I jokingly call it management myopia: anything I don't understand can't be that hard.
Brilliant line, that probably goes a long way towards explaining why software in general simply sucks from a users perspective.
If the car next to me isn't driven by a person, but is bristling with high resolution cameras that will immediately upload footage of my face to the authorities if I collide with it, I would indeed change my behavior.
They'll be able to correlate across time and space, similar to how phones running Google Maps are reporting their position and velocity to create up to the minute traffic overlays. They'll be able to approach politicians and police forces with a message like "hey, want to get serious about safety? These are the top one hundred drivers in your area who need to be taken off the road now— click through to our portal to find dozens and dozens of videos of each one speeding, weaving, failing to yield, running stop signs, etc."
Each individual incident may be hard to prosecute, but when you have all of them in a bundle, a few a week for months at a time, it'll become impossible not to act on it. When crashes happen, they'll be able to shame the jurisdiction after the fact by publishing dumps of the incidents leading up to it that were not acted on.
https://www.azfamily.com/news/police-say-man-deliberately-ca...
The thing is, that car was far enough away that both cars could have easily turned in front with room to spare. My wife had seen it before starting her turn, and realized there was plenty of time. In fact, after a few seconds, the driver in front of my wife realized just how much time they had, and finally made the turn, still before this other car arrived. Because my wife is an attentive driver this wasn't a problem, but you could certainly see a driver in her position starting to make the turn while looking to the left, and rear-ending the car that suddenly stops for no apparent reason. Of course they would be at fault for doing so, but the first driver's excess of caution, if you want to call it that, would also be a contributing factor.
Folks that hit the brakes crossing a green light. Braking well before the off ramp so they are going 40 on the highway. Slowing down while merging.
The worst ones are those that are scared to go but decide too late. Like stopping in the middle of the intersection while turning left because there is a car coming from the distance but late enough they end up blocking the left lane going straight.
Sometimes it gets truly absurd. Once I was standing on the sidewalk at an intersection waiting for an Uber when a driver stopped at a green light and started honking at me, furious when I refused to cross the road.
But I generally agree with you. it’s a often egregious and can be extremely dangerous for both the pedestrian and other vehicles when a lone driver stops unexpectedly on a >2 lane road.
Also, the other day, I was making a left from a one-way street, from the left side of it, and someone tried to drive around me on the shoulder to the left, because they were unaware I was waiting for a jogger pushing a stroller to cross in front of me.
Even so, this never made sense as a business strategy, unless Uber somehow has a comparative advantage in achieving self-driving cars and then can get a long monopoly on them.
If they don't -- if others have SDCs around the same time, then sure, their costs go way down, but they can also charge a lot less, because the competition has the same "advantage"!
It's like:
"Hey, man, do you really think your grocery store can make those superhuge profits when you sell at the wholesale price?"
'Oh, no, I have a plan. You know those barcodes they're putting on products now? I'm going to invent a way to integrate that with the checkouts, and boom, I don't have to pay for people to put price tags on. Labor costs go way down!'
Same problem: "No, you're not. Someone better at that will, and they'll sell the tech to all grocery stores."
There was never a reason to believe Kalanick's operation as it stood in 2010/11 had that comparative advantage, so that strategy never made sense. And today, not surprisingly, Uber is one of the worst at SDCs, and is correspondingly unlikely to have that advantage.
I got a D in my only economics class, but I think that I've seen comparative advantage used to mean that "X is better at doing Y than doing Z", whereas competitive advantage is "X is better at doing Y than Z is at doing Y".
If you're not using it as jargon, then the fact that it is jargon might be confusing.
A canonical example would be the doctor who is a better secretary than their secretary (produces more value per hour, looking only at secretarial value). The secretary still has a comparative advantage in secretarial labor because they forgo $0 of doctor income to work that job, while the doctor would forgo $100/hour they could be earning as a doctor in order to work as a secretary.
This is true even though the doctor has an absolute (or competitive) advantage in secretarial work.
