let downvotes get to you like this. I know it's not always easy, but the site guidelines ask it explicitly of everyone. That's because it quickly causes comments to sink below the acceptable levels, which is what happened here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Thanks for all you do, dang!

However, unless HN implements K-Means clustering, a single-axis downvote mechanism will inevitably lead to echo-chamber bullying, I believe.

Especially if no-one fights back, encouraging the people who vote “sensible” vs “nonsense”, and discouraging the “like” vs “don’t like” voters who ruin debate.

In my experience, everyone is a like vs. don't-like voter.

Autopilot is at most evidence that human-machine systems are better than just human drivers. Throughout its history "autopilot" had many cases where the human saved its ass and quite a few where it managed to kill the human anyway.

Good luck getting the system to even that level of proficiency. Not impossible, but people are actually very good drivers (that still kill truckloads of people).

Now imagine every car equipped to 'self-drive'. No manually driven cars anymore anywhere. No old timers, no exceptions. What would the daily dead rate be? 30k? 30m? Somewhere in between? Lower?

It's easy to say they are better, when there are so few of them. (Compared to the amount of human driven cars)

Configurable! A reasonable amount of death. Not to much but enough to still allow for fast traffic. This kind of calc is already done for car safety features. It probably is as ridiculous as it sounds but who am I to judge.

Ascribe it to my typical german worryguts.

DELTA DASH NOVEMBER OSCAR NOVEMBER OSCAR

While "autonomous vehicles" are the biggest practical joke of the 2010's, this artists joke trapping an "autonomous" car in a circle of salt like a medieval demon was pretty good:

https://imgur.com/gallery/24jLd

> I doubt, that the software / hardware will have a common sense, like we humans have

Aren't sanity checks basically common sense? I would suspect they already play a major role in making autonomous driving a reality.

I'd argue those are the opposite - due to the software/hardware failing to have common sense, we've added some extremely coarse checks to shut it down when it's clearly going nuts. Less "common sense", more "don't push this button, it will kill you [presses button anyway]"

Common sense is not just a large number of sanity checks, it also includes the ability to solve some of the problems identified by failed sanity checks. For example, common sense might lead you to break the road rules in an emergency, or drive a car with a safety problem for a short distance instead of getting it towed.

Imagine something like a dangerous situation -- there is an oncoming fire or flood, and you need to get out of there, but your self-driving car decides to do a precautionary stop because one of the sensors stopped working. People are totally underestimating the intelligence required to make these types of decisions. Surrendering your mobility to a program is a much bigger hurdle than people think, and the bar is much higher than being able to successfully avoid collisions.

More then solving problems, common sense involves identifying a problem as a problem. Unknown unknowns.

I would argue that signing beacon messages with a PKI infrastructure would migate that issue.

Who is the signing authority? China? The United States? Russia?

Probably whatever authority is responsible for the sign installation/road maintenance.

Makes sense assuming that authority doesn't leak their private keys like a sieve.

Provided they have a way to easily rotate keys via access to the physical hardware it's probably fine. If a local government loses a signing key they would have to register a new one and send a work crew to swap a micro SD card in every traffic light or whatever, but at least that's all they would have to do. In the meantime all an adversary can do with their signing key is install fake beacons, but that requires actually fabricating beacons, and putting themselves at risk by physically installing them in a place they will quickly be noticed, so the potential for damage is pretty limited. Much like how people can already steal stop signs or put up their own speed limit signs, in practice I don't think this will be more than a nuisance.

> If a local government loses a signing key they would have to...

They'd have to know they were compromised first. I think that is a big 'if', and creation of a centralized repository of backdoor keys makes for tempting targets.

Also, a stake in the ground on the edge of the road that says, I'm 15 feet to the right of the center lane will probably pay for itself in a couple years of stripping. You put two in the ground that say, I'm 15 feet to the right of the centerline and 35 feet from the next beacon and you never have to paint a centerline there again.

But all you've done is swapped one thing that will be poorly maintained for one thing that's already poorly maintained.

