People just expect it to happen much too quickly, there's no patience.
The time it takes to get from say a car that just drives about randomly to a car that drives pretty well 75% of the time is about a day's worth of work with today's technology. Going from 75-80% is a week or two. 80-85% is months. Getting to the 90% is years, and who knows what we need for 99+%.
I did a self-driving car in GTA V project that streamed on Twitch 24/7. If the car wasn't improving noticeably day by day, people were getting angry and frustrated, as if the car was meant to be perfectly driving within months, surely!
There's definitely a major disconnect between the hype and reality of what the challenge of self-driving cars is. The bubble is just simply bursting at the moment, but the dream itself is not dying amongst actual engineers. It's just dying for the people who never understood how absolutely challenging the problem actually is.
I'm not sure why anyone would say the "dream" is dying. If anything is dying, it's unrealistic hopes that fully autonomous vehicles will be widespread and dirt cheap to be driven around in by the end of this decade.
I suspect the hype's been fueled by--in addition to the usual suspects--the growth of young professionals in urban areas who have this vision of never having to own a car and being driven around everywhere. For that to be a reality, self-driving has to happen right now--not incrementally over the coming decades.
> People just expect it to happen much too quickly, there's no patience.
> It's just dying for the people who never understood how absolutely challenging the problem actually is.
You're laying a lot of blame at the feet of the excited people, but in their defense, much of their excitement is thanks to hucksters (cough Elon cough) who've been insisting that fully autonomous cars are just a year or two away. It's not like these people can be reasonably expected to understand how difficult the problem domain is, especially when they've seen recent AI successes at other problems that were popularly considered impossible (e.g. AlphaGo).
I watched some of the progress updates that you posted on youtube for that project and I was amazed by what you could acheive at home with a powerful GPU and publicly available software.
> How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.
Takeaway: people expect way too much out of next five years of the future, and typically it takes twenty years for those expectations to become fully realized. (I believe there is an Andy Grove quote to the same effect, but I couldn't find it in time.)
However, there is a difference, and I think an important one. With the internet, every piece of needed technology was either in place or easily imagined; with driverless cars, I don't think anyone can claim that is true. While ML/deep learning have made impressive strides in the past years, it is still a big leap to say these same technologies are enough to drive a car in the wild. They may be, but it also may be many years until such a technology is realized.
We still don’t have flying cars nor self-conscious robots, things that have been prophetized 100 to 50 years ago. Going back more in time we still don’t have a philosophical stone. The idea is that some technological prophecies are indeed wrong.
I think the quote is along the lines of people tending to overestimate progress in the next 5 years but underestimate it in the next 25.
However they also get it wrong. It's hard to predict. Others in the thread have pointed out Asimov's stories that featured FTL warp drives and computers that fit in only one room.
One thing I've noted from observing 20th century progress is that progress is much, much faster for things that are less capital intensive per iteration. It's one reason I've been predicting that solar power will eat the world. Nuclear power is capital intensive per iteration (per power plant or research reactor), so even if it's superior in some ways it has a longer iteration time and so it will lose the race. I think this neatly explains why space tech stagnated and computer tech zoomed way ahead. So today we still have chemical rockets and still get most of our electricity globally from burning coal and gas (100+ year old tech), but we have supercomputers in our pockets.
> We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.
Roy Amara:
> We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.
Kurzweil has called it ”the intuitive linear view” vs ”the historical exponential view”:
> Most technology forecasts ignore altogether this “historical exponential view” of technological progress. That is why people tend to overestimate what can be achieved in the short term (because we tend to leave out necessary details), but underestimate what can be achieved in the long term (because the exponential growth is ignored).
To be fair, one of the main things Stoll was critiquing at the time was whatever the educational tech hype du jour was which he was more right than wrong about. And twenty years later there's still a huge amount to criticize about how little tech has transformed education, especially in K-12.
