Lots of things come to the Bay Area and Los Angeles before anywhere else. Partly that's because coastal California is an innovation hotbed. Partly because it's a single large rich market. Since one of these that succeeds entirely in the safe parts of California would be an incredible game-changer on its own (door-to-door small-group spikable public transit!), it's still amazingly exciting.
And while lots of Americans view many things as unchangeable, that's not the case in many other places. In China, if you were to talk to public planners about how autonomous vehicles will handle detours, they'll just say, "Oh, we'll use transmitters to tell you. We can sign the transmitters so you know they're trustworthy." Everything about the universe is mutable.
Yep, no ice road truckers will be autonomous in the next year, and that's okay.
What does spikable mean here?
Because every time I hear this kind of thing I keep finding myself asking why/whether mass transit systems aren’t just the same end state?
I'm a firm believer in Elon Musk's vision for public transit, wherein you may own an autonomous vehicle that is hired out for rides by others via something like Lyft. If you choose to own a car, it'll sit at your house when you choose, but can go out and make you money while you have nowhere to go. At this point, you can imagine that there are detractors from this idea - namely those who would profit from owning all the vehicles, those who manufacture traditional vehicles, and the fossil fuel industry, to name a few. Those people are the ones who will keep us in a state of limbo as long as possible from a legal and infrastructural standpoint. We have to decide that this future is better than the one we're in. It'll have a vast impact on pollution, anthropological contributions to climate change, and human equality and prosperity.
All we have to do is start demanding progress and stop accepting mediocrity.
A look at the local weather could see where a storm is and give an estimate of when it will be able to automate leaving and require a person otherwise. I think there are pragmatic answers to extreme situations.
Imagine your public transit system only ran in good weather. How useful would it be?
You have a robo-taxi that works when it's not raining, which is still pretty good (assuming it can safely disengage/pull over if it thinks the weather is getting bad).
> Imagine your public transit system only ran in good weather. How useful would it be?
I and many other Americans live in places that don't have any public transit, so a few robocars that only worked during the day would be a huge improvement.
I appreciate the general point that autonomous driving that only works under some conditions would be useful. But I think it's more along the lines of handling highway driving under most circumstances which already pre-supposes a licensed sober driver that can take over control with a minute or two notice.
I already have an option for local driving. It's called taxis/Uber/Lyft and robo versions won't be all that much cheaper.
In the given example "driving in a parking lot +rain" it's completely reasonable to pass the buck to the human driver. In your example "driving +rain" you can't because that situation occurs well more frequently.
People like me are only looking forward to completely autonomy -- I am forbidden to drive, you see.
And it gives me some perspective... I believe society would benefit enormously if it didn't treat "everyone can drive" as a truism. If you were to break down what the concept "drive" means in terms of simultaneous tasks a human most be capable of performing you would quickly see how utterly ridiculous it is -- with devastating results in how urban environments have transformed and how many deaths are on the roads.
This thread is about automated driving from a systematic point of view, it isn't about you.
> if it didn't treat "everyone can drive" as a truism.
No one said that or implied that anywhere here. You hallucinated some sort link between this conversation and your own frustrations.
- The handoff of control to a person is well-defined and not too sudden
- You accept that autonomous driving is essentially a convenience and safety feature with a competent driver behind the wheels at all times. No using an autonomous car to drop little Jimmy off at soccer practice. (And no summoning a shared robo-taxi service.)
Also, predicting the weather a week out isn't the same as giving an ETA when you can see a map of the storm happening live. That is a completely separate scenario.
yes you do. There is a whole lot of driving that happens in perfect conditions.
Think "Truck driving, on long highways".
Replacing half of all truck drivers is still a trillion dollar industry.
And for your robo taxi situation, you can simply only allow the robotaxis to run half of the time.
Human drivers, can simply get in their cars, and be paid to drive, when it is likely to be unsafe driving conditions. IE, surge driving/pricing.
But there absolutely would be days/times/places where the robo taxi would be perfectly safe. And these days/times/places could be predicted easily, ahead of time.
IE, in arizona, I am sure that it is safe most of the time, and there would not be any issues with snow.
Parts of Arizona.
Sure. Thats my point. And that is still very valuable.
But humans can't drive well in those situations either. Why are you asking for something better than humans can do?
Ask Canadians, Swedes or any other people living in a location with long winters.
I've been exactly where you were, driving the Coq highway in British Columbia at night in a blizzard, following two red dots in front of me. I had (mandatory) snow tires on a rear wheel drive BMW. I also had my family in the car.
It was probably the single stupidest thing I've ever done driving a car.
Perhaps you should have pulled over at this point? Maybe that's what an autonomous car would do.
That sounds like it solves the situation nicely.
And plenty of us humans can and do drive reasonably-safely in snowy/icy conditions. It takes practice, like anything else driving-related, but it's something that most drivers north of the Mason-Dixon Line likely have quite a bit of practice with and have to handle a significant fraction of the year. It's not unreasonable to hold self-driving cars to the same standard.
I don't think so. 'As good as humans can do' would be useful.
I don't understand why you'd have that opinion. If it's no riskier and relieves people from having to drive then that seems like a net benefit to me.
As another example, imagine if you had a radiotherapy machine, when operated manually it randomly kills 1/10000 patients, but when operated by AI it randomly kills 1/100000 patients. Yet I'm 100% certain even though it's a 10x improvement over a human operator it still wouldn't be allowed on the market.
Hmm I don't agree I think people would go for that.
That wasn't AI - it was a concurrency error, wasn't it?
You shouldn't discard technology because sometimes it's wrong. It can be better overall.
I think people's idea of what a computer should be doing has changed a lot since then, due to the common knowledge of AI applications.
Perhaps we're close to the situation where when a person makes a mistake they're asked 'why weren't you using the computer?' I've seen this happen myself.
If we're willing to settle for "as good as a human" in autonomous vehicles, then IMHO all this expertise, R&D, time, effort, money, etc. would be better spent on the public transit and/or active mobility solutions of the near-future.
Ok... What if I were to tell you that there is a solution to this?
The solution to this, is simply "dont drive in those conditions".
A self driving car can't get in a wreck that is caused by snowy roads, if it simply doesn't drive in the snow.
Self driving, during perfect conditions is still extremely valuable, because it turns out that there is a whole lot of driving that is in perfect conditions.
So, you would do things like prevent the taxis from running, if there is any chance of rain at all. I am sure that there are lots of places where rain is not an issue, and rain could be predicted ahead of time. Not everywhere. But still in many places.
did you see that 5 lane intersection going over a tram lane? I myself had no idea where I would have driven there.
I am out of my depth in terms of the topic we are discussing so I might be quite wrong.
Just like all other self-driving demos. I'd like to see a demo like this on snow covered roads, with no lane markings visible. I think that would tell a lot more about the system's ability to deal with an imperfect world.