6 ms·

While I hope the technology succeeds I don't think it is going to be as big of a change as people think. If you are upper middle class in a large city where lab

by njoro 8y ago

While I hope the technology succeeds I don't think it is going to be as big of a change as people think. If you are upper middle class in a large city where labour is cheap, like in some Asian countries, driving is already close to free. And while that is somewhat nice from a quality of life perspective, it also means that rush hour traffic is horrible and sitting in a car isn't much more fun just because it is cheap. Basically a car is still a car.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
airstrike 8y ago
The idea is that with autonomous driving nobody needs to own a car and traffic jams are severely reduced because robots don’t drive like assholes (or at least by design shouldn’t...)
- njoro 8y ago
  Not having to own a car to travel by car will of course increase driving, or being driven really. A situation where there is only self-driving cars is probably decades away at he minimum. And that doesn't really solve inherent throughput or speed issues.
  - jellicle 8y ago
    Not only "doesn't really solve", but "makes vastly worse".
    - tim333 8y ago
      Not necessarily >... technology move people from their homes or work to existing public infrastructure hubs could be a thing. Also maybe some sort of road pricing to stop them being clogged with empty cars going to get pizza.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    Not having to own a car to travel by car will of course increase driving, or being driven really. I'm not sure. When you own a car, you pay large fixed costs but your marginal cost per mile is low, whereas with rented cars it's the reverse. Sure, people who don't own cars currently will probably ride more, but everyone who does have a car now will have an incentive to ride less.
    - ghaff 8y ago
      Your visible marginal cost (i.e. mostly your fuel) may be low but the vast bulk of car costs are proportional to mileage--especially in areas where salt in various forms (winter roads, marine) isn't an issue.
      - icebraining 8y ago
        It doesn't really matter if it's lower than the fixed costs, it matters whether it's lower than these hypothetical rented cars, and most likely, it is.
  - airstrike 8y ago
    Even if self-driving cars are 50% of the fleet, these cars drive better and can collectively work around traffic jams, so even human-driven cars benefit from automation.
- sf_rob 8y ago
  They may also lower the costs (time, effort, money) of driving. That will almost certainly lead to more driving and likely greater urban sprawl.
- agumonkey 8y ago
  And mostly because they can drive when you're not in it. I'd be very curious to see city simulations where people just get off 200m from their job and wave their car goodbye as they can park somewhere else smoothly.
  - tekno45 8y ago
    In the techies dream world, the car goes off and, gives someone else who starts work a little later than you a ride.
    - agumonkey 8y ago
      Yeah sure, in the fully shared/non-owned system that would be it. A fleet of non polluting transportation mules.
  - dmd 8y ago
    In America people will get in the car to drive 200m instead of walking.
- jellicle 8y ago
  Because that's always what happens when you make something better: people use less of it. What?
  - airstrike 8y ago
    That's clearly not what I said.
2bitencryption 8y ago
Uber went from zero to essentially killing off taxis, despite the fact that "a car is a car". Primarily because they don't pay as much for their fleet as a taxi service does. What's coming next is going to be that, except you don't have to pay your drivers anything because you don't have drivers! (yes, there will be huge technical overhead of running this system and maintaining the cars/hardware, but over time this will become mass produced, and become cheap).
- atomical 8y ago
  Uber went from zero to killing off a pedestrian, despite having LIDAR tech. Downvoted by Uber devs no doubt.
- icantdrive55 8y ago
  Don't discount the power of future legislation. Right now the wealthy definetly control politicians. In a few years, poor people who have been the kicked around by technology might be voting in huge numbers? They will definetly be the majority of the population. Voting, along with tying corrupt politicians to wealthy donors; might throw a wrench in all this "progress". Sorry folks--losing jobs to technology, and being told to get your side-hustle on my the 1 percent does not calm the horrid existences of poor families. It's all cool when you can afford to use the tech. It's all cool except when the tech takes your job. When the Hispanics, whom have been scapegoated, get together with the low skilled white underemployed/underpaid segment of the population; things might get sticky for the tech boys club. I feel a simmering rage. I don't think I'm alone. Oh yea, watch what happens to the highly paid tech worker in a decade from now, or sooner. Remember most are not engineers, or scientists; they're JavaScript commerce soldiers.
- perl4ever 8y ago
  "Uber went from zero to essentially killing off taxis, despite the fact that "a car is a car". Primarily because they don't pay as much for their fleet as a taxi service does." Uber (and possibly other similar companies) is a huge charity for passengers funded with investment money. It's definitely premature to declare they've demonstrated or accomplished anything before they operate on a sustainable basis. I do think using a credit card an app is far superior to the way taxi businesses are traditionally run, regardless of price, but I also don't see why traditional taxis can't adopt the mechanism eventually. At some point, the bubble will burst and capital will be scarcer for a while, and things will realign.
