[zbentley]

> With that attitude, you are stuck in the past and don't want to make progress with technology.

The statement you quoted is qualified, not an assertion of impossibility.

Your claim is silly; the alternative to breathless hype isn't Luddism, it's getting educated about a field and proceeding, if possible, in an informed way. Claiming delusional enthusiasm (with a side of hucksterism and a strong odor of financial incentives) is the only way to advance the state of the art encourages the very worst kinds of pseudo-innovation and chicanery.

If acknowledging the difficulty (or impossibility) of something means someone is stuck in the past and is anti-progress, well, then I guess every safety board in existence is anti-progress.

[AlanSE]

Even if the cars of the future won't be able to drive on all roads at all time, I don't see how it would matter all that much. Of course there will always be forms of rural driving where the terrain is unknown and there are limited options for sensor fusion available.

But that's not what's important. What's import is DC, LA, and many other metro cities that can't build more roads, but still need population and economic growth. For these cases, we're looking at something entirely different. If self-driving cars ever come to be a large share of the cars on the road, they become and unignorable option to lift the congestion ceiling on growth.

For major thoroughfares, you're looking at something close to a controlled environment. Even if there's rain or snow, you could have precision car location, relative to static beacons, and relative to other cars. There's no question where the lanes are, because all of these extremely major routes have detailed 3D models that all the algorithms have access to. I'm not saying we have that now, but compared to the other resource expenditures in self-driving technology, it's practically a trivial thing to do.

People don't need a car to drive them anywhere at any time. They need a reasonable option to get to work in the places where the jobs are. I would say that we're losing that right now, and self-driving cars are a solution, rain or no rain.

[zbentley]

> What's import is DC, LA, and many other metro cities that can't build more roads, but still need population and economic growth.

> People don't need a car to drive them anywhere at any time. They need a reasonable option to get to work in the places where the jobs are.

Mass transit. We know it works, and works well in circumstances you described. We know it increases in effectiveness in response to investment and added resources. Why bet on a long shot, if we know what works?

[AlanSE]

It works well in some circumstances, but not in those circumstances. In places where it does work, urban development had to change to accommodate transit. All of the existing development and infrastructure is so inflexible that these particular metro areas have no choice but to have the transit system change to accommodate.

The requirements seem pretty clear to me. The system has to be on-demand, able to accommodate sprawl, and lose little in terms of average speed compared to old expectations of personal car transit, and most importantly, it can't demand new physical roadway infrastructure.

I see how it's dubious that autonomous vehicles will fit this bill. Or it may be very challenging and take many decades. But let's be honest about the situation - it's the only option on the table.

[dralley]

> What's import is DC, LA, and many other metro cities that can't build more roads, but still need population and economic growth.

Mass. Transport.

[corey_moncure]

I see it as indicating a need to revise definitions. Ultimately what we want is a car that is at least as good as driving itself as we are at driving it. But even the Eyeball Mk. I is unreliable if the rain or snow is heavy enough. I've often had to simply pull off the road in a torrential downpour and wait it out. Why isn't this be the watermark for full autonomy- a system that recognizes when the SNR is too low to proceed, and suspends itself safely?

There will always be a set of conditions that overwhelm your sensors. It sounds like the definition is bad. but we can probably develop an autonomous car that is satisfactory nevertheless.

[mohamedattahri]

I think there's a world of difference between difficulty and impossibility. I can see your point when someone speaks of the former, but I don't think anyone should nor can state that something's impossible.

[zbentley]

That completely removes all meaning from the term, then.

[mohamedattahri]

The term definitely means something. But it’s only useful when axioms and constrains have been established and verified.

To be honest, my biggest issue with it is that often those who use it don’t realize that the burden of proof falls on their shoulder. And it just happens that it’s much harder to proof that something is impossible than the opposite. In one case you to prove you’re right once. In the other, you have to exhaust all possibilities.

[throwka235]

How many times have we heard from “experts in the field” say it can’t be done, and then new advances solve the problem?

When I hear an expert say, “...and that may never change,” I interpret it to mean, “I don’t know how to solve it.”

[cco]

Bundled in that statement is an assertion that there is something about the human visual system that is magic, I think that is frankly ridiculous.

Our eyes are pretty terrible cameras, it's our post processing that makes us able to drive and unless I'm mistaken I'm making relatively straightforward judgements when I'm driving. That processing and logic is really hard right now but I don't see any reason to believe it is impossible.

[flyingpenguin]

I have always wondered about this sensor thing. We drive and our only sensors are a pair of cameras on a mobile swivel and two microphones.

I feel like at Some point we have to have enough computing power to just stick Multiple Cameras behind glass with wipers and dehumidifiers and alarms if they are obstructed. Basically just humans but better?

[SomeHacker44]

We have additional sensors useful for driving: force sensors on the steering wheel (works better with lower levels of power steering) as well as our accelerometers in our inner ear. The latter has redundancies in pressure sensors located around the body, though to be fair I only used those back in my car racing days.

[sixothree]

I never realized how oblivious people are force feedback from the steering wheel until I was passenger in a car on a windy day. We got out onto an open space and I could see him really correcting. I remarked about how much wind there was and he asked what I meant.

My point is I have never heard about self-driving cars having an understanding of crosswinds. I just hope they aren't as oblivious as my friend.

[homarp]

you forgot our brain...

[SilasX]

I agree you need to keep expectations realistic, but ... it's not like humans have access to some special snow oracle or rain oracle that we use to drive, and it seems unnecessarily pessimistic to bet on "we can never get a machine to recognize a rainy environment like humans can".

[mbrumlow]

I like your words.