Comment by lateforwork 3 days ago
Even the best AI can't drive without good sensors. Cameras have to guess distance and they fail when there is insufficient contrast, direct sunlight and so on. LiDARs don't have to guess distance.
Nah. That's a common "thought about it for 15 seconds but not 15 minutes" mistake.
Making a car that drives well on arbitrary roads is freakishly hard. Having to adapt every single road in the world before even a single self-driving car can use them? That's a task that makes the previous one look easy.
Learned sensor fusion policy that can compensate for partial sensor degradation, detect severe dropout, and handle both safely? Very hard. Getting the world that can't fix the low tech potholes on every other road to set up and maintain machine specific infrastructure everywhere? A nonstarter.
Well, we already provide dedicated lanes for multi-passenger vehicles in many places, nearly all semi-major airports have dedicated lots and lanes for rideshare drivers, many parts of downtown/urban areas have the same things... and it didn't exactly take super long to roll all that out.
Also, 99% of roads in civilized areas have something alongside them already that you can attach RFID tags to. Quite a bit easier than setting up an EV charging station (another significant infrastructure thing which has rolled out pretty quickly). And let's not forget, every major metro area in the world has multi-lane superhighways which didn't even exist at all 50-70 years ago.
Believe me, I've thought about this for a lot more than 15 minutes. Yes, we should improve sensor reliability, absolutely. But it wouldn't hurt to have some kind of backup roadside positioning help, and I don't see how it would be prohibitively expensive. Maybe I am missing something, but I'm gonna need more than your dismissive comment to be convinced of that.
You are missing the sheer soul-crushing magnitude of the infrastructure problem. You are missing the little inconvenient truth that live in a world full of roads that don't even consistently have asphalt on them. That real life Teslas ship with AI that does vibe-based road lane estimation because real life roads occasionally fail to have any road markings a car AI could see.
Everything about road infrastructure is "cheap to deploy, cheap to maintain". This is your design space: the bare minimum of a "road" that still does its job reasonably well. Gas stations and motels are an aside - they earn money. Not even the road signs pay for themselves.
Now, you propose we design some type of, let's say, a machine only mark that helps self-driving cars work well. They do nothing for human drivers, who are still a road majority. And then you somehow manage to make every country and every single self-driving car vendor to get to agree on the spec, both on paper and in truth.
Alright, let's say we've done that. Why would anyone, then, put those on the road? They're not the bare minimum. And if we wanted to go beyond the bare minimum, we'd plug the potholes, paint the markings and fix the road signs first.
Cameras also fail when weather conditions cake your car in snow and/or mud while you're driving. Actually, from what I just looked up, this is an issue with LiDAR as well. So it seems to me like we don't even have the sensors we need to do this properly yet, unless we can somehow make them all self-cleaning.
It always goes back to my long standing belief that we need dedicated lanes with roadside RFID tags to really make this self driving thing work well enough.