*with a much longer life. Stripping needs to be done every year to stay fresh. You can put a beacon in the ground and I should be able to be there and working 10 years later.

Those beacons can be DoSed. Consider how Hong Kong protestors avoid the face recognition with laser pens.

Yeah, but couldn't you also simply disconnect the beacons with a wirecutter?

I mean, every technical system can be shutdown and will shutdown sometimes, isn't that a inherent weakness of such a system?

if that beacon does not respond disable automation for that part?

Sure, but I was thinking about temporary disabling (like a temporary, reversible DoS). If you can temporarily disable something, it is more difficult to find the culprit, and the impact is higher because of the surprise element. If something is permanently disabled, you fix it right away.

Just like bullying: bullying itself is annoying, but what I found annoying is the inconsistency of it. At some point, my bullies were friendly, at another point once more bullying. If it were permanently on-going and not sneaky, they'd be found out by e.g. teachers long ago already.

Ahh, yes that would be a problem.

On the other hand, wouldn't a ddos be visible in the logs?

Logs should be checked centrally anyway, so a 30 second flood of messages should be visible.

But in the end, you are right that it will be hard to do this the right way.

Trolls can also drop bricks on cars from overpasses, and I suspect fucking with road signs will rapidly carry the same taboo and punishment

You can already screw with infrastructure to kill people. Sometimes we just have to hope that the combination of positives and negatives convince people not to go out and screw the world.

You might want to consider https://xkcd.com/1958/.

Right, the main question is can one murderer murder lots of people at once with new technology. Can they buy a machine gun, or reprogram every car to crash, or lobby the government to force doctors to prescribe the opiates they sell.

Even current tech can easily drive a car on a road completely without digital beacons.

We won't lose that capacity.

Try up north during the winter...

It would actually be easier to make smart infrastructure tamper proof relative to existing infrastructure.

You realize trolls can wreak havoc with traffic today if they wanted to?

There is an ia that we try to learn it common sense.

This is definitely one of the things xkcd has talked about:

https://xkcd.com/1958/

We'd have self-driving road marker printers to keep the paint from becoming invisible ;)

The Road Roomba 9000!

Volvo has proposed some rather simple infrastructure - driving magnetized nails into the pavement as a lane hint. This is mostly because they have to deal with heavy snow. It's not the sole, or even the primary guidance system, but it helps. They also suggest that snowplows could use the magnets for guidance. In snowy areas, it's common to use posts or flags or even overhead signs (in Hokkaido) to show where the road is.

Possibly something between lifts of asphalt would work. But a nail through the surface layer of asphalt would allow water in, and mess with the structural integrity of the wear surface. Also, the water it allowed in would freeze and expand and likely push the "nail" upwards - leading to punctured tires. I'd be curious to read a bit more if you have a link.

The overhead lane markers in Hokkaido work well, but would be an expensive retrofit elsewhere (not the poles themselves, but the foundations)

It's a cool idea, but nails rust, meaning a maintenance issue and outages. Is there a magnetic material that doesn't corrode?

The signal doesn't have to be strong, only detectable.

The nails aren't structural, only a signal.

Multiple nails mean the signal is highly redundant, depending on density.

Regular maintenance could detect weakening signal (rusting nails) and result in new nails being inserted.

Iron oxide remains (weakly) magnetic.

Treatments (galvanised nails, coated, etc.) could slow corrosion.

How about magnetic hematite mixed into the road building materials; especially as its a biproduct of iron mining...

Good point, such an issue could/would become obvious during a multi year trial.

Yeah. For the cost of all this retrofitting of roads, you’d be able to build the most insanely comprehensive transit system anyone has ever heard of.

FWIW though, it probably is possible to use this sort of technology for buses and shuttles. You can’t fix markings on ALL the roads, but you can make sure the markings are good enough on main arterials to have a dedicated bus lane.

For the love of everything holy, some of us just dont want public transit - especially having seen the horrors of most public transit options even in the best managed nations and conditions.

