Any evidence they are not doing these things?
okay, they are probably not doing a lot of this: - not driving on unimproved (dirt) county roads. But I doubt a significant percentage of other folks do a lot of it either.
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okay, they are probably not doing a lot of this: - not driving on unimproved (dirt) county roads. But I doubt a significant percentage of other folks do a lot of it either.
ttupper92618
Member
JeffK
Well-Known Member
Nearly every one of those situations is taken care of in the new mobileye work...
That's my point. The easy stuff was mastered years ago. Those situations have been the more recent focus and model 3 is still two years away.
Look from 2005:
That's my point. The easy stuff was mastered years ago. Those situations have been the more recent focus and model 3 is still two years away.
Look from 2005:
Thanks for the link. After looking through Google's site, I can buy an argument that they are not doing much on dirt roads.
I see nothing that says or implies that they are not driving in bad weather.
As far as " not driving in the idiosyncratic, dangerous, or life threatening conditions where complex situational awareness is required." I don't think it is possible to drive on public roads and not encounter idiosyncratic, dangerous, or life threatening conditions where complex situational awareness is required on a regular basis.
I suspect neither of us is going to convince the other, so perhaps it would be best to agree to disagree.
We can't have human drivers not just because of accidents - but traffic.
LA, DC, Houston, South FL - imagine it all goes away because computers make appropriate undistracted decisions. Sorry but human drivers suck and traffic goes away without them. Also the energy use plummets 20% by getting rid of wasteful humans. And most people want to do something else while driving anyway.
LA, DC, Houston, South FL - imagine it all goes away because computers make appropriate undistracted decisions. Sorry but human drivers suck and traffic goes away without them. Also the energy use plummets 20% by getting rid of wasteful humans. And most people want to do something else while driving anyway.
Um not true, a lot of people like to drive, we just can't help it if you car is crappy and boring to drive.
With the exception of in the middle of downtown or on a freeway during busy traffic, do you think humans should still be able to drive? Because I thing we NEED to be able to control our vehicles.
stopcrazypp
Well-Known Member
This article from August 2014 is a bit old, but Google said it couldn't handle heavy rain or snow or potholes.
Hidden Obstacles for Google’s Self-Driving Cars
JeffK
Well-Known Member
If you want to see where Tesla and other auto manufactures are going check out the talk on sensing from Mobileye
For a roadmap of where Mobileye is going from from early 2015
Specifically obstacles and snow are mentioned in the second video. Having experience with deep neural networks myself I find this stuff extremely interesting.
For a roadmap of where Mobileye is going from from early 2015
Specifically obstacles and snow are mentioned in the second video. Having experience with deep neural networks myself I find this stuff extremely interesting.
ttupper92618
Member
Don't be so sure we are that far apart; I try to be reasonable, and I'm quite aware of the doubling function involved here, and how quickly things are advancing. I am, accordingly, aware I may be very wrong, and I may wind up being overly-pessimistic.
In general terms, I'm really not arguing that we won't have a technical capacity which would allow a large percentage of driving tasks to be done autonomously - maybe even in 4 or 5 years - I think we will. But I'm not sure we will have 100% coverage in my lifetime. I think there will continue to be edge cases which mean cars will still need human input in those circumstances, and that in turn means that most cars will continue to have human-operable controls.
We'll see.
Dan Detweiler
Active Member
You know this whole subject may come down, not to a matter of will we have the technology. That is just a matter of time. The question may very well come down to will we ever WANT to totally give up the driving experience. I would hope that driving autonomy would be a tool that could be used to make certain driving experiences safer and more efficient. That being said, we all know that there are times...many times...where the driving experience is a visceral one that stimulates the senses and is enjoyable in and of itself. I hope it doesn't come down to an all or nothing scenario.
Dan
Dan
I don't see how that's possible. There can be various degrees of autonomous driving, but "fully autonomous" by definition means that the car must be capable of driving itself with no human involvement whatsoever (i.e. nobody needs to even be inside the car).
Now it's certainly possible for a fully autonomous car to have restrictions on where it can drive (just as a human driven car has restrictions on where it can drive depending on the capabilities of the car or driver).
I'm not quite sure what you mean by 100% coverage. As I pointed out in my previous post human driven cars don't have "100% coverage" meaning that they can drive anywhere in any conditions. But when will we get to the point where a car can drive without any occupants and transport people who do are not capable of driving (under reasonably normal conditions)? Because that's the game changer.
JeffK
Well-Known Member
I don't think a car needs absolute full autonomy to take over the responsibilities of say an uber or taxi driver. There's not even complex parking involved. Doing that alone would be a huge accomplishment.
I'd be perfectly happy if it could get me from the end of my driveway to the outside of a parking garage at work. It's my daily commute that's incredibly boring, I get distracted because I'm so bored. I really feel like this is why people have accidents close to home, they're so used to the drive they get bored and no longer drive defensively.
