One way to help prevent a winner-take-all situation is to have more open protocols for some of the hard problems. An example that I feel needs to be done right now: an open protocol for signaling intent.
Today we have left and right blinkers, brake lights, the horn, and some 'body' language when you use the whole vehicle to show your intent. But with fully autonomous cars, we could be giving out signals that are rich with information.
"My exit is soon, I'd like to change to the right hand lane everybody!"; "People up ahead of me seem to be stopping suddenly, watch out as I may need to do the same!"; "The right lane is blocked at 43.718045, -79.507663, pass the word back to everyone so they are prepared".
If we can build an open protocol for how cars can share this rich information, then as more and more cars are autonomous, the roads will improve continuously. Even non-autonomous cars could start listening to this data and sharing it with the drivers.
On the other hand, if we don't build an open protocol then we could start to see, for example, all the Waymo cars helping each other out- but not helping the Teslas or the GMs. There's a winner-take-all effect in action.
While reading this article, I had a paranoid convergence of ideas.
I was reading another article the other day about stock trading strategies, and how some particular strategies only work if a small number of people are using them; once they go mainstream, they lose their advantage.
The example used was a whole lot of funds jumping into a particular strategy, which then effectively killed the strategy's effectiveness, and everybody lost.
My paranoid fear is something similar in autonomous vehicles; a vicious cycle of systems reacting to each other, because they're not able to communicate directly.
Like when you're walking towards someone, and you both try to step to the side to let the other pass, but you step to the same side; then you correct by stepping the other way, but so does the other person.
I wonder if typical car manufacturers who sell cars to other people will really be able to capture this data, technologically speaking.
It's way too much data to send over LTE, so you need to have a bunch of disk space to store it, and then you need your users to be OK with you abusing their WiFi in the middle of the night to send gigabytes of data back, which they won't, because we have data caps.
Whereas if you operate a fleet, you can just connect a data transfer cable to the car every night and dump all the data.
Obviously you can compress the data; maybe throw away the vision and point cloud data, and just keep the object locations, but is control with already recognised objects the real problem here, or is it the actual recognition part?
Problem with this is the number of split-second decisions that are made on the road. How can we establish all the connections and pass on all these messages in these 'split-seconds'? Failure to do so can be catastrophic and cause all kinds of confusion.
You can't rely on that, so don't. Self-driving cars should drive defensively too, even if for them that may mean half a second rather than two seconds.
This is much less useful data than the map data and fleet positioning data mentioned in the article, for which the advantage due to network effects is very large.
Autonomous cars are going to kill people, lots of people. They are going to kill passengers, bicyclists, pedestrians etc. It has already happened and will continue. Even though autonomous cars will be (and Tesla argues already are) safer than human drivers the fact that these deaths will be at the hands of machines rather than people will outrage the public. The industry will become even more heavily regulated, and there won't be any tolerance for testing unproven autonomous systems in the wild soon.
Related... it will be interesting to see how well autonomous cars handle mechanical failures as they (and their tires) age. Good drivers really distinguish themselves in the moments where the inputs and behaviors that are expected do not occur (ex: tire blow out).
I'm confident that autonomous cars will handle mechanical failures and other "black swan" events far better than human drivers do. Human drivers are unlikely to encounter any such incident more than once, and so are unable to learn from them; but autonomous cars can learn from all of the weird situations encountered by other cars.
> Autonomous cars are going to kill people, lots of people. They are going to kill passengers, bicyclists, pedestrians etc. It has already happened and will continue.
I wouldn't be surprised if Tesla (and other autonomous driving providers) directly offer customers their own insurance and liability coverage. The auto insurance companies of the world see the writing on the wall, yet have no data to accurately model or price such a product. It might be a good thing too, since it providers a second layer of incentive to improve the underlying autonomy technology.
> the fact that these deaths will be at the hands of machines rather than people will outrage the public
I keep hearing, and used to assume, this. But observe public reaction to e.g. the Tesla autopilot accident: measured and muted.
