But to reach that point, we've got to accept a learning/development process that will involve some risks and some annoyance.

Uhh, about that...

> Tesla allows self-driving cars to break speed limit, again

- https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/16/tesla-all...

It's the same with Tesla wanting to allow rolling stops at stop signs – not the letter of the law, but it's what humans expect. In many instances you are more likely to cause a minor accident (being rear-ended) by coming to a complete stop at a stop sign than the risk of causing and accident by rolling through an intersection that clearly has nobody else in it.

Won't be a problem once most cars on the road are driverless.

The time to find out your car does not stop for emergency vehicles, is not during an emergency. Yet here we are

How about all those new drivers hitting the road for the very first time? Are you suggesting we should banish them from public roads until they've got a few hundred hours under their belt?

How are they going to get freeway practice?

However it is very likely that self driving is in some sense AGI complete - in other words to get to the goal may require something just as generally intelligent as humans, not least as driving in a city is a social interaction problem as much as a routing problem.

Have most people just not encountered confusing road conditions?

A couple weeks ago, I was in West Virginia bobbing up and down hills around hairpin turns on loose gravel. The whole time, I was thinking to myself "The first autonomous vehicle that attempts this route is going straight into the ravine."

One time evacuating from a hurricane, the route I found required me to drive through an open field. How well does LIDAR cope with tall grass?

Another time, I'm headed north on I-95 and there's a several car pileup. Police divert all traffic off the nearest exit and close the highway with a few road flares. I'd wager anything an AV would blow right past the flares and wreak havoc on the scene of the accident.

Until AI can cope with completely novel scenarios it was never trained for, it's going to be prone to catastrophic failure.

Personally, I don't expect to see it in our lifetimes.

They slow down. Tesla's dumbest form of automation will slow down more than a human when encountering a turn.

> How well does LIDAR cope with tall grass?

It stops and demands help. While car automation leans on GPS/nav, it won't blindly follow it -- similar to (almost all) humans.

I wouldn't want to risk anything near a vehicle accident on the road, though. But the situation is not _as_ bad as you might think.

That'll happen only when we have solved the general intelligence problem. Driving on roads is a cooperative process, it requires a theory of mind, and many people are sick of making allowances for experimental technology that is inherently incapable of performing as intended. It's the equivalence of goldmaking alchemists.

Meanwhile there's us motorcyclists - I trust robotaxis to even estimate distances as much as I trust drunk drivers or teenagers on their second driving lessons.

Banish that shit to test tracks.

Don't get me wrong, this is an impressive feat—that sometimes crashes into firetrucks.

Until they stop crashing into firetrucks, which are rather large, bright red, and pretty hard to crash into, the idea that they are going to be better than most drivers is speculation.

Not a core SF strength, but there are many other cities.

And we need to de-personal-vehicle-ize. It's already killing us.

Here in Austin Cruise is regularly blocking streets at night. The tech works great…until it doesn’t.

Even suburbia can be made more walkable.

For example, walking to my local gas station isn't really that practical due to a lack of continuous sidewalks. It isn't that far but the path to the gas station can get pretty muddy at time.

I once tried to get food at a fast food joint by walking, the lack of sidewalks is even more acute. Crossing several lanes of road felt pretty unsafe even when the traffic light is red.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REni8Oi1QJQ

^^ "Not Just Bikes"

While you have a point that "lo-density" is an oversimplification, only New York has the kind of density and frequency of service that make public transit really usable. Boston commuter rail sucks pretty bad, with a too-sparse schedule. BART from SFO to the city is OK but around town there are too few lines and stops. This all could be fixed, but the fact is they suck compared to cities like Amsterdam where cycling has the infrastructure and the critical mass to be safe (unlike London, for example).

AVs are not currently competing with human drivers in the use-case you say they'd be best at, they're clogging already dense cities with even more cars.

I am getting so incredibly jaded at pretty much every single thing the us systems do.

It’s a joke.

-

And I don’t think the Bay Area is going to be a walkable smart city any time in the near future.

People use mass transit because it's cheaper or because the circumstances make individual vehicles very inconvenient (e.g. not parking space and terrible traffic), not because they prefer it.

I suspect individual vehicles is inherently inconvenient. The parking lot for Disneyland is an example, the traffic jams of any city with over 50k people in it are examples. Individual vehicles do not scale very well, and through extreme expense the US has built infrastructure to make individual vehicles as convenient as can be.

