This isn’t like the game of Go where processing power eventually wins. Driving in a major city, based on intuition, social cues, and the ability to drop a plan and make a new one, is the definition of too complicated for a computer. We could have public transportation, but we just can’t imagine a world where someone doesn’t privately own a thing someone else rents.
> This isn’t like the game of Go where processing power eventually wins...[it's] the definition of too complicated for a computer.
Isn't that sentiment how people used to think about computers playing Go, writing an essay, beating humans at Jeopardy, or transcribing spoken language? Betting on the side of "computers will never be able to X" seems like a generally bad bet.
> We could have public transportation, but we just can’t imagine a world where someone doesn’t privately own a thing someone else rents.
The concept of self driving cars isn't mutually incompatible with public transportation.
I went to a talk given by computer experts on the game of Go about 10 years before AlphaGo and the consensus was that the solution space was so large[0] that it was impossible to solve by a computer, whatever its capability, in the foreseeable future, by the methods known at the time. We now know that AlphaGo followed a somewhat new approach, but I don't remember that being obvious or expected back then...
There is a difference between being better than humans and having solved a game. Could you clarify what exactly the experts were saying? Everything in the Wikipedia article you linked seems to be talking only about solving it so I'm really curious.
> The concept of self driving cars isn't mutually incompatible with public transportation.
It is.
Just like Uber with $25B in funding is mutually incompatible with small time taxi services around the world. The only way Uber ever pays its investors back is by establishing a global monopoly over taxi-transportation and making narrow margins over economies of scale.
The self-driving industry has received upwards of $200billion in funding. If cities start moving towards public transit, that signals an existential threat to the ability of these VCs to make their money back.
Note: Some industries are zero sum games. The total number of places people want to go to is limited. Better taxi technology will not mean a larger addressable market. The only way self-driving companies win, is by defeating other means of transport.
Public transit is hard is in the same way that going to Harvard as a black person in 1900 was hard. It was hard because malicious forces (whether they accepted the accusation or not) made it impossible.
Painting a BRT line and some traffic cones is all you need to set up public transit. Hell, almost all pre-established cities had entire street car networks that we disassembled due to car-centric post-1950s development.
The issue with self-driving cars and public transportation is tricky. Self-driving cars might both drive down the cost of taxi-services, and drive up the convenience, both by not needing drivers and allowing providers to dynamically move cars to ideal position based on local demand, and so they might well drive up the use of personal transportation.
On the other end of the scale, while this would be possible with human drivers too, driving down the cost and response times of being able to automatically reposition and provision a fleet of cars would potentially make deep integration with public transport in ways that'd make public transport more attractive possible as well. E.g. imagine a public transport provider guaranteeing a maximum X minutes wait to drive demand, and plugging holes by dynamically provisioning cars to meet that guarantee on lower demand routes, or in case of full buses. Or an "end to end" service where you input where you want to go and instead of just getting the route, you're told to get on bus Y, and when you get of at station Z a car is there waiting to take you to your final destination.
Most of my Uber use is for journeys where public transport would be feasible but where being able to guarantee low waits and/or predictable arrival times makes a difference, and sometimes where a short leg (distance wise) of the public-transport option is too time consuming, and where it'd be "easy" to cut down on the car use if the transport system was better integrated.
If you can make the experience smooth enough to reduce the "end to end" convenience advantage of a car, even if it means using cars for part of it, it might well be a net improvement in public transport use.
> The concept of self driving cars isn't mutually incompatible with public transportation.
No, but it does make individual vehicle ownership look pretty silly:
Why buy a vehicle if you're just going to let it sit there for 95% of the time when it could be, you know, doing vehicle things?
And if you're going to let it drive strangers around, what (besides a maintenance burden and a parking burden) have you gained by owning it as compared to, say, owning stock in a company who maintains a fleet of said vehicles?
The knowledge that nobody has farted in this seat besides the people I invited to just isn't worth that much.
Driving in Los Angeles sucks balls, mostly because of the absolute underinvestment in mass transit solutions. It's a necessity because it's been made a necessity, it's not a Law of Nature to have suckass mass transit in a massive city, it's policy driven by ideology and lobbying power...
Freedom's just another word for massive infrastructure investments and subsidies which allow the personal control of inefficiently utilized capital goods.
> we can’t imagine a world where someone doesn’t privately own
I love public transportation and my favorite cities are ones that have the best public transportation.
But most of what I like about it is great when “visiting,” not living. When I’ve lived in cities that had great public transportation it was occasionally nice; I could go downtown and get drunk without worrying about/coordinating transportation.
But commute times on public transport are absolutely dreadful. Unless you win the lottery and your frequent destinations are along a single route with few stops, you’re transferring and waiting for a bunch of other folks.
