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The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car
- Grazester 11y agoGeo Hotz amazes me!! With that said, can he be prosecuted for using his driverless car on public roads without a license to do so?
- ocdtrekkie 11y agoPossibly, since California I think has specific laws governing self-driving cars, and it sounds like he wants to test it there. If he's in a state that doesn't have laws on self-driving cars, it'd probably be up to existing laws. Is he driving recklessly?
- dvh 11y agoI always thought default Ubuntu WM is only used by the people who don't know how to change it.
- Glyptodon 11y agoOr those of us who don't care about it enough to change it. There are a lot of things that in the right context are not worth bothering about.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- thedz 11y ago> “I understand the state-of-the-art papers,” he says. “The math is simple. For the first time in my life, I’m like, ‘I know everything there is to know.’ ” Yep, he's still in his twenties.
- buro9 11y agoBut that belief is enough to attempt something that more experienced people would hesitate to start. Naivety is a very good thing at times. I've seen average people achieve incredible things, and not because what they did was incredible... but just because they started work on things that no-one else thought they could complete. Some way into it, when enough progress has been made, people have rushed to give support because "halfway there but badly done" is a hell of a lot better than "not even started yet".
- peckrob 11y agoA friend of mine in college had a very good saying about this that I always keep in mind: "There's nothing like succeeding at something you weren't even qualified to attempt."
- thedz 11y agoI don't disagree with that. I've worked with some very smart people in my 20s who sounded similar to Hotz -- enthusiastic, retrospectively naive about their understanding of a field, but above all, superbly intelligent. They did really great things, things that maybe didn't work perfectly or as envisioned, but still things that might scared off more experienced folks. But also now that I am in my 30s, and they are as well, we frequently look back at that time and laugh about being that young. "Man, you were fun to work with, but also what were we thinking" So I definitely wish Hotz all the luck. If nothing else, the more smart people working on the problem of self driving cars, the better. My comment mostly stemmed from amusement of his quotes.
- sixQuarks 11y agoI would totally agree with you IF this kid hadn't proven his chops with iPhone and PS3 hacks, not to mention building a self-driving car in his garage. I also realize this kid probably won't end up making a huge dent in the universe.... but.... statistically speaking, there should be several "Leonardo da Vinci"- level humans alive right now. Why not this kid?
- sangnoir 11y ago> I would totally agree with you IF this kid hadn't proven his chops with iPhone and PS3 hacks, not to mention building a self-driving car in his garage. Impressive as they are, his chops still don't support his claim to "know everything there is to know". The Dunning-Kruger effect is in full swing.
- david_shaw 11y agoSure, but that claim was made in the context of deep-learning networks. He went to work for an AI company, and realized that he knew -- from reading cutting-edge academic papers -- as much as the forefront of the field. He wasn't claiming to know everything there is to know in general, or even in software development, just that he can understand and implement machine learning with the best of them. Personally, I don't doubt that claim.
- darkmighty 11y agoThe field doesn't require a particularly extensive background either. A good grasp of linear algebra and multi-variable calculus basically has you set to understanding even the state of the art in the field. Of course, coming up with the papers would require a whole lot more work.
- username3 11y agoTypical twenty year olds don't read all the state-of-the-art papers on a subject before saying they know it all. It sounds more like he's caught up on the latest AI research and fundamentals.
- nightski 11y agoIf he really did read the papers then it's clear he would not say this. The papers aren't an end. They describe incremental progress. Having just returned from NIPS where most of the researchers are saying "We don't know" all the time, it is ironic.
- mturmon 11y agoPrecisely. We have some stuff that works and we don't know why.
- robotresearcher 11y agoPeople in their twenties wrote those papers.
- grahamannett 11y agoThe math in any of the paper's he's most likely referring to aren't some theoretical pde maths or abstract algebraic geometry stuff... it's pretty understandable if you can grasp a "graduate level" linear algebra course.
- robotresearcher 11y agoThat's true. My point was to respond to the breathless reporting about that this guy has achieved so young. He's replicating the work of other mostly young people. Doing it the first time is the trick. (I'm very familiar with this literature - see my username)
- josefresco 11y agoI wish I could upvote this more. A person in their 20's knows nothing, but thinks they've outsmarted the world. It's not until your 30's that you realize how big of an idiot you were/are and how much of the world you actually understand (read: little).
- mikeg8 11y agoThis whole: "Twenty year olds don't know shit but 30 year olds are so enlightened" sentiment needs to stop. I agree that many younger people think they understand more than they do but that's just part of growing up and we all go through it.