ADDED: One thing Stoll did get quite wrong was missing the utility of mass amounts of often uncurated information. Though, in this regard, he has a lot of good company among science fiction authors who mostly envisioned centralized encyclopedias created by experts, not Wikipedia or the Web generally.
He wrote a great book "Silicon Snake Oil" that is full of things just like this he was so very wrong about, it's a great read still. He complains about how bad things were in the late 90s, but somehow misses how things will get better. It's really worth reading.
Somewhere there's a great review, written somewhat recently, on all the things he had wrong. I can't seem to find the one I'm thinking of. I guess he was correct about how things on the web are never permanent.
To be fair, I find the experience of reading a book or newspaper on <insert your favorite E-reader here> at the beach is still inferior to having the dead tree version.
The part that I can't figure out is why everyone seems to act like driverless cars will be some kind of all-at-once phase change transition instead of being incremental.
It seems almost a certainty that we will gradually ease into the concept. Some cars will be able to do some things autonomously, a little, for some people, some of the time. Eventually the cost/benefit levels will improve, more features will roll out, and sure over a long time scale things might look revolutionary.
In other words this big complicated category of tech will grow like most other technology has. This isn't an individual app like Instagram or WhatsApp it's a whole category of technology, like the concept of automated factories, or container based shipping, or the internet itself. It could be decades, or longer. Or not.
But as a casual observer it's pretty easy to look around and notice that there really aren't any practical applications of autonomy with mass adoption, and conclude that it's going to be a minute, and that we'll definitely have ample time to notice as we slowly get closer.
Here's my negative scenario: self-driving is "AI-complete"; you can't really hit all the edge cases without solving AI in general, which is more than 30 years away (Kurzweil is the wild optimist and predicts 2045).
edit: Although since writing that I have become aware that Kurzweil thinks the Turing test will be passed in 2029; the "singularity" is the 2045 date.
In any case, I think it's realistic that level 4 self-driving cars won't be widely deployed for end-to-end trips until 2029-2045. This doesn't seem to be what many people think right now. They think it's going to be an "instant roll-out" like the iPhone -- either it works or it doesn't.
This is how everything happens, and it's why we're living in the future even though we never realized it. We have a small square in our pockets that can do real-time translation, you talk into it and it'll say the same thing in another language.
I remember reading about this exact thing in the 90s and thinking that it was completely incredible, but I didn't even notice it when it happened. We first got computers that could sort-of translate, but not impressively so, then computers that could sort-of speak, but not impressively so, then computers that could sort-of listen, but not impressively so. All these technologies improved, little by little, until they got to a point where they are pretty impressive, but we're used to them.
Cars are already going the same way, my 5-year-old car can already follow/match speed with the car in front of it and warn me about signs on the road. Little by little, it'll do more things on its own, until I won't be needed any more.
> The part that I can't figure out is why everyone seems to act like driverless cars will be some kind of all-at-once phase change transition instead of being incremental.
Because there is a significant difference in kind between human driving with driver assistance and self-driving, because having both on the road creates problems that's neither alone faces, and because once self-driving becomes viable for general use, regulatory and insurance factors will probably drive a rapid transition to a state where it's the only thing most people can do on most publicly accessible roads.
> or container based shipping
Intermodal container-based shipping was a fairly rapid global phase change, going quickly from introduction to international standards to global dominance of shipping. So it's kind of an odd example to use to counter the idea of a rapid phase change.
Phase change is a great metaphor. Once conditions are right, network effects between particles coordinate to rapidly produce a reaction in the entire substance. The catalyzing particles here are people. Once people see that autonomous driving is "here", the incentives will be too powerful to ignore, for businesses, politicians, and others who live by exploiting opportunities. So yes, I think once change comes, it will be rapid and fairly complete. Possibly at cost of human life.
Yes, and it's already happening. Automakers have already agreed to implement automatic collision avoidance in all their cars by 2022, IIRC, so there's one example.
