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Comment by yalogin | Hacker News Reader

I used to believe in the self driving hype. Then I learned ML and started working in related areas. Now I know full self driving is not happening, not with the technology/algorithms we have. So what ever anyone does is just an approximation and we will never be able to trust the car will handle any situation thrown at it. So its always going to be a souped up cruise control, the likes of which Tesla and others are selling. We need some kind of breakthrough to get fully autonomous self driving where we can sleep in the car while it takes us to the destination.

I would, of course, love to hear if folks here think I am wrong.

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This viewpoint seems to be a strange version of Schneier's law. Just because you learned ML and can't think of a way to make a car drive itself doesn't mean it is impossible.

I believe within the next few years we will see driverless long haul freight operations. Freeways are orders of magnitude easier than dynamic city streets, longer routes can be taken at little cost to avoid adverse conditions (a human rider isn't going to be ok with adding 10 hours to avoid a snow storm, a truck load of coffee beans doesn't care), and the cost of humans in this case is stupid high.

Once it is demonstrated in the real world that corporations stand to profit from eliminating drivers, you'll start to see pressure on the public sector to annotate the world. Stop signs will by law include an RF beacon, lanes will no longer be defined by paint but by transmitters in the pavement, federal law will mandate that personal vehicles transmit their location and dimensions to other nearby cars, etc.

Eventually once we have the infrastructure built, every new car will piggyback on it. Remember the Interstate Highway System was started in 1955 and completed in 1992 - progress just takes time.

Annotating every object on the road with RFID beacons seems like it actually would be an impossible project. Yes, you can attach beacons to stoplights and signs (although they already have “beacons” that display in the visible light spectrum).

But you can’t attach them to people like the homeless pedestrian killed by Uber’s test self driving car, animals, trash thrown on the roadway or falling off a truck, or a boulder falling from the side of a mountain.

And looking at the decades-long process it took to install PTC on train lines, it would take decades to install radio beacons on everything we can and by then technology should have advanced to the point where we don’t need them.

I saw a trash bag on the highway yesterday. It was full but looked light, as if it were stuffed with pillows or plastic bags. I could have safely hit it with my car (I didn't) whereas other objects that size I wouldn't. This decision making happens often like with pieces of paper or plastic bags. I thought about how much contextual knowledge it takes for us to make these everyday decisions.

There s however one thing you cant do but an ML solution probably could: share your contextual experience at the instinct level with every driver.

Say you're right and an ML model cannot know intrinsically the trash bag is safer to hit than to avoid, however, if a few car hit or avoid those for a little while they can learn of the consequence of both actions and then share them back to every other car.

I suppose as long as it can properly learn, it'll get there (and, more valuable: STAY there) eventually. The brain is an efficient machine that can work in highly complex network, but I dont know if the fact every brain is born mostly blank of experience is a good or bad thing to build much more complex specialized behaviour like driving with 0 death in an entire nation.

The leg up that I gave over a super-networked AI: I’ve seen a trash bag before. If the cars have to hit every item they see to find out what happens then we’re going to be here a while!

> share your contextual experience at the instinct level with every driver.

> Say you're right and an ML model cannot know intrinsically the trash bag is safer to hit than to avoid, however, if a few car hit or avoid those for a little while they can learn of the consequence of both actions and then share them back to every other car.

He is definitely, 100% right.

All this talk of networked AI/ML is a particularly insidious form of evangelism. Because it doesnt answer the questions that need asking.

There are people who will go out of their way to mess with driverless cars and I think the car needs to handle that somehow.

Heck, I’ve seen kids mess with real cars. Like the bag you mentioned, some idiots were taking cardboard boxes, filling them with rocks and putting them in the street waiting for the drivers to think “oh just it’s an empty cardboard box, not gonna slow down for it”.

Somehow I can see an AI driven car, especially without a person inside, becoming a target of bullying like that.

Perhaps it would be easier to build tougher cars rather than better ML.