From one of my previous comments on a different post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19638171

- - - -

Reducing the number of cars (and therefore traffic) on the roads will benefit everybody You seem to have a rose-tinted view of the world we live in.

  Have you ever had to commute in less-than-ideal 
  conditions?
  Heavy snow? Sleet? Black ice?
  Have you ever lived in places that are not
  perfectly flat? or lived in places that 
  are hot that make bicycling unfeasible?
  Did you have sporting gear / work gear that
  you had to lug? Did you know some people have
  to fetch their own gear to work
  Did you have to take calls during transit?
  Did you know its common practice for employees
  to call into meetings during their commute and/or
  help assist operations via conference calls?
  Have you had to shop for more than a baguette
  or a bagel at a store? You know how cumbersome
  that gets for even a family of three?
  Do you have the slightest clue how much casual 
  violence and crime happen on public transit?[1]
 

Not to belabor the point but there simply are dozens of cases where bicycles or public transit just don't cut it. Not to mention the hygiene, personal safety (from other passengers for example) and personal space aspects involved in someone choosing a mode of transportation other than public transit or bicycling. Ride-sharing, autonomous vehicles and emission-free vehicles should all alleviate the issues we currently face with traffic, parking and accidents.

However doing away with cars or vehicular traffic is just pollyannaish madness.

[1]

Teen robbed at gunpoint at Fruitvale, BART officer says writing a report is a 'waste of resources'

https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/bart-police-refuse-repo...

- - - -

edit: formatting

> Ride-sharing, autonomous vehicles and emission-free vehicles should all alleviate the issues we currently face with traffic, parking and accidents.

No they won’t. This is just willful self-delusion on the part of transit haters.

Most of your concerns are either just plain petty (like, just wear headphones if you don’t like hearing other people) or lacking in perspective (cars kill way more people than whatever safety concerns on a transit system you want to gussy up).

A lot of tech solutions to transportation problems are reinventing elements of mass transit. Self-driving trucks that are virtually linked like a train. Telling Uber pool rides to walk to the nearest intersection to optimize routes (like a bus stop). Central scheduling to share right of way timeslots between vehicles. Or tech fails to reinvent the wheel, e.g. assuming that the congestion and parking issues caused by too many single occupancy vehicles can be solved with software instead of dynamic road and parking pricing and high occupancy vehicles.

>A lot of tech solutions to transportation problems are reinventing elements of mass transit.

For sure. And I feel like they're going about it backwards by defaulting to maintaining norms of private property and leasing things starting with private/personally owned property and developing ways to lease it to for communal use.

They'd probably have a more viable business model if they had started with communal property and charged rent or usage fees for maintenance instead. Jitney cabs or dollar vans have been around forever, and their big challenge was figuring out how to do dispatch and routing in a way that didn't give people intolerably long wait times.

The impetus will be wartime, just as the impetus for the interstate highway system and most of the railway system was wartime.

In peacetime, self-driving cars are a nice-to-have that can save many billions of driver hours and a few traffic fatalities. In wartime, they're literally a matter of life or death. The side that can handle all of their logistics without exposing their precious humans to enemy fire has a huge advantage over the one whose supply lanes can get picked off one by one.

This argument is tough to swallow. The real push to build interstate highways was in early 1950s and began in earnest in 1956. National defense was only one piece of the justification for the project.

The origins of the interstate highway system in defense is well-documented in the historical record, and the title of the bill authorizing it was the "National Interstate and Defense Highways Act":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Aid_Highway_Act_of_195...

There were of course other civilian concerns as well, but Eisenhower's arguments at the time of the plan primarily cited the importance of Germany's autobahn system during WW2 as a justification.

Dropping bombs on smart highways seems much easier than hitting a moving vehicle.

Relatively futile, though, when a self-driving cement mixer comes along, patches the crater, and restores any guidechips needed for other vehicles to navigate.

If a road is too dangerous for humans to drive on due to enemy fire, I would expect the conditions of the road to be much worse than American roads today.

