Self Driving Cars Article

[Cortopassi]

An interesting take by Karl Denninger. I like it, and look forward to it! Can't think of how many times I have thought flying somewhere would be better, but when you factor in arriving early, navigating parking and the airport, limited baggage, jerks in front of you who instantly recline their seat, renting a car, etc., etc.
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https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?singlepost=3424559
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Prediction: Within 10 years every single airline will be reduced to carriers that operate routes consisting entirely of flights of more than 1,000 miles, most over water.

Why?

Because self-driving cars..............

[Pointedstick]

Rarely are people so excited to predict massive disruption from a technology that hasn't even reached the market yet--let alone become safe, cost-effective, and widely available. All of that may indeed happen--but I feel like the author thinks he's living 15 years in the future.

This obsession with self-driving cars is so uniquely American: we love and are totally dependent on our automobiles, but over time have come to hate their obvious drawbacks. Self-driving cars promise to alleviate one of the biggies: the annoyance of actually operating them! But in the process they promise to exacerbate many of the others: their cost, maintenance schedule, and the degree to which they destroy the fabric of a people-centric environment by pushing everything ever farther apart from everything else. And possibly their safety as well. People may be lousy drivers, but I trust that everyone here has fairly extensive experience with software, right? Bugs, bugs, bugs. Features that don't work. Incompatibilities. Upgrade nightmares. It's really hard for me to see how software-izing motor vehicles will improve the situation.

[Cortopassi]

Rarely are people so excited to predict massive disruption from a technology that hasn't even reached the market yet--let alone become safe, cost-effective, and widely available. All of that may indeed happen--but I feel like the author thinks he's living 15 years in the future.

This obsession with self-driving cars is so uniquely American: we love and are totally dependent on our automobiles, but over time have come to hate their obvious drawbacks. Self-driving cars promise to alleviate one of the biggies: the annoyance of actually operating them! But in the process they promise to exacerbate many of the others: their cost, maintenance schedule, and the degree to which they destroy the fabric of a people-centric environment by pushing everything ever farther apart from everything else. And possibly their safety as well. People may be lousy drivers, but I trust that everyone here has fairly extensive experience with software, right? Bugs, bugs, bugs. Features that don't work. Incompatibilities. Upgrade nightmares. It's really hard for me to see how software-izing motor vehicles will improve the situation.

Sure, I hate driving for the most part and that is a main reason for me, esp. being next to a big city. But the tech is coming along so quickly. My current car has blind spot detection and rear crossing detection. Both of which have alerted me to close calls multiple times. I love seeing the little light in the side mirror on, but not being able to see the car that is there at all with my eyes.

I think (hope) the model will be that as a family, we only need to "have to have" one car, and a second car is instead on demand, driverless Uber type pickup instead, some company(s) managing fleets of these, with no direct costs to me except the cost of the ride.

I work at a company that at times does automotive vision systems. The capability of these systems is so far beyond a human, I have to believe we can alleviate many of those 40,000 deaths a year on roads. Seeing demos of a driving scene where there are 25 things to track in it, people walking, biking, motorcycles, cars, etc and how the system picks up and knows where they all are and in what direction and speed they are moving is amazing.

For those that read Mish, I am with him, that this tech will be out there way earlier than even the most optimistic assessments.

[Pointedstick]

I work at a company that at times does automotive vision systems. The capability of these systems is so far beyond a human, I have to believe we can alleviate many of those 40,000 deaths a year on roads. Seeing demos of a driving scene where there are 25 things to track in it, people walking, biking, motorcycles, cars, etc and how the system picks up and knows where they all are and in what direction and speed they are moving is amazing.

Just for fun, how many open bugs are in your bugtracker? How many are priority 1/immediate/urgent?

I'm just really skeptical of the progression of replacing simple, comprehensible, human-scale technology with complicated high-tech digital software only created and modifiable by big tech companies. Your example of blind-spot assist comes to mind: simply adjust your mirror properly and you won't have a blind spot at all, unless you're towing a shipping container or something.

At its core, the promise of self-driving cars is: "make driving safe and useful again!" But we already have alternative short-to-medium-range transportation technologies that are vastly safer and allow the traveler to focus on something else: trains and buses. They are only slower and more inconvenient than cars because the USA has systematically under-invested in these systems in favor of personal automobiles, but that's a choice--one that could be reversed.