- YooLi 11y agoYou are misunderstanding the sentiment. No one is saying 30 year olds know everything, they are saying 30 year olds _realize_ they don't know everything.
- sirkneeland 11y agoOr as Socrates put it, "the only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing" (probably one of the more Buddhist-ish gems from Western philosophy)
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- drumdance 11y agoAge is shorthand for "I've spent X years making a lot of mistakes and learning from them."
- sangnoir 11y agoWhy does it need to stop if you agree that its a fact of life. No one is saying 30 y/o's are enlighted, just that they have a bit more perspective. The same can be said for twenties vs. teens. It's not that teens are idiots - they are just teens with the life-experiences & perspective of a teen
- mturmon 11y agoI cringed. Saying "the math is simple" -- ouch. The writer must have been barely able to suppress his glee when that one popped out.
- Dylan16807 11y agoWhile I don't know a lot about the subject, I would bet that's likely right. As in, there are very hard problems, but the actual mathematics are not all that hard.
- bloaf 11y agoI don't doubt it at all. Keep in mind that "simple" is relative, we have to ask "simple compared to what?" For lots of people, I be that the math involved in these neural nets is the most complicated math they've ever done. They would never say it is simple, because they themselves barely grasp it. But in my experience, topics in mathematics have a funny way of becoming very simple the moment you "graduate" to thinking about a slightly more general mathematical framework. Someone who has digested enough of the AI literature to think about the methods in aggregate is very likely to be in a position to see any particular method as a "simple" implementation of some more general set of principles.
- mturmon 11y agoAs a general observation, what you say has some truth to it. But the particular quote is referring to learning rates in autonomous robotics, especially visual classification in complex real-world scenes. I have worked and published in ML since the early 1990s, was a program chair for the learning track at NIPS one year, participated in the same DARPA learning-to-drive program that Yann LeCun did, and don't consider the math behind "state-of-the-art papers" to be simple. Just taking deep learning: there are a lot of tricks and recipes (e.g., rectified-linear activations, number of layers, staged training) that are not mathematically understood. It's exciting, but mathematically still a jungle. Just because a neophyte can code and optimize a network does not mean that the math that explains why it actually works is simple. As engineers, we need to understand why it works before using it in a safety-critical situation.
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- Dylan16807 11y agoThat statement is clearly tongue-in-cheek, come on. "I well-understand the cutting edge of this narrow research area" is less fun to say, but that's the meaning.
- ishanr 11y agoIts so much fun to see people who crossed their 20s doing nothing close to great, get so jealous.
- mipapage 11y ago"I know everything there is to know." I kind of took that to be like how Musk talks about needing to know first principles. In the article you can see that he was humble about what he thought he knew, took jobs here and there and eventually confirmed that he was at the cutting edge, that he knew 'everything there is to know' about this special area. That's when he realized that he was qualified to try this. IMO, anyway ;)
- drumdance 11y agoOn a smaller scale, I remember one day realizing that I, a self-taught programmer, knew more than my boss. Within six months I left to start my own company.
- mipapage 11y agoNice. I'm still struggling to feel I know enough to do my own thing other than lead gen and optimization for others.
- SonicSoul 11y agoHow smart was your boss and how did it go with your company ?
- drumdance 11y agoThe boss was pretty smart in the sense of knowing how to work with big corporations to build large decision support systems. But his technical knowledge was fairly shallow. I sold my first company and the investors did very well, but I made tons of stupid mistakes in the process. Not least of which was holding on to dotcom stock that I thought would go to the moon but which mostly went down the drain.
- ksk 11y agoWell, a lot of people on HN certainly comment on technology without immodesty and an air of authority. It does feel boorish to have someone say that out-loud though.
- swombat 11y ago> I know everything there is to know. If only he knew about the Dunning Kruger effect...
- relkor 11y agoTo be fair, this is machine learning we are talking about, not algebraic topology. The experts in ML are still proud of the fact that they figured out the chain rule...
- cinquemb 11y agoNevermind that they have no idea of the behavior of the partial derivatives nor attempts to model such when presenting their "latest and greatest", at least from most of the stuff I've read that's been posted here…
- walrus 11y ago> The experts in ML are still proud of the fact that they figured out the chain rule... I assume you're talking about using backpropagation with gradient descent. Backpropagation itself isn't all that interesting. The interesting part is that it works for practical problems and doesn't get stuck in shallow local minima.