kevdragon6 8y ago
Reducing driving accident deaths (>37,000/year in the US alone) will be a pretty amazing change.
- londons_explore 8y ago
  37,000 lives per year wasted due to fatalities. 400,000 lives per year wasted mind numbingly staring at a road and keeping a car driving along it.
- killjoywashere 8y ago
  Currently glad I did not go into trauma surgery. Most of their work is car accidents.
- njoro 8y ago
  Sure, I just don't think that is as much of a paradigm shift as gradual improvement over time. It is not self-driving so much as the deployment of self-driving that will make that change if that makes sense. If everyone drove XC90s on barrier separated roads with automatic traffic cameras that enforced things like speed and distance between cars, we would also be much safer. But it would still be largely the same thing as today.
clomond 8y ago
However, I think you should consider how autonomous vehicles enable better utilization of existing cars on the road. If you own a car, what % of the time is it sitting in your driveway idle? Rather consider how with autonomous driving, when paired with services like Uber/Lyft enable a car to be active 80-95% of the time - driving folks around. This means that your cost “of the trip” can be significantly less once you factor how his affects vehicular depreciation.
- brudgers 8y ago
  Peak demand at rush hour determines the number of vehicles necessary to achieve a given level of service. Self driving vehicles don't change the underlying mathematics of the job scheduling problem.
  - rbranson 8y ago
    This would only be true if everyone commuted at exactly the same time or along the same route.
    - axaxs 8y ago
      You basically just described 'traffic.'
      - mcny 8y ago
        The goal I think is a complete ban on human driving on public roads. With that in place, maybe we can make significant improvements in traffic. I agree that the last mile will always be a problem though. While self-driving cars are cool, I’d imagine self-driving subways would be easier. In New York, the f train in Queens hits a standstill because of problems in the d line. The air train at JFK has no driver. Why can’t we do this for MTA? While we are at it, transit in the city should be entirely tax funded. N We also need self-driving buses. The buses in Queens sometimes don’t show up for over half an hour and three show up at the same time. Why?
bodas 8y ago
Optimistically, self-driving vehicles may allow the west to finally discover the joys of share taxis, which would increase people/vehicle and (hopefully) decrease congestion.
VikingCoder 8y ago
"“Our experiments show that with as few as 5 percent of vehicles being automated and carefully controlled, we can eliminate stop-and-go waves caused by human driving behavior,” Daniel Work, assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a lead researcher in the study, said in a statement." https://www.rdmag.com/news/2017/05/study-shows-self-driving-car-reduce-traffic-jams https://www.rdmag.com/news/2017/05/study-shows-self-driving-...
- benjaminjackman 8y ago
  Per the article: > “Before we carried out these experiments, I did not know how straightforward it could be to positively affect the flow of traffic,” Jonathan Sprinkle, the Litton Industries John M. Leonis Distinguished Associate Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Arizona, said in a statement. “I assumed we would need sophisticated control techniques, but what we showed was that controllers which are staples of undergraduate control theory will do the trick.” If it really is that simple shouldn't it be possible to put this into an app that if 1/20 drivers had installed would also solve the problem?
  - Phlarp 8y ago
    An app can't convey near the granularity of control to the driver compared to what a fully automated solution could do, and you run the risk of making the situation worse due to the driver splitting focus between paying attention to the road and following the app instructions. To some extent we already have "the app" (google maps) and I wouldn't be surprised if it's running for close to 1/20 of drivers actively in traffic, and a whole lot more passively collecting and reporting location info that is trivial to map to major roads. To that argument Waymo somewhat belongs to Maps (or Maps to Waymo if you'd like).
    - benjaminjackman 8y ago
      > An app can't convey near the granularity of control to the driver compared to what a fully automated solution could do Yes I agree, however it might not require that level of granularity, that's what I was wondering given that the researchers were surprised by it working as easily as it did in their experiment. Since, That's why I am wondering, maybe it's something a human could be taught or directed to do by an app. Open questions to me: Is central coordination required which observes the current state of the system and doles out specific instructions depending on that? If it's simpler is possible to craft a simple set of heuristics we could be taught to follow that would make things better if enough people knew them and followed them? Could they perhaps be implemented with simple road signaling targeting know problem area where jams frequently occur?
Jyaif 8y ago
Autonomous vehicles will make deliveries become almost free. This in turn will make food delivery explode, to the point of kitchen becoming an option in houses. In general, owning stuff won't be as important as before because you'll be able to simply borrow anything you need.