Of course we should all have the ability to manually drive, I'm not a fan of Google approach of not having a steering wheel especially if the car is going to be as fun to drive as the Model 3 is going to be.
I'd be perfectly happy if it could get me from the end of my driveway to the outside of a parking garage at work. It's my daily commute that's incredibly boring, I get distracted because I'm so bored. I really feel like this is why people have accidents close to home, they're so used to the drive they get bored and no longer drive defensively.
Of course we should all have the ability to manually drive, I'm not a fan of Google approach of not having a steering wheel especially if the car is going to be as fun to drive as the Model 3 is going to be.
ttupper92618
Member
Exactly this - this is I think the area which causes confusion. From my perspective, an autonomous vehicle that can only operate safely in, say, 30% of the conditions it may encounter... is not autonomous. Here's why: road conditions change, sometimes severely.
I grew up in the midwest so perhaps I have a perspective that people native to more sunny regions may not. It would take hours to expound upon the number of times, in my youth, I found myself shoving cardboard and rock salt under the drive wheels of my (or a random stranger's) car while trying to extract the vehicle from a snow drift... or even to just get out of the parking lot at work after a snow plow had been through, or after an unexpected plunge in temperature had turned light rain into ice.
And that sort of variability in real world conditions is why it is unreasonable to expect that fully autonomous vehicles will really be workable unless their limitations closely approximate a human driver. As a thought experiment, what happens to the commuters who got to work in their autonomous Google cars (with no human controls) when that sudden ice storm makes the car decide it cannot safely drive? They don't go home, I suppose. What happens when a snow plow leaves a 1 foot column of snow all the way across the intersection where the car wants to turn? I guess it doesn't, and just gets stuck there. What happens when rain causes flooding, and the vehicle finds itself in rising waters, and needs to get out? Does it shut down, because the driving conditions are unsafe?
The questions involved here range from convenience factors to safety.
My point here is that in the real world, limitations of the sort you describe will cause consumers to reject the technology, because it will be both inconvenient and occasionally unsafe. And that burden - the burden required to overcome consumer objections - will be much higher for vehicles that don't allow human input (like Google's cars), because people will expect them to be more capable than another vehicle of a similar class.
What I expect to see, really, is an approach much more like Tesla's - I expect to see autopilot features get better and better, such that the conditions in which they can reliably autonomously drive increase until the point that in day to day conditions, they will mostly be able to drive unassisted. However, there will still be conditions in which a human will have to intervene. And that brings us back to where we started, because by definition, a vehicle that requires human input, no matter how infrequently... is not a fully autonomous vehicle.
But to take a different point of view of customer acceptance. You talk about somebody who could drive their own car choosing a no-control driverless car, but how about the ability to not own a car and summon one at any time, the ability of an elderly person no longer able to safely drive, and person coming home after a party with a couple too many drinks to be able to get to where they need to go without the incredible expense that goes along with having human taxi drivers. Doesn't having those abilities compensate for some of the other tradeoffs? The question is at what stage a car is considered to be reliable enough to be able to meet those needs, where having human takeover simply isn't possible.
Exactly. However since driving necessarily involves a human element - directions after main road, gesturing around traffic, etc we would have to force the public to accommodate the so called "autonomous" car's limitations in order for it to function in the same set of circumstances as a human driver would be expected to function. Many places and situations where humans have no problem navigating and problem solving will have to be made "robot friendly" in order for the car to understand what to do. Since all that is not forthcoming in the near term...
Although in all fairness, I bet a computer can do a lot better job than a ton of drivers I've observed in unpredictable situations. The greatest challenge for the computer isn't figuring out what to do, it's dealing with all the stupid stuff the human drivers decide to do.
Even if the computer could do a better job than a human in unpredictable situations, it still would not be sophisticated enough for full autonomy. The problem is that completely predictable and human-understandable situations occur where a relatively dumb car would fail to identify and/or understand the required task(s). The public would need to provide robot cars special guidance and concessions in order for them to not be late or disruptive to other traffic.
Like for example where single-lane traffic is stopped and the car in front is motioning for the autonomous car to go around, due to a stall. But the car in front's view is obscured by something, and actually there is a cop gesturing for traffic to stop.
Or when a 4-way traffic light is out with heavy traffic, but drivers are not moving through in any order.
Here's some completely predictable situation where a human would always succeed yet an autonomous car would fail:
After some heavy rain, a shallow stream runs through crossable road / A not-so shallow stream is runnng through the road
Road near construction site has a bunch of nails scattered
Cop simply says clear the area or go back the way you came
Narrow parking decks with various unmarked entrances and exits, where drivers must take turns moving
Access gates with remote attendants
Blind driveway
Sign or light at same angle as sun or reflecting sun
Something insubstantial like a thin piece of electrified wire is dangling ahead in car's lane
A tornado is crossing the road just ahead
