Time for Driverless Taxis in Taiwan? Curb Wuhan Virus or other sickness

Three items make me think this is good, (1) seeing a car hit a lady backing into a parking space pushing to the ground with seems broken body parts (2) No sick drivers or drivers getting sick (no need for this job, with unemployment to low) (3) After seeing Tesla and tech behind it’s auto drive, me thinks this is safer than self driving (it’s not perfect yet, but safer) and driverless car in Vegas https://www.gearbrain.com/lyft-las-vegas-driverless-taxi-2598041262.html

1 Like

So…you like driverless cars because they maim/kill old women?

I mean if you do, I kinda get it, as women generally live long as hell, old people tend to act like assholes, and they’re a drain on resources. So running them over might be good for the rest of us. But…what?

I dunno. I have this weird issue about being a passenger in a car that has no driver. :man_shrugging:

2 Likes

So did this guy:

1 Like

Tesla isn’t even a front runner in self driving tech but still a good point.

That’s the point. No driver, then nobody to give the Wuhan Flu or any other flu or virus. Just tell the computer where you want go, safer than a manual driven car.

Will this driverless car understand English and know how to avoid crazy scooter ahmas? I’ll take my chance with the Wuhan.

I have dug into the code of driverless taxis. This is the reply I get if I tell it to avoid crazy scooter amas.

You have said Avoid. I do not know this word. Please try another word.

These things have been crashing in Arizona, where looking at the pictures, the roads appear to me to be as wide as football fields…

1 Like

[quote=“DrewC, post:7, topic:188967, full:true”]

Sure, English, Japanese or whatever the app or computer is programed to accept. And it can avoid hitting an object better than a human driver (does not mean a crazy driver still hits you, but that would happen anyways. And last no need take your chances on the Wuhan. Just like the LINE app was created by a catastrophic event (2011 Japan great earthquake NAVER staff made LINE), this catastrophic event could be the thing that makes the conception of a new way of transport.

Number one. We’re a human society and people have to have jobs, have children and raise them.
I enjoy mom and pop shops and the familiar yet annoying taxi driver of my village. I won’t use the self service islands at the gas station or the self check out lines. That worker has handed me her money so I can teach her children.
Now, avoiding the flu? Doesn’t it stay on surfaces and is easily kicked up into the air for several hours? Are you going rig up a self cleaning system like the Japanese and New York high tech toilet booths do?
At least I see Afu polishing his taxi and wiping down the interior while waiting for fares.

2 Likes

i’ve followed this a lil bit since it’s in a tangential area to my own research area back when i was a grad student. i don’t think we are that close to being able to implement this in taiwan because taiwan has very ‘fluid’ rules when it comes to driving, which is something driver AIs have a problem with. basically, to drive in taiwan, you have to constantly break rules and perform maneuvers that would be classified as unsafe. to do a lane change in a car, you basically force your way into the swarm of mopeds expecting them to flow around you. an AI would have a difficult time with this. a lot of turns and u-turns are unprotected and you basically do it expecting incoming traffic to adjust. having to deal with all of this can paralyze the AI who will determine that it can’t safely drive under these conditions. we’ve seen accidents (including lethal ones) when the AI gets confused at a scenario, and that’s on roads that have reasonably well followed driving laws. on taiwan’s chaotic driving roads, and as long as non-AI drivers and mopeds are still around, AIs are probably a decade+ away.

2 Likes

Yes, I came from a state where we drove in an orderly way. When I first started driving here I kept complaining calling the swarms of scooters mosquitos. Somehow, after time, I don’t know how, I grew to handle it. It’s either Devine intervention in answer to my prayer or I learned to read cues from the driver’s. A subtle but shake can signed the a scooter driver will cut in front of you.
Does anyone remember about ten to fifteen years ago, there was a rash of Taiwanese drivers getting into serious and fatal accidents in the states? Maybe they couldn’t adapt to the US traffic patterns.
Anyway, I’m not sure AI can adapt to the same unconscious learning that people can.

1 Like

I can totally picture all the human-driven scooters and cars taking advantage of self-driving cars by driving even more recklessly, knowing the self-driving car will do everything to avoid them without pushing a single honk.

Also wondering how many youngsters will jump on the opportunity to pull a quickie during their ride.

3 Likes

Automation through technology will advance. First it seems weird, but you get used to it very quickly.

There were times where we had elevator operators. And now they operate by themselves, just tell it where you want to go. That system is obviously much simpler and has safety measures.
Autonomous driving will be solved in near future. First large rollout will be with autonomous trucks. You don’t have to convince cargo to be driven without a driver.
And soon it will be much safer to be in a car with a computer driver than a human driver. This will save many lives on the road. Now humans can get back to texting while being driven.

1 Like

One would hope that the Wuhan Flu (my term for it) has been eradicated before we see Driverless Taxis and the like in Taiwan.

There are huge problems with the tech. Researchers have found devilishly changing a few pixels in the input video stream can make the underlying decision engine do really strange things. A stop sign, with some weird paint splotch on it, that was never observed in the training set, might be misinterpreted as a speed limit sign. There are also inter-driver non-verbal communication things which are quite subtle that the AI is just too stupid to figure out. Think of that momentary bit of eye contact/tilt of the head to another driver. These are core problems, not corner cases.

It was a nice little infantile geek fantasy, but they have massively underestimated the problem at hand!

Remember the big players said this year for the rollout, but they are not even close…

I’ve spoken with a few people working on self-driving cars, and it’s clear to me nobody underestimated shit and the problems are not huge. There are problems, yes, and people are working to solve them. If they didn’t think they could solve them, nobody would be working on them.

Your example with the splotches sign is a bad one since it’s much more efficient to load a road database onto the car rather than develop complex technology for the car to read all the signs along the road. That also prevent cases like people putting stickers on signs with deadly consequences. A better difficulty example would be: how does a car know that a cloud of smog or a flurry of snow is not an obstacle?

The first issue you mention is sensors. And how they interpret the environment. Autonomous cars have a huge advantage over humans. They can have unlimited amount of sensors and a growing database of route information. We have only two eyes that can look in one direction, only know the roads we have personally driven.
The problem to solve is to make sense of the data. This is a hard problem, but not impossible.

Inter-driver non-verbal communication is not needed if all cars are autonomous. They can communicate directly and share more information with each other when the big players can agree on a communication standard.

I guess you are talking about Tesla. They are saying they will solve autonomous driving with human supervision very soon. The driving without human operator is scheduled for near future though. Google is also testing and carefully rolling out autonomous taxis already.

1 Like

Taiwan already has a nice testing facility for autonomous vehicles in Taoyuan. Pretty cool stuff.

http://taiwancarlab.narlabs.org.tw/index_en.html

1 Like