> not because they prefer it.

I would like to see data behind this. Driving for a commute is generally not enjoyable, it's time a person will not get back and meanwhile they have done very little productive other than perhaps listen to a podcast. OTOH when on a bus, someone else is worrying about the roads and plenty of people get significant work done, reading done, generally relax. I suspect most would prefer mass transit if it were more time efficient. Driving yourself is still a pretty killer option in most of the US as it's an extreme reduction in commute time due to lack of density and frequency in the mass transit network.

1. Some woman starts yelling at me saying I am a foreigner (I am, but I am more Canadian than anything else). She gets louder and louder and tells me that I am probably a visa student and that I’ll be deported when my studies are done. She went around the entire bus making derogatory comments about them (I.e. what are you doing with that white bitch to an interracial couple)

2. A woman accuses me of being a North Korean spy on the bus (she says I have the nose of a North Korean). I exit the bus because she is increasingly hostile. I get off the bus. She follows me 4 blocks to my apartment, trying to get the red blooded Americans to catch the North Korean spy.

Can you see how some folks would prefer to drive?

I can imagine that most people who take public transit daily (I hope) probably never experience the things that I have experienced.

Maybe because I am visibly Asian (therefore easier to be perceived as non-American), some folks are more daring in picking on me? Unfortunately I cannot a/b test it because I can't look any less Asian than I do now.

Very much so, yes. I agree with the reply comment that you should not have been subjected to that experience. As a 215lbs white male - I don't have those experiences.

I was making fundamentally two points: (1) single occupancy vehicles are a non-scalable transportation solution and (2) I would suspect most people intrinsically would prefer to spend their time while traveling doing something other than driving. It's one of the major selling points for AI cars, that you can do something else while travelling.

It is not enjoyable. A car feels much better and is more convenient as well.

Public transport should be encouraged where possible for practical reasons but it is not realistic to claim that people would prefer it in general.

That is unsurprising. Though, when you are stuck in gridlock, do you think to yourself, "this is exactly where I want to be?"

The car commutes I had in Seattle were 90% gridlock, very common to spend about 30 minutes to travel 7 miles. I went into office one night and it took 14 minutes total. One evening trying to get home during rush hour it took 45 minutes just to get down the on-ramp onto the actual highway! In total that was a two hour commute to travel 12 miles. The 2 hours was atypical, but spending 60-90 minutes to get home was typical.

Now if I lived in Tokyo I would be so hot to ditch the car!

I don't like waiting at lights when I could be moving, with a metro that's not an issue.

I am quite tall and find all cars uncomfortable. Seats on metros and trams are fine for me.

I enjoy people watching.

I like to be able to stretch my legs and walk around on long trips without having to interrupt my journey.

Finding parking, worrying about the vehicle being damaged, knowing that I'm still paying for it even when I'm not using it, those things all annoy me.

At this point in my life I am barely ever in a car, and on the rare occasions when it happens (three times this year so far) it seems worse than ever.

So you never have to wait for a vehicle and all of your routes are direct with no stops? I doubt that.

> worrying about the vehicle being damaged

You been on US public transit?

> knowing that I'm still paying for it even when I'm not using it

You pay for public transit while you're not using it.

>, those things all annoy me.

Then I guess public transit annoys you just as much if not more if you are in the US.

If I am riding the metro at peak hours then I wait a minute or two.

If off-peak then I leave the house at the appropriate time so as not to have to wait.

There are stops, but they are predictable and short. Nothing at all like the experience of being in a car.

> You been on US public transit?

Yes, and in my experience, my insurance company does not raise my rates if someone damages a metro car.

> You pay for public transit while you're not using it.

In the same way that I pay for car infrastructure when I'm not using it, except that I pay a lot more for car infrastructure I don't use than people who don't ride the metro pay for that.

That's never going to happen. We've had personal transport ever since we tamed horses. And we can't really go back to horses.

We just need to prioritise small personal vehicles powered by pedals and/or batteries, particularly in urban environments. We need to make more roads safer for them, and solve the storage/theft problems.

Consumers like good products.

And driverless cars are a good product, as evidenced by the literally free taxi service that is just being given out to many people in SF right now.