While I'd agree that driverless cars are not here today, that the hype is over-doing it, and that Tesla has tried to push too fast, there is a huge economic incentive to have driverless cars. If a system can be built to replace long haul truck drivers with even being slightly safer than a human driver, that saves some on insurance and tons on labor, not to mention not having to limit driving time per day. With those kinds of incentives, trucking companies wouldn't blink an eye before going forward with it. People seem so focused on personal vehicles that they ignore that people won't want to give up control at first and don't realize how the change will take place.
I don't think "slightly safer" is enough. Slightly safer would likely be determined based on the average accident rate, but the problems lie farther out on the bell curve. It is one thing if, say, a driverless Model 3 hits a bus full of people: almost everyone involved woud probably walk away from that. But if a driverless Tesla Semi hauling two full trailers of heavy batteries does the same thing, the results would be horrific. Lawyers would appear out of nowhere, claim that people aren't perfect sure, but the trucking company took an undue risk on a technology with known flaws etc. Bad press everywhere, said trucking company then gets sued out of existence, etc.
Given our litigious society, I think that driverless systems for big trucks need to be far far safer than the human-guided equivalent. When accidents happen, they have the potential to do far more damage.
> While there is no doubting the scale of this industry, with billions being invested every year, none of the OEMs has yet made a penny from selling a driverless car. This money, benefiting these exhibitors, is therefore a punt, a high-stakes bet there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
For OEMs, I think it's less about a pot of gold and more of a defensive move. They're willing to throw money at trying to mitigate a huge business risk.
These companies might not know (or even have an opinion on) how close the leaders like Waymo are to making it work. But they know that, if it does work, a new era will begin when nobody will be able to sell a car without it.
And it's almost moot whether they believe it will work. They're protected as long as they're putting sufficient resources into it that they stay roughly as far along as others.
Isn't the author already wrong? There are Waymo autonomous cars operating right now on public roads in Chandler, Arizona without safety drivers. Sure, those are very carefully mapped and selected routes, but they are not closed routes, they have to deal with anything that can happen on a public road. As any engineer knows, the last 10% is always harder than expected, but scaling from 0.1% to 90% coverage seems fairly straightforward IMO.
I don't understand how the people considering driverless cars infeasible can reconcile this with what is happening already. Why would Waymo order 80,000 cars in the next year if they thought their project is all hype?
Personally, I’d be happy with just automated freeway driving. That seems like an easier problem to solve (no pedestrians, complex traffic controls, cars going the other way or turning across your path, and visibility is usually pretty good). Why not focus on and perfect that first?
While driving on California freeways I have seen: pedestrians, complex traffic controls (law enforcement rerouting traffic or running moving breaks due to incidents), cars going the other way (drunk or confused), and terrible visibility (fog, snow, dust, heavy rain). It's going to take decades before automated freeway driving is perfected. Those edge cases can't just be ignored.
This seems fixated on driverless vehicles' availability for purchase by the general public. I thought it was becoming pretty clear that, early on at least, the common approach is fleets operated by manufacturers, a la Waymo?
One thing I have never understood about the driverless vision is how it seems to ignore economically significant problems like (a) traffic congestion and (b) extremely inefficient energy use in transportation, especially personal vehicles.
Just looking at the first problem, a four lane highway is a four lane highway, regardless of how vehicles comport themselves. It seems more productive to solve congestion by getting at least some of the vehicles off the ground using emerging passenger drone technology. [0] That incidentally looks like an easier place to attack automation as there are fewer corner cases. Commercial aircraft achieved high levels of automated flight decades ago.
Automation for flight is easier because there is a central authority controlling all (major) flights. Airspace and behavior therein is very tightly regulated, and the automation has a lot of dependencies upon extra-vehicular infrastructure (navigation aids, approach radio beacons, etc). There's also relatively few planes in the air at any given time. Scaling that up would not be trivial.
