None of what is mentioned above is a deal-breaker for self-driving car service:
- lidar at night works just fine
- plenty of cities with no or very little snow
- construction zones: blacklisting, remote monitoring & manual mapping, detection of cones, barriers, re-painted lanes
- self-driving cars with 360 degree view and plenty of patience and no distraction are safer for bicyclists than manually driven cars
An auto-auto (I'm using that term unabashedly for "self-driving cars", you can too) has to be able to perceive and understand that the car in the next lane with the mattress poorly tied down might, at any moment, suddenly become two large moving objects. And so on.
If we set it up right the whole fleet will learn from the experiences of each member, likely in near-realtime. More than just traffic conditions, this will help with things like emergency response.
(We should be making self-driving nerf golfcarts with a top speed of maybe 15kph. Duh! We could make those today and sell a million and then incrementally make f'ing sportscars and sh!t.)
On second thought I bet you could make a decent auto-auto out of a dog's brain... https://villains.fandom.com/wiki/Rat_Things_(Snow_Crash)
Yes, let’s rely on a single sensor.
> - plenty of cities with no or very little snow
But plenty of city have plenty of snow. So perhaps not a deal breaker in a limited set of circumstances.
> - construction zones: blacklisting, remote monitoring & manual mapping, detection of cones, barriers, re-painted lanes
Why should we add to already high construction costs just because the self driving tech isn’t up to snuff?
>- self-driving cars with 360 degree view and plenty of patience and no distraction are safer for bicyclists than manually driven cars
Citation?
Ultimately humans cannot match the senses of an automated car, the problem is in processing and integrating. Which we are pretty far away from solving in a general case.
https://youtu.be/B8R148hFxPw?t=148
What the car is in essence doing is driving by GPS and maps while staring at its feet. It is not as bad as driving with your eyes closed, but it's not that much better.
Further, some of the infrastructure it is relying on, like lane markings, are very poorly maintained.
If railroads were invented today they would never be allowed. They can't stop for miles? You have to teach everyone everywhere to stay off the tracks? How's that supposed to work?
It's good that our safety standards are a lot higher today for new tech, but perhaps there are a few common sense rules that could be taught, rather than requiring perfection?
I think the analogy to railroads is a bit tenuous. There are immediate benefits to connecting two sufficiently separated points with a rail line. A single stretch of properly marked and instrumented roadway is relatively worthless[1].
[1] Trucking being a potential exception.
But what happens that rare day it snows? Hundreds of deads? Cars get recalled for much less than that.
But in this specific case of snow, I think this could be handled in a decent way by AI, as I would not expect snow conditions to be too hard to detect. Even something like "grip is not good enough for autopilot/snow detected on/around the road, stop on the side or slow down to the point of being impossible to have a fatal car crash until driver takes over" would be good enough.
Sure they may perform worse in snow but humans do too.
What's missing from AI is reliability. It's brittle, it works well in some situations and not at all in others.
Which is a problem, because you can never be sure how well it's working for you.
There's no anti-Dunning-Kruger-function to say "I'm sorry Dave, I can't handle this, you should take over" - partly because that's not something you want to experience driving into a hail storm at 70mph on a freeway if you're asleep, but also because it would require a level of domain-specific AI self-awareness that is barely on the radar in most domains.
Explanation is harder. But we probably shouldn't care, even in courts people cannot often explain what and why they did while driving, or they just lie. The thing is, for liability purposes you have to ensure it is not a series defect and that a good human driver would not be able to handle it
But is it sufficient to answer _why_ the machine chose to act a certain way given a certain set of instantaneous input criteria?
This is why "crazy" people make us so uneasy. They don't fit our mental models for how a human should act. Would you be comfortable driving with a road full of unpredictable "crazies"?
I wonder if we'll ever have the same level of trust with AI as humans if it is still being used at a black box level.
From my perspective the idea of a self driving taxi is the opposite of public transit in the worst possible way: pay more so fewer people have a job and you’re even more lonely and alienated than before. If I indulge I’m just making myself and everyone around me more miserable, and no amount of marketing will convince me otherwise.
The area where I’d appreciate this the most is the country where uber and lyft haven’t reached yet, and that’s precisely the environment where self driving cars will take the longest to reach. We’ll see.
Plus, I can’t wait to see the game of “beat the shit out of the corporate empire’s self driving car for fun when drunk”.