by njoro 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

airstrike 8y ago

The idea is that with autonomous driving nobody needs to own a car and traffic jams are severely reduced because robots don’t drive like assholes (or at least by design shouldn’t...)

njoro 8y ago
Not having to own a car to travel by car will of course increase driving, or being driven really. A situation where there is only self-driving cars is probably decades away at he minimum. And that doesn't really solve inherent throughput or speed issues.
- jellicle 8y ago
  Not only "doesn't really solve", but "makes vastly worse".
  - tim333 8y ago
    Not necessarily >... technology move people from their homes or work to existing public infrastructure hubs could be a thing. Also maybe some sort of road pricing to stop them being clogged with empty cars going to get pizza.
- icebraining 8y ago
  Not having to own a car to travel by car will of course increase driving, or being driven really. I'm not sure. When you own a car, you pay large fixed costs but your marginal cost per mile is low, whereas with rented cars it's the reverse. Sure, people who don't own cars currently will probably ride more, but everyone who does have a car now will have an incentive to ride less.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    Your visible marginal cost (i.e. mostly your fuel) may be low but the vast bulk of car costs are proportional to mileage--especially in areas where salt in various forms (winter roads, marine) isn't an issue.
    - icebraining 8y ago
      It doesn't really matter if it's lower than the fixed costs, it matters whether it's lower than these hypothetical rented cars, and most likely, it is.
- airstrike 8y ago
  Even if self-driving cars are 50% of the fleet, these cars drive better and can collectively work around traffic jams, so even human-driven cars benefit from automation.
sf_rob 8y ago
They may also lower the costs (time, effort, money) of driving. That will almost certainly lead to more driving and likely greater urban sprawl.
agumonkey 8y ago
And mostly because they can drive when you're not in it. I'd be very curious to see city simulations where people just get off 200m from their job and wave their car goodbye as they can park somewhere else smoothly.
- tekno45 8y ago
  In the techies dream world, the car goes off and, gives someone else who starts work a little later than you a ride.
  - agumonkey 8y ago
    Yeah sure, in the fully shared/non-owned system that would be it. A fleet of non polluting transportation mules.
- dmd 8y ago
  In America people will get in the car to drive 200m instead of walking.
jellicle 8y ago
Because that's always what happens when you make something better: people use less of it. What?
- airstrike 8y ago
  That's clearly not what I said.

2bitencryption 8y ago

Uber went from zero to essentially killing off taxis, despite the fact that "a car is a car". Primarily because they don't pay as much for their fleet as a taxi service does. What's coming next is going to be that, except you don't have to pay your drivers anything because you don't have drivers! (yes, there will be huge technical overhead of running this system and maintaining the cars/hardware, but over time this will become mass produced, and become cheap).

atomical 8y ago
Uber went from zero to killing off a pedestrian, despite having LIDAR tech. Downvoted by Uber devs no doubt.
icantdrive55 8y ago
Don't discount the power of future legislation. Right now the wealthy definetly control politicians. In a few years, poor people who have been the kicked around by technology might be voting in huge numbers? They will definetly be the majority of the population. Voting, along with tying corrupt politicians to wealthy donors; might throw a wrench in all this "progress". Sorry folks--losing jobs to technology, and being told to get your side-hustle on my the 1 percent does not calm the horrid existences of poor families. It's all cool when you can afford to use the tech. It's all cool except when the tech takes your job. When the Hispanics, whom have been scapegoated, get together with the low skilled white underemployed/underpaid segment of the population; things might get sticky for the tech boys club. I feel a simmering rage. I don't think I'm alone. Oh yea, watch what happens to the highly paid tech worker in a decade from now, or sooner. Remember most are not engineers, or scientists; they're JavaScript commerce soldiers.
perl4ever 8y ago
"Uber went from zero to essentially killing off taxis, despite the fact that "a car is a car". Primarily because they don't pay as much for their fleet as a taxi service does." Uber (and possibly other similar companies) is a huge charity for passengers funded with investment money. It's definitely premature to declare they've demonstrated or accomplished anything before they operate on a sustainable basis. I do think using a credit card an app is far superior to the way taxi businesses are traditionally run, regardless of price, but I also don't see why traditional taxis can't adopt the mechanism eventually. At some point, the bubble will burst and capital will be scarcer for a while, and things will realign.