Counterbalancing negative reactions to machines are generational shifts in our perception of technology. I haven't seen a study on this, but from memory, what was the last new (or, for franchises, first-in-franchise) film that portrayed a man-vs-machine war? The closer we get to a population of people mostly born after the mid-1980s, the better the reaction appears to likely be.
The Matrix comes to mind as a movie that portrayed the aftermath of an apocalyptic war between man and machine.
There's quite a few recent rogue AI movies, but they typically have a few characters stopping the machine rather than a war. Avengers 2, I Robot, Eagle Eye.
Maybe. But cars seem to get a free pass with regulation, since they kill about 1.3 million people a year. We have all pretty much decided that this is acceptable, and having something traveling at 50 miles an hour a few feet from where you are walking is ok.
>Good drivers really distinguish themselves in the moments where the inputs and behaviors that are expected do not occur (ex: tire blow out).
Autonomous cars will be much better at handling these types of situations - in your example, the machine will know what's going on few milliseconds after it happens and will be able to adjust speed and direction almost instantaneously. All you need is lots of sensors.
I agree that autonomous cars will be much better, but mostly not because of sensors. Experience will be the difference. Virtually no drivers actually have experience handling blowouts and know what to do during one. Even the ones who have will mostly not be very effective at handling it, because it happens so rarely, and virtually nobody actively practices it and studies and trains the best techniques.
What will make autonomous cars better is that they can take all of the input from thousands of blowouts, add "training" from actual experts, and load the resulting techniques into every car on the road, ready for execution the instant something happens.
And engineers who can recognize every possible failure and make the car react to them.
There are two things where human beings far outpace AI in competence. The first is the ability to recognize when inputs just simply don't make sense and thus the intended algorithm is going to return garbage results. A related, but important issue (particularly if you talk about networking cars together) is being able to recognize malicious inputs.
The second issue is that humans are good at higher-order planning. An example as it relates to driving is what we do when we can't tell the state of the traffic light (direct sunlight, say). Humans naturally look for ways to indirectly infer the state: the status of the traffic light in the cross direction, the current disposition of cars around the intersection.
Autonomous cars will only be better at handling these situations if the engineers are aware that these situations need to be handled and take measures to make the cars aware of them. And history suggests that is sufficiently unlikely to happen to make me fearful of the future.
You're giving us humans superhuman abilities. How many people are prepared for tire blowout? Have you ever had your wife calling you asking what is this red light on the instrument panel? Heck I myself questioned myself when ABS light turned on in a middle of my trip.. Should I continue? Pull over? Will my breaks work? When the autonomous vehicle gets that signal it will most likely play it on a safe side, pull over and call service, all automatically. Me? I just kept driving...
And yes, we can deduct light color from other clues, but we can also go through a red light because we were preoccupied with our cellphones. AV will on the other hand have access to multiple cameras, looking at the light from multiple angles, possibly with some polarizing filters that will make this non-issue.
And this is one reason they will be better to rent than own. How many times have you had a perfectly drivable car with some failing sensor? In an autonomous vehicle, such sensor failures will essentially brick the vehicle until it's fixed.
If the sensors are redundant enough, a failure or two shouldn't prevent the car from driving; it'll just drop you off and drive itself to the nearest repair place.
The liability question will be an interesting one--far more so than trolley problems IMO. There aren't a lot of examples where we just accept things sold to consumers killing people when used according to directions and properly maintained because "hey, sometimes stuff happens." Drugs are probably the best example. But even that isn't a case of your drugs killing someone else.
I do think it will figured out in some future where there's true autonomy and they're proven far safer statistically. But you're right that the general public isn't going to shrug when $AUTOMAKER's car runs over a skateboarder and the company says "We are committed to safety and we'll try harder next time."
There's also the uncanny valley when no one's paying attention although they're legally supposed to be.