I don't want more cars. Cars are ruinously expensive for the average person--a trend that will only increase once they're packed with AI driving capabilities. Their ubiquity causes people to design around them instead of people, leading to sterile, soulless towns and cities. They don't last very long and must be discarded after a certain point, resulting in an enormous and unnecessary environmental burden. They are large and must be garaged at private expense (a very high one in cities), or else their maintenance schedule accelerates and they can be stolen. Even if the car death rate drops to zero and people get back an hour of time a day during their morning commutes, all that's been accomplished is re-inventing what trains and buses already offer--at high cost to everyone and by even further centralizing important parts of society into the minds of a very small number of engineers in a few gentrifying metro areas. That's what's driving income inequality: the push to replace broadly diversified and accessible knowledge, technology, and opportunities with their narrow, inaccessible, professionally-engineered equivalents that come from expensive cities.

[Cortopassi]

Just for fun, how many open bugs are in your bugtracker? How many are priority 1/immediate/urgent?

Well, sure. But, to be fair, consumer level electronics and military/automotive level electronics are not even close in terms of the amount of testing behind them to weed out bugs before they go out into production. Apps on you phone get updated seemingly literally daily, yet most cars are out in the field with electronics that work perfectly fine for the life of the car and never need updating.

I would imagine there will be a long intro period, where you will need to be ready at the wheel to take over, and not immediately sleeping in the back seat. But it will get there because there is a massive push from all corners to get there. We went from the first satellite to men on the moon in about 11 years, and that was with crappy/non existent computers and poor simulation ability.

To get from the current level of adaptive cruise, lane detection, blind spot detection, etc to self driving, at least in reasonable situations (highways in good weather) is not too much of a stretch. I will take that happily when driving down 57 in Illinois, even if only for 15 minutes at a time just to stretch and zone out.

The whole car based society is another matter!

[Pointedstick]

At its core, the promise of self-driving cars is: "make driving safe and useful again!" But we already have alternative short-to-medium-range transportation technologies that are vastly safer and allow the traveler to focus on something else: trains and buses. They are only slower and more inconvenient than cars because the USA has systematically under-invested in these systems in favor of personal automobiles, but that's a choice--one that could be reversed.

Please explain how buses and trains, which must stop every couple of blocks and only go over pre-determined [often inconvenient] routes could ever be faster than cars which can be driven over the most direct route without stopping. If this is possible, it is certainly counter-intuitive.

Cars get stuck in traffic. Buses (and streetcars, and subways...) with dedicated lanes don't. When I lived in the bay area, my morning commute became so bad after a few years that I could walk the 3.2 miles in almost the same time--literally. But speed isn't the primary advantage. In addition to the fact that you can do something useful with the time you spend on the bus, with a good enough public transit system you don't need to own a car at all. This saves you a minimum of $1000 a year amortized (possibly much more), frees you of the need to have a garage or parking space (or you can use your garage as a workshop, or renovate it into another room), and you don't have to deal with car insurance, annual re-registration, the DMV, traffic, and the possibility of being one of those 30,000 people who die on the road every year. How many people die in bus, train, and subway accidents each year in countries where those transportation methods are ubiquitous?

I get that it's a hard sell here in the USA. We love our cars. I get it. I really do. But let's try to think big. Self-driving cars are like pressure-treated wood: if you have to use it, you're probably using the wrong thing for the task in the first place.

[Mountaineer]

PS, one other way to think about self-driving cars that might be slightly more encouraging: We won't own them anymore. The country could be full of uber-managed, self driving cars that we share. Yes, we'd still have to have the critical mass of vehicles to transport our fat asses to our corporate hell-holes in the morning, so the minimum number would still be high, but it should be a bit lower than in the case of individual ownership. So there is a big pool of self driving cars, and we can use them as we choose. No more garages at our homes, no more DUI's. Everybody's happy.

An addition to your post: How about self driving solar powered "air boats/ships with built in matter/energy/matter converters" to bring all of our needs, all free of course, to us while we sit comfortably hypnotized in front of our reeducation devices until some AI machine decides it's time for us to expire? We won't even need the highway system or have the desire to go anywhere. And, our bodies can be converted to some other poor soul's Big Mac.

[dualstow]

PS, one other way to think about self-driving cars that might be slightly more encouraging: We won't own them anymore. The country could be full of uber-managed, self driving cars that we share.
...
No more garages at our homes, no more DUI's. Everybody's happy.

And no more road rage.

[Kriegsspiel]

I'm pretty much with PS on this issue (I think). Car-dependent locations are still going to be shitty from a transportation perspective. If you need to drive to get to a grocery store, work, gym, library, your friend's home, the coffee shop, the bar, etc etc... Then self-driving fleets of cars aren't going to save you. You'll either still need to own your own vehicle, or be calling up an Uber every time you want to go anywhere. Especially if lots of people started Ubering to work. If everyone imagines they'll get in their personal Uber and drive right to the front door of their job from their far flung suburb without stopping... that seems incredibly resource-intensive.

