1925: Self-Driving Car Milestones

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Self-Driving Car Milestones
I'm working on a car capable of evaluating arbitrarily complex boolean expressions on "honk if [...]" bumper stickers and responding accordingly.
Title text: I'm working on a car capable of evaluating arbitrarily complex boolean expressions on "honk if [...]" bumper stickers and responding accordingly.

Explanation

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This comic is a list of milestones for self-driving cars. Some have already been achieved, others are still being worked on, while others are facetious "milestones".

Transcript

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Discussion

This page is, without offense to the creator, a mess. We're gonna need a table for this. 172.68.47.78 19:14, 6 December 2017 (UTC)

  • Or at least a list. I have created one, but it could use fleshing out.WingedCat (talk) 19:55, 6 December 2017 (UTC)
List is fine. You don't need a table for everything - especially if this table had only one or two columns...
none taken, it's my first time (I only wrote the first three points from a blank page) 162.158.111.61 09:08, 7 December 2017 (UTC)

I'm going to go with a [citation needed] on that "sex in a self-driving has probably already happened." Are there stats suggesting the amount of coitus per vehicle in the relevant counties?

"This a joke about Boolean satisfiability, as evaluating an arbitrarily complex bumper sticker and determining whether to honk is NP-complete." What? Determining whether to honk has nothing to do with the satisfiability problem; this is more of a joke about getting a computer to evaluate the truth of Boolean expressions that it may have no information about. Checkmate (talk) 22:07, 6 December 2017 (UTC)Checkmate

I believe the "Autonomous canyon jumping" is related to the self-loathing; a self-loathing is likely to autonomously jump off a cliff. 108.162.212.179 22:30, 6 December 2017 (UTC)

"As of 2017, self-driving s require a human to be able to take over just in case, but any such trip where the human never actually took control would qualify for this milestone." I seems like not all places require a human backup driver: https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/7/16615290/waymo-self-driving-safety-driver-chandler-autonomous 172.69.22.146 23:19, 6 December 2017 (UTC)

Time to start printing "Honk if this statement evaluates as 'do not honk!'" bumper stickers! 162.158.63.28 01:24, 7 December 2017 (UTC)

Is this related to the Vsauce Mind Field video about self-driving s and the trolley problem the literally released today, or is it just a weird coincidence?162.158.74.225 05:13, 7 December 2017 (UTC)

The likelihood of trolley-like problems is no lower for an autonomous car than a human-driven one, since it depends on external factors. It might be true that if a significant number of the other cars on the road were replaced with self-driving ones, that would reduce the occurrence of conflicts, and therefore the likelihood and severity of these problems would be lower, but it would be lower for self-driven and human-driven cars alike. The real issue with such debates is that they tend to make a false assumption that existing human drivers are good at solving these problems, when the whole thrust of these thought experiments is to demonstrate that there are no generally accepted solutions to these problems.141.101.104.239 09:33, 7 December 2017 (UTC)

I don't think anyone would argue that human drivers are good at handling trolley-problem situations, and we don't tend to expect humans to make good decisions under pressure. The problem is that a self-driving car would need to be programmed to make decisions in these scenarios in advance, which would involve assigning absolute values to the different options in a trolley-problem scenario. As you said, there's no generally accepted solution to these problems, so the controversy arises from deciding how self-driving cars should be programmed to handle these situations. 162.158.79.161 21:05, 7 December 2017 (UTC)
"Given the nature of human sexuality, it is possible this has already happened, but there has not been a public documentation of this milestone."

Rule 34 applies. --162.158.89.133 12:44, 7 December 2017 (UTC)

that part after the but is an edit from me, because the previous wording was even less plausible:
"but no one recorded the incident." - I changed that to "but there has not been a public documentation of this milestone."
because I didn't find any recording with a quick search on one of the more famous free sites for videos like that (not car videos...) Lupo (talk) 16:58, 7 December 2017 (UTC)
A simple search on pornhub (maybe I shouldn't have that in my first comment?) shows that this has already happened. TsumikiMiniwa (talk) 19:55, 22 October 2019 (UTC)
welcome to the wiki, we need experts on all kind of topics here ;) just kidding. However yes, as the explanation states, it has happened and has been documented by now (note that the other comments and the comic are from 2017). If you find a source that predates this comic, then we should mention it in the explanation. --Lupo (talk) 06:24, 23 October 2019 (UTC)

"An empty car wandering the highways" - that doesn't seem so ridiculous; a car costs what, $9000/year? That's like an EC2 instance and not even the biggest one. Sabik (talk) 13:22, 7 December 2017 (UTC)

Plus you have to factor in the potential for the cost of letting the car wander becoming cheaper than paying for a parking space, in which case it may become a deliberate choice.141.101.104.239 13:24, 7 December 2017 (UTC)
Some stops will provide free electricity so an electric car could keep going that way. Its owner will notice it's missing but they could be sick in hospital or even dead - they may even die in the car from a medical issue if that then counts as an empty car. Why the car's journey never ends is a different question. Maybe it drives the deceased owner to work and back every day. Maybe it's searching for a parking space and charging point but cannot reach the former from the latter before it has to go back and charge again. Robert Carnegie [email protected] 141.101.105.6 16:09, 7 December 2017 (UTC)
My first thought was of a woman who had died in her house, but wasn't found for many years because her bills were all auto-paid.162.158.122.12 14:49, 8 December 2017 (UTC)


Added a bit more to the explanation and formatted everything into a table so it's more organized. --JayRulesXKCD what's up? 13:26, 7 December 2017 (UTC)

Are there any researchers working on cars that can find a parking space? (Instead of just park in one that the human driver finds?) 162.158.111.145 14:53, 7 December 2017 (UTC)

There is a parking space app and parking payment apps. I don't know if smart cars are allowed to use these without human supervision. Robert Carnegie [email protected] 141.101.105.6 16:11, 7 December 2017 (UTC)
Tesla already has software to allow a Model S or X to park itself after dropping off human occupants at their destination. It's not yet released to owners but Tesla is testing it. ----

The first three milestones all come under the heading of recently achieved. 1.Volvo has an auto breaking system on imminent collision detection 2.lane keeping/warning systems are now relatively common. 3.Several models have automatic parking assist.162.158.165.16 04:28, 8 December 2017 (UTC)

Perhaps commenters here are to young to remember Evel Knievel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evel_Knievel but I feel very confident Randall was thinking of Evel and his Snake River Canyon jump when he wrote the "Autonomous Canyon Jumping" milestone----

The table seems to miss the fact that the comic starts with things which have all been implemented in vehicles and have become commonplace, spending a lot of time talking about hypothetical problems which don't really change the fact that these things are all "done". Automatic emergency braking is available on new cars and appears to be a fairly simple collision-avoidance system. Highway lane-keeping is also definitely "solved" in the current batch of self-driving cars and is a selling point for some mainstream cars and trucks too (and the difficulties with faded lines or whatever is fairly irrelevant to the comic as a whole). Self-parking is also available in a lot of standard cars these days. "Full highway autonomy" is more or less solved now, though of course there are legal issues with it. Without doing any research I think we can all agree that "First sex..." has definitely been done by now. The first milestone that is probably in our future, now, is the "no input" line (though I can't be sure... can a user really just get into the car, give and address and do nothing else to help until it parks at its destination?).141.101.69.33 19:16, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

The bit about first sex brings to mind "What on Earth!" What on Earth!. 172.68.141.82 07:17, 12 December 2017 (UTC)