>But you're right that the general public isn't going to shrug when $AUTOMAKER's car runs over a skateboarder and the company says "We are committed to safety and we'll try harder next time."
Unfortunately many examples from recent years (acceleration pedals, air bags, tires) show that after few weeks everybody will forget about the issue and move on.
> Even though autonomous cars will be safer than human drivers the fact that these deaths will be at the hands of machines rather than people will outrage the public.
Of course. If somebody is a much-better-than-average driver, then suddenly their probability of getting killed is going to be equalized with the rest of the population and may become higher as a result.
There's considerable wishful thinking about autonomous cars. Not about the technology; that's coming along fine. (I used to work on that stuff.) About the business possibilities. There's a fantasy that there's a high-margin business opportunity in there somewhere.
The most likely outcome in the near term is that self-driving is an auto accessory you can order for a car. That's what the car-makers have in mind, and most of them are talking about shipping it for the 2020-2021 model year. In that business model, it's not a big money-maker for whoever sells the self-driving technology. They get to be a Tier I auto parts supplier, squeezed hard on price.
There's a lot of noise about "transportation as a service". Remember that Uber loses money, even after squeezing its drivers really hard and making them buy and maintain the cars. Actual "transportation as a service" is going to look more like car rental and Zipcar, and will probably come from companies that already operate fleets of cars. They already have "rent by the hour, day, week, or month". They're just adding "rent by the trip". Also, bear in mind that "transportation as a service" requires level 5 autonomy - no driver required - so the vehicles can move around empty to pick up a passenger. That's going to come a few years after Level 4.
Autonomous cars don't require car to car communications. They don't need to be "connected" at all. Chris Urmson pointed that out when he was heading Google's self-driving effort. From a safety perspective, it might be better if they're not connected. The enthusiasm for car to car communications is coming from the infotainment and advertising people.
> There's a lot of noise about "transportation as a service". Remember that Uber loses money, even after squeezing its drivers really hard and making them buy and maintain the cars.
Uber loses money because it pays the drivers - if you eliminate the driver you eliminate most of the cost. And if you can use simpler electric vehicles which are cheaper to drive and maintain, then you have yet another significant advantage.
I don't think anybody knows what exactly will happen, but there is clearly an enormous opportunity. The trucking industry alone in the United States is nearly a trillion dollar market. Of course when you add in all the complexities of actually scaling the business it doesn't become pure profit, but I'd be amazed if you couldn't print money if the technology worked.
Eliminate the driver and Uber loses the already weak marketplace network effect. Why would a taxi fleet service come to Uber rather than having their own app?
I think still the marketplace is pretty useful, especially if a taxi service is competing with people renting out their autonomous car to uber while they work or aren't using it. It would also be annoying to have to find an app for every city you're traveling in.
There are several of those, none of which seem to be beyond the demo level. Navya is really slow, about walking speed. EasyMile is so slow they have to show sped-up videos. Proterra, which makes electric buses, is just talking about self-driving. Olli, from Local Motors, is starting out at 5MPH and doesn't seem to have any units installed.
None of these systems seem capable of an ordinary airport parking shuttle route. That's embarrassing. Those things should be performing better.
The key question is what advantage can a level 4 car can give to an on-demand service(maybe like Via who seems like the cost leader, by succeeding in doing shared on-demanf rides and filling(maybe) small microbuses).
For example, if a driver can rest while such car travels the highway(or a traffic jam), he might agree to a 10% pay cut(Via pays decently today, unlike Uber), and that would be enough to win.
That's a level-4 service with strong network effects and thus nice margins, with time.
As for how that translates to advantage in level-5, that's a complicated question, but a few ideas:
1. Brand and technology advantage due to much more miles.
2. Sharing. Maybe some share of the global transportation demand would continue to be shared.
3. Politics. On-demand shared transportation solves moat of the slowness of public tranaport. Maybe we could also solves the experience part(and easier for 3 person shring than a bus). At that context, dedicating special road lanes for sharing may become politically realistic, and than cars lose on speed.
