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by SketchySeaBeast 1038 days ago
> It’s not hard to imagine a new type of safety cone that has an explicit sign for autonomous vehicles to stop far far away.

Isn't that kind of defeating the point of autonomous vehicles if we need to build a world that will accommodate them?
1 comments
dotnet00 1038 days ago
The point of autonomous vehicles is to not have to totally reshape the world before being able to accommodate them. But small shifts like adjusting signs to also be easily read by autonomous vehicles aren't that crazy.

It'd just be done such that new signage is made to be easily readable, so that over time, as old stuff is replaced, the signage becomes more readable for machines.

This sort of thing can also benefit regular vehicles.

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SketchySeaBeast 1038 days ago
It's corralling in the possible range of the vehicles - anywhere without the enhanced signage will have to be no man's land. If an autonomous car drives to a small town that doesn't have the enhanced cones and gets into an accident at a construction zone whose fault is it?

I'm not sure what "This sort of thing can also benefit regular vehicles." means in this instance. If the cone is machine readable how does that help me?

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dotnet00 1038 days ago
Enhanced signage doesn't mean that the cars shouldn't be able to read regular signage, it just means that future usages of signage will make the task easier and lower risk. As such, locations without the signage aren't "no man's land". Would be similar to how many places aren't outright banning ICE cars, just banning the sale of new ones at some point in the future. Allowing for a comparatively smooth transition.

The cones being machine readable would allow regular vehicles to also be given the ability to read them more reliably (and potentially with less equipment than needed by a current autonomous vehicle), so, they could do things like warn the driver, which could be valuable in reducing the cases of distracted drivers slamming into closed off lanes.

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SketchySeaBeast 1037 days ago
> Would be similar to how many places aren't outright banning ICE cars, just banning the sale of new ones at some point in the future. Allowing for a comparatively smooth transition.

This comparison doesn't make much sense. We're highlighting a dangerous failure in capability here, not a desire to change out the engine. Either engine works perfectly fine, it's secondary properties that we care about with transition. It's a primary responsibility of an autonomous vehicle to be able to identify and react to obstacles.

We either need the enhanced cones or we don't, but only a fraction of cones being enhanced means they aren't actually that useful or that the situations without them are inherently more dangerous. Are we OK with a situation where autonomous vehicles identify the enhanced cones 90% of the time but the non-enhanced 50%? No, we want both to be very high.

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dotnet00 1037 days ago
>We either need the enhanced cones or we don't, but only a fraction of cones being enhanced means they aren't actually that useful or that the situations without them are inherently more dangerous. Are we OK with a situation where autonomous vehicles identify the enhanced cones 90% of the time but the non-enhanced 50%? No, we want both to be very high.

I agree that we should strive to improve the vehicles' ability to detect even unenhanced cones. Doesn't mean that we can't also aim to gradually improve detection accuracy further with enhanced cones. That is, if autonomous vehicles identify regular cones correctly 98% of the time, but enhanced cones can be identified 99.99% of the time, we should be okay with a gradual transition to the latter, even though tautologically it means that the former is less safe.

We already do this with all sorts of things, safety standards improvements often have at least a grace period during which the comparatively less safe things are still allowed to exist and operate alongside the safer ones.

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