Paint is a wear item, the example of beacons would not be a wear item. If original commenter is correct that infrastructure meets halfway, I wouldn't expect self driving cars transition to happen fast at all - maybe on highways first, and busy city streets, later secondary roads. But that kind of thing would result in a decades long transition, and I would estimate it as never being fully autonomous (if beacons die, car would need manual intervention)

If there is one thing we can be sure of, looking at the past couple decades of wireless tech, it's that there will be a profusion of mutually incompatible standards, each spanning multiple HW generations. It may not experience the same physical wear, but it will be an expensive maintenance issue nonetheless.

Definitely. If it was clear that external beacons were necessary, you would have the Tesla beacons, you'd have the European manufacturer associated beacons, you'd have the Japanese manufacturers associated beacons... installed at manufacturer's cost (or as a partnership), leading to duplication some places, total absence in others, and exclusivity in the rest. And the EU would do better than the rest of the world, having cars with different receivers (manufactured only for the EU market, of course)

"Paint is a wear item, the example of beacons would not be a wear item"

I am extremely skeptical that beacons, sitting out in the heat, and the sun, and the cold, and the rain, and exposed to whatever we use to maintain roads at that juncture, will not be "a wear item".

They'll get hit and sheared off by plows and over-size loads, or just by drunks or idiots still driving dumb cars.

I do not think people have a solid grasp of how many millions of miles of road would need to be technified for self-driving cars to be widely viable.

Most likely, it's going to be a niche thing, tightly restricted to certain places that can afford to build and maintain the infrastructure.

I, for one, already fail to grasp where we manage to get the funds required to clear and level the land and butter a fresh layer of asphalt on top of it regularly enough to build and maintain that many roads to begin with.

Don't know about the US, but most roads in Europe already have coded reflectors to aid identification of lane geometry. Roadside reflectors have become a standard feature even on small rural roads, they're just hollow plastic half-tubes with reflecting strips on them. Cheap to install, cheap to maintain.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=road+reflectors&t=ffab&ia=images&i...

Sure, but in the sense that road signs or traffic lights are a wear item. They wouldn't be exposed to the real causes of damage to roads (at least in my area) - transport trucks and road plows. They would need to be replaced at 5-30 year intervals, rather than 4-12 month intervals.

Traffic lights seem to have a pretty long lifespan.

The primary deployment potential for self-driving cars is long haul freight, which could be done exclusively via the interstate system.

If we're going to beacon up a road, they easily make the most sense.

> which could be done exclusively via the interstate system.

The interstate system already has working self-driving, even without any beacons. Inherently-safe roads like interstate freeways are already almost solved, and you can already buy a Chevrolet today that can self-drive the interstate system 99% of the time.

It's all the dangerous roads that need the help. The ones with bicyclists and pedestrians and parked cars and uncontrolled access and such.

this might be true for the US, but in many parts of europe, roads are far more crowded. not to mention this doesn't solve the last mile problem.

Pavement is a wear item.

Yes, the top lift of pavement is a wear item in the decade time frame. Paint is a wear item in the sub-one year time frame (where I live, with low-VOC paint and frequent winter plowing)

Curbs, signage, lights, poles, drainage infrastructure, lower lifts of asphalt and granular material, ...are all non-wear items. This doesn't mean they never need to be repaired, but rather that they tend to get replaced after unintentional damage. Off-surface beacons (what the original comment suggested) would be in this category.

All it takes is a little bit of rain and hundreds of traffic lights go haywire in my city. What makes you think those beacons would fare any better? Politicians don't a crap for long term maintanance of little visibility infrastructure like that, so they're poorly funded.

And you say "private contactors will save the day", please, stop drinking the Ayn Rand Cool-aid.

What is wrong with the traffic lights in your city would be the much more interesting question here. Everywhere I know, traffic lights work as long as their power supply is intact

Shitty maintenance on top of lower bidder supplying sub-par equipment because half of the money went to corruption. The result is water getting in the circuits and shorting them out.

Alright. I work with roads and traffic infrastructure, and have never seen that situation before. The active equipment (in my experience) is all stored in above ground cabinets - just simple grey metal cabinets, elevated on foundations or poles, sealed with a gasket but with vent holes to prevent heat buildup. It would take almost deliberate misconstruction to cause a short.