It varies from state to state, but on average Type 1 (the most important) signs are replaced every 7 to 10 years.

If you tag each one with some sort of RF beacon, not only do you tell the car "this is the spot to stop" you also have an absolute fixed reference point and can correct GPS or other navigational systems.

At the point you know where everything is, and cars begin to share their location with each other, you have an absolute map of everything in the environment. If LIDAR detects anything that isn't part of the gold standard of what the world looks like, _that_ is an exception and handled as a danger (the person Uber should have detected had they had all the sensors turned on).

  Until the stop signed is knocked down and now is laying 5 meters away from the original position. Oops. You perfect spot to stop is now wrong.

Guess you can't trust the stop sign to always be in the correct place after all.

It would be sufficient just to have a) consistency, and b) 2D bar codes.

In most countries, every council does their own road markings and signage. Sure, there are laws, but they're implemented inconsistently. Worse, those laws are often ambiguous, intended for humans, and defined at the state level.

Ideally, all of the critical markings should have a single, consistent, internationally agreed standard. This doesn't have to be every road sign, but all of the really important lane markings and basic speed limits and stop signs should be consistent.

Then, these signs could have infrared 2D barcodes layered on top, which would guarantee machine readability.

Humans would benefit from the consistency, but wouldn't be able to even see the bar codes.

Cones are already, within a specific jurisdiction, a rather specific shade of orange. Except for sunlight, and shade variations, and fog, and dirt, and mud, and snow. An orange cone is easy to detect, visually. The problem is all of the real-world details and complications. If cones are the issue, the first city in the world to be brave enough to issue a requirement that all their contractors use cones that are unavoidably bright to self-driving cars (whatever the specific technology for them to be unavoidable. A discussion of how the shade of orange is/isn't enough, vs a radio marker isn't interesting to me), and will license companies for self-driving cars in that specific jurisdiction, will ride to prominence. Self-driving car companies will move there, and so will tech companies and then.... So Arizona realized this and did that a few years ago. The technology's still not there but it has become some sort of hub. If the Federal government had the bandwidth to do something about it and set standards and work with manufacturers to ensure it was safe along federally recognized guidelines, then.... Okay I'm sure the big players have lobbiests and that they're working with government to do so. The problem is that'll take time and, oh hey, have you seen the news lately? I get the sense the lunch to talk about self-driving cars got cancelled.

Unfortunately, traffic cones come in all sorts of shapes, sizes, and colours: https://hivis.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/hivis-trafficco...

I've also seen vertical poles: https://cdn2.bigcommerce.com/n-arxsrf/vpk2ddje/products/119/...

I also regularly see these water-filled barriers, in various colours including red, white, blue, and yellow: https://www.bronsonsafety.com.au/media/catalog/product/cache...

I wouldn't be surprised if some countries have custom-made things built from bamboo or whatever local materials are available...

We don't need to include the description 'homeless' unless we're talking about their housing status.

Small nit - drivers are only about a third of the cost of shipping. Adding 10 hours to remove the driver probably wouldn't make sense in a lot of cases.

PDF page 20 - https://truckingresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/ATRI...

Stated another way: You can ship something for 60% of the cost without a driver.

The commercial trucking industry goes bonkers over a solution that cut costs by even .5%.

Nah, this person saying ML cars don’t work is right unfortunately

I don't think stop signs with RF beacons is needed.

The cameras on the car can provide just as good an image as what a human eye can. The problem to be figured out is generating a mental model of the environment and reasoning about it.

Think "Brain in a vat" analogy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_in_a_vat

> Freeways are orders of magnitude easier than dynamic city streets

Yes they are. Although it's still not an easy problem. Occasionally I get sucked in to watching highway accident and road rage videos on youtube and try to consider which ones a ML could realistically handle. It's still a very complex random environment, even on interstates far away from cities.

