Even After $100 Billion, Self-Driving Cars Are Going Nowhere

Thanks for that!

The incident with the tangle of fallen wires seems more significant. I mean it is exactly the sort of thing I was talking about above - how do you program (or train with patterns!) for the unexpected? The car should really also 'know' about electricity and caution tapes displayed to inform corporeal drivers.

Imagine also how these cars might behave in an earthquake.

David

San Franciscans Keep Calling 911 About Baffling Self-Driving Car Behavior

Aaron Gordon

Cruise vehicles have also interfered with fighting fires. The letter says that on June 12, a Cruise AV “ran over a fire hose that was in use at an active fire scene,” in violation of the California Vehicle Code. On January 21, 2023, a Cruise AV entered an active fire scene, drove towards the fire hoses on the ground, and failed to stop despite “efforts” made by the firefighters on scene to block it. They were “not able to do so,” the letter says, “until they shattered a front window of the Cruise AV.”

Cruise has also called 911 multiple times for “unresponsive” passengers who, when emergency crews showed up, turned out to be sleeping.

Tesla car in Beta full self-driving mode almost rams cyclist (+ video)

Top Tesla engineer confesses he staged an inaccurate self-driving video at Elon Musk’s bidding

Tesla Officially Admits Its Self Driving Cars Cause Crashes With A Massive Recall

It's pretty obvious the technology was oversold, along with a lot of machine "learning" and now investments are dropping.

Companies oversell the self-driving capabilities of their cars, with horrific outcomes

Elon Musk's self-driving-car project is on a road to nowhere

Tim Levin

But according to Phil Koopman, an engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University who specializes in autonomous vehicles, Full Self-Driving doesn't look nearly reliable enough to function safely without a driver, given the types of simple mistakes it's still making. If the system were as close to ready as Musk claims, it would stumble only once in a blue moon and exclusively in freak scenarios that might trip up a human driver, he told Insider. 

That's not yet the case. For all the impressive-looking videos shared online of the Beta smoothly traversing intersections and roundabouts, plenty of clips show a jerky system struggling with routine driving tasks like slowing for speed bumps and choosing the correct lane. That's not to mention numerous recent crashes involving Tesla's automated systems and stopped emergency vehicles that are under federal investigation. 

Kenji, a 2019 Tesla Model X owner who withheld his last name to avoid online harassment from Tesla fans, said he shelled out for Full Self-Driving after hearing Musk talk up the system's imminent potential. Years later, the system frequently makes unsettling mistakes, leaving Kenji feeling "duped." Reporting that Tesla staged an infamous 2016 video touting its autonomous tech added insult to injury, he said.

In tandem with the above post on the failures of the company Cruise I'd say driverless cars are more an unpredictable hazard than boon...

I wonder if anyone has considered the possibility that we can drive as well as we can, partly through psi effects. You look at someone and sense what they are going to do next. It might be worth testing if people can do so well on driving simulators.

David

I wonder if anyone has considered the possibility that we can drive as well as we can, partly through psi effects. You look at someone and sense what they are going to do next. It might be worth testing if people can do so well on driving simulators.

David

An interesting suggestion. I am skeptical mainly because many decades of research in parapsychology has apparently established the reality of psi effects but at the cost of a very low level of effectiveness, requiring endless numbers of trials to statistically demonstrate marginal levels of the anomalous effects like telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psychokinesis. Why should automobile driving conditions in everyday life bring forth esp and psi effects orders of magnitude greater than this, just because of the circumstances? Of course, we know too little of the etiology of esp and psi to rule out intentionality and purpose and survival on the road as possible factors in the magnitude of the effects. Lab experiments don't have the immediacy and survival priority of driving in traffic.

An interesting suggestion. I am skeptical mainly because many decades of research in parapsychology has apparently established the reality of psi effects but at the cost of a very low level of effectiveness, requiring endless numbers of trials to statistically demonstrate marginal levels of the anomalous effects like telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psychokinesis. Why should automobile driving conditions in everyday life bring forth esp and psi effects orders of magnitude greater than this, just because of the circumstances? Of course, we know too little of the etiology of esp and psi to rule out intentionality and purpose and survival on the road as possible factors in the magnitude of the effects. Lab experiments don't have the immediacy and survival priority of driving in traffic.

Well first of all, many of the micro-decisions involved in driving involve potential death or severe injury - this is the sort of situation where psi comes into its own. Driving involves a realm where experiment really cannot go.

I guess people would perform worse in lab experiments than in the real thing.

As to aetiology, I tend to assume that the human mind has some ability to review possible outcomes before the wavefunction collapses into one state. It is the potential consequences which make the activity special.

Something similar has been reported among combat veterans (I think Sheldrake mentions it somewhere). Certain patrole leaders are considered to be much luckier than others.

