
Self-Driving Truck Encounters the Unexpected, Then Reaches a Milestone - edward
https://blog.caranddriver.com/self-driving-truck-loses-its-remote-connection-but-not-its-shot-at-milestone-achievement/
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ThePhysicist
Honestly, I do not consider stopping squarely in the middle of the highway and
blocking one of the lanes as the "correct" way to handle this situation. I'd
rather expect that the truck at least knows how to stop in a safe manner, i.e.
by moving to the shoulder first. A large number of accidents (probably even
the majority) here in Europe are caused by drivers crashing into stopped
vehicles on highways, so having AI-controlled cars stop in the middle of the
road is clearly not acceptable.

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aaronm14
Agreed, but I would imagine a meaningful population of people would do the
same thing in that situation

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dwighttk
“That situation” was loss of contact with a control center. What is the
equivalent for people?

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CDRdude
Perhaps dense fog, or whiteout blizzard conditions? I’m making the assumption
that the server parses the data from the truck to determine what it is seeing.

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winthrowe
No, those are sensor failures, not external communications failures.

The human equivalent would be being unable to call someone for directions.

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smallstepforman
The article keeps iterating how they’ve tested for every conceivable condition
they can think of, and yet the narrative says that they were stunned to
experience a communications loss which they never tested/conceived of. It’s
not reassuring when someone claims 100% test coverage and 100% pass, when they
only have a limited number or tests in their script. A comms loss was
_unthinkable_?!? What is this, amatuer hour?

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ccozan
They say that the truck/system is autonomous?

Because, yes, if loss of connectivity is a major fault and put it into a safe
mode, then no, is not autonomous driving.

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titzer
Agree. It is "automated" driving, not "autonomous" driving.

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subroutine
On one hand, it's great that the Semi truck was able to slow and stop without
hurting anyone, after losing connection with the control center.

On the other, how does this bode for an autonomous fleet of trucks that all
suddenly stop somewhere along a highway? The traffic disruption could be
nightmarish. And what if there was no lead vehicle to go fetch said truck in a
timely manner?

Also i feel like there is a lesson to learn here about how it's not just
hacked servers and software that could produce these events, but a hacked or
disrupted (lightening striking a utility pole) power supply could also have
immediate real-world impact on these transport systems. Particularly if you
dont have backup control that is distributed and redundant (or onboard the
vehicle itself).

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Moru
This is the tradeoff we get with technology. It gets increasingly better with
every iteration but the consequences of failure gets worse and worse. What
happens with humanity if a big solarstorm comes again?

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ehnto
We are incredibly eager to introduce technology dependencies it seems. The
idea of robustness via simplicity seems to be a mantra for individual bits of
software, but we are happy to stack it all together in a teetering jenga tower
of dependencies. We rave about how great it is to have a good ecosystem in a
platform or language, but the word ecosystem is synonymous with complex
dependency trees (ha!). Nature is definitely a more robust architect than us
though.

As for what I would do when it all falls apart, I would barter for a sailing
boat and some paper books on how to sail, and live the life of an ocean
vagabond until I inevitably perish on some island or at sea.

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titzer
So, it lost its umbilical to the great brain in the sky and came to gentle
halt on the highway.

Color me unimpressed.

Sorry for my snark, but, donkeys do better. If only they could travel at 70mph
:/

We are making incremental progress towards this autonomous vehicle goal, but
hey, let's get some perspective and not let our techno-fetishism get us
overexcited. Trains and stuff.

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ddalex
So you're advocating taking a donkeys' brain and hook it up to a truck and let
it drive?

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simion314
Maybe an insect brain is enough, the ones that fly are very fast in reactions.

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smallstepforman
My windscreen would disagree with you ;)

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simion314
You hit the insects with your car, also you need to consider distances
relative to the insect size.

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meigwilym
> the truck inexplicably slowed and stopped in the middle of the road.

This scenario caused a fatal crash in England which is now finishing up in
court. 8 people dead.

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-
herts-432271...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-
herts-43227167)

~~~
ainiriand
I wonder if these vehicles are performing advances regarding other vehicles
they encounter. If that is the case, this particular truck could stop in the
middle of the left lane, can you believe that?

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PhantomGremlin
Oh Fuck No.

The "safest decision of all" is most definitely not to stop "in its lane of
travel". That's insanely dangerous in any real-world scenario.

At least have the vehicle pull over onto the shoulder. What makes them so
"special" that they think they should just stop in the middle of a highway? If
that's the state-of-the-art of self-driving, then those vehicles simply aren't
yet ready to be on the road.

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sandos
It should actually not be "insanely" dangerous to stop at any point, if you
have sane drivers and laws. You should always be able to stop before the
visible part of the road ahead of you, or before the vehicle in front of you,
right?

But yeah stopping on the shoulder of course is a no-brainer. How to do that,
though, is maybe not so simple. In winter judging where the road ends and a
ditch begins can be very hard if there is no rail.

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mantas
> You should always be able to stop before the visible part of the road ahead
> of you, or before the vehicle in front of you, right?

You're following another vehicle at safe following distance. Which is much
shorter than distance you can stop at if that car stopped in 0s. Car suddenly
changes lanes, revealing obstacle in your line. If you can't change lanes as
quickly for some reason, you've a massive problem...

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kd5bjo
For exactly the reason you list, what you describe is not a "safe following
distance."

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PuffinBlue
You can argue the point until blue in the face but you're not going to improve
anyones safety by chasing this argument. Humans are terrible at managing risk.
Humans will always make mistakes. Telling them to 'not follow closely' is
futile.

If you don't design systems to take account of this then your safety practices
will be ineffective.

If autonomous systems are to be on the road with human users then those
autonomous _should_ be designed in a way to minimise the mistakes humans make.

They should be designed that way because they _can_ be designed that way.

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kd5bjo
I agree completely, and I never advocated for any change. I do, however, like
to point out cognitive dissonance when I notice it on HN.

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mantas
It's not cognitive dissonance at all. You're talking about safe speed based on
line-of-sight. Meanwhile safe following distance is completely different
matter. One of the reasons why traffic works is that we trust other drivers
and rely on them.

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rco8786
This is eerily like the common sci-fi movie plot of killing the “brain” to
eradicate the entire fleet of bad guys. (Independence Day, Star Wars Ep 1,
etc)

Imagine what this would be like at scale. Besides the danger of having
thousands of trucks suddenly stop on the highway, now whatever those trucks
were actually shipping is also stuck.

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stephengillie
Should autonomous cars have multiple self driving systems, so if one service
is DDOS'd, they can failover to another?

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littlepinkpill
But autonomous vehicles are not autonomous (as in "without dependencies on a
complex chain of tech with human operators in it"), and all I can think is
“hackable."

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cafard
Odd how thoroughly the original meaning of "milestone" has been lost.