And cities where public transport works well are densely packed, making getting downtown from the edges any other way difficult too.
Unless you’re talking about converting privatized point-to-point travel to public transportation, which sounds absolutely awesome and autonomous driving might bring closer to being a reality, I’d say I’m rather fond of going directly to my destination and back in less than 10min of drive time.
Edit: realizing from the comments here that many people’s experience with using a vehicle and public transport is a daily commute. I work from home and I don’t drive during “rush hour” when, for some reason, society pays to migrate an entire city full of knowledge workers from their home to a computer.
Living in the suburbs and not participating in daily commute culture looks a lot like “winning the lottery.”
An example of how I use my car: I choose to go to the grocery store with the best supply chains in my area and it adds ~5 minutes to my drive compared to the one that’s “walkable” as long as it’s not rush hour. I place my order on my phone, pull up, open my trunk, a store employee puts the groceries in, and I drive home.
That’s a hard baseline to compete with, especially for anyone who has a family they have to coordinate this around. I’d much rather stick my kids in a car seat and do the above than whatever the equivalent would be with public transportation.
> Unless you’re talking about privatized point-to-point travel for public transportation, I’d say I’m rather fond of going directly to my destination and back in less than 10min of drive time.
This is usually a driver's fantasy.
How many times I have waited in a place or been at the office only for people to arrive late complaining of the traffic or not being able to find a place to park?
I think most people want to use individual transportation because of the feeling of control it gives them. They can choose an alternate route, honk, hate and insult other road users, aren't bond to a schedule, choose where they park. Most of the time if you take into account the time it takes to go to their car, exit parking or find parking, they aren't faster or only negligibly so [1]. But they don't feel it because they are feeling they are always active compared to the passive act of sitting in a bus/tramway/subway.
The only users of individual transportation that are on average really faster than public transports in a city with a decent public transport system are motorcycle/moped users and cyclists, and mostly because the former tend to park illegally on the sidewalk.
> But commute times on public transport are absolutely dreadful.
Where this is true, it’s due to a policy decision to prioritize private vehicles ahead of everything else. I noticed your subsequent “less than 10 minutes of drive time”, which as an American seems quite fanciful for someone who didn’t “win the lottery” - that’s barely enough time for parking in many cases, or a single congested intersection or on-ramp.
The other big factor is alternate use of that time: if you’re walking or bicycling, you get a workout; if you’re on transit, you can catch up on your reading, gaming, social media, or prepare for your first meeting; but if you’re driving you’re just staring at the car ahead of you wishing you could go faster. That’s why so many people really want to believe self-driving cars are right around the corner because that holds the prospect of a simple purchase making their lives better without having to help anyone else.
>But most of what I like about it is great when “visiting,” not living. When I’ve lived in cities that had great public transportation it was occasionally nice; I could go downtown and get drunk without worrying about/coordinating transportation.
But commute times on public transport are absolutely dreadful.
My opinion couldn't differ more. I lived for 6 years in London. I didn't own a car the entire time. I had a zipcar membership, but I used it maybe once every 2 months. I kept it mostly not to loose my "car insurance no claim discount" of many years more than to use the service.
When I did commute by tube(underground) and train the entire trip lasted ~20min(including 5 min walk) and I didn't mind it at all. This was using one of the worst lines (the northern line). It's the deepest, the hottest and the dustiest (or at least it was back then) of the tube lines. But I got used to it pretty quickly and I actually enjoyed my very short commute (as compared with one I had before, when I lived in Staines, that was almost an hour one way).
Note that within a city like London there are better and worse modes of public transport. My favourite was definitely commuting by river (10min on a fast boat, no people packed like sardines, no hot temperature etc).
But then again I also spent few months biking to work(sadly before my bike was stolen).
Before that I lived in another large city with much worse public transport than London. I used my own car there every day. And as someone with experience of living long term in both places I can tell you I much preferred London.
That was all before the advent of remote work. Now, I much prefer not commuting at all and living elsewhere.
On the other hand when I visited for the first time I didn't enjoy London's public transport one bit. It seemed confusing(initially) cramped, uncomfortable etc. Only later I started liking it much more.
To be fair, if they crack automated driving it'll revolutionize public transport too. Imagine buses routed dynamically, and sized perfectly to match demand. Or other automated, private cars on the road yielding to public transit vehicles.
It's disappointed in the past partly because it's slow and expensive because you have to pay human drivers. And because there's a human driver, you have to have at least a 4-seater vehicle and that increases fuel and maintenance costs.
Signal priority is only at signals. I'm talking about private cars changing lanes to let public transit pass through. Human drivers will only do it for emergency vehicles, but you can make it a condition of licensing for a private driverless vehicle.