As for that Kittyhawk prototype - one prop failure at altitude and the pilot is dead. There's a reason they're testing over water at very low altitudes. Quadcopters have a very bad failure mode: they always crash. You want at least six motors, if not more, to avoid a crash every time a single motor fails. But, of course, more motors requires more battery power, which raises the weight, which makes it less maneuverable, and so forth.
From a pure "worst case failure mode" ground traffic is a better first automation target for moving small quantities of people.
> One thing I have never understood about the driverless vision is how it seems to ignore economically significant problems like (a) traffic congestion
Capacity is a function of maximum density at speed, which both consistency of behaviour and speed and accuracy of detection and reaction have a role in setting. Automated driving — if it is exclusive — addresses congestion (provided added “deadhead” runs
don't offset max density gains), and that's always been part of the self-driving vision, even back when it was about “smart roads” and not smart cars on dumb roads.
> (b) extremely inefficient energy use in transportation, especially personal vehicles.
Self-driving might help address that, too, as it allows lower friction exchanges between local personal transport and higher capacity—and higher efficiency—shared long-range transport.
I wouldn't be surprised to see it make congestion worse, that one hour journey to work that was unacceptable before might become bearable if you can read a book or surf the web during your trip.
> Just looking at the first problem, a four lane highway is a four lane highway, regardless of how vehicles comport themselves.
Lanes are as wide as they are and following distances are as long as they are because people are terrible at driving. A mostly-driverless 4-lane highway could more than double capacity just by reducing following distances when computers rather than human beings are making the decision when to brake and how hard to brake.
Humans also cause traffic jams by causing accidents or rubbernecking at accidents - that'll get better too.
It will happen but the timelines are looking much longer than people were promising two years ago to get investment. The reality of the difficulty of the edge cases and long term reliability has been made more clear and the hype is fading. Now it's time to slog through the real and difficult work of making what we have reliable and safe.
We're going to get driverless cars one way or another. Even if the problems are much more intractable than we first gave them credit for people are too clever.
Take driving in the snow, for instance. It might be completely impossible to do it safely for the next twenty years by having a computer manage the drive path, but designs might create the ability for cars to form mini-trains where the lead car is driven by a human and the cars fall in line together. Then you could still get in a self-driving car, it could still get you from Toronto to Ottawa. It could even get you right to your front door! They'd just have to pay some train drivers (conductors?) when the weather is too harsh for to put it in full auto mode.
We're going to get there. The benefits are too obvious and we can work around the persistent problems.
>We're going to get driverless cars one way or another.
Sure we will, no doubt about that.
The question is when?
In 10 to 20 years from now level 4 sounds reasonable, in 2 to 5 years from now it sounds not, notwithstanding the (daily) announces about this or that new autonomous driving system or related "breakthrough".
Obvious question: why just not take the train? In your example I’d have to depend on other strangers for my private travel, one of the most important things that made me purchase my first car in my 30s, I don’t want that.
Snow seems like one of the easier problems, honestly. Pretty much all the "technical" problems seem pretty straightforward. Waymo already posted an article where they talked about how they can filter falling snow out of their LIDAR input, for example.
It's the social problems that are hard for AI, like how to handle a construction zone that looks like you need to break the law to get around. Those don't always have easily generalizable answers.
Wolmar's argument is horribly uncompelling and betrays a bizzare technophobia. He talks about the hardware as if they're dark magic tools and his argument for the death of the cars is that reality hasn't lived up to press releases. This is an argument made with no understanding of the technological underpinnings of driverless cars, and while I agree that driverless cars are farther away than the press would have you believe, the author needs to dig in further to get a real understanding of what he's discussing.
The substance of this article can be sumarized as "I talked to a bunch of people at a convention, and some had concerns, ohh, and I wrote a book about how I'm skeptical of driverless cars."
Regardless of how you feel about the future of driverless cars, this is a safe article to skip - there's no content.
