Comment by binoct
7 months ago
One of my favorite things to question about autonomous driving is the goalposts. What do you mean the “stated goal of full self driving”, which is unachievable? Any vehicle, anywhere in the world, in any conditions? That seems an absurd goal that ignores the very real value in having vehicles that do not require drivers and are safer than humans but are limited to certain regions.
Absolutely driving is cultural (all things people do are cultural) but given 10’s of millions of miles driven by Waymo, clearly it has managed the cultural factor in the places they have been deployed. Modern autonomous driving is about how people drive far more than the rules of the road, even on the highly regulated streets of western countries. Absolutely the constraints of driving in Chennai are different, but what is fundamentally different? What leads to an impossible leap in processing power to operate there?
> What do you mean the “stated goal of full self driving”, which is unachievable? Any vehicle, anywhere in the world, in any conditions? That seems an absurd goal that ignores the very real value in having vehicles that do not require drivers and are safer than humans but are limited to certain regions.
I definitely recall reading some thinkpieces along the lines of "In the year 203X, there will be no more human drivers in America!" which was and still is clearly absurd. Just about any stupidly high goalpost you can think of has been uttered by someone in the world early on.
Anyway, I'd be interested in a breakdown on reliability figures in urban vs. suburban vs. rural environments, if there is such a thing, and not just the shallow take of "everything outside cities is trivial!" I sometimes see. Waymo is very heavily skewed toward (a short list of) cities, so I'd question whether that's just a matter of policy, or whether there are distinct challenges outside of them. Self-driving cars that only work in cities would be useful to people living there, but they wouldn't displace the majority of human driving-miles like some want them to.
I mean, even assuming the technical challenges to self-driving can be solved, it is obvious that there will still be human drivers because some humans enjoy driving, just as there are still people who enjoy riding horses even after cars replaced horses for normal transport purposes. Although as with horses, it is possible that human driving will be seen as secondary and limited to minor roads in the future.
I'd apprecite that we dont hurry past the acknowledgement that self driving will be a cultural artifact. Its been championed as a purely technical one, and pointing this out has been unpopular since day 1, because it didn't gel with the zeitgeist.
As others will attest, when adherence to driving rules is spotty, behavior is highly variable and unpredictable. You need to have a degree of straight up agression, if you want to be able to handle an auto driver who is cheating the laws of physics.
Another example of something thats obvious based on crimes in India; people can and will come up to your car during a traffic jam, tap your chassis to make it sound like there was an impact, and then snatch your phone from the dashboard when you roll your window down to find out what happened.
This is simply to illustrate and contrast how pared down technical intuitions of "driving" are, when it comes to self driving discussions.
This is why I think level 5 is simply not happening, unless we redefine what self driving is, or the approach to achieving it. I feel theres more to be had from a centralized traffic orchestration network that supplements autonomous traffic, rather than trying to solve it onboard the vehicle.