David

I wonder if anyone has considered the possibility that we can drive as well as we can, partly through psi effects. You look at someone and sense what they are going to do next. It might be worth testing if people can do so well on driving simulators.

David

I and a friend both practice something we call 'flow' when driving in traffic that is not very heavy. This is not the physiological meaning of the term flow, where you become so engrossed in something that time passes without awareness. Rather, this is reducing your degrees of freedom to a binary choice of acceleration/deceleration, and attempting to feel the 'real' choice which will allow you to flow with the traffic, rather than what you want to happen. I came across an article years ago from a bus driver who had noticed something that seemed similar, which he - IIRC - also termed flow. We're both happy there is a real effect.

I and a friend both practice something we call 'flow' when driving in traffic that is not very heavy. This is not the physiological meaning of the term flow, where you become so engrossed in something that time passes without awareness. Rather, this is reducing your degrees of freedom to a binary choice of acceleration/deceleration, and attempting to feel the 'real' choice which will allow you to flow with the traffic, rather than what you want to happen. I came across an article years ago from a bus driver who had noticed something that seemed similar, which he - IIRC - also termed flow. We're both happy there is a real effect.

Can you elaborate a bit? What happens if the road turns a corner or you need to turn into another road? Also, where exactly does the psi come in?

David

Can you elaborate a bit? What happens if the road turns a corner or you need to turn into another road? Also, where exactly does the psi come in?

David

sure, but I doubt I'm going to be able to tell you much more. I'm focused on 'feeling' for whether I should apply the accelerator, or not apply the accelerator (go faster or go slower). Everything else goes on as usual, but with the intention to flow, and feel for that binary choice. (It's working when I'm not having to apply the brakes - but that can't be the aim). Note that it doesn't work in very heavy traffic when there's no possibility to achieve flow, because your car is stopped etc. or where you don't know the road, and so naturally one can't enter that binary choice feeling state).

I can't tell you what thus state is, you just have to find it. It took weeks for my friend to find it. It's hard to do too. One of the things I'm doing is learning to separate the feeling of what I want to do, from this other feeling. Both are the same, but one is flow the other is not, I guess you might call the feeling thats not - a bit like ego, and the feeling that is, is listening-like, surrender of something... perhaps. I don't really have any way to describe the place/state, it's like it's hidden, curled up real small.

But you know it, when you're there, you can feel it as righter... I've wondered if it might be meditation-like state, but aware and in the world, with simple binary choice, rather than apart from it.

sure, but I doubt I'm going to be able to tell you much more. I'm focused on 'feeling' for whether I should apply the accelerator, or not apply the accelerator (go faster or go slower). Everything else goes on as usual, but with the intention to flow, and feel for that binary choice. (It's working when I'm not having to apply the brakes - but that can't be the aim). Note that it doesn't work in very heavy traffic when there's no possibility to achieve flow, because your car is stopped etc. or where you don't know the road, and so naturally one can't enter that binary choice feeling state).

I can't tell you what thus state is, you just have to find it. It took weeks for my friend to find it. It's hard to do too. One of the things I'm doing is learning to separate the feeling of what I want to do, from this other feeling. Both are the same, but one is flow the other is not, I guess you might call the feeling thats not - a bit like ego, and the feeling that is, is listening-like, surrender of something... perhaps. I don't really have any way to describe the place/state, it's like it's hidden, curled up real small.

But you know it, when you're there, you can feel it as righter... I've wondered if it might be meditation-like state, but aware and in the world, with simple binary choice, rather than apart from it.

I suspect I know it also, but to be clear, steering goes on as usual?

As a further thought, think of presentiment (Dean Radin's experiment). That operates on a time scale of about 0-4 seconds. That is certainly in a range where a lot of driving decisions get made.

David

I suspect I know it also, but to be clear, steering goes on as usual?



David

Yep, in the UK, if I'm on the inside on a motorway, I'll move out to overtake, and then back in. I'll turn corners, and go around roundabouts etc. The degrees of freedom for steering seem so limited, that it does not interfere greatly with 'feeling' this binary state of whether to go faster or go slower - as you're stuck with just following the road ahead. (Again, this doesn't apply if you don't know the road/route, or are in heavy traffic).

You can see that it might be a different, but related perspective to the Ouija board...

Ouija participants know the board layout
Flow drivers know the road layout...

Ouija participants are moving with the puck
Flow drivers are moving with the car...

Ouija participants are sharing the same movement - limbs on puck
Flow drivers are sharing the same movements - limbs on steering wheel, foot on accelerator...

Ouija participants are asking for binary yes or no
Flow drivers are feeling for binary faster or slower...

Ouija participants can convince themselves that they are not in control
Flow drivers are learning to distinguish between the feeling of "what I want", from this 'other' feeling/state that 'fits in' with other drivers.