Safe Streets Rebel's protest comes after automatic vehicles were blamed for incidents including crashing into a bus and running over a dog. City officials in June said...
Safe Streets Rebel's protest comes after automatic vehicles were blamed for incidents including crashing into a bus and running over a dog. City officials in June said...
You make it sound like it's a 50/50 split between human drivers and autonomous vehicles, which is definitely not the case.
There are way more human drivers than autonomous vehicles. So, when an autonomous vehicle runs your child or pet over or whatever, who do you blame? The company? The programmers? The DMV for even allowing them on the road in the first place?
What's an autonomous vehicle do if it gets a flat? Park in the middle of the interstate like an idiot instead of pulling over and phone home for a mechanic?
DARPA figures out how to safely drive cars using LIDAR. Musk asked for a self driving car. Engineers come back the LIDAR solution. Musk fires them, says if humans can drive with two eyes, then so can computers. Cameras are cheaper than LIDAR. Second group tries it with cameras, can't get it to work, asked why they can't use LIDAR. Second group of engineers is fired. Third group comes up with something that 'kind of works'. People die. Big companies avoid self driving altogether, even though we have a perfect solution with LIDAR, all because Musk wanted to save a buck and can't get out of the way of his engineers.
I’ve worked on serious projects involving LiDAR. The LiDAR you need at these speeds and with this resolution cost almost as much as an Electric Car - it’s too expensive to reach wide adoption. But video processing with CNNs/RNNs has proven you can build the same level of data with cameras. You don’t even need binocular cameras now - if objects are moving you can generate binocular data by combining IMU data with time-series imagery.
As I understand it, Tesla’s delays aren’t related to image capture (which is where LiDAR could help). They’re related to trying to find universal actions to take against an almost infinite number of possible scenarios (mostly actions by human drivers).
the real funny here is how the USA has the most lax driving test standards in the developed world resulting in crazy amounts of road traffic accidents and really high mortality rates, but instead of dealing with shitty driving at the source there's a billion dollar industry in autonomous driving.
When a for profit company is deciding how much time/energy/funds they want to invest in pedestrian safety, you get LOUD and you stay that way forever.
Your comment is blind to the reality we live in and the broken, out of touch people deciding if human lives are a businesses priority, and at what percentages, as these types of vehicles scale.
When humans get in an accident, there were choices/mistakes made, but there are things we can understand in certain situations and find closure often. When elon's failed experiment decapitates your grandmother by driving her under a semi and sheering off the top off the car, you'll probably never settle with that image as long as you live - and you'll see elon in the news each day being a tool and never seeing justice for that moment.
There's a difference with distinction in this conversation.
Imagine your dog gets run over, you rush them to the vet but ultimately they die and your thousands out of pocket. You call the corporate helpdesk to log a claim because there isn't anyone else to contact, they offer you $300 in credit for immediate resolution or you can dispute. You become upset because your dog was more than a credit refund, the call centre drone says that you've become aggressive, that you can call back during business hours and hangs up.
Oh ok I didn't realize a person's life was worth less of they're killed by the mistake of another person instead of the mistake of a computer. Since it'll be easier for their loved ones to blame a person and just get over it then that's better. Thanks for explaining that!
Did you read the article? The protests are in favour of affordable public transit, instead of using 'surveillance pods' as a way to build even MORE roads. The accidents are probably the least of their concerns, although still on the list
90 accidents a year is a LOT, if you stop to think that there are like only a few dozens of them out there, versus more than a hundred million human drivers.
They stop for no reason, cause gridlocks that require a human to comd out to it and pilot it, they've run over fire hoses being used and don't always get out of the way for emergency service vehicles. Nice statistic though.
Comparing these two requires the number of cars with human drivers and the amount of time humans spend driving per year versus the number of autonomous vehicles and the amount of time they spend driving per year. I am not saying that you are wrong, I am just saying that comparing these numbers directly is like comparing apples with oranges.
I agree completely. My original post was just a stupid meme. I don't really think putting cones on the hoods of the cars is helping and that it's kind of dumb to do that and act smug about it. I'd rather people were sueing or something. I'm sure there is precedent for stopping manufacturers from making their vehicles more dangerous just to save a small percentage of money. I guess we do live in a capitalist utopia though so maybe I'm wrong but it seems like court might be more effective than trying to make these cars even more dangerous by adding a cone to the hood.
I live in the area and the streets are just clogged with these fucking autonomous cars. Traffic is slower, people end up having to swerve, it's just a constant persistent headache. If I had it my way, they'd all be off the streets and into the crusher
I'm envisioning a system where you tell it your location and where you want to go, then it automatically sets up a route for the bus that coincides with where most people want to go and tells you to get off when it's near your destination. This can work in conjunction with self driving taxis if no one else is going to your destination.
Public transit is better, but self-driving taxis are absolutely coming to every city in this country, which is great if you live in a city like mine that has little to no public transport infrastructure.
Also, automated taxis can service more rural areas, which is the key driver of lack of public transport in many "commuter cities."
Luddites gonna Luddite, but this tech is coming, and it's coming to logistics and taxis first.