There have literally been hundreds of threads advocating self driving cars saying it's here and now, max 10 years, and rubbishing anyone advocating caution.
Since the hype and exuberance was entirely self created, how can anyone else be blamed? This is like blaming others for taking you seriously.
How many years did it take for cars to go from beta to wide spread use?
It would be nice if it would happen faster, we could cut the number of car accidents in half, car related fatalities by a quarter, and zero speeding tickets...
Right now roadways are designed for maximizing the value of the kinds of sensors that evolved in humans. We need roadways designed for the kinds of sensors we can manufacture. Imo, that's how we'll get driverless cars.
I thought I just read that Google will have some operating in Arizona "by the end of this year" ...no? These things are basically a solved problem already and just waiting to get approval.
[+] [-] sentdex|7 years ago|reply
The time it takes to get from say a car that just drives about randomly to a car that drives pretty well 75% of the time is about a day's worth of work with today's technology. Going from 75-80% is a week or two. 80-85% is months. Getting to the 90% is years, and who knows what we need for 99+%.
I did a self-driving car in GTA V project that streamed on Twitch 24/7. If the car wasn't improving noticeably day by day, people were getting angry and frustrated, as if the car was meant to be perfectly driving within months, surely!
There's definitely a major disconnect between the hype and reality of what the challenge of self-driving cars is. The bubble is just simply bursting at the moment, but the dream itself is not dying amongst actual engineers. It's just dying for the people who never understood how absolutely challenging the problem actually is.
[+] [-] ghaff|7 years ago|reply
I suspect the hype's been fueled by--in addition to the usual suspects--the growth of young professionals in urban areas who have this vision of never having to own a car and being driven around everywhere. For that to be a reality, self-driving has to happen right now--not incrementally over the coming decades.
[+] [-] Analemma_|7 years ago|reply
> It's just dying for the people who never understood how absolutely challenging the problem actually is.
You're laying a lot of blame at the feet of the excited people, but in their defense, much of their excitement is thanks to hucksters (cough Elon cough) who've been insisting that fully autonomous cars are just a year or two away. It's not like these people can be reasonably expected to understand how difficult the problem domain is, especially when they've seen recent AI successes at other problems that were popularly considered impossible (e.g. AlphaGo).
[+] [-] mschwaig|7 years ago|reply
Here's the playlist with all of those videos if anyone else is interested: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQVvvaa0QuDeETZEOy4Vd...
[+] [-] maxharris|7 years ago|reply
> How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.
Takeaway: people expect way too much out of next five years of the future, and typically it takes twenty years for those expectations to become fully realized. (I believe there is an Andy Grove quote to the same effect, but I couldn't find it in time.)
[+] [-] Upvoter33|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paganel|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] api|7 years ago|reply
However they also get it wrong. It's hard to predict. Others in the thread have pointed out Asimov's stories that featured FTL warp drives and computers that fit in only one room.
One thing I've noted from observing 20th century progress is that progress is much, much faster for things that are less capital intensive per iteration. It's one reason I've been predicting that solar power will eat the world. Nuclear power is capital intensive per iteration (per power plant or research reactor), so even if it's superior in some ways it has a longer iteration time and so it will lose the race. I think this neatly explains why space tech stagnated and computer tech zoomed way ahead. So today we still have chemical rockets and still get most of our electricity globally from burning coal and gas (100+ year old tech), but we have supercomputers in our pockets.
[+] [-] Sharlin|7 years ago|reply
Bill Gates:
> We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.
Roy Amara:
> We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.
Kurzweil has called it ”the intuitive linear view” vs ”the historical exponential view”:
> Most technology forecasts ignore altogether this “historical exponential view” of technological progress. That is why people tend to overestimate what can be achieved in the short term (because we tend to leave out necessary details), but underestimate what can be achieved in the long term (because the exponential growth is ignored).
