7 ms·

I wonder where "a country road with no lanes which barely fits 1.5 car in winter in the Czech republic" is on your scale... Something like this, just imagine th

I wonder where "a country road with no lanes which barely fits 1.5 car in winter in the Czech republic" is on your scale... Something like this, just imagine the snowdrifts around it https://www.google.com/maps/@49.080269,16.4569252,3a,75y,307.21h,76.36t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sADh8CUYDhZWcT9KBTkAZAQ!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DADh8CUYDhZWcT9KBTkAZAQ%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D225.13959%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.com/maps/@49.080269,16.4569252,3a,75y,307...

atourgates 5y ago
I live in north-central Idaho. 10 minutes from 2 state-universities, but in an otherwise relatively rural part of the county with a 1/4 mile long, somewhat steep driveway. Every year, I'm amazed at how quickly our personal "veneer of civilization" collapses in the snow. The prior owners of our home would just keep their kids home from school, and work from home an average of "about a week every winter." We're a little more aggressive with snow removal, but there are still mornings every winter where I'm getting up at 5 to spend a couple hours plowing and blowing out drifts on our driveway (after typically doing the same thing the night before) just in order for my wife to make it down to our county road which might still have a foot or so of snow covering it. Similarly, in windy snow-covered conditions, there are a couple spots between us and town where the snow regularly drifts back over the road in a matter of hours, causing a "well, I know the road goes about here, I think I can make it through these drifts if I floor it so here it goes" situation. Even when the roads are well plowed and clear, there are plenty of situations where it's difficult for me, a human, to distinguish between the plowed-but-still-white-road and the white snow all around it in some lighting conditions. And let's take snow out of it. Our fastest route into town involves gravel roads. And our paved route is chip-sealed every couple years, and typically doesn't get a divider-line drawn back on it for 6-months or so after. Which is all to say, I think it's going to be quite a while before I have a car that can autonomously drive me into town in the summer, and global warming aside, I'll probably never have one that can get me there reliably in the winter.
- sandworm101 5y ago
  Northern Canada here. We have all been down that road. I had a rental once that wouldn't let me backup as the sensor was frozen over. I doubt AI will ever handle winter situations without help.
  - liamwire 5y ago
    > I doubt AI will ever handle winter situations without help. Sure it will, at least eventually. However, I suspect the humans at the time won’t like the answer: that it’s not always safe to drive in these conditions, and then the car refusing to drive autonomously, even if it is technically capable of navigating the route. It may deem the risk of getting stuck, etc. to be too high. Or you may need to accept a report to your insurance company that you’ve opted to override the safety warnings, etc.
    - sandworm101 5y ago
      Lol. Good luck selling that in the north, the mountains, farm country or anywhere else more than 10 miles from a starbucks. Sometimes lives depend on being able to move and there isnt time to reprogram robot to understand the risk dynamic. Malfunctioning sensors or broken highbeam circuits (tesla) are no excuse for a car to remain stuck in a snowbank.
- vasco 5y ago
  Why do you live in a place where you have to shovel snow from 5am on a week day? I mean I appreciate building character but at some point you're just deciding to live life on hard mode.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    A large band of the United States reliably gets heavy overnight snows. In my case we're talking an hour west of a major metro--Boston. These days, the inevitable travel snafus notwithstanding, I just stay home. But when I had to go into an office barring a state of emergency digging out in early am was a regular occurrence.
paganel 5y ago
Or an ambulance going on the opposite direction (because that’s the only available choice) on a boulevard in a busy capital city like Bucharest. Saw that a couple of hours ago, the ambulance met a taxi which was going the right way but of course that the taxi had to stop and find a way for the ambulance to pass (by partly going on the sidewalk). I said to myself that unless we get to AGI there’s no way for an “autonomous” car to handle that situation correctly.
- cgrealy 5y ago
  That is 101 for autonomous driving. Solved years ago.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  Oh you can have that in Bucharest even with regular cars. Lanes are pretty fluid there, as is the preferred direction of travel, I've lived there for only two years and I've seen more vehicles go in the opposite direction ('ghost riders' we call them here) than anywhere else over the rest of my life. Romanian traffic is super dangerous, especially if you are a pedestrian and you can just about forget cycling in traffic. It is also the only place where a car behind me honked to get me to move over when I was walking on the sidewalk.
- chx 5y ago