I don't believe full self-driving has any chance of being a reality this century. It's far too complex a problem in an environment where all the edge cases do matter.

> annotate the world

This I do believe may start to happen in coming decades. But this is effectively an admission that actual self-driving isn't really possible, so the problem gets redefined to a smaller and easier scope.

Although even that will only work in limited access roads where nothing else can be present. Like barrier-separated HOV lanes but for these trucks.

Perhaps we should just bring back horses. BI as in biologic intelligence. Where I'm from it was common merely 100 years ago to exit the tavern, plonk yourself into the wagon, let the horse free and fall asleep in pleasant stupor. Usually the horse had no issues finding its way home. Usually. Sometimes it supercharged itself on a nearby pasture. Crashes were uncommon.

If you think this is sarcasm, it is not. That horse was clearly more reliable, adaptable and performant, not to mention safer, than anything Tesla or Wayomo is offering today.

I see what you are saying. We don’t need to build something as smart as a human. It just needs to be as smart as a horse. ABI. We can even train ABIs using horses. Where are you from? East europe or central asia? South america? I imagine itd be easier to train ABIs in certain countries. Heck even in western europe they can start with the beer deliveries. In america, the ABIs wont be so smart, they are limited to safe tourist areas.

Except that they poop and piss everywhere and need to be fed and watered.

Is that really worse than car/truck exhausts?

Horse manure is mostly dry and inoffensive, plus solutions to that problem have existed for hundreds of years in the form of bags hung from the harness, to collect the manure, which makes for excellent fertilizer.

That's biofuel!

I feel like the problem involves a liability shift.

If you stand or park on a railway track and get creamed, the pedestrian is going to be the target of blame.

We've come to the conclusion that the track belongs to the trains; at best the engineer can perform a limited, good-faith effort to stop and everyone knows that's not going to happen when you've got a kilometre-long, 10,000-tonne wad of physics rushing down slick metal rails at 60kph.

But if you walk into the middle of I-5 at rush hour, we still throw the legal and financial liability at drivers. Everyone is supposed to expect a rando suddenly stepping into the road and brake/steer around them. That's hard for humans and potentially harder for machines.

I could imagine a network of "autonomous only" roads which were much regulatorily much more like the rail infrastructure-- designed for minimum surprise (limited on/off ramps, limited turning points, predictable advance signing and marking, perhaps a block-control system to mitigate traffic flow) and limited recourse for pedestrians or human operators who enter the territory.

I don't think I-5 is the problem. City streets are the problem. Cars, bicycles, and pedestrians will always mix there, and there is no reasonable street design where that won't happen.

I think it will be way easier to rebuild our infrastructure around self driving than to teach computers how to react to human drivers.

Why not trains then? We could put the vehicles on tracks and link them together for extreme space and energy efficiency.

How long a train do we need to take me to the grocery store?

You don't need a long train, you just need enough to cause most people to not drive, then the grocery store will come to you.

Seriously, though, check out the density of grocery stores in areas with good public transportation. Your grocery store is far away from you, and huge, with a giant parking lot, because of cars. I have 3 grocery stores within a 5 minute walk. I also have 3 bakeries, a general butcher shop, two chicken butcher shops, 4 convenience stores, 3 dry cleaners, numerous clinics, and too many restaurants to count.

Cars ruin your city and you're simply unaware.

I agree.

Modern cars depend on modern road infrastructure. Like traffic lights, lane markers, traffic engineering, etc, enabled the efficiency and convenience we enjoy today.

And this infrastructure was built for human driver. And they do not work well for software driver.

>And this infrastructure was built for human driver. And they do not work well for software driver.

How much would it cost though for parallel infrastructure that is suitable for a software driver? (better signage, rfid tags in the roads, 'smart' traffic cones, etc.) For say the Bay Area. 10 billion to a few hundred billion? Speaking for myself, I'd be happy to pay say an additional 1% sales tax if it meant facilitating an area wide 24/7 autonomous 'public transit' taxi service, presumably with at-cost per mile fares.