[+] [-] ghaff|7 years ago|reply
ADDED: One thing Stoll did get quite wrong was missing the utility of mass amounts of often uncurated information. Though, in this regard, he has a lot of good company among science fiction authors who mostly envisioned centralized encyclopedias created by experts, not Wikipedia or the Web generally.
[+] [-] blakesterz|7 years ago|reply
Somewhere there's a great review, written somewhat recently, on all the things he had wrong. I can't seem to find the one I'm thinking of. I guess he was correct about how things on the web are never permanent.
[+] [-] hyperbovine|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CPLX|7 years ago|reply
It seems almost a certainty that we will gradually ease into the concept. Some cars will be able to do some things autonomously, a little, for some people, some of the time. Eventually the cost/benefit levels will improve, more features will roll out, and sure over a long time scale things might look revolutionary.
In other words this big complicated category of tech will grow like most other technology has. This isn't an individual app like Instagram or WhatsApp it's a whole category of technology, like the concept of automated factories, or container based shipping, or the internet itself. It could be decades, or longer. Or not.
But as a casual observer it's pretty easy to look around and notice that there really aren't any practical applications of autonomy with mass adoption, and conclude that it's going to be a minute, and that we'll definitely have ample time to notice as we slowly get closer.
[+] [-] chubot|7 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16353541
Here's my negative scenario: self-driving is "AI-complete"; you can't really hit all the edge cases without solving AI in general, which is more than 30 years away (Kurzweil is the wild optimist and predicts 2045).
edit: Although since writing that I have become aware that Kurzweil thinks the Turing test will be passed in 2029; the "singularity" is the 2045 date.
https://futurism.com/kurzweil-claims-that-the-singularity-wi...
In any case, I think it's realistic that level 4 self-driving cars won't be widely deployed for end-to-end trips until 2029-2045. This doesn't seem to be what many people think right now. They think it's going to be an "instant roll-out" like the iPhone -- either it works or it doesn't.
[+] [-] StavrosK|7 years ago|reply
I remember reading about this exact thing in the 90s and thinking that it was completely incredible, but I didn't even notice it when it happened. We first got computers that could sort-of translate, but not impressively so, then computers that could sort-of speak, but not impressively so, then computers that could sort-of listen, but not impressively so. All these technologies improved, little by little, until they got to a point where they are pretty impressive, but we're used to them.
Cars are already going the same way, my 5-year-old car can already follow/match speed with the car in front of it and warn me about signs on the road. Little by little, it'll do more things on its own, until I won't be needed any more.
[+] [-] dragonwriter|7 years ago|reply
Because there is a significant difference in kind between human driving with driver assistance and self-driving, because having both on the road creates problems that's neither alone faces, and because once self-driving becomes viable for general use, regulatory and insurance factors will probably drive a rapid transition to a state where it's the only thing most people can do on most publicly accessible roads.
> or container based shipping
Intermodal container-based shipping was a fairly rapid global phase change, going quickly from introduction to international standards to global dominance of shipping. So it's kind of an odd example to use to counter the idea of a rapid phase change.
[+] [-] darkerside|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TulliusCicero|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grigjd3|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mpweiher|7 years ago|reply
I think such a system can be built. It's called a train.
[+] [-] MegaDeKay|7 years ago|reply
Given our litigious society, I think that driverless systems for big trucks need to be far far safer than the human-guided equivalent. When accidents happen, they have the potential to do far more damage.
[+] [-] adrianmonk|7 years ago|reply
For OEMs, I think it's less about a pot of gold and more of a defensive move. They're willing to throw money at trying to mitigate a huge business risk.
These companies might not know (or even have an opinion on) how close the leaders like Waymo are to making it work. But they know that, if it does work, a new era will begin when nobody will be able to sell a car without it.
And it's almost moot whether they believe it will work. They're protected as long as they're putting sufficient resources into it that they stay roughly as far along as others.