This doesn't answer your question about money, but with (mostly) human drivers on the road there isn't much incentive to keep the lines visible, because humans are excellent at inferring where the lines should be, even if they're not there.

The counter-example to this is train tracks. (There are minimum standards for roads, too.)

Self driving trains would probably be easier. Aren't there already some airport shuttle trains and metro transit that's fully automated?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_train_syst...

SkyTrain in Vancouver, BC for example is fully automated. It works well unless there are issues with track or sensors, at which point it has to be driven manually.

The SkyTrain is a great example of how easily transportation technology infrastructure fails during even slightly unexpected circumstances. The trains were inoperable for multiple times this past week, for hours at a time due to snow storms.

Trains aren't exactly new technology, yet here we are with them still not functioning properly during what was actually a pretty routine snow storm. It doesn't leave me very optimistic for self driving cars, which will be significantly more compliced technology.

I agree with your point, although I don't think "slightly unexpected" is fair in this case. For non-locals, Vancouver and the region was hit with pretty heavy snowfall, ice and wind that week.

Sources

Footage of conditions in the city: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ek8dN9AoGbo

Hydro woes and 150km/h winds in the region: https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/snow-day-highway-al...

Transit status snapshot: https://www.vancourier.com/news/metro-vancouver-snow-results...

School closures, Blizzard warning: https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/snow-day-highway-al...

Interviews about the ice buildup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWgx99k585s

Finally, a bit of fun; how Canadians deal with weather: https://bc.ctvnews.ca/video-shows-people-skiing-snowboarding...

Docklands Light Railway works quite well with 45 stations. Humans can take over if needed. Running since 1987 so fairly old tech.

A DLR train has a trained operator, they just aren't (usually) driving. A few places have trains with nobody trained onboard at all. In the event of an emergency remote operators can talk to the passengers e.g. to explain that somebody will come to help or that it has been made safe for them to evacuate (automated trains are invariably electric so it may not be safe to just wander off the train outside a station).

FWIW, self driving trains are a very different problem. With self driving cars, the approach has been to use sensors on the vehicle and make autonomous decisions based on that input. This will never work for trains, because their stopping distances are so long that they cannot use a sensor to detect most oncoming issues.

Self driving trains will require more coordination, with central dispatch to tell them when/where to go. That leaves the intelligence on the train much more basic.

So how do drivers stop with long stopping distance?

They have signals to tell them “stop”, they have speed limits posted, they have route knowledge. All detectable by computers, even without changes. Fast trains have in cab signalling in any case.

They have no decision about where to go (signal box sets the points/switch track), they have no decision on when to go (signal goes green)

The only bit which may need human input is the “ok to depart” notification when all the doors are clear at a station.

Except you can always install sensors that can look as far as you want

Do you mean on the tracks?

There are hard limitations on sensing onboard the train. Tracks that bend around hills, etc. I have some exposure to wireless communication for trains, and one of the limitations is that you can often not get a line of site even from one end of the train to another.

Not OP, but yes, along the right of way.

Since railroad tracks rarely get up and go walkabout, you can instrument them (conduction, video, lidar/radar) to the limits of your preferences and/or budget. Information can be relayed to both central control and individual trainsets.

Is self-driving the same as fully-automated? I think not.

Self-driving implies intelligence, and fully-automated trains simply follow rote rules, and apply the emergency brakes if something unexpected happens. Not intelligent.

Put another way, self-driving has unbounded complexity, while a fixed number of vehicles on a protected, grade-separated railway is not very complex at all.

Now that you mention it, I wonder if tracks would actually be a better solution for most use cases. I could see a situation where highways have tracks and you only have to actually drive at the beginning and end of the journey.

Never mind that money for basic road maintenance is diverted because people want to pay less tax/rates and vote for politicians who promise this bugger the long term effect.