  You don't even need to go that far, the other day I saw an ambulance going down on Burrard Street in Vancouver, BC without lights or sirens then I guess a call came in , it put on both and turned around. It's a six lane street where normal cars aren't allowed to just turn around. It was handled real well by everyone involved, mind you, it wasn't unsafe but I doubt a computer could've handled it as well as the drivers did.
  - trhway 5y ago
    a very complex looking behavior sometimes comes from the very simple easy to implement principles, like say a bird flock behavior https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flocking_(behavior)#Rules https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flocking_(behavior)#Rules I don't believe people are using their full AGI when driving (and the full "AGI" may as well happen to be a set of basic pattern matching capabilities which we haven't discovered yet). After decades of driving the behavior is pretty automatic, and when presented with complex situation following a simple rule, like just brake, is frequently the best, or close to it, response.
arsome 5y ago
From what I've seen of Tesla's solution at least - even busy city centers and complex parking lots are very difficulty for present day autonomous driving technologies. The understanding level necessary just isn't there. These things are excellent - undeniably better than humans at the boring stuff, highway driving, even major roads. They can rightfully claim massive mileage with high safety levels in those circumstances... but throw them into nastier conditions where you have to understand what objects actually are and things quickly seem to fall apart.
- nradov 5y ago
  Would you describe Tesla's tendency to crash full speed into stopped emergency vehicles during highway driving as "excellent"? https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/16/business/tesla-autopilot-federal-safety-probe/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/16/business/tesla-autopilot-fede...
  - zaphar 5y ago
    I would say it's better then the Human's tendency to drive full speed into anything while impaired by a drug. Especially since the bug was fixed in Tesla's case but the bug in Human's case is probably un-fixable.
    - Dylan16807 5y ago
      They fixed driving into stationary things? That's news to me. What's your source? It's not an easy problem to fix at high speed without false positives, and they seem to really hate false positives.
    - fragmede 5y ago
      Drugs (or alcohol)? There are so many more failure modes that drugs are the least of my concerns. Especially of unspecified type. I'm not the least bit worried about drivers hopped up on tylenol. Humans get distracted while driving, by texting, or simply boredom and start daydreaming. Don't forget about driving while tired. Or emotionally disturbed (divorce or a death; road rage). Human vision systems are also pretty frail and have bad failure modes, eg the sun is close to the horizon and the driver is headed towards the sun.
jjoonathan 5y ago
I'd still buy a self-driving car that refuses to drive on that road.
- hellbannedguy 5y ago
  In the back seat of the Waymo there's a "Pull Over" emergency lever.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    You can't always "pull over."
Swizec 5y ago
As someone who learned to drive in the city, those roads make me sweat bullets. My grandpa who drives on those roads primarily, sweats bullets in the city. Maybe you’ll have different driving models to load in different scenarios …
- RhysU 5y ago
  My mother thinks nothing of driving on deserted roads in significant unplowed snow. She gets nervous on a dry, Texas highway at rush hour.
  - dahfizz 5y ago
    Yeah, that seems perfectly rational. There is nothing to hit on a deserted highway. Driving in traffic, on the other hand, is more stressful and has worse downsides.
    - fragmede 5y ago
      > significant unplowed snow Spinning out on a deserted highway and hitting a snowbank and getting trapped in your car kills a large number of people every year. Even with smartphones, calls for help can't always be responded to in time, resulting in death. (Have an emergency kit in your car if you live above the snow line!) Driving in city traffic can be quite harrowing, but hitting another car at 20-30 mph isn't usually fatal. (Wear your seatbelts!) The point that GP post was trying to make is that humans have different preferences, and what seems dangerous to one doesn't (and possibly isn't) dangerous to another. Humans are also notoriously bad at judging danger, eg some people feel threatened by the idea of wearing of papers masks.
willyt 5y ago
Lots of roads like that in Britian as well and the speed limit is 60mph/100kph. Not uncommon for two cars on a single track road to adjust speed to pass each other at a passing place without slowing down much, so at a closing speed of over 100mph. Perfectly safe for human drivers who know the roads.
- smeyer 5y ago
  This sounds like the sort of "perfectly safe for human drivers who know the roads" that actually results in a fair number of road deaths.
  - willyt 5y ago
    If you look at the accident maps, there are almost none on single track roads and lots on twin track roads. My hypothesis is that driving on a single track road feels much more risky so people pay more attention and slow down more on blind corners. Also, it’s not possible to overtake and a lot of accidents are related to overtaking.
skrtskrt 5y ago