I don't know. There has not been any serious effort in theoretizing the changes needed for software driver. The so-called vechle and road codesign has been mostly gimmick as far as I know.

I've considered this before, but never ironed out details. What would it entail? Magnets/IR/Beacons of some type marking roads and lanes? And each car would need them too I guess. It doesn't sound insurmountable, especially if the auto manufacturers worked together on speccing it out.

Recognizing the roads is not the biggest problem, it seems. It's the myriad of purely human situations. Anything and anyone can suddenly appear on the road in front of the car, not just traffic cones. Which means the AI needs a pretty much full understanding of the world it operates in.

On the other hand, isolating the roads for AV's from us may become a major inconvenience. I really don't see how this tech can evolve today, unless cars learn to fly already.

How is what Waymo offering anything like a souped up cruise control?

Sure it's EXTREMELY limited but that doesn't seem like an accurate description since they trust it enough to be liable for it to drive by itself or stop safely when it can't. Given the number of their cars going around SF lately I think they'll expand some soon too.

> How is what Waymo offering anything like a souped up cruise control?

It is actually less than that, since there is no Waymo car you can go out and buy. Driverless Uber rides are absolutely useless. When I order an Uber, how does it matter to me if it is driven by a human or a computer?

You're not. At least for a good few decades more.

Anyone committed to self driving cars needs to be a road building company and own the road network that will manage these mostly-automated efficiency lanes, with car provision (more likely tech/compatability licensing) as a secondary income stream.

Waymo is currently successfully handling extreme edge cases on city streets via a call center. Which is a viable option as their cars average 30,000 miles completely autonomously. Worst case come to a complete stop and then ask a human to take over is perfectly reasonable option.

Google running this as a pure Taxi substitute is seemingly a completely viable option today. They don’t need to be 100% autonomous as long as one person can handle a dozen or more cars that’s easily good enough to out compete traditional taxis or ride sharing services. Granted this is limited to a 50 square mile area, but collecting more data isn’t the difficult part.

Including all the expense of r&d, call center training, liability insurance etc.

Is this a viable business in a 50 square mile area? Is it scalable nationwide? Is it price competitive with traditional taxi and ride share?

The overnight use case is compelling as it opens entirely new transit options. Cars could be made competitive with air travel for the overnight use case. And traffic wouldn’t be nearly as large of a concern for most if they weren’t driving.

> Is it scaleable nationwide? Is it price competitive with traditional taxi and ride share?

Yes to both, critically you can use a hybrid approach for outlying areas and cities lacking regulatory approval. By comparison DC is only 61 square miles and San Francisco is 47 square miles so this is plenty of area for local service and a reasonable benchmark for expansion.

What’s not mentioned is the cars do need someone to clean them and fill up the tank etc, but that’s hardly an additional expense.

I think the real innovation would be having my car be equipped with a bunch of sensors and cameras, and then have a well paid dedicated remote driver in a third world country doing the driving for me. I'm only half joking.

"Tunnel approaching. You have 5 seconds to take control until connection can be reestablished."

It's pretty crazy how tunnels can sometimes just pop out of nowhere such that an automated system with extensive mapping can't predict them more than 5 seconds early.

BUFFERING… BUFFERING…

Remember Taylor Series or polynomial expansion from calc I. You can fit something until it doesn't. With a really large number of terms you can fit a lot.

Is the future driver assistance perfected to the point where the car lets you drive but prevents you from doing something bad?

Try to jerk the wheel into the woods and it won't obey.

The moment driver assistance is good enough to overrule human input, it ceases to be merely driver assistance.

It’s unlikely this will ever be the case.

Navigating is more difficult than just not crashing.

That’s my point. The moment that a car says the safest thing to do isn’t to veer off the road (maybe to avoid a large compressed gas carrier in front) even when the human says it is, then we’ve achieved L5

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