Same goes for rush fees.
Or maybe, just owning the customer order layer, would be enough to win on optimization of single person cars moving around a city, giving a 10% advantage in trip time , and that would be enough , with time, for a mono/duo-poly.
But even if not and it's a low margin business, there would still be a ton of money to be made.
This is a great write up but misses how gov't regulation could actually force a winner-takes-all distribution. States (like CA and NV) have already started to draw up their own autonomous driving regulations and the DOT is planning to support this evolution with Federal standards.
It's reasonable to assume that these standards will get more stringent over time as accidents, insurance, and compatibility become forced issues (likely though lawsuits). The companies that have the data and systems to meet these standards will be able to keep up but it'd be hard (read: impossible) for a new entrant to catch up after the initial players are further down the evolutionary curve.
The government regulatory standards could be so tough that there would be no real quality differentiation between autonomous car vendors, as all vendors would have to meet the same incredibly high standards of safety.
An outcome could well be that both Tesla and Google both meet the high government standards, but in doing so they've had to create such high performing autonomous systems that the consumer can't tell the difference. They both work equally perfectly because they have to be to be allowed on the road.
If this is the case then the autonomous system becomes a non-factor in the purchase of a car. Either you're in the market for an autonomous car or you're not.
> It's reasonable to assume that these standards will get more stringent over time as accidents, insurance, and compatibility become forced issues (likely though lawsuits). The companies that have the data and systems to meet these standards will be able to keep up
There's a term for this twin to regulatory capture. In essence, the amount of regulation in an industry scales with the age and development of the industry. Difficulty of entrance scales scales with regulation. Combine this with any economies of scale and network effects present, and you have a state-subsidised incumbency bias.
This write-up overlooks that hardware integration is neither free nor easy. Tesla has a huge advantage over an 'autonomy in a box' model because 1. It only has to support 2 or 3 car models and 2. It has full control over all design decisions.
Imagine trying to calibrate your third-party self-driving software for every different car geometry, sensor placement, transmission system, and steering sensitivity across a few different car manufacturers. If you screw it up for one car model, people die and it's your fault.
Now let's say waymo chooses a sole partner to avoid this, GM, for example. Now waymo and GM have to work together to build a car, with a huge expertise barrier between the two teams. Will GM be willing to redesign their decades-old electronics platform around Waymo's self-driving system? Will Waymo put in the effort to make their sensors easily maintainable by GM mechanics? If the relationship doesn't last forever, much of this effort is wasted.
Tesla has expertise on both sides and has a mandate across the organization to make the integrated system work. Not to mention a huge head start handling UX and safety regulations in the field. They may not have a monopoly, but I expect them to be the first to level 5 and the leader in autonomous driving market share for years to come.
> Now let's say waymo chooses a sole partner to avoid this, GM, for example.
I think it depends a lot on the specific partner. Noticeably WayMo has partnered with Chrysler, rather than Ford, and Chrysler seems in a position where they would retool to do what WayMo told them to do, because they have no self-driving effort of their own, so WayMo is their only hope if this becomes real. WayMo might just buy Chrysler at that point.
So much talk about LIDAR and other sensors. Why nobody talks about obvious idea of Road Object Message Bus? ROMB is a protocol where each road object (a traffic light, a sign, a car, etc.) can transmit info about itself. A car could broadcast its direction vector, intention to turn, any non ROMB moving object it sees. A traffic light could broadcast current state and when it is going to change. That additional information would greatly enhance overall security, especially during rain and snow conditions.
Self-driving is such important (just after eliminating combustion engines) that we could upgrade existing cars with cheap ROMB boxes. Vehicle GPS tracking system costs about $30. ROMB box would cost about $60.
Let's say a car ROMB received info about the white truck, while your car cameras and vision recognition systems see just a cloud and any truck in 50 m range, that conflicting info should cause the car to slow down.