Now add the completely blind switchback turns, where your "visibility' into whether another car is coming comes from a convex mirror nailed to a tree or post at the apex of the corner - if it hasn't fallen off or been knocked crooked... basically all of Italy
raldi 5y ago
The computer doesn't have to be perfect; it just has to be better than a human.
- liamwire 5y ago
  Adding to this to really drive the point home: it doesn’t even need to be better than a human that’s good at driving. It only needs to be better than the average human driver. Anecdotally speaking, that’s not such a high bar to pass (relative to the topic at hand).
  - jobigoud 5y ago
    For general acceptance I think it has to be better than how good the average human thinks they are at driving. Secondly, its dumbest errors have to be better than what the average human thinks their dumbest errors would be. If there is an accident and every one thinks they would never have made this error, it will crush the acceptance. Looking at the general accidents stats and saying to people that, on average there are less deaths on the road but they might die in a stupid accident they would never have been into, had they been driving themselves, will be a very hard pill to swallow. Most people prefer to have the illusion of control even if statistically it means worse expectations.
sologoub 5y ago
That’s just stunningly beautiful - Czech countryside is something else! I’d gladly buy a self-driving car that require some additional input on such a road and had additional aids to spot oncoming traffic I can’t see behind the tractor that’s a few hundred meters forward of the spot linked to. It would still be safer. To really make things work, we need cars to be able to negotiate the way humans do on the right of way, etc. There is a lot of non-verbal (and when that fails, very verbal) communication while driving. Currently, cars can’t communicate with each other and the pedestrians, which limits possibilities a lot.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
boc 5y ago
Believe it or not there are tons of two-way roads like that just 30 minutes from Silicon Valley that self-driving cars could practice on. Here's an example: https://goo.gl/maps/1CVb7Mpiwv1VL2sd7 https://goo.gl/maps/1CVb7Mpiwv1VL2sd7
- nostrademons 5y ago
  There're also similar roads 30 minutes from Silicon Valley that have all that, plus residences, pedestrians, parked cars, sheer cliffs, unclear driveway splits, and porta-potties, eg. https://goo.gl/maps/57jzzK6fvtCqvu5w5 https://goo.gl/maps/57jzzK6fvtCqvu5w5 Strangely I've never seen Waymo vehicles practicing on that. They're all over Mountain View, but I have never once seen them in the mid-peninsula hills.
- rpmisms 5y ago
  Just have them drive up to the Lick Observatory and back.
LeifCarrotson 5y ago
Autonomous driving systems are set at various levels of autonomy. Level 0 is no automation, level 1 is just a dumb cruise control, level 2 is radar adaptive cruise control plus lane keeping (which is where most production systems like Tesla Autopilot and GM Supercruise are currently at). Level 2 still requires full human supervision, if you engaged it on the road above it would either fail to engage or you'd crash and it would be your fault. Level 3 is the same plus an ability to handle some common driving tasks, like changing lanes to pass a slower vehicle. Level 4 is where it gets really interesting, because it's supposed to handle everything involved in navigating from Point A to Point B. It's supposed to stop itself in the event of encountering something it can't handle, so you could theoretically take a nap while it drove. However, an important limitation is that Level 4 autonomy is geofenced, it's only allowed in certain areas on certain roads. Also, it can disable itself in certain conditions like construction or weather that inhibit visibility. Waymo vehicles like these are ostensibly level 4, if you tell them to drive through a back road in the snow they'll simply refuse to do so. It's only useful in reasonably good conditions in a few big cities. Level 5 is considered to be Point A to Point B, for any two navigable points, in any conditions that the vehicle can traverse. You could build a Level 5 vehicle without a driver's seat, much less an alert driver. I kind of think this will require something much closer to artificial general intelligence; level 4 is just really difficult conventional programming.
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  Actually it doesn't matter if your cruise control is dumb or adaptive. If you have only cruise control, of either kind, then it's level 1. And if you have lane-keeping but not cruise control, that's also level 1. The difference between 1 and 2 is weird.
- zestyping 5y ago
  It's not obvious that Level 4 falls within what one would call really difficult conventional programming. That level entails something like "in the event of any exceptional situation, find a safe stopping location and safely bring the car to a stop there," and even that alone seems incredibly hard.
robterrell 5y ago
You can replicate that without going overseas. Send that autonomous vehicle over the Golden Gate bridge, take any of the next few exits, and turn right. The street I live on is a paved horse path from the 1910s. No snowdrifts, but a lot of aggressive drivers angrily refusing to back up, which will be fun to see software deal with!

