needing cars poll result

I did a survey on RPG.net (It's on a members-only forum so non-signed up people won't be able to see it) on having and needing cars, in the US or elsewhere. Final results:

I have a car, need it, and live in the USA Votes: 155 42.0%
I have a car, don't need it, and live in the USA Votes: 8 2.2%
I don't have a car, need one, and live in the USA Votes: 11 3.0%
I don't have a car, don't need one, and live in the USA Votes: 25 6.8%

I have a car, need it, and live outside the USA Votes: 59 16.0%
I have a car, don't need it, and live outside the USA Votes: 18 4.9%
I don't have a car, need one, and live outside the USA Votes: 5 1.4%
I don't have a car, don't need one, and live outside the USA Votes: 88 23.8%

Total voters
369

The poll was inspired by memories of a German poster saying that while Germany has a lot of cars they were more of a luxury item, possessed because you want one (country drives, easier grocery shopping) rather than because you need it. This was kind of a test of that, and as you can see the claim is somewhat falsified: the majority of non-US car owners still say they need it. Most respondents everywhere either have a car and say they need it, or don't have one and say they don't need one.

OTOH there are differences. 1/4 of non-US owners do in fact say they don't need it, vs like 5% of American owners. More strikingly, 62% of non-US respondents say they don't need a car, vs. 17% of US respondents; 52% of non-US respondents don't have a car and don't need it, vs. 78% of US respondents having a car and needing it. The difference in societies is quite stark.

The poll technology was primitive, thus clumping all non-US countries together, but based on comments and past polls, the main countries are Canada, UK, Ireland, Germany, and Sweden. The site has a liberal tilt; if you're vocally not okay with feminism or queer rights, you get banned, and 10 years ago even the otherwise conservative US posters generally seemed fine with universal health care. OTOH I don't know if it has any particular urban bias, nor the age distribution -- though I've been around long enough that I can say many of the posters can't be that young any more.

Many of the US comments were along the lines of "transit sucks" and "but how can you even go shopping without a car???", what I'm starting to call "virgins talking about sex" discussions.

self-driving car skepticism gloat

When self-driving cars first started getting talked about, like 10 years ago, many people were enthusiastic and anticipatory. I was skeptical, because as someone who walks around dense cities, driving safely and effectively in such felt like a human-complete AI problem, needing theory of mind, social interaction, and a large amount of adaptation to unforeseen circumstances.

Also because while in some things like chess or Go, rather dumb computers beat humans through powerful search, a more common AI pattern is that a fairly simple system can get 60-90% of human performance, but then stalls despite a lot of effort. Which is fine when you're making models for targeting direct mailing, and poorer performance can be balanced by much faster turnaround time and it's just moderate amounts of money at stake anyway. Less fine when even a missing 1% of performance may mean people die, or alternatively that traffic is frozen as cars can't figure out how to safely push through busy streets.

(The direct mailing example is from my first full-time job; we could build a decision tree, to predict response rates to a direct mailing, that was said to be 60% of a hand-crafted model but took a few hours instead of a few months to create. A machine translation course in grad school included various systems that could do 60-95% as well as humans, on fairly narrow word tests, but improving that was Hard. Statistical translation, rule-based, hybrid, all stalled.)

Basically an application of the Pareto principle: 20% of the work can get you 80% of the performance. Except it might be more like 1% of the work gets you 80% of the performance; since we don't *have* human-equivalent AI in most of these domains, we can't even say how much work it actually takes.

Early articles were along the lines of "we're making lots of progress! (but can't drive in the rain or snow and are tested mostly in low-density sunlight)", which for some people sounded like "we're almost there but for a bit more work" but to me sounded like "we're already spending years on the *easy* stuff, imagine what the hard stuff will be like."

More recent articles have been more like "wow, this is harder than we thought", with even the executives in charge of developing and selling this stuff saying like "thirty years away" or "never" or "far in the future", or "decades away".

Singapore reportedly has deployed them, as someone on Facebook likes to keep saying, but a friend there observed various caveats: 10 MPH, a bounded area, not mixed with other cars, safety driver, and attendants trying to shoo pedestrians out of the way. Also see. And this is the state of the art!

So, "ha ha!"

I'll also include a FB thread I made two years ago about predictions, and include just one example of receding predictions:

2014: Volvo promises fully self-driving cars by 2017, 3 years later.
2017: Volvo promises partial self-driving cars by 2021, 4 years later.