Comment by noobermin
3 years ago
Why should we change city infrastructure to work with less than AGI driven cars? It sounds instead like yes, AV companies are over selling what they can do and they should be restricted to things like highways and the like where the easier, less complex driving environment already exists.
Cities are by far the most complex relative to every other driving environment, in fact there is a good argument that, in cities, cars should be much more restricted because of health effects and traffic deaths, and the less complex areas (highways) are already the bulk of the drudgery in driving, but are much easier to automate, so why not do it for there?
Not all driving outside city areas happens on the highways.
My brother lives in the countryside (somewhere in the EU), and, as a driver, he shares the paved road just outside his house with the village’s cows (including his two cows). I don’t see any non-AGI system being able to negotiate that, as at times is difficult even for me, a reasonably AGI system, to make sense of it all when I encounter a herd of loose cows on the road.
Sparsely populated rural areas are really the only place where personal autos make sense. Long distance highway travel is better serviced by train. And transportation inside the city is better serviced by literally anything except a car (bikes, e-bikes, subway, trams, scooters, walking).
Even cities with decent public transport networks (such as Prague) tend to have a problem with tangential relations. Most lines go from some periphery to the center and to another periphery. If you need to travel between two peripheries, you have to be somewhat lucky to have a line connecting them at your disposal. Going through the center and back to the other periphery is possible, but usually takes too long. (e.g. 1h 30 min instead of 15 minutes by car).
> Sparsely populated rural areas are really the only place where personal autos make sense
This might be true, if rural areas and densely populated uran areas were the only 2 states, but there's a lot of intermediate density in between
Having kids makes car sharing very unattractive. Finding car sharing with enough (and high quality) car seats can be quite challenging. And as much as I like public transport, with kids using the car is often much faster.
How do you get around the sparsely-populated rural areas at either end of the highway?
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/fRAAf83QzR0
And this is just a single clip. The huge advantage Tesla has is their massive amount of training data. If it happens in the real world, they probably have a clip of it and can train on it.
Sheep are worse. They run from one side of the road across you to get away from you.
Add to that the vagueness of where the road ends and field/bank begins for many country roads.
2 replies →
Oh come on, it’s just collision avoidance, you don’t need general AI for that
Collision avoidance that needs object permanence including theory of mind (for cows). How hard could it be?
2 replies →
One good reason is to help the AIs make better decisions through greater certainty. For example, if a road sign has machine readable data there is a greater certainty that an AI will interpret it correctly. This could affect safety and ease of implementation.
The question is what value would a city get after, what seems to be, a very expensive process? What value do they get from unlocking semi competent AI cars that's worth the time, effort, and requires dedicated street space and an inconvenience to everyone else who travels a different way? It doesn't seem like it's replacing public transit and if someone needs a private vehicle to go beyond the area that's optimized they'll need a different transportation solution. It seems like a lot of cost for a very small benefit.
A very small benefit for society but potentially a very large benefit for a select few stakeholders.
Musk largely became the richest person on the planet off the back of the promise that nobody else would have decent EV tech (turns out, they do), nobody else would have the battery production capacity (turns out, they do, plus super ironic when Tesla is partnering with Panasonic for battery production), AND the promise of fully self driving cars (which will happen for Tesla immediately after flying cars).
I don't have a good term for this, but it's basically corruption: a few benefit at the cost of everyone else.
5 replies →
How is my example, street signs, an inconvenience to others or needs dedicated street space? Signs need to be replaced anyway, just add a code at the next replacement.
You're thinking back and white "it's not replacing...". What does that matter? To me what matters is "can we make transport better"
I thought the question was "can we actually make fully autonomous vehicles?" If we have that, the value is pretty obvious.
If a so-called AI needs help reading a road sign then it stands no chance dealing with the rest of it's surroundings.
Then someone spray paints the sign, a taxi parks in the bike lane just behind a box truck blocking half the entrance to where you're going, meanwhile a cyclist rides the other direction directly toward you because human agents are chaotic and cities are full of them. Oh, a racoon!
Less tongue in cheek: I think we should optimize city centers for human scales and activities, rather than sending cars right through them at all. We already sacrifice so much for cars in their current state, if we have to optimize for their mobility even moreso we are going in the wrong direction I feel.
I'm not saying get rid of cars, just keep them out of the denser parts of cities and the CBD. Put them on roads, not streets.
Cars should just be blocked from cities unless very special situations. Removing cars from cities has huge health and economic benefits. Car free city centers are universally better then car invested cities.
Cars where they are still allowed should move significantly slower, on much thinner roads.
Self-Driving will not solve anything for cities. They will solve even less then EVs.
It seems like it would be cheaper and easier to get rid of cars entirely
But not politically palatable :-)
The environment requires too many constraints, in a city it wouldn’t be unusual for someone to vandalize these road signs.
How well would that work during snow, fog, storms, how resilient would it be to vandalism? Sounds extremely fragile.