atourgates 5y ago

I live in north-central Idaho. 10 minutes from 2 state-universities, but in an otherwise relatively rural part of the county with a 1/4 mile long, somewhat steep driveway. Every year, I'm amazed at how quickly our personal "veneer of civilization" collapses in the snow. The prior owners of our home would just keep their kids home from school, and work from home an average of "about a week every winter." We're a little more aggressive with snow removal, but there are still mornings every winter where I'm getting up at 5 to spend a couple hours plowing and blowing out drifts on our driveway (after typically doing the same thing the night before) just in order for my wife to make it down to our county road which might still have a foot or so of snow covering it. Similarly, in windy snow-covered conditions, there are a couple spots between us and town where the snow regularly drifts back over the road in a matter of hours, causing a "well, I know the road goes about here, I think I can make it through these drifts if I floor it so here it goes" situation. Even when the roads are well plowed and clear, there are plenty of situations where it's difficult for me, a human, to distinguish between the plowed-but-still-white-road and the white snow all around it in some lighting conditions. And let's take snow out of it. Our fastest route into town involves gravel roads. And our paved route is chip-sealed every couple years, and typically doesn't get a divider-line drawn back on it for 6-months or so after. Which is all to say, I think it's going to be quite a while before I have a car that can autonomously drive me into town in the summer, and global warming aside, I'll probably never have one that can get me there reliably in the winter.

sandworm101 5y ago
Northern Canada here. We have all been down that road. I had a rental once that wouldn't let me backup as the sensor was frozen over. I doubt AI will ever handle winter situations without help.
- liamwire 5y ago
  > I doubt AI will ever handle winter situations without help. Sure it will, at least eventually. However, I suspect the humans at the time won’t like the answer: that it’s not always safe to drive in these conditions, and then the car refusing to drive autonomously, even if it is technically capable of navigating the route. It may deem the risk of getting stuck, etc. to be too high. Or you may need to accept a report to your insurance company that you’ve opted to override the safety warnings, etc.
  - sandworm101 5y ago
    Lol. Good luck selling that in the north, the mountains, farm country or anywhere else more than 10 miles from a starbucks. Sometimes lives depend on being able to move and there isnt time to reprogram robot to understand the risk dynamic. Malfunctioning sensors or broken highbeam circuits (tesla) are no excuse for a car to remain stuck in a snowbank.
vasco 5y ago
Why do you live in a place where you have to shovel snow from 5am on a week day? I mean I appreciate building character but at some point you're just deciding to live life on hard mode.
- ghaff 5y ago
  A large band of the United States reliably gets heavy overnight snows. In my case we're talking an hour west of a major metro--Boston. These days, the inevitable travel snafus notwithstanding, I just stay home. But when I had to go into an office barring a state of emergency digging out in early am was a regular occurrence.

paganel 5y ago

Or an ambulance going on the opposite direction (because that’s the only available choice) on a boulevard in a busy capital city like Bucharest. Saw that a couple of hours ago, the ambulance met a taxi which was going the right way but of course that the taxi had to stop and find a way for the ambulance to pass (by partly going on the sidewalk). I said to myself that unless we get to AGI there’s no way for an “autonomous” car to handle that situation correctly.

cgrealy 5y ago
That is 101 for autonomous driving. Solved years ago.
jacquesm 5y ago
Oh you can have that in Bucharest even with regular cars. Lanes are pretty fluid there, as is the preferred direction of travel, I've lived there for only two years and I've seen more vehicles go in the opposite direction ('ghost riders' we call them here) than anywhere else over the rest of my life. Romanian traffic is super dangerous, especially if you are a pedestrian and you can just about forget cycling in traffic. It is also the only place where a car behind me honked to get me to move over when I was walking on the sidewalk.
chx 5y ago
You don't even need to go that far, the other day I saw an ambulance going down on Burrard Street in Vancouver, BC without lights or sirens then I guess a call came in , it put on both and turned around. It's a six lane street where normal cars aren't allowed to just turn around. It was handled real well by everyone involved, mind you, it wasn't unsafe but I doubt a computer could've handled it as well as the drivers did.
- trhway 5y ago
  a very complex looking behavior sometimes comes from the very simple easy to implement principles, like say a bird flock behavior https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flocking_(behavior)#Rules https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flocking_(behavior)#Rules I don't believe people are using their full AGI when driving (and the full "AGI" may as well happen to be a set of basic pattern matching capabilities which we haven't discovered yet). After decades of driving the behavior is pretty automatic, and when presented with complex situation following a simple rule, like just brake, is frequently the best, or close to it, response.