Right, and I think it's the obvious way to approach autonomous vehicles. With the correct infrastructure investment, self-driving vehicles would be vastly simpler and more reliable.
The problem is who pays for it, and who authorizes its installation. It's really something that has to be done at the governmental level. And I don't think there's any will to pay for it.
There are other issues of course. One is that in an Urban environment transportation issues would be better served by good public transport than self-driving vehicles.
The other is that I think once the government get involved, the numerous sociological issues associated with self-driving cars (which I personally think are more significant than the technical issues) would become apparent.
This makes sense--and is quite consistent with what I've heard around some efforts being far more open (ahem) to open sourcing their code than their data.
A lot probably comes down to the size of the moat. If some fairly modest dataset is "good enough" that implies needed data will be widely available can be used by anyone for their automation algorithms. (Regulation could also force some level of standardization at this layer.)
Alternatively, truly vast data sets could turn out to be the difference between decent assistive driving systems, autonomy on highways, and more broadly useful and enabling self-driving technology. Such data sets could end up being outside the capabilities of a few companies who got there first.
> A lot probably comes down to the size of the moat. If some fairly modest dataset is "good enough" that implies needed data will be widely available can be used by anyone for their automation algorithms. (Regulation could also force some level of standardization at this layer.)
Given that humans do without detailed data of this sort, I think it should be okay to leave manufacturers and service providers to figure out how proprietary or standardized the datasets should be.
I personally might never trust/desire an autonomous car, especially one connected to the internet, a phone network, or a car-to-car network. In a world where everyone has your best interests at heart, it seems like a nice feature; in the one world we've got, it doesn't.
Any specific suspicious death may come and go, but the fact that something like this is believable with conventional networked cars is enough reason to be very skeptical of security and government access (and criminal access) claims of manufacturers, no matter how well-meaning.
If I had a level 5 autonomous car that was compromised by someone who wanted to kill me, they probably could. Or they could just push me down a flight of stairs.
Ultimately, I am alive because nobody cares enough to murder me.
"Why lock my door, people will open the door if they want to, or break the window."
I don't see what's wrong with having fewer things in your life which can silently kill you.
If you get in a new car, you are now completely at its mercy. There are few or no precautions you can take; you might as well lay on your back, and strap your arms down so your belly stays up.
What you're really doing is making it cheaper and easier to kill, misdirect, or trick you. This means that people who wanted to do these things before, but couldn't afford it, now can.
> Given that humans do without detailed data of this sort
Humans learn by using data from their interactions with the environment, since childhood. That's a ton of data and there might not be a way around that.
Given the lack of network effect in cars already, it's not likely we'll see a huge explosion of inter-car connectivity anytime soon. Even Tesla see their cars largely as individual machines, and not nodes on a highway network.
Example: Driving with cruise control on at 60 mph. The car in front is going ~59.5 mph, so you slowly gain on them. Why do the cars not communicate their speed, so your car can adjust speed to maintain a safe distance? Even cars of the same brand can't do this today. What will be the catalyst for this changing?
Cars should not depend on information from other cars, they should treat them just as suggestions, or intents, not actual events. In your example, the reported speed of the car will depend of many factors like tire size, quality of the sensor or even humidity or temperature, so it can't be trusted by other cars.
> Why do the cars not communicate their speed, so your car can adjust speed to maintain a safe distance?
How do you deal with spoofing info for/from another vehicle?
What happens when someone decides to see what happens when they `inter_car_radio.broadcast(myspeed=0)` or `inter_car_radio.broadcast(myspeed=120)` when the speed limit is 80?
The naive solution would be to make it illegal to modify the communication system of your car, but wouldn't just making it illegal to broadcast false data be enough? And then if an accident is caused because of that, you can tack on some other charge like an autonomous version of reckless driving.
A better solution would be to provision each car with its own key pair and the car maker's root CA just before it rolls off the factory floor, that way it can constantly beam 2 signals:
- a signed (regulator-mandated) signal for cars from other manufacturers;
- an encrypted signal intended for cars from the same manufacturer.
