[jeshin]

I feel like a lot of people have kind of wisened up about this hypothetical future anyway, now that we're seeing FSD in practice. Sure, some problems would be eliminated by all cars being self driving, and the roads being tailored to that use case. But then, at the same time, trains literally run on tracks and they still have conductors.

[walleeee]

I hope we continue to wise up

If a core goal is really to make thoroughfares safer and reduce traveler injuries/fatalities, we seem to be ignoring or discounting some pretty obvious options, like minimizing car traffic

This vision where we all get around in low-passenger-count autonomous robot cages on existing roadways is just one possible future but we seem to fixate on it. At the end of the day the car is a tool but we've allowed it to burrow into the collective psyche

What about making cities walkable, bikeable, segway-able, wheelchair-able, scooter-able, whatever, with proven public transportation options like trains or buses running fixed routes for longer commutes? Much more energy efficient, way easier than autonomous cars, and conducive to much more livable urban areas imo

It will take some effort to change habits and expectations and revamp infrastructure but surely that's as worthwhile as all the time and money going into FSD?

[mmustapic]

Completely agree, there are lots of things that can be done to reduce car related fatalities, like reducing car usage, lowering the maximum speed, designing better roads (that encourage lower speeds), improve road signage, more stoplights, better pedestrian crossing and protection, reducing distances between useful places.

In parts of the city I live in it has become very uncomfortable to drive a car, there are just too many pedestrians and bikers, and this has encouraged be to bike even more. For distances of less than 6km there is no time advantage when using a car. And in the highway I just use normal driver assist functions like lane keeping and adaptive cruise control, and it's enough.

I will go even further and say that reducing injuries and fatalities is just an excuse for FSD development, so the public thinks it's a good idea to go with it. The real reason is that a fleet of autonomous taxis can be very profitable.

There is really no evidence that FSD fleets will reduce car usage or fatalities, so really it could be the wrong solution for the wrong problem.

[vasilipupkin]

"there is really no evidence". It's not a statistical question, we can deduce it. For example, autonomous cars don't drink and drive.

[mmustapic]

Then autonomous cars should be better than drunk drivers, but that's still not the case.

[ClumsyPilot]

the ll$300 xiaomi electric scooter has beem a bigger improvement to piblic transport than the $50000 tesla.

Electric rideables are the future, and if we could give them storage on public transport and a lane of road, they would go a long way.

[jack_squat]

Regarding trains anyway, a) there have been autonomous trains for decades and the numbers are increasing. b) there are 100x as many professional drivers as train conductors in the US - so it's easy to see why the focus on driving. That's where the money is.

[walleeee]

> That's where the money is.

This is part of the problem imo

[dclowd9901]

The answer is going to look like: freeway and maybe roadway driving is autonomous while drivers are expected to takeover for irreconcilable issues. There can be no other way outside of someone actually factually creating general AI.

[tdumitrescu]

> drivers are expected to takeover for irreconcilable issues

Remote employee "drivers" take over when a car signals that it doesn't know what to do

[Xylakant]

> Remote employee "drivers" take over when a car signals that it doesn't know what to do

Because it has lost connectivity due to a technical glitch, an outage in the cell network, lack of coverage (tunnel, …)

[jfoster]

Even humans can't safely drive in all sets of circumstances. There may even be circumstances where autonomous vehicles can drive, but humans can't or shouldn't.

[semi-extrinsic]

Yeah, nah. Even when you put a self-driving race car on a closed track with no other cars, a human driver still beats its time by a handsome margin. In challenging conditions (visibility/rain/ice/etc) the human will absolutely crush the computer.

I'm extremely confident that self-driving cars will never make a significant improvement on car safety.

I'm also confident that it will never be applicable to anything but highway driving in good weather conditions - we will never see a Level 5 car, those designations have about as much practical relevance to us as the Kardashev scale.

First of all, the safety statistics that we have with modern cars today is such that you need to run 10 million cars for several years before you have gathered enough statistics to say whether a new development has actually improved the situation. For instance if you take the Volvo XC90, there has not been a single fatal accident in the US or UK since the model was launched in 2002, with over 1 million such cars sold in those markets combined. That kind of lag in your dev cycle means it's extremely hard to do any sort of meaningful development of a machine learning system in a way that demonstrably improves safety.

Second of all, human factors such as being distracted by a cell phone or being intoxicated, plus not wearing a seat belt, accounts for the overwhelming majority of fatal accidents. It is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, much easier to build a system that detects such conditions and then deliberately slows down or stops the car. It's already being deployed today and will only increase in the future, so most of the potential safety improvement from self-driving will be eaten up by other tech.