The real test for whether something is financially optimal is if you have a comparative, not absolute advantage.
Uber not having a competitive/absolute advantage in SDCs would also be a reason not to do it, because of the details of this case, but comparative advantage is correct as well, though perhaps an unnecessarily strong criterion for the point I needed to make.
Yes, however I don't see a relevant difference between that and my phrasing.
It still looks to me as though you were clearly describing a lack of competitive advantage, while using the word comparative. Sure, you can discuss comparative advantage if you want.
This might be due to the fact that I don't really care much about road rage. At least where I live, the chance of someone getting out of their car and actually escalating it into a situation that matters is basically 0. When I lived in a major city, I felt the same way but for different reasons (most people in big cities Don't Have Time For That). But I can't imagine it's an isolated opinion.
This is kind of nitpicking, but this has always been a backup plan at best for Uber. Look at their expenditures and it is clear that their strategy has never been "all in" on self-driving.
Their main plan was and basically still is a combination of driving competitors out of the market, increasing their efficiency, raising prices, and lowering payments to drivers, before the money runs out. If self-driving cars happen, it will be a tremendous boon to Uber's bottom line, but it is not a necessity.
So, textbook monopoly behavior.
The self-driving problem on highways is much more solvable, and can further be improved by convergent infrastructure evolution (forewarning of traffic jams from central control, embedded rfid to aid pathfinding in bad weather, weather reports, wildlife nets/barriers, highly standardized signage, internetworked cars). It would solve and serve a number of functions that are extremely valuable in efficient logistics, safety automation of boring long term driving, and better utilization of infrastructure (automated overnight driving when the interstates are much less used).
I don't really care if my trip to Taco bell is automated. Sure it would be nice, but that is so insanely difficult compared to automating a 400 mile trip on an interstate.
When they can full automate a 400-800 mile interstate trip so that I can sleep in my car while it drives overnight, it will massively disrupt the airline industry in so many positive ways.
But the article is from a sensationalist news source, so what can one expect.
This could be implemented today with train tracks and automated trains.
Someone will comment that there is not enough profit but are the roads making profit?
If you have the money you can travel A class, much more comfortable then sleeping in a car or an airplane.
I am not against cars so don't reply with some examples of why you need a cat, I understand that... my point is that for long distances transport where you could sleep,rest or do something else trains could be done today where AI driven cars would take at least 20 years.
Long highway drives may be something they don't do that often. So the ability to own a car that can automate that subset of their driving probably doesn't strike them as all that interesting.
Personally, as I've said elsewhere, this seems like a much more tractable problem and gives me a lot of the total benefit of self-driving.
Compare to city driving: 10 minute drive, $5. That's at least 5x more profitable and takes less capex. Plus, if anything goes wrong, your facilities and backup vehicles are already nearby.
As you said the Taco Bell trip doesn't matter.
The one area where it does matter is for the longer distance commuter--the unpleasant experience of spending an hour every morning and every night in stop and go traffic.
Well, it would probably be a significant benefit to someone who is blind to be able to commute to work by themselves.
For example, I avoid doing things on the road that an inattentive other driver might be slow to react to and hit me, such as suddenly cutting across 3 lanes of traffic.
The AI car will have sufficient cameras to record your actions and report them directly to your insurance company if not the police.
This will be MORE effective at deterring stupid driving, not less.
Look at the number of "Plug this in so we can track your driving continuously and we'll give you an insurance discount" apps that now exist.
People will be even happier to tattle on others.
Now please laugh, put down the phone and don't even think about implementing this. It's a terrible idea.
In countries where regulating things is understood as a purpose of government the availability of self-driving will end the "everybody needs to" justification for lax driving standards.
First thing you'll see is Continuing Education. Today for personal drivers testing is once and done. If you can hold in your instinct to aggressively cut off other drivers, pass on the inside and generally be a maniac for the length of the test you're set for life. There are small moves towards more continuing education (e.g. Speed Awareness requirements for people who keep getting tickets) but that'll speed up enormously once self-driving is viable.