> Imagine buses routed dynamically, and sized perfectly to match demand.
We don't need self-driving to do this, and in fact many localities have already tried this with human drivers, and it's been an abject failure. Dynamic-dispatch public transit has been tried!
The results have been low usage (because it turns out the predictability of a timetable and consistent route is a feature, and not a bug!), with high wait times and long trip times.
Heck, the major ride hailing companies have done pilots on this front (ride hails as last-mile supplements to fixed-route public transport) and it's been a pretty thorough failure there as well.
In urban planning circles there's the term "gadgetbahn" to derisively describe high-tech, flashy transit projects using unproven tech that ends up being far worse than normal proven technologies. Dynamic-routed public transit is like that, but with even less "gadget".
> in fact many localities have already tried this with human drivers,
> and it's been an abject failure.
For the product being delivered (low speed, low latency, available only in specific areas), public transit is criminally expensive. I'm not surprised people prefer driving in suburban areas. If it was 1/10th price, or free, it becomes a lot more attractive. Free is impossible if you have to pay salaries to human drivers.
Driverless vehicles don't have to be 4-seater cars. They can be much smaller, like the Smart Car, or a single person enclosed three-wheeler.
> "For the product being delivered (low speed, low latency, available only in specific areas), public transit is criminally expensive."
This is true - the problem is that dynamic-dispatch transit is even more expensive on a per-passenger or per-ride basis, and both speed and latency are actually worse than status quo public transit.
It'd be one thing if the result of these projects have been "this is great but expensive", but the result overwhelmingly has been worse than fixed-route bus transit across every major metric.
Autonomous cars can improve the cost problem, but can't dramatically change the calculus on speed and latency. Likewise, autonomous cars can also solve the cost problem for buses, and better!
Fleet/swarm/traffic management would be an amazing thing to see.
Imagine seeing vehicles automatically moving to the side of the road to let an emergency vehicle through. Or the subtle nudges and lane shifts to ensure traffic doesn't reach a standstill.
> This isn’t like the game of Go where processing power eventually wins
It turns out transportation is not a zero sum game. There's no "AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol" watershed moment for AV. Instead we progressively work towards a good-enough level of AV driving that minimizes the risks compared to human drivers. Transit will always have accidents and deaths, even for public transportation, and we try to reduce that risk over time with new solutions.
Personally I'd like to see the evidence that Cruise and Waymo are riskier than human drivers in SF. My anecdata is that they drive by my house every 5-10 minutes during the day and are the best drivers on my street. Just yesterday, a Cruise slowed down nicely to edge into the other lane while I was getting into my car on the street. Most humans (including Muni drivers) speed past, inches from me.
In the case of this accident, sounds like the fire truck hit the Cruise. That actually happens a lot with non-AV cars. Emergency vehicles go into a red light expecting the green side to stop and they don't. So let's learn from it. Did the truck have its siren going? Could the Cruise car see the truck around the corner (it was at Turk and Polk)? Could the truck see the Cruise? What could the Cruise detect that could have indicated the truck was coming?
I've spent a good decade trying to poke holes into "why 'acthually' public transportation can't work in the US", and I've come out of it even more confused. The US has all the hallmarks of country that's well suited for public transit. Urban housing shortages, open space, flat land, pockets of density, overdue infrastructure overhaul, you name it. It is really THAT simple. There's so much low hanging to pick off and best-of-all, public transit spending goes back into the pockets of
That being said, you can't convince a person to like anything if they're reasoning from a place of comfort. I'm a broken record, but hearing an American praise European cities while simultaneously doing everything in their power to stop their city from ever becoming that, is the sort of hypocrisy that cannot be solved through convincing, logic or education.
Lastly, public transit also needs a strong police force, and there is some much needed 'cognitive dissonance' that YIMBYs need to figure out if they're going to convince those holding out.
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Prevention is better than a cure. Driverless electric cars are here to save the automobile industry at the expense of the environment, climate and public safety.
> Driving in a major city, based on intuition, social cues, and the ability to drop a plan and make a new one, is the definition of too complicated for a computer.
It's also too complicated for humans, though. They get into accidents all the time.
I feel like we're holding computer drivers to a higher standard than the humans we already allow to drive. The computers are absolutely going to make mistakes, and some of them will have catastrophic results, but, uh...
The incident where a bunch of Cruise cars near the Outside Lands concert in SF randomly stopped moving until they were manually reset, people I know in SF saying they drive erratically, and also this incident to a lesser extent. Humans don't make these kinds of mistakes (or faint at the wheel) this often.
I don't know. It's telling enough to me that they drive horribly. I would look at stats instead if they were known and if there were a statistically meaningful number of Cruise cars, but there are only 100-300 in SF.