The first signal would be signed by the root CA of the car maker to indicate that its communications can be trusted.
The encrypted signal would of course carry an information-rich payload for coordinating a convoy to travel at the same speed, brake, signal a turn, etc simultaneously, for instance.
Surely the (already) observable relative difference is more important than what the car thinks it's speed is? Both cars might read 60mph and go at different speeds. Therefore I don't see much need for that to change.
I think more interesting would be smarter traffic control systems which communicate with cars in cities to advise traffic flows - a simple example being a (wirelessly) counting down light rather than red/amber/green.
Cars already communicate their speed through the EM spectrum, and it's very hard to spoof this. LIDAR can easily determine if it is approaching an object at even 1 cm/s.
Interesting questions posed, and relevant. Centralizing forces like network effects can be very powerful in technology fields, and they're constantly evolving. We don't have generations of experience to draw predictions from, like traditional manufacturing. Data aggregation advantages seems to be something companies believe in, and are pursing.
From full-autonomy onwards, it is very hard to predict anything. There will still be manufacturers of course, but the manufacturer-consumer structure of the market could completely change. I think there's a decent chance personal ownership will decline.
Removing drivers from ride-services will drive down costs, a lot. Probably enough to change ownership incentives and market dynamics.
If that happens, 2nd order effects will also be big. People act very differently when they pay per-km explicitely, even at reduced rates. Tolls (economists love tolls, btw) become more palatable when rolled into a per km price. There might be fleets of little, light cars servicing city centres.
In this chaotic context, I think it's hard to predict anything about market structure.
Combining maps with road journey data is already an oligopoly, based on: first mover advantage, economies of scale, network effects, satnav products/apps, in-car systems, mobile device OS oligopoly, fleet management data and value added data analytics.
The 3+1 companies of sufficient scale to dominate the market are: Google (Android), HERE (was Navtek, was Nokia), Tom Tom (Apple iOS), and Inrix (startup) - which does not create its own maps, but has captured enough driving data to compete with the Big 3.
The only other major map provider is Microsoft Bing, but it does not (AFAIK) have significant products based on driving data, although it does have 'T-Drive' and various other research efforts. Losing the battle for mobile OSes has crippled its efforts.
Important point is that software for self-driving is subject to virtuous cycle because the more it is in use, the more information it collects and the better it becomes. Which in turns means more use... And it can go out of control with one supplier dominating the market completely.
Let's say you're a strong company ,one that can manage to achieve a lead of, say 5 years over competitors with the tech. Does anybody think you won't(most likely) manage to bind yourself to a stable competitive advantage in this industry, if such exists ?
Planet Labs is the big wildcard in mapping. When Google first mapped the world, they had to hire thousands of contractors to drive cars down every street, and even pretty metropolitan areas would be updated once or twice a year. Now, there's a company with a fleet of a couple hundred satellites that's imaging the whole world every day, with a resolution of about 10 feet. Not sure on their pricing - I think it's a lot - but the capital cost of building an accurate physical map has gone down dramatically.
Today we have left and right blinkers, brake lights, the horn, and some 'body' language when you use the whole vehicle to show your intent. But with fully autonomous cars, we could be giving out signals that are rich with information.
"My exit is soon, I'd like to change to the right hand lane everybody!"; "People up ahead of me seem to be stopping suddenly, watch out as I may need to do the same!"; "The right lane is blocked at 43.718045, -79.507663, pass the word back to everyone so they are prepared".
If we can build an open protocol for how cars can share this rich information, then as more and more cars are autonomous, the roads will improve continuously. Even non-autonomous cars could start listening to this data and sharing it with the drivers.
On the other hand, if we don't build an open protocol then we could start to see, for example, all the Waymo cars helping each other out- but not helping the Teslas or the GMs. There's a winner-take-all effect in action.