[paganel]

Not the OP, but I think rain and especially snow and fog don’t happen that often in those two States and afaik driving autonomously under those circumstances is still an unsolved problem with no easy solution in sight.

Now, if you want to extend the self-driving thing to other parts of the world you’ll most probably need to solve the singularity problem, at least for driving in the Eastern European capital city where I’m currently living where you have to actually “guess” what the other traffic participants will do next: is that kid going against the flow of traffic on his bike? (answer: yes) Is that cab going to cut me off in the middle of the intersection and should I take my foot off the acceleration pedal so that we won’t crash? (answer: yes to both questions). Are those pedestrians going to jaywalk without checking for any incoming vehicles? (answer: yes). All these things happened to me during my short city drive half an hour ago.

[azernik]

All of those scenarios are definitely a thing in sunny clear Oakland, CA. And San Francisco, where a lot of the testing has been run, is notorious for both its hostile and unpredictable driver/biker/pedestrian behavior, and for its fog. Rain and snow, which change the observed road surface, seem to be the harder problems.

[GFischer]

That said, no North American city comes within an order of magnitude of the complexity of driving in Latin America.

You can forget about traffic rules, and you very often have to check the other driver´s body language to make split-second decisions, and play a game of "chicken" to cross a busy thoroughfare (inch through, then force yourself in front of an incoming car and expect him to stop). Giving way to other cars means you might be stuck in a traffic jam, so drivers can be incredibly aggressive - and I wouldn´t want to drive with an AI trained to try to battering ram their way around.

There are cities where I wouldn´t trust myself to drive (Lima, Peru is one I've experienced firsthand).

I'm hopeful for self-driving, but it's going to be very tough (and might take decades to adapt to the third world)

[coldtea]

>at least for driving in the Eastern European capital city where I’m currently living where you have to actually “guess” what the other traffic participants will do next: is that kid going against the flow of traffic on his bike? (answer: yes) Is that cab going to cut me off in the middle of the intersection and should I take my foot off the acceleration pedal so that we won’t crash? (answer: yes to both questions). Are those pedestrians going to jaywalk without checking for any incoming vehicles? (answer: yes). All these things happened to me during my short city drive half an hour ago.

Those sound very quaint. Try India, China, SEA, most of Latin America and so on...

[needles]

Is there a reason you have brought up the inferiority of third-world countries in your last several comments?

Blind comparisons (to put things into perspective) aren't useful. You need to have a point of some kind.

[sewer_bird]

It's not really inferiority: the commonality of the other countries is that they typically follow a different regime of negotiation of the road. In specific, the USA and other anglophone countries are extremely strict about what motions are allowed on the road: the expectation is that everyone stays precisely within the lanes and drives a bit robotically.

This, however, is actually not that common in most of the world, where the road is much more 'negotiated': speeds are slower but the streets more chaotic. I wonder sometimes if it's more like treating the vehicles as horses rather than boxes of death, or something similar: it's a markedly different mode.

I imagine his point is that self-driving cars rely on the robotic driving customs of parts of the West to do as well as they do, and that he's skeptical of these vehicles' ability to interact with more dynamic streetscapes filled with e-scooters, rickshaws, tuk-tuks, people carrying stuff, and so on.

(Source: living in China/Asia)

[coldtea]

>Is there a reason you have brought up the inferiority of third-world countries in your last several comments?

Is there a reason you have been "stalking" my last several comments across different threads? Checking what this or that commenter wrote in different threads to call them on it is kind of abusive.

For my part, the reason is quite simple: I first wrote about such countries in a thread, and so had the situation there fresh in mind when I encountered a couple of other threads with similar issues. I've also travelled and worked in those places for periods of time, so I also have them in mind.

Also, note that I didn't bring up the "inferiority of third-world countries" (those are your words).

I mentioned how they drive in some of them - which I don't find inferior. If anything it's more lively and less obsessed with cushioning the individual, which I appreciate).

In another comment I mentioned how countries near the tropics where billions live have lots of mosquitos and lots of heat -- and that was again in a positive spin, to contrast someone complaining about how Houston was unlivable before air-conditioning because of such things.

And that's it, a grand total of 3 comments, 2 about traffic patterns and driving, and one about heat/mosquitos.

Not all places I mentioned are "third world" either. I explicitly included e.g. China which is the 1-2 biggest economies in the world. Do you consider all of those places "third world"?

>Blind comparisons (to put things into perspective) aren't useful.

"Blind" is a weasel word without which there's no argument above.

Those are not "blind comparisons", they are simply "comparisons". Putting things into perspective is extremely useful alone.

In fact you first need to put things into perspective (survey what's going on across countries/domains/etc) and only _then_ form your "point". Else it's just a priori dogma.

[paulddraper]

That's true. But Bird is a still billion dollar company selling transportation that is compatible with only certain weather and population density.

If you can make 5% of the world's transportation 5x better, you have an enormous success on your hands.

[jonny_eh]

> Bird is a still billion dollar company

It's hype at this point, we'll see how that shakes out as well.

[zaroth]

I’ve been in Paris this week and I’ve started to see more of them. I’ve found because they are silent they have an absolutely minimum impact on me.

They appear to be able to slow to walking speed and still remain stable, I’ve walked right along side one without any concern.

I’m thinking safety concerns are overblown. It’s a rad way to get around.

[shkkmo]

Yet I still see a great deal of very irresponsible driving of those scooters. I expect there to be a lot of local pushback as regulators catch up.

[abakker]

It’s always too bad that regulations catch up instead of manners. Things could be so much easier...

[briandear]

To be fair though, there are lots of irresponsible pedestrians. People buried in their phones paying attention to nothing. Stepping into the road, ignoring crossing signals, taking up an entire sidewalk while walking in a group of three. People want to regulate the hell out of scooters, yet some lady with a dog on a long leash can pretty much do whatever she or or dog wants. If San Francisco denizens care so much about sidewalk etiquette, then I suggest prohibiting people from camping and shooting up and shitting on those sidewalks. That’s a bigger danger than anything I’ve faced as a pediatrian sharing space with Lime or Bird.

[rhizome]

Someone is going to be seriously injured first.

[brenschluss]

The easy answer is to have autonomous driving be region-locked. To only work in regions that are tested, and to have those regions slowly grow as automakers slowly gather data from people driving around.

I think this has unethical implications at the system level - it would create an even more unequal distribution of the future, to paraphrase Gibson, and an unequal expectation or burden on labor.