Too complicated for most humans too. I've seen human drivers t-boned by fire trucks and ambulances. Have had near misses myself a couple times. The solution is not "intuition and social cues" but better technology and instrumentation and especially Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication (V2V) which all emergency vehicles (and eventually all vehicles) should have.
I don't think you understand what public transportation is.
Public transport is a local monopoly where profitable routes are used to subsidize unprofitable routes in order to guarantee base level of price and service to all residents. Public transport is not linked to any particular ownership or operating model, nor to any specific vehicle type. Sometimes agencies own and operate a fleet directly, other times they contract out operators and sometimes contract out whole fleets.
Self-driving vehicles are just another tech they'll have to incorporate the way they have been incorporating shared bicycles or scooters. In the long term, large bespoke expensive vehicles (busses, trains) requiring special operators and infrastructure will not be able to economically compete with mass-produced Autonomous EVs, so they'll replace much of today's fleets. Thinking that AEVs and public transit are at odds with each other is nonsense.
For sure. We often drive robotically, with our minds on a conversation, a podcast, or a daydream. That makes it easy to think a robot could really do it. But then there are the moments where driving requires our full attention, our knowledge of the world, or our ability to quickly read social situations and social signals.
As the article shows, a system that works 99% of the time won't cut it. Ditto the recent story where a robot car drove into wet cement. Or a zillion other edge cases, some of which will be fatal.
Agree it's not intractable (nearly any problem is tractable if you give yourself a long enough time horizon), but "premature" seems almost like an understatement?
And this isn't just shade directly at Cruise, this seems to apply to all of the SDV companies out there. It's far from being ready for primetime. And speaking who was an early cheerleader of SDVs, and who continues to be highly supportive of their development, I'm increasingly skeptical that they are ready-enough to be tested en masse on public streets.
The recent Cruise meltdown re: Outside Lands was pretty concerning. In a natural disaster (like the types that the Bay Area is highly prone to!) the idea is just that you'd have all of these unoccupied vehicles sitting in the middle of the street preventing evacuation and emergency access?!
Anybody who thinks escaping a natural disaster in a car is a good idea will probably die trying. The people who died in the Oakland firestorm died in their cars. Car traffic suffers from a catastrophe where throughput falls to zero in the face of even slight overload.
Nobody is saying that it’s impossible but rather that it’s much harder that the people fundraising claim, and that companies shouldn’t be allowed to cut corners doing their alpha testing on public roads with little oversight and no compensation for the negative externalities they impose on the actual residents of the cities they’re being tested in.
Beating Go required dramatically improved algorithms. Simply increasing processing power was not sufficient.
I think Chess would be a better example - IBM was able to beat Kasparov with the Deep Blue super computer simply through hardware upgrades to essentially the same model. That system was searching 200 million moves per second, whereas with improved search algorithms modern (and better) chess engines beat GMs at orders of magnitude fewer moves per second on simple PCs.
I think the deeper point is that Go is a well-defined problem: it’s simple, the rules are fixed, and there’s no question of being able to determine success.
Driving a car has multiple problems which are all much broader, and some of your goals are at odds with each other (e.g. driving slower makes everyone safer but the owners won’t be satisfied & some situations like merges or unprotected turns may be intractable without a safety risk; you need to respond to police / fire fighters / construction flaggers but not pranksters or carjackers, etc.)
Nobody said you couldn’t solve Go without AGI. It’s still open for debate whether that’s true of driving.
The thing that gets me about self-driving vehicles is they just stop and block the road when they're confused (unsolvable situation, network disconnect, etc.) We can snicker at Cruise's meltdown during Outside Lands, but I keep thinking of the videos of people driving out of the Paradise fire, or more recently the Maui fire. One confused vehicle could kill dozens, hundreds, even thousands of people behind it.
It's like the article a few days ago about the Air France 447. We expect a competent pilot to form a situational awareness model, but then discard that model when confronted with novel information. Sometimes they have to do this in a matter of minutes, other times it's just a few seconds, in the worst case sub-second accuracy is needed. It remains an unsolved problem in both the human and machine worlds.
At the same time, other companies have cars self-driving around cities for years outside of the headlines.
I imagine after we all start just using an app to summon one of those cars to go around, there will still be people quick to call self-driving impossible every time something interesting happens.
Many places are probably past the point where neighborhoods could be connected with public transit simply due to how they're laid out and how sparsely they are populated. Cities though I agree. Extreme individualism and convenience probably.
Regulators are playing way too fast and loose in this case, but given the number of human drivers that collide with firetrucks - just drop the "for a computer" from your definition.
While Go is theoretically calculable with infinite processing power, that is not the lever with which the best algorithms have claimed dominance over others.