To give access to a very lucrative business endeavor? Someone would come up with the investment. We put a nice canape of cell towers too, or wired up every home for internet, after doing it for cable TV, after doing it for electricity. No one really frowns much at those economics anymore (in big parts of the world at least).

Those who think FSD can be solved by building special road infrastructure for self driving cars misunderstand the problem.

Cars are already equipped with suites of sensors giving them far more complete information than any human can process. Cars can already react faster and hold lanes with more precision than humans can.

What’s lacking is general intelligence. The ability to creatively respond to unexpected situations, even when it’s something you’ve never seen before.

And those unexpected situations are not edge cases either. Virtually every time you drive you’ll encounter a novel case that has never been seen before. Your human brain is good at improvising. Computers? Not so much...

My average drive distance is under 10 miles. The expected number of miles for Waymo to disengage once is over 3 orders of magnitude higher. I'd have to take 1000 trips before Waymo would have disengaged.

That does not jive with your numbers (1 disengage per trip, roughly 10 miles), unless you're saying that Waymo's numbers are juiced by few city miles?

Last I checked waymo drives a very prescriptive route and doesn’t go over like 35mph or something. It’s also not running at scale, meaning a non trivial amount of them on the road.

Call me back when waymo can drive in all seasons in random places anywhere in the US.

Sure sure, maybe we have FSD only in like SoCal+TX+AZ+AL+FL. That, on its own, is a game changer.

Doesn't have to solve all problems, only sufficiently large problems.

Gentle correction: 'jive' -> 'jibe'

Oooh, thanks for that!

It's also a business endeavour that's done a lot of bragging about the number of people it will render jobless. It's not going to be an easy political sell to erect lots of additional road furniture unless it's cheap and unobtrusive.

All of these provided access to new technologies.

Autonomous driving is a marginal improvement on an already deployed technology.

It’s hardly a marginal improvement. If FSD were to become a reality, it would offer incredible benefits to economic productivity, safety, and quality of life.

Privatized roads?

Does it have to be visible? Couldn't it be tokens transmitting their location with great accuracy?

0 visibility in snow happens often.

The Advanced Snow Plow system that Caltrans used as a test on Interstate 80 near Donner Summit had four miles with embedded magnets. This cost about $25,000/mile in '98.

The full description of the system can be read at https://path.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/advanced_snowp...

Alaska uses GPS for their precision plowing - https://www.truckinginfo.com/329914/how-alaska-dot-uses-gps-... . Note that to get the 2" precision you need high quality GPS receivers.

> The trucks have two GPS receivers mounted atop the cab. These receivers cost about $10,000 each, Shankwitz says. "That's probably why this hasn't been deployed in many other areas; it's just too expensive and most applications do not require that level of accuracy."

> The two-centimeter accuracy actually comes from a third receiver -- a high-precision, stationary ground-based receiver perched atop a microwave communications tower in nearby Valdez. It's accurate to within millimeters and it acts as reference receiver for the plow-mounted systems.

I don't see this being standard on self driving cars.

That said, ground penetrating radar is being looked at and appears to be a lower price point. https://phys.org/news/2016-06-vehicles-high-precision-advers...

It's called differential GPS. However the new block of GPS sats have higher accuracy without the need for the (multiple) expensive receivers.

However, I'd argue the lanekeeping and "where am I" problems this stuff solves is dwarfed by the common sense and logical reasoning & recognition problems.

I don't see why not. We have centimeter-level GPS. It's true you maybe can't always rely on GPS signal being there, but you could also install devices on traffic lights that would allow cars to precisely locate themselves at intersections, so they stop at the correct position, etc.

What I think is that self-driving cars may also force us to confront ways in which real-world driving environments are inadequate, so that we can make them more adequate. For example, there are intersections where stop signs (or other signs) are present but not visible. Humans know they have to stop there, so they stop anyway. Self-driving cars could systematically find and report these locations, and might get the city to do something about them.

I also picture the moment a lot of cube satellites are above broadcasting internet across the globe 24hrs a day combined with millimeter gps combined with 5g cellular technology we could do a reasonable job of driving cars anywhere.

