[InclinedPlane]

In theory, sure, in practice, it's a little disconcerting.

I've worked in software since the '90s, I've seen how the sausage is made at all kinds of companies big and small. The theory of autonomous cars is a bunch of really smart folks hand crafting history's finest software. And there may be some cases where that won't be too far from the truth. But the reality on the street is going to be a zillion different competitors cutting every corner, skirting ever regulation they can get away with, and just shitting out the worst "move fast and break things" hackathon bullshit code that "sort of seems to work, most of the time" that they can manage. I know how devs and product managers think about testing and quality in the absence of dedicated and rigorous QA standards and infrastructure, in the context of life critical systems that is frightening.

Ask yourself, do you want to put your life in the hands of a code base that had some pimple faced learned-to-code-in-10-days bootcamp graduate who just "fixed a bug" in the drive software by ctrl-c-ctrl-v'ing from stackoverflow and then pushed to master? Because that is going to be the reality, not the ivory tower "well, if they did it the RIGHT way" fantasy that people have in their heads. The only way we'll get the "right" way of autonomous software development is if there is extensive and careful regulation with very rigorous auditing and process requirements. And we are nowhere near that right now.

[gwenzek]

I think most big players (like Google) are conscious that 1) there is a lot of money to make 2) a few deaths in a row will scare the public and the regulators

So they are not cutting corners. I'll be more concerned about the companies playing catch up, or the cheap clone that will try to cut on the costly sensor like Lidar and on the long and rigorous process required to develop it correctly. .

[InclinedPlane]

Precisely. And once there is the perception of a gold rush and that others (namely google et al) are already way ahead, then what?

[dchichkov]

I'm guessing that Google had deployed Level 4, built with legacy technology. Very large codebase, strong dependency on a well serviced Lidar, dependency on accurate calibration, dependency on real-time high fidelity maps. A solution scalable to well-managed fleets in good neighborhoods. If this is the case, the others still have a chance at getting to Level 5 in the same time frame as Google. If they play the technology in a right way.

[jessriedel]

> The only way we'll get the "right" way of autonomous software development is if there is extensive and careful regulation with very rigorous auditing and process requirements.

What makes you think the NHTSA has the expertise or resources to carry this out? The proof will be in the empirical results (accidents/fatalities per mile), not super duper code audits.

[carlmr]

>The only way we'll get the "right" way of autonomous software development is if there is extensive and careful regulation with very rigorous auditing and process requirements.

From what I've seen that doesn't really make a difference either. Companies will follow the regulation on paper, but not in spirit. That's already happening in other heavily regulated areas of software development. My experience has actually been that heavy regulation makes for worse software, because the company starts spending more time on lawyers and "quality engineers" driving up meaningless metrics than maintainable clean code.

[TeMPOraL]

So basically, it's too late.

Maybe regulators should have been preemptively putting barriers in front of commercializing (then) sci-fi level tech. When there's no competitive pressure and rushing to be first to market, when it's just university people on DARPA funding developing the tech, you can afford to have it done The Right Way. Now that people are excited and build companies around self-driving, we'll only get Worse is Better.

[TeMPOraL]

> Because that is going to be the reality, not the ivory tower "well, if they did it the RIGHT way" fantasy that people have in their heads.

And if someone doubts that, remember that's what always happened in computing. That's how Lisp Machines and Smalltalk systems lost to UNIX. That's how we got C and JavaScript. Worse is better. The rule of computing under competitive, market-driven environments.

I dread to see it applied to life-critical systems.

[JumpCrisscross]

> the reality on the street is going to be a zillion different competitors cutting every corner, skirting ever regulation they can get away with, and just shitting out the worst "move fast and break things" hackathon bullshit code they can get away with that "sort of seems to work, most of the time"

Humans are terrible drivers. A half crap autonomous car might still be safer than the status quo. In any case, whether talking about consumer goods or services, this is a space markets work in. Calling for rules to be written before we fully understand the problem is a recipe for overregulation.

[stryk]

> Calling for rules to be written before we fully understand the problem is a recipe for overregulation.

I think s/he outlined, at least in essence, one of the (many) problems. This is an area where rigorous QA, test, re-testing, and re-re-testing should be paramount above all else -- including profits, at least at first until we get the software down pat. Do you want to trust your children's lives to some half-baked "ship it!" product? I don't.

[megy]

> This is an area where rigorous QA, test, re-testing, and re-re-testing should be paramount above all

Great, when are we going to do this for people?

[erobbins]

> Humans are terrible drivers.

Compared to what? We have some evidence that computers can do better in tightly controlled scenarios (limited access freeways) but that's always been low hanging fruit.

I think humans are pretty good drivers, actually. How many 2 lane undivided roads do people go zipping down all day, every day, with very few accidents? A ton. We're also very adaptable and good at handling outlier situations.

[sien]

Sober, rested, humans are great drivers.

The problem is that we also a bit too good at creating outlier situations (stoned, drunk, exhausted, angry at X Y or Z).

[astura]

Some just aren't good drivers when sober and rested - I've met many, and they let anyone with a pulse get a driver's license and even if you don't have one you're free to operate a motor vehicle all you want, nobody stops you from turning the key.

[TeMPOraL]

Sober, rested, focused humans.

We're also bad at maintaining constant focus for longer periods of time.

[TeMPOraL]

> Compared to what?

Compared to the potential machine driver. Yeah, one may say it's comparing reality to a dream. But it's a fact that humans have a ceiling on reaction time, focus and input processing, and machines of today all operate at levels much, much above that ceiling. That machines can be made to drive safer than humans is an extrapolation made pretty much of simple logic steps.

[InclinedPlane]

OK. So what? The key word here is "might" be safer than the status quo. We should ensure that we are measuring carefully and confident in our results (which also requires being confident that the systems are well behaved and well understood and thus the testing is valid) so that if they do show they are safer than humans on average it will be beneficial to move to autonomous driving as much as is practicable. And if, on a case by case basis, that is not true then we can avoid killing more people unnecessarily because we want to save some money on development costs.