Self-Driving Cars Aren't Going To Be So Great Until We Make Our Maps Better (theverge.com)

Uber is debuting its self-driving cars in Pittsburgh this month, a move that has many taxi drivers upset. The Verge's Nilay Patel argues that this move should change the way we think about maps and addresses. He adds that Uber is currently unable to pinpoint his home, and often ends up at the door of a "widely different address." Citing the CEO of a "large ridesharing company", Patel writes that this issue is known as the "egress problem" -- "the way we locate buildings on a map doesn't really describe how people move in and out of those buildings." Though there are workarounds and inventive ways to pinpoint your exact address, Patel argues that when we grow reliant on self-driving cars, things will get far more complicated and futile if we don't make our maps and navigation services better. He writes: Driverless cars are one of the ultimate signifiers of the future -- the real Jetsons stuff. And we're so close to making them happen: tons of cars have sophisticated adaptive cruise control that can basically keep you going on the highway, prototypes of true self-driving cars from Google and others are already on the road, and the momentum is only increasing. But maybe we shouldn't hand control of how we get somewhere to the machines until we're entirely sure the robots know where we're going.

Comments

Maps will never be good enough

[Darinbob]

There will always be something not on the map. The AI on the cars will need to be good enough to figure out what to do in many cases or else allow the passenger to manually maneuver the car. That is why many of the plans from google are about driving from a known location to another known location, as it may be decades or more before they'll be able to figure out how to get into and out of a condo garage, negotiate mountain roads, deal with temporary obstacles (the dog is in the middle of the driveway so there's no way to recalculate a route), etc. But pickup from a street corner and get dropped off at a street corner, that's much more doable.

Re:More BS

[PopeRatzo]

If a human driver, using the same map and their set of eyes, can't get the guy to his front door, what makes him think a car programmed by humans will be any better, especially by humans who have never seen the place you're going to?

When I was in college, and for the first couple of years of grad school, I drove a taxicab. Not a fruity Uber car, but an honest-to-god hack. For part of that time, I drove an actual Checker Marathon, which may have been the finest automobile ever built.

Decades later, I can still find my way around that city (Chicago), to any address and give you the best route. If you dropped me blindfolded anywhere within the Chicago city limits, I could find my way (as long as I was allowed to take the blindfold off after you dropped me). If there are Uber drivers who can't find their ass with both hands, it has nothing to do with maps. Maps? Pshaw. Learn your town and don't rely on the goddamn Google maps for everything. Learn how to navigate by the stars like we did back in my day (only partly kidding).