this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2024
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I mean... self driving cars probably will. Just not as soon as they think. My guess, at least another decade.
Not until a self driving car can safely handle all manner of edge cases thrown at it, and I don’t see that happening any time soon. The cars would need to be able to recognize situations that may not be explicitly programmed into it, and figure out a safe way to deal with it.
As someone said on this thread: as soon as they can convince legislators, even if they are murder machines, capital will go for it.
Borrowing from my favorite movie: "it's just a glitch".
I doubt it. The liability would be far too great. Ambulance chasing lawyers would salivate at the chance to represent the families of pedestrians struck and killed by buggy self driving cars. Those capitalists don't want endless years of class action cases tying up their profits.
When was the last time a corporation got anything other than a slap on the wrist and a small donation to the government just so they could keep doing what they're doing?
Like Boeing. As much as I hate people saying dumb shit about a company they don't know much of anything about, Boeing is the epitome of what you said. A company getting a small slap on the wrist for gross negligence in the name of profit. Especially because of all the goodies they develope for the US Federal Government. And since they are a world wide company our government isn't the only one. They know they reside in a place of power because they fill a hole in an industry that basically has to be filled. And people want to try to bankrupt them with some weird ideas about voting with their dollar. But that's nonsense.
People don't understand about how they build planes not to sell but to lease. How these types of leases keep their customers paying out the nose for an asset they don't own, and responsible for the maintenance of that asset until it's time to upgrade. They cornered the market on enshitification long before the likes of Microsoft and Google, and they have mastered the art of it.
Tesla or Uber or whoever wish they could do what Boeing has been doing for decades. People have this rose tinted glasses view of what Boeing "used to be" when it was "run by engineers" etc. That's hilarious to me. Back in the day they hedged their bets in a race to the bottom to develop a two engined plane that wouldn't catastrophically fail and fall out of the sky if it lost an engine so they could skirt worldwide federal regulations that required planes to have more than two engines. This added to upkeep and fuel costs making it untenable and creating air travel that was incredibly expensive. And their engineers managed it, so they played the long game, basically allowing them to develop planes that were more fuel efficient and cost effective to maintenance meaning their customers could afford to buy more of them by providing air travel opportunities to more people.
You know what we got from that? Shittier seating arrangements, poorly manufactured planes, and baggage fees out the whazoo in addition to ever rising ticket prices for air travel.
Alternatively measures could be put in place to eliminate certain edge cases. You can see similar concepts in places with separate infrastructure for things like busses or HOV lanes. Places you could still ostensibly allow "regular" vehicles to travel but limit/eliminate pedestrians or merging.
Abolish snowfall
We're working on it, although for some parts of the world we will need to go through periods of increased snowfall to get there.
Tbf human operated cars are also murder machines, we just are more amenable to tolerating it
there will be a massive building in like india with many thousand of atrociously paid workers donning VR goggles who spend their long hours constantly Quantum Leap finding themselves in traumatizing last second emergency situations that the AI gives up on. Instantly they slam on the brakes as hard as they can. They drink tea. there's suicide netting everywhere. they were the lowest bidder this quarter.
I wish I could give this comment more than a simple upvote. I want to mail you a freshly baked cinnamon bun.
Plus, as soon as the cars can drive themselves people will stop needing Uber in many cases.
No parking? Just tell your car to go park on a street 10 blocks away.
Drunk? Car drives itself while you sleep.
Going to the airport? Car drops you off and returns home. Car also picks you up when you are back.
This is combined with the fact that people will do more disgusting things in an Uber without the driver there. If you have ever driven for Uber, you know that 10% of people are trying to eat or drink in the car. They are going to spill and it's going to end up like the back of a bus.
Not sure if we're agreeing and saying exactly the same thing here, but Uber's business model is to get suckers who are bad at math to own the cars. Uber's business model does not work if they have to own their own cars. Self-driving Uber doesn't work because Uber would have to own the cars and therefore has to cover vehicle insurance, vehicle depreciation, and so on out of its own margin.
Their accident rate continues to decrease and things like quorum sensing and platooning are going to push them to be better than humans. You're never going to have a perfect system that never has accidents, but if you're substantially better than humans in accidents per mile driven and you're dramatically improving throughput and reducing traffic through V2X, it's going to make sense to fully transition.
I imagine some east Asian countries will be the first to transition and then the rest of the world will begrudgingly accept it once the advantages become clear and the traditional car driving zealots die off.
The robot taxi from Total Recall came to mind while reading your reply. Our future is almost assuredly dystopian.
"handle" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. The signs are already there that all of these edge cases will just be programmed as "safely pull over and stop until conditions change or a human takes control". Which isn't a small task in itself, but it's a lot easier than figuring out to continue (e.g.) on ice.
Just like all humans can do right now, right?
I never see any humans on the rode staring at their phone and driving like shit.
The problem with self-driving cars isn't that it's worse than human drivers on average, it's that it's SO INCREDIBLY BAD when it's wrong that no company would ever assume the liability for the worst of its mistakes.
But if the average is better, then we’re will clearly win by using it. I’m not following the logic of tracking the worst case scenarios as opposed to the average.
Average is better means fewer incidents overall. But when there are incidents, the damages for those incidents tend to be much worse. This means the victims are more likely to lawyer up and go after the company responsible for the AI that was driving, and that means that the company who makes the self-driving software better be prepared to pay for those worst case scenarios, which will now be 100% their fault.
Uber can avoid liability for crashes caused by their human drivers. They won't be able to do the same when their fleet is AI. And when that happens, AI sensibilities will be measured my human metrics because courts are run by humans. The mistakes that they make will be VERY expensive ones, because a minor glitch can turn an autonomous vehicle from the safest driving experience possible to a rogue machine with zero sense of self-preservation. That liability is not worth the cost savings of getting rid of human drivers yet, and it won't be for a very long time.
Those self-driving cars are called trains. They already can be self-driving. In a situation where the computational complexity and required precision are somewhat controlled, that is, on train tracks.
Maybe, or maybe like harnessing fusion it will always be “just a few more years away!”
Self driving taxis are definitely happening, but the people getting rich in a gold rush are the people selling shovels.
Uber has no structural advantage because their unique value proposition is the army of cheap drivers.
We're a century away from self-driving cars that can handle snowfall
Just this year farmers with self-driving tractors got screwed because a solar flare made GPS inaccurate and so tractors went wild because they were programmed with the assumption of GPS being 100% reliable and accurate with no way to override
I'm right there with you, but I also remember hearing that this time last decade.
Way longer. Roads will have to be designed and maintained with them in mind.