If you are constantly paying a corporation to transport you everywhere, I wonder how much you will end up saving? Either the trip will need to be pretty expensive, to compensate Uber for tying up their vehicle for so many miles/minutes, or Uber will start acting more like the bus system MangoMan noted above. Would Uber start having each vehicle pick up multiple people, and drop them off at multiple sites? How much like mini, inefficient buses will they become? I doubt people would be "getting work done on the ride in" if they're riding bitch in the back of a sedan. It seems like the "everyone can Uber everywhere" society will either be massively resource intensive individualist vehicleish, or kind of like a society where everyone is taking small-scale and expensive public transportation, but sending their wealth off to California every time they do.

How will highways and roads be maintained if the self-driving cars are electric? The gasoline tax pays for a lot of upkeep. It seems like either a) the ride-sharing companies will be taxed and pass it on to consumers, or b) everyone will be taxed more to upkeep roads. The current highway maintenance program is massively underfunded, the money will need to come from somewhere or else the whole country's highways will start to look like Michigan's. Long distance driving is only more convenient if you ignore the costs.

It takes more work to move things over longs distances, and doing it quickly is more expensive. You still can't get around the fact that the Uber self-driving vehicle paradigm works better in a more dense footprint. It's like the bank that doesn't lend you money until you can prove you don't need it; self-driving fleets will work better in areas where you don't really need cars all the time.

There are surely ways to make this a boon for society, but I don't think patching self-driving cars onto our existing framework is it.

Dissect plz.

[dualstow]

The patch in your penultimate line will prove to be a messy transition, but it's going to happen.

I'm all for more pedestrian-only sections of cities. I'm all for taking MagLev trains for long distances and then taking a shared self-driving car for the final leg of the trip. (Not shared with a stranger at the same time, but not owned by me). No parking lots. Summon a car when it's time to return to the MagLev.

I guess it won't happen in our lifetimes, but when all cars are self-driving, communicating with each other and cruising at the same speed, it's going to be a beautiful thing.

My favorite part of the article:

The day I can get into the car at midnight in the back where I have equipped half the fold-down rear seat and trunk into a comfortable place to sleep, push the button, go to sleep and wake up at 6:00 AM (1 hour time zone shift) in Atlanta in time for two espressos before a business meeting Delta is bankrupt.

But, again: MagLev.

[WiseOne]

Software is indeed buggy. I remember these same sorts of discussions when Reagan was proposing his "Star Wars" defense shield. We were guessing that the most likely result when the button was pushed would be an error message: "Memory fault - core dumped". Quick, we have to debug this in the 20 minutes before the Soviet ICBM's get here! Wait, we forgot to compile with the -g option!

However, in this case the question is whether software is more buggy than people. If self-driving cars are at all viable, they may well save most of those 40,000 annual traffic deaths and increase the carrying capacity of roads and highways. This alone would be a huge win...roads and highways are expensive to build, expand, and maintain, and in some areas there just isn't enough land available to build more.

My idea of car utopia is what PS said: no more car ownership, only free-floating self-driving cars that you call up as needed. Just imagine what would happen to the land wasted by parking lots. There's also something in between individual cars and public transit: jitneys. I first encountered these in Kenya, and there are several routes in northern NJ that I use frequently. These are vans maybe 1/4 the size of a bus that run so often that the average wait time is around 30 seconds. NJ Transit buses are more comfortable, but they run maybe every 2 hours and have fewer routes. The jitneys are eating their lunch, not surprisingly. And they're expanding as they're getting increasingly popular. The only downside is that stepping into one is like being instantly transported to the Dominican Republic or Ecuador. Great if that's your thing, but it can get a bit annoying.

Partial answer to Kriegspiel: Uberpool is already active in NYC. If you pick that option, the fare is reduced by almost half. Usually I've shared with only one other person, and the ride takes less than 5 minutes longer. Sometimes you don't share with anyone, but you still get the steep discount.

[Cortopassi]

If self-driving cars are at all viable, they may well save most of those 40,000 annual traffic deaths and increase the carrying capacity of roads and highways. This alone would be a huge win...roads and highways are expensive to build, expand, and maintain, and in some areas there just isn't enough land available to build more.

That in a nutshell is what's going to bring us to self driving faster than anyone expects.