kevdragon6 8y ago

Reducing driving accident deaths (>37,000/year in the US alone) will be a pretty amazing change.

londons_explore 8y ago
37,000 lives per year wasted due to fatalities. 400,000 lives per year wasted mind numbingly staring at a road and keeping a car driving along it.
killjoywashere 8y ago
Currently glad I did not go into trauma surgery. Most of their work is car accidents.
njoro 8y ago
Sure, I just don't think that is as much of a paradigm shift as gradual improvement over time. It is not self-driving so much as the deployment of self-driving that will make that change if that makes sense. If everyone drove XC90s on barrier separated roads with automatic traffic cameras that enforced things like speed and distance between cars, we would also be much safer. But it would still be largely the same thing as today.

clomond 8y ago

However, I think you should consider how autonomous vehicles enable better utilization of existing cars on the road. If you own a car, what % of the time is it sitting in your driveway idle? Rather consider how with autonomous driving, when paired with services like Uber/Lyft enable a car to be active 80-95% of the time - driving folks around. This means that your cost “of the trip” can be significantly less once you factor how his affects vehicular depreciation.

brudgers 8y ago
Peak demand at rush hour determines the number of vehicles necessary to achieve a given level of service. Self driving vehicles don't change the underlying mathematics of the job scheduling problem.
- rbranson 8y ago
  This would only be true if everyone commuted at exactly the same time or along the same route.
  - axaxs 8y ago
    You basically just described 'traffic.'
    - mcny 8y ago
      The goal I think is a complete ban on human driving on public roads. With that in place, maybe we can make significant improvements in traffic. I agree that the last mile will always be a problem though. While self-driving cars are cool, I’d imagine self-driving subways would be easier. In New York, the f train in Queens hits a standstill because of problems in the d line. The air train at JFK has no driver. Why can’t we do this for MTA? While we are at it, transit in the city should be entirely tax funded. N We also need self-driving buses. The buses in Queens sometimes don’t show up for over half an hour and three show up at the same time. Why?

bodas 8y ago

Optimistically, self-driving vehicles may allow the west to finally discover the joys of share taxis, which would increase people/vehicle and (hopefully) decrease congestion.

VikingCoder 8y ago

"“Our experiments show that with as few as 5 percent of vehicles being automated and carefully controlled, we can eliminate stop-and-go waves caused by human driving behavior,” Daniel Work, assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a lead researcher in the study, said in a statement." https://www.rdmag.com/news/2017/05/study-shows-self-driving-car-reduce-traffic-jams https://www.rdmag.com/news/2017/05/study-shows-self-driving-...

benjaminjackman 8y ago
Per the article: > “Before we carried out these experiments, I did not know how straightforward it could be to positively affect the flow of traffic,” Jonathan Sprinkle, the Litton Industries John M. Leonis Distinguished Associate Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Arizona, said in a statement. “I assumed we would need sophisticated control techniques, but what we showed was that controllers which are staples of undergraduate control theory will do the trick.” If it really is that simple shouldn't it be possible to put this into an app that if 1/20 drivers had installed would also solve the problem?
- Phlarp 8y ago
  An app can't convey near the granularity of control to the driver compared to what a fully automated solution could do, and you run the risk of making the situation worse due to the driver splitting focus between paying attention to the road and following the app instructions. To some extent we already have "the app" (google maps) and I wouldn't be surprised if it's running for close to 1/20 of drivers actively in traffic, and a whole lot more passively collecting and reporting location info that is trivial to map to major roads. To that argument Waymo somewhat belongs to Maps (or Maps to Waymo if you'd like).
  - benjaminjackman 8y ago
    > An app can't convey near the granularity of control to the driver compared to what a fully automated solution could do Yes I agree, however it might not require that level of granularity, that's what I was wondering given that the researchers were surprised by it working as easily as it did in their experiment. Since, That's why I am wondering, maybe it's something a human could be taught or directed to do by an app. Open questions to me: Is central coordination required which observes the current state of the system and doles out specific instructions depending on that? If it's simpler is possible to craft a simple set of heuristics we could be taught to follow that would make things better if enough people knew them and followed them? Could they perhaps be implemented with simple road signaling targeting know problem area where jams frequently occur?

Jyaif 8y ago

Autonomous vehicles will make deliveries become almost free. This in turn will make food delivery explode, to the point of kitchen becoming an option in houses. In general, owning stuff won't be as important as before because you'll be able to simply borrow anything you need.