arsome 5y ago

From what I've seen of Tesla's solution at least - even busy city centers and complex parking lots are very difficulty for present day autonomous driving technologies. The understanding level necessary just isn't there. These things are excellent - undeniably better than humans at the boring stuff, highway driving, even major roads. They can rightfully claim massive mileage with high safety levels in those circumstances... but throw them into nastier conditions where you have to understand what objects actually are and things quickly seem to fall apart.

nradov 5y ago
Would you describe Tesla's tendency to crash full speed into stopped emergency vehicles during highway driving as "excellent"? https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/16/business/tesla-autopilot-federal-safety-probe/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/16/business/tesla-autopilot-fede...
- zaphar 5y ago
  I would say it's better then the Human's tendency to drive full speed into anything while impaired by a drug. Especially since the bug was fixed in Tesla's case but the bug in Human's case is probably un-fixable.
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    They fixed driving into stationary things? That's news to me. What's your source? It's not an easy problem to fix at high speed without false positives, and they seem to really hate false positives.
  - fragmede 5y ago
    Drugs (or alcohol)? There are so many more failure modes that drugs are the least of my concerns. Especially of unspecified type. I'm not the least bit worried about drivers hopped up on tylenol. Humans get distracted while driving, by texting, or simply boredom and start daydreaming. Don't forget about driving while tired. Or emotionally disturbed (divorce or a death; road rage). Human vision systems are also pretty frail and have bad failure modes, eg the sun is close to the horizon and the driver is headed towards the sun.

jjoonathan 5y ago

I'd still buy a self-driving car that refuses to drive on that road.

hellbannedguy 5y ago
In the back seat of the Waymo there's a "Pull Over" emergency lever.
- ghaff 5y ago
  You can't always "pull over."

Swizec 5y ago

As someone who learned to drive in the city, those roads make me sweat bullets. My grandpa who drives on those roads primarily, sweats bullets in the city. Maybe you’ll have different driving models to load in different scenarios …

RhysU 5y ago
My mother thinks nothing of driving on deserted roads in significant unplowed snow. She gets nervous on a dry, Texas highway at rush hour.
- dahfizz 5y ago
  Yeah, that seems perfectly rational. There is nothing to hit on a deserted highway. Driving in traffic, on the other hand, is more stressful and has worse downsides.
  - fragmede 5y ago
    > significant unplowed snow Spinning out on a deserted highway and hitting a snowbank and getting trapped in your car kills a large number of people every year. Even with smartphones, calls for help can't always be responded to in time, resulting in death. (Have an emergency kit in your car if you live above the snow line!) Driving in city traffic can be quite harrowing, but hitting another car at 20-30 mph isn't usually fatal. (Wear your seatbelts!) The point that GP post was trying to make is that humans have different preferences, and what seems dangerous to one doesn't (and possibly isn't) dangerous to another. Humans are also notoriously bad at judging danger, eg some people feel threatened by the idea of wearing of papers masks.

willyt 5y ago

Lots of roads like that in Britian as well and the speed limit is 60mph/100kph. Not uncommon for two cars on a single track road to adjust speed to pass each other at a passing place without slowing down much, so at a closing speed of over 100mph. Perfectly safe for human drivers who know the roads.

smeyer 5y ago
This sounds like the sort of "perfectly safe for human drivers who know the roads" that actually results in a fair number of road deaths.
- willyt 5y ago
  If you look at the accident maps, there are almost none on single track roads and lots on twin track roads. My hypothesis is that driving on a single track road feels much more risky so people pay more attention and slow down more on blind corners. Also, it’s not possible to overtake and a lot of accidents are related to overtaking.

skrtskrt 5y ago

Now add the completely blind switchback turns, where your "visibility' into whether another car is coming comes from a convex mirror nailed to a tree or post at the apex of the corner - if it hasn't fallen off or been knocked crooked... basically all of Italy

raldi 5y ago

The computer doesn't have to be perfect; it just has to be better than a human.