I was in SF 4 years ago and it was insane how many self-driving cars were on the streets for tests. Especially on Lombard Street they just drove in circles. I can't imagine how annoying this is for someone who lives there
The interviewed protesters sound a little whacky. Maybe the cars are doing surveillance with the police, but that idea seems far fetched and unrealistic. Maybe I’m wrong.
I agree with more public transportation, bikes, and so forth, but I also agree with self driving cars. I dream of a future in which all cars are driven automatically without human drivers. Humans are very fallible and we all know, in almost every city, how many shitty drivers there are. Autonomous vehicles could fix this.
Maybe the cars are doing surveillance with the police, but that idea seems far fetched and unrealistic
I'm sure that's what people said about Ring, or Facebook messages being used to arrest women for abortions. Why would a company turn down an extra revenue stream (or subpoena)?
Facebook messages being used to arrest women for abortions.
That's a misrepresentation of what happened. The police already suspected her, and so they requested the information from Facebook. Facebook didn't voluntarily supply a bunch of data to the police for no reason, and then the police didn't comb through all the data to find this one crime that they otherwise didn't know about.
What is being suggested with the automatic cars is that the police are actively monitoring the surveillance footage looking for criminal activity. They definitely won't be doing that. It's way to much like work.
Cars are incredibly inefficient at transporting people though, like you need a massive highway to transport the amount of people a train can transport, not to mention how much higher maintenance roads are compared to train tracks.
Cars are incredibly inefficient at transporting groups of people long distances
FTFY
I'd love a legit train system to take me to locations across the state or country. But for running errands or local, day-to-day tasks, trains aren't the answer.
If all cars became autonomous there would no longer be traffic, it'd be similar to train cars in that they are linked together with no disruption in progress due to other cars/drivers.
Bay Area native here. They're also prone to dead stopping in the middle of the street and other moving violations, blocking emergency services and public transit in addition to normal traffic. Ideally, we'd like these vehicles to be held accountable for these violations like normal drivers: fines, suspensions, impounds. But we'll settle for a human driver on standby who can immediately override the software when a moving violation occurs.
How many autonomous cars are there compared to human-operated? Far far more.
I think you meant less.
Ideally, you'd be correct and we should be looking at per capita incidents- like how many incidents per 100 miles on the road or something. But the article just cited a flat number of incidents without contextualizing, which as you've pointed out can be misleading. Without knowing the ratio of AVs to human-driven vehicles, the best rebuttal that could be offered is "Yeah, but how do those 90 incidents compare to how people drive?"
The comparison needs to be normalized for distance driven. There's far more human driven cars. But most humans don't spend that long driving (I'm not sure how much of the day is spent driving by these AI cars, but they theoretically could drive all day long).
The quota also does say "involving", which may include accidents where someone else hits an AI driven car. If so, that's highly misleading.
To play devil's advocate, how many AVs are on the road everyday? There are millions of cars on the road so naturally there are going to be a ton of accidents.
One of the car companies is quoted as having caused no serious injuries or deaths, so it seems like the 90 incidents number only includes those. Unfortunately the article doesn't question those numbers or explain what is counted, which is very poor journalism. I don't understand how they can write about the protesters' motivations without asking how many moving violations those cars have caused, or at least mention that this number is unknown.
If the numbers indeed don't count the times where they block traffic, stop for no reason or block emergency vehicles where they need to wait for the company to send someone out to the car, then AV's could be far worse than human drivers, not only in the number of incidents but also in the total delays they cause. At least a human driver can be removed from the car so that someone more competent can take over and resolve the situation quickly. And a human generally doesn't just stop in a lane and refuse to move out of the way for a very long time.
Another bonus: a human can just remove a cone from the hood and continue driving.
And they will definitely be better than people. Just them being able to communicate with each other, even locally, can remove the need for traffic lights already.
There's a concern about more cameras recording all the time, and while I don't personally buy that argument (because being out in public means you don't have any expectation of privacy) I don't agree with these companies storing that data to give to police, effectively making Waymo or Cruise into private arms of law enforcement.
The reason that makes the most sense to me is it still encourages cities to be designed around cars, and not transit or people-oriented methods of travel. Even though they might make travel smoother by better decision-making than people, I'd still rather see more spaces devoted to foot traffic connected by buses or trains than the sprawl necessitated by personal vehicles.
Cars are freedom. You can go anywhere, anytime, without worrying about a delayed schedule or how many connections you'd need to get exactly where you're going.
You can listen to your own music and carry as much as you like, without worrying about someone trying to steal it or altercations with the public.
I agree we need electric cars, but anti-car policy is ultimately just trapping people in cities, allowing the rich to still enjoy their cars from commuter towns, etc. whilst the working class are stuck in overcrowded pod apartments. This is literally the reality in a lot of Spain, Sweden, etc. where you're lucky to get even a 70m2 apartment and parking is extortionate.
Some autonomous vehicles are not properly programmed to actually notice and properly avoid everything they should. For example, cyclists might be getting hit more by them.
I believe they are fighting to get the AI worked on more to actually avoid real obstacles.
Shame we can't do the same for people. I wouldn't be surprised to find that humans cause more of this type of problem than self-driving cars for the number of miles driven.