[+] [-] bryanlarsen|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sidibe|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] netfire|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nradov|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taneq|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hodgesrm|7 years ago|reply
Just looking at the first problem, a four lane highway is a four lane highway, regardless of how vehicles comport themselves. It seems more productive to solve congestion by getting at least some of the vehicles off the ground using emerging passenger drone technology. [0] That incidentally looks like an easier place to attack automation as there are fewer corner cases. Commercial aircraft achieved high levels of automated flight decades ago.
[0] https://www.dezeen.com/2017/04/28/kitty-hawk-prototype-perso...
[+] [-] falcolas|7 years ago|reply
As for that Kittyhawk prototype - one prop failure at altitude and the pilot is dead. There's a reason they're testing over water at very low altitudes. Quadcopters have a very bad failure mode: they always crash. You want at least six motors, if not more, to avoid a crash every time a single motor fails. But, of course, more motors requires more battery power, which raises the weight, which makes it less maneuverable, and so forth.
From a pure "worst case failure mode" ground traffic is a better first automation target for moving small quantities of people.
[+] [-] dragonwriter|7 years ago|reply
Capacity is a function of maximum density at speed, which both consistency of behaviour and speed and accuracy of detection and reaction have a role in setting. Automated driving — if it is exclusive — addresses congestion (provided added “deadhead” runs don't offset max density gains), and that's always been part of the self-driving vision, even back when it was about “smart roads” and not smart cars on dumb roads.
> (b) extremely inefficient energy use in transportation, especially personal vehicles.
Self-driving might help address that, too, as it allows lower friction exchanges between local personal transport and higher capacity—and higher efficiency—shared long-range transport.
[+] [-] tonyedgecombe|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] glenra|7 years ago|reply
Lanes are as wide as they are and following distances are as long as they are because people are terrible at driving. A mostly-driverless 4-lane highway could more than double capacity just by reducing following distances when computers rather than human beings are making the decision when to brake and how hard to brake.
Humans also cause traffic jams by causing accidents or rubbernecking at accidents - that'll get better too.
[+] [-] maym86|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 3pt14159|7 years ago|reply
Take driving in the snow, for instance. It might be completely impossible to do it safely for the next twenty years by having a computer manage the drive path, but designs might create the ability for cars to form mini-trains where the lead car is driven by a human and the cars fall in line together. Then you could still get in a self-driving car, it could still get you from Toronto to Ottawa. It could even get you right to your front door! They'd just have to pay some train drivers (conductors?) when the weather is too harsh for to put it in full auto mode.
We're going to get there. The benefits are too obvious and we can work around the persistent problems.
[+] [-] jaclaz|7 years ago|reply
Sure we will, no doubt about that.
The question is when?
In 10 to 20 years from now level 4 sounds reasonable, in 2 to 5 years from now it sounds not, notwithstanding the (daily) announces about this or that new autonomous driving system or related "breakthrough".
[+] [-] paganel|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] TulliusCicero|7 years ago|reply
It's the social problems that are hard for AI, like how to handle a construction zone that looks like you need to break the law to get around. Those don't always have easily generalizable answers.
[+] [-] Invictus0|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nolemurs|7 years ago|reply
Regardless of how you feel about the future of driverless cars, this is a safe article to skip - there's no content.
[+] [-] throw2016|7 years ago|reply
Since the hype and exuberance was entirely self created, how can anyone else be blamed? This is like blaming others for taking you seriously.
[+] [-] stevew20|7 years ago|reply
It would be nice if it would happen faster, we could cut the number of car accidents in half, car related fatalities by a quarter, and zero speeding tickets...
[+] [-] qrbLPHiKpiux|7 years ago|reply
“Shall hold manufacturer, software developer, etc not liable for any injury or death from the result of using car...”
[+] [-] montrose|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sakopov|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Consultant32452|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] XalvinX|7 years ago|reply