Compare the regime for driving an articulated lorry (mandatory refresher courses, licenses automatically expire and you must be re-tested) to my grandfather being legal to drive long after he was in no physical or mental condition to be safe on the road.
Then I think you'll start to see tightening of basic requirements. That incautious fast turn you took becomes a Test Failure not a slap on the wrist. All fatalities result in lifetime disqualification. And when your lawyer says "My client needs a car..." the judge says "This isn't a license for a car, it's a license for driving. Buy a car that drives itself" much more often. Rich footballers who used to get away with this have already started to see judges say well, why don't you just hire a chauffeur? Self-driving tech would push this down to middle earners.
HighwAI or HAIghway or AI-95 or Night on the Interstate where the plucky action hero has to save the day with the help of an old car, a grizzled mechanic, and his sweetheart from a malignant swarm of AI controlled cars that have terrorized and paralyzed the country by killing any humans they sense near the roadway. Or a small town is terrorized by a swarm of autonomous vehicles that lurk the stretch of highway between them and the next town, and some disaster necessitates a massive human piloted convoy protected by the town sheriff and traffic cops as best they can until they can eventually make their way to a rendezvous with the State Patrol. Or teenagers having to avoid a gruesome death at the whims of autonomous vehicles on the way to Grandma's house.
Then you all have to bring insurance into it.
Seriously HN. Keep this up, and I don't think we can be friends anymore.
In absence of competition they might use it as a way to gouge you for more money, but there is no lack of competition in the insurance space.
20 years is a long time, arguably you're already wrong because self-driving vehicles already exist. But Self-driving with the ability to replace Uber drivers will be here by 2030 at the latest.
If you’re talking anything below level 5 then all we will be doing is making current human drivers worse. Some of the deaths so far have been people who knew the limitations of the technology and still got complacent. If it requires you to have constant supervision then people simply won’t do that and will die.
The real limiting factors for level 5 are less legible to humans. We understand the physical world via years of experience and good priors. Teslas crash straight into concrete lane separators and Ubers hit pedestrians that they know are there. In the latter case the actual reasons for the collision would strike a human as absolutely nuts - things like the algorithm not having a proper sense of object persistence or being terrible at commonsense reasoning. Yes, the Uber system was quite primitive, but the way that it broke gives us some insight into how AI drivers face a totally different set of challenges than what we would think of as "difficult conditions".
(Disclosure: I work for Google which is a sibling of Waymo)
The radar can penetrate fog, rain, etc. https://navtechradar.com/features/autonomous-vehicles/
Ultrasound works well up close for detecting a potential collision.
In theory you could have all four.
I guess that isn't as pithy but it's closer to the truth.
When it became clear that Uber's strategy (under Kalanick anyway) was premised on replacing drivers with AIs before the cash ran out I couldn't see general self-driving vehicles coming within 20 years. I still say that's true. AI assistance? Sure. But there's an uncanny valley there too where the AI will be good enough in most circumstances that drivers lose attention and people will die. You already see this with Tesla autopilot.
Here's a simple counterexample to the idea that self-driving cars are "just around the corner": in NYC, quite a few buildings have doormen. This is great for residents. Part of this is dealing with deliveries and so forth but there's also an issue of general security. People can sneak in (and I'm sure do) but just the fact that a human is there acts a strong (but not complete) deterrent. Just like having a dog is one of the most effective burglary deterrents.
What prevents a lot of bad actions on the roads is actually fear. Fear of what other drivers might do. Fear of road rage by other drivers. That sort of thing. This is just how humans work.
Once a driver knows the car next to them isn't driven by a person it changes their behaviour. They will do things they wouldn't do if it were a human behind the wheel, particularly because they know an AI won't ram them, cut them off, yell at them and whatever. There's no fear there. Even if there's a passenger in the car, it's still (psychologically) different.
How do you program around humans changing their behaviour to take advantage of there being no driver in your car?