Hell, I'm a dreamer, now with these full size taxi drones operating in Dubai or wherever, I picture a day where we are all getting around on those, and the millions of miles of streets and highways can become housing, parks, bike paths and sidewalks! And/or converted to maglev!

[dualstow]

This thread makes me want to reread that Pointedstick thread (and linked blog by someone else) about dense city living, urban planning, etc. Good stuff.

[Pointedstick]

This thread makes me want to reread that Pointedstick thread (and linked blog by someone else) about dense city living, urban planning, etc. Good stuff.

Here are some. The one you're probably thinking of was started by Kriegspiel, not me (though you may be remembering this post of mine):

viewtopic.php?f=9&t=8587

viewtopic.php?f=9&t=8835

[dualstow]

Kriegsspiel's Strongtowns thread, that's it! Thank you!

[Cortopassi]

PS, I just saw your "this post" post, and the pics of other places vs. Philly.

I am in a suburb of Chicago, next to a 55 acre lake, and a huge park 30 seconds away. My parents moved here purposely from Chicago to escape the crowding. However, I also just did a random Google map of a street in a neighborhood in Chicago which is associated with high crime (I think).



I would have to say that at least from a green, feel good perspective, Chicago is not in bad shape.

Here's the street I grew up on:



Still in decent form.

[dualstow]

Berwyn Avenue? Svengoolie would like that.

[Benko]

Driving is fun, or can be and you'd be surprised how many people will not want to give it up.

"when all cars are self-driving,"

Guess when this happens? When the state outlaws anyone owning human driven cars.

[dualstow]

Driving is fun, or can be and you'd be surprised how many people will not want to give it up.

"when all cars are self-driving,"

Guess when this happens? When the state outlaws anyone owning human driven cars.

Yes, I've heard that argument countless times over 7 years. Certainly, Europeans would be quicker to give it up because they're already used to trains. However, I disagree about it needing to be outlawed. Milennials are already giving up driving in droves. (Wordplay unintended).

I get that a lot of people enjoy driving, but I think it's high time these dangerous hunks of fast-moving metal were taken out of our dangerous human hands. Yes, there will be some holdouts, and who wants a self-driving Lamborghini Countach, but it will happen. Our grandkids will probably experience police who can stop a car in its tracks with the touch of a keyboard at some creepy traffic control center.

[Benko]

Driving is fun, or can be and you'd be surprised how many people will not want to give it up.

"when all cars are self-driving,"

Guess when this happens? When the state outlaws anyone owning human driven cars.

Yes, I've heard that argument countless times over 7 years. .

I'm not arguing for or against anything just pointing out the obvious.

I get that a lot of people enjoy driving, but I think it's high time these dangerous hunks of fast-moving metal were taken out of our dangerous human hands.

Wow. Just wow.

[dualstow]

Wow. Just wow.

Just pointing out the obvious.
No, seriously, it will take some generations. People used to drive without traffic lights once upon a time, too.

[Benko]

Wow. Just wow.

Just pointing out the obvious.
No, seriously, it will take some generations. People used to drive without traffic lights once upon a time, too.

The analogy doesn't work. You are not talking about driving with an electronic aid. You are talking about doing something "for our own good" and preventing humans from being involved at all because you are sure your way is better.

About the time they perfect the holodeck.

[dualstow]

I am not convinced that it is better for everyone as far as enjoyment is concerned. I *am* fairly convinced that driving deaths will be greatly reduced, even with weird things like- well, once in a thread like this Mark Leavy pointed out that kids could string a cable across a highway in front of a fast-moving convoy.

Also, I am not campaigning for this or trying to take away anyone's right to drive a car. (As if I had any power). I just think that's the way things are going, and because I think it will virtually eliminate road deaths, I am all for it.

We'll just have to figure out a better way to thin the herd.

[Cortopassi]

Wow. Just wow.

Just pointing out the obvious.
No, seriously, it will take some generations. People used to drive without traffic lights once upon a time, too.

The analogy doesn't work. You are not talking about driving with an electronic aid. You are talking about doing something "for our own good" and preventing humans from being involved at all because you are sure your way is better.

About the time they perfect the holodeck.

Cars are dangerous because of the drivers. How many times have you driven and seen a near miss? Been involved in an accident? Look at a car that can't stay in their lane and pull up alongside and see they are texting? Road rage killings for cutting someone off? Almost all of this starts disappearing, even now with safety features becoming standard.

Other than when I was 16, or the first few days after getting a new car, I've rarely found driving fun. Ok, through the mountains in CO was fun.

[dualstow]

Someone should start investing in a kind of touring track through trees and mountains where real men can drive without computer assistance in the future. A closed course, I mean.