Actually, if all we factor in is paint then if we would have autonomous vehicles for which 'paint' was critical there would be a higher frequency in the maintenance cycle using automated robot painters. I'm fairly sure if the highways facilitated 100% autonomous operation their maintenance could be automated thus driving down the costs.

But you are right, road maintenance is never cheap.

It would probably be easier to have a swarm like national airtraffic AI, all cars flying, all cargo in blimps than to maintain a complex ground network of "smart roads"

That's a tragedy of priorities. Priorities of the local municipality or even the federal government. A dysfunction of misplaced deliberations.

All the road and infrastructure taxes being funneled by the politicians to, other areas as they see fit to placate their constituencies or finance their pet projects.

Same with out-of-control grossly over-budget projects that dont deliver the bang for the buck.

If we - as an electorate - insisted on superior paint or "marking technology" for surface roads, we shall have them in one form or the other.

Do self-driving cars even need road markings? IIRC Google's self-driving car project started out ignoring road markings entirely, and relied on a centimetre-precision map of the test city instead.

That obviously has downsides too, but unreliable road markings would be a pretty silly blocker to ever having a self-driving car. that's a solveable short-term problem.

all fun and games until some jack-ass spoofs the GPS and moves a road 20 feet to the left.

https://www.wired.com/2012/07/drone-hijacking/

People in this thread are way too hung up on the "what if cars get attacked" problem. Just because you can't solve every problem, doesn't mean you can't have a usable product.

Cars today don't have any defense against people dropping bricks or pouring paint off an overpass, but somehow the system still works.

They do actually, the humans driving the car can respond to a threat that an autonomous car would have to be programmed to avoid

I'm not sure humans have the reaction time to avoid an object thrown from an overpass.

On the contrary, over the years I've read on many occasions how drivers and passengers have been seriously injured or killed by the morons who get a kick out of dropping objects from an overpass.

https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/local/wilson/mt-juliet...

One brick can attack one car.

One bricked GPS system can attack an entire country. Or planet.

True, but humans can see a bunch of kids loitering on top of a bridge, get suspicious and change lane or slow down as a precaution

That's the point though, the Waymo car doesn't rely on gps, it's has HD maps on board. Plus is has dead reckoning because it's touching the ground, so it knows where it's moving.

Not sure I get your point.

Having atom-resolution maps doesn't help a bit it you don't know where on it you are.

Can't spoof gps all the time everywhere. Once you have a general idea where you are (usually because that's where you were when you stopped yesterday), you can compare what you can see with hd maps, and fix your position exactly. You know you're not in a building, but on a drivable surface for a start.

My 2006 car was fine driving underground for 10 mins with no gps signal, but got confused when I drove it onto a train and it moved 30 miles without the wheels turning. Then after a few minutes got a gps signal again and fixed itself. Had an option to manually set the position and heading too.

That isn't true. There were car navigation devices that predated non-military GPS. They used inertial sensors to understand the car's acceleration and turning, and used on-board maps to correct for the inevitable drift. The car made a 90 degree turn onto a side street but the map indicated that road was 30 feet ahead, it would reset its position to be 30 feet from where it thought it was.

I think the idea is that with a good idea of where you're starting, either by GPS or some other waypoints, you can avoid the need for GPS through dead reckoning and updating based on other known features. At least, that's my guess.

The first navigation devices didn't rely on GPS. I wouldn't be suprised if Waymo reintroduced this.

If you have high res images available of the vicinity ( and constantly update them ) you can work out where you are.

it won't happen overnight everywhere. there are other transportation methods that require lots of infrastructure to maintain, e.g. trams, subways where the need is big enough to worth it. I guess we will see the same with roads, busy avenues will be smart, and small country roads will require manual driving.

We can on motorways, which is where I think driverless technology will actually start - motorways are simpler environments than most roads, and have convenient service stations along them.

Driverless lorries that go from one service station to another will be the first fully autonomous vehicles I think.

In dense urban and suburban areas that's likely not an issue.