You realize that it's only free while they test and it's not going to be free forever, right? In fact, the protests are in response to a decision which allowed the companies to start charging for driver-less rides, so that is already changing.

Hard to say which way people will go overall. I personally am no longer a fan of driver-less cars. I used to be but now I see it as a doubling down of car-dependence. I could see a nasty rebound effect [1] through increased convenience and a lot of other negative consequences if cities adapt their infrastructure to cater to those vehicles. History repeating itself for "automobile progress." A possible second coming of demolishing our cities and neighborhoods to make way for cars. Yeah I know most if not all of the arguments for how the technology will just fix all the problems and make everything about cars better, I used to make those arguments myself. I don't believe them anymore.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebound_effect_(conservation)

You realize that the whole point of self driving taxis is that they are cheaper to run than regular taxis, and that's how they will compete right?

> I used to be but now I see it as a doubling down of car-dependence

Ok, so you just don't like taxis in general then.

That's fine, but it changes nothing about the idea that self driving taxis are strictly better than regular taxis.

> I could see a nasty rebound effect [1] through increased convenience

Oh the irony of this statement.

At the very beginning of you post, you talk about how the benefits of self driving cars are temporary, and yet now you admit that the problem is that they are too good.

I am glad that I have convinced you that self driving cars are such a benefit, such a popular consumer product that everyone will love, so much so that it will cause problems because of just how useful they are!

>> I used to be but now I see it as a doubling down of car-dependence

> Ok, so you just don't like taxis in general then.

That was not the point. One of the general arguments for AVs is that it will reduce car-dependence, that we're all going to be able to live car-free and AVs will shuttle us around in hyper efficient transport systems.

If the way we get there is by having a taxi service that is 70% cheaper, I don't see how that follows. I agree with the parent, the claim that AVs are a ticket out of car dependence seems like a bill of goods.

The person responded by using arguments that they don't like a car driven society.

That does not contradict my point that self driving taxis are better than regular taxis.

Furthermore they admitted that self driving taxis are more convenient, which further supports my point.

Time will tell, but I suspect it'll be economically unviable once the lawsuits start flowing

Longterm that will be true if there is substantial competition between driverless car providers (since it requires very significant that won’t necessarily be the case).

Otherwise these companies will just keep their margins high and charge only slightly below what a car driven by a person costs.

So you mean like, "the whole point of self-driving taxis is that they are cheaper to run, ... and that's how they will compete?"

You're trying to convince yourself too hard that you disagree with the previous comment.

There will probably be a bit of both: using the margin to seriously undercut the taxis and ubers in order to drive them out, and then raise prices.

Why would you say that? I wasn’t trying that hard at all.

It just seemed that you were implying that they will be significantly cheaper for consumers which is not at all obvious at this point.

That's the process of "Enshittification" by Cory Doctorow. And it's blatantly obvious by your comment that we're in stage 1, "good to their users".... except people LOVE free shit. But no techbro gives shit away for free. This is 'buy-in' and training data.

It ONLY gets worse from here.

And 100 cars on the road is still 100 cars on the road, even if only carrying 100 people. It's a waste of energy, waste of resources, and climate-destroying by fact of all that asphalt and resources to make said cars... all so you don't have to ride in icky 'public transit', cause that's what the "poors" take.

If AV taxis are cheap then people are going to use them for all sorts of things they previously could not afford to use a taxi for.

And if they're expensive then they will cannibalize public transport for the benefit of the upper economic classes and the significant detriment of people of lesser means.

There is no way this turns into a net good.

Self driving cars are cheaper than regular taxis to run.

The incentives are aligned.

The whole point is that self driving cars will be cheaper than regular taxis.

This isn't some crazy complicated social media business plan. Instead the business plan is simply.

Costs of running taxis go down, therefore complete with regular taxis with lower prices.

So yes, this is all good for consumers.

And not everything can be refuted by referring to a pitty viral article that doesn't apply to the right industry.

> all so you don't have to ride in icky 'public transit

Cars aren't going away. There will be lots and lots of places that still use cars, for a very long time, regardless of how much additional public transit funding a couple cities add.

And yes, this means that cars self driving are a benefit.

And for all they've driven, there's been what? One fatality from someone who literally walked in front of a car.

Compared to how many fatalities there are from human drivers, that seems a lot lower.