liamwire 5y ago
Adding to this to really drive the point home: it doesn’t even need to be better than a human that’s good at driving. It only needs to be better than the average human driver. Anecdotally speaking, that’s not such a high bar to pass (relative to the topic at hand).
- jobigoud 5y ago
  For general acceptance I think it has to be better than how good the average human thinks they are at driving. Secondly, its dumbest errors have to be better than what the average human thinks their dumbest errors would be. If there is an accident and every one thinks they would never have made this error, it will crush the acceptance. Looking at the general accidents stats and saying to people that, on average there are less deaths on the road but they might die in a stupid accident they would never have been into, had they been driving themselves, will be a very hard pill to swallow. Most people prefer to have the illusion of control even if statistically it means worse expectations.

sologoub 5y ago

That’s just stunningly beautiful - Czech countryside is something else! I’d gladly buy a self-driving car that require some additional input on such a road and had additional aids to spot oncoming traffic I can’t see behind the tractor that’s a few hundred meters forward of the spot linked to. It would still be safer. To really make things work, we need cars to be able to negotiate the way humans do on the right of way, etc. There is a lot of non-verbal (and when that fails, very verbal) communication while driving. Currently, cars can’t communicate with each other and the pedestrians, which limits possibilities a lot.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

boc 5y ago

Believe it or not there are tons of two-way roads like that just 30 minutes from Silicon Valley that self-driving cars could practice on. Here's an example: https://goo.gl/maps/1CVb7Mpiwv1VL2sd7 https://goo.gl/maps/1CVb7Mpiwv1VL2sd7

nostrademons 5y ago
There're also similar roads 30 minutes from Silicon Valley that have all that, plus residences, pedestrians, parked cars, sheer cliffs, unclear driveway splits, and porta-potties, eg. https://goo.gl/maps/57jzzK6fvtCqvu5w5 https://goo.gl/maps/57jzzK6fvtCqvu5w5 Strangely I've never seen Waymo vehicles practicing on that. They're all over Mountain View, but I have never once seen them in the mid-peninsula hills.
rpmisms 5y ago
Just have them drive up to the Lick Observatory and back.

LeifCarrotson 5y ago

Autonomous driving systems are set at various levels of autonomy. Level 0 is no automation, level 1 is just a dumb cruise control, level 2 is radar adaptive cruise control plus lane keeping (which is where most production systems like Tesla Autopilot and GM Supercruise are currently at). Level 2 still requires full human supervision, if you engaged it on the road above it would either fail to engage or you'd crash and it would be your fault. Level 3 is the same plus an ability to handle some common driving tasks, like changing lanes to pass a slower vehicle. Level 4 is where it gets really interesting, because it's supposed to handle everything involved in navigating from Point A to Point B. It's supposed to stop itself in the event of encountering something it can't handle, so you could theoretically take a nap while it drove. However, an important limitation is that Level 4 autonomy is geofenced, it's only allowed in certain areas on certain roads. Also, it can disable itself in certain conditions like construction or weather that inhibit visibility. Waymo vehicles like these are ostensibly level 4, if you tell them to drive through a back road in the snow they'll simply refuse to do so. It's only useful in reasonably good conditions in a few big cities. Level 5 is considered to be Point A to Point B, for any two navigable points, in any conditions that the vehicle can traverse. You could build a Level 5 vehicle without a driver's seat, much less an alert driver. I kind of think this will require something much closer to artificial general intelligence; level 4 is just really difficult conventional programming.

Dylan16807 5y ago
Actually it doesn't matter if your cruise control is dumb or adaptive. If you have only cruise control, of either kind, then it's level 1. And if you have lane-keeping but not cruise control, that's also level 1. The difference between 1 and 2 is weird.
zestyping 5y ago
It's not obvious that Level 4 falls within what one would call really difficult conventional programming. That level entails something like "in the event of any exceptional situation, find a safe stopping location and safely bring the car to a stop there," and even that alone seems incredibly hard.

robterrell 5y ago

You can replicate that without going overseas. Send that autonomous vehicle over the Golden Gate bridge, take any of the next few exits, and turn right. The street I live on is a paved horse path from the 1910s. No snowdrifts, but a lot of aggressive drivers angrily refusing to back up, which will be fun to see software deal with!