Another possibility is Automaker X partnering with comms / infrastructure Company Y (e.g., Comcast). Put another way, if they can get to the point this is the dealbreaker then it's easy compared to what it took to get here.

Don't get me started on the potholes. There are some traffic lights near me which need patching every month or two in the winter. Can they not just engineer it to lift in a new concrete slab each time?

If you're going to try to swear like a 60's Brit, at least get you bloody grammar right. ;-) <strikethrough> "bloody" is an adjective, not an adverb, so </strikethrough>:

"We can't even keep the bloody yellow markings on the road visible"

It's bloody well both: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bloody

Hmm, you're absolutely right! (And the dictionary I consulted is as wrong as I was.) So why does the post I was replying to not work as is?

The "even" both breaks up the flow and makes the "bloody" unnecessary - i.e. you've already said "even", you don't need to say "bloody" too.

So although there's nothing grammatically wrong with the sentence, it reads awkwardly. A native British English speaker would be more likely to use your suggestion. It's just one of those barely documented curiosities like adjective order (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/13/senten...).

Oh, that's brilliant! I'd seen this described before, but not distilled down to that specific order. Thank you!

It does bloody work as is. People bloody say "bloody verb" all the bloody time.

Here's a bloody example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGWhjojt5dw

Probably just because you're not familiar with the usage.

I expect private companies will be the ones providing the infrastructure for self driving cars, and your car will have to subscribe to a "awareness service provider", much the same way that your phone needs to subscribe to a carrier.

Same as usual for the past few decades: private capital that funds existing and upcoming startups, who will deploy proprietary smart infrastructure and allow users to connect to it probably through some monthly subscription service.

If subsurface radar imaging tech works out, it will fix the marking/signage problem nicely. Kind of disappointing not to hear more about that since the initial articles came out a couple of years ago.

Perhaps take 10% of the military budget and you might just have some $ for that

Probably in those places in the world where "we" can keep the markings on the road visible and the roads properly maintained?

The money is going to come from ads and VCs

It seems to me 99.99% of all road markings are perfectly visible

I'm incredulous that that can be the case anywhere.

I live in a wealthy jurisdiction, and the road markings here largely are not what I'd consider to be "perfectly visible". I'd guess that currently, probably 3/4 of painted lane markings have one or more of the following issues: a) obscured by snow/ice, b) faded c) road under construction and lane markings don't correspond to current lanes.

This just goes to show how even unperceptive humans are better than the most perceptive car logic.

Where the car would freak out and stop, you don't even notice anything is missing.

If you ever visit a city that gets substantial snowfall, road markings are essentially nonexistent, even when the snow and ice melts in the spring.

Assuming you're right in that estimate, the hard work is getting more 9s. As a total kind of spitball number, you want 4 more of them.

If it is on asphalt roads you can easily embed wires and electronics underneath the surface by heating it up. And an embedded wire would be both easy for a computer to track and easy to fix or replace.

We may actually discover it’s cheaper or smarter to limit the scope of what self driving cars have to do by limiting their infrastructure. If cities become more pedestrian (cyclist, public transport) centric then some of the issues disappear. It would be a hell of a lot easier if you eliminate the complexities of navigating city traffic if most of it is gone or car traffic is completely separated from the rest. Either via a reduced number of tunnels, suspended roadway, or simply by reducing the number of places where cars and pedestrians cross paths.

Between vastly reducing car traffic and separating it from pedestrians the problem of fully self driving is greatly simplified (probably not eliminated).

Where will existing cities find the budget and physical space for separating transportation modes?

If you do it in the correct order, first massively reducing car traffic and then separating it, the costs should be manageable over time. The point isn’t to do it all at once or overnight. This has the “side” effect of making cities a lot more human friendly even before doing anything to separate traffic while still reducing the complexity of navigating the city FSD.

Re-purposing one of the existing lanes (a bus lane can move more people than 3 SOV lanes combined). Toll roads, reinvesting parking revenue, and increased tax revenue from downtown land used for working, living, and playing instead of just storing automobiles.

Which proves the point the volkswagen guy was trying to make I guess.