- ryanSrich 11y agoI'd typically tend to agree with you (that a guy in his 20's saying he knows everything is ludicrous), but geohot is an actual savant.
- rokhayakebe 11y agoNobody created anything great by first fully appreciating the size and difficulty of their endeavor. I would say, underestimating a problem, and overestimating one's skills are crucial to innovation and progress.
- serge2k 11y agoor just legitimately an expert on the field.
- nathan_f77 11y agoHe may well know everything there is to know today, but there's bound to plenty more breakthroughs in AI research. It would be like Newton saying "I know everything there is to know about physics today".
- staticint 11y agoI take that to mean that for the first time in his life he read the papers and fully understood them without needing additional background, not that there isn't more to learn outside of those papers.
- rhema 11y ago> Amazed, I ask Hotz what it felt like the first time he got the car to work. >“Dude,” he says, “the first time it worked was this morning.” I can't tell if this is a joke or unbridled hubris. Either way, self driving cars seem like a new hacker space.
- danielharan 11y agoAlso: "Hotz hadn’t programmed any of these behaviors into the vehicle. He can’t really explain all the reasons it does what it does." Good luck to him understanding how to fix corner cases: he's built a black box.
- JustSomeNobody 11y agoThis will be safe on the road for sure.
- rasz_pl 11y agoAre YOU safe on the road? Have you tested all corner cases on yourself?
- bosdev 11y agoYou're describing the fundamental tradeoff with all neural networks.
- roymurdock 11y agoMost of the article reads as a stylized joke, written to make Hotz seem like a Tony Stark sort of figure. I'm sure he has a good handle on the tech running the car, he's at least looked at licensing it to test on the freeway (learning from the backlash on the Jeep Hack), and he had tested the car extensively before inviting a reporter with children to test it at 70mph on the freeway. If you include these details and less of the sassy dialogue and flourishes of panache [1], you get a less interesting article. Bloomberg goes for sexy. Take their reporting with a grain of salt. It's more art than facts-based. [1] At one point, the virtual-reality company Oculus Rift failed to man its booth at a job fair, and Hotz took it over, posing as a recruiter and collecting résumés from his fellow students. None of this was enough to keep him interested. “I did two semesters [at CMU] and got a 4.0 in their hardest classes,” he says. “I met master’s students who were miserable and grinding away so that they might one day earn a bit more at Google. I was shocked at what I saw and what colleges have become. The smartest people I knew were in high school, and I was so let down by the people in college.”
- hamhamed 11y ago> “Frankly, I think you should just work at Tesla,” Musk wrote to Hotz in an e-mail. “I’m happy to work out a multimillion-dollar bonus with a longer time horizon that pays out as soon as we discontinue Mobileye.” > “I appreciate the offer,” Hotz replied, “but like I’ve said, I’m not looking for a job. I’ll ping you when I crush Mobileye.” > Musk simply answered, “OK.” I have to agree with Elon here, Hotz is such a good fit there. But Hotz knows best, if he thinks he can take down Mobileye then he did the right decision, sucks that Tesla wouldn't back it. I'm sure other car companies would buy Hotz's software
- ocdtrekkie 11y agoI'd be far more interested in a piece of software for my car put out by Hotz than either Google or Tesla. Because the latter two are almost certainly going to keep it proprietary as heck. (Tesla has notoriously actually called people to ask them to stop tinkering with their car when they detect the interface has been connected to.)
- lintiness 11y agoyou're sure to have a more interesting ride with hotz's software.
- testuser111 11y ago> "He says he’s come up with discoveries—most of which he refuses to disclose in detail"
- ocdtrekkie 11y agoWe'll see where things get in the future. If I wasn't sure where I was going yet, I might hold a few things close to the vest initially too. There's a short-term value too, where he has to ensure Google or Tesla or Uber doesn't become too dominant first. I really hope self-driving systems are an ecosystem, not a monoculture.
- ProAm 11y agoI dont think there is anyway that Hotz's and Musk's personalities get along well in any type of working relationship. They are both difficult people to deal with (from an outsiders perspective).
- iblaine 11y ago>The smartest people I knew were in high school, and I was so let down by the people in college. He seems like a good person to get into business with. He's so non-judgmental. Reminds me of myself and all the stupid things I said to VCs in my 20s.
- ragnarok451 11y agoAren't judgmental people the best kind of people to get into business with? At least as long as they can judge people/situations accurately. Because that implies that they will make better decisions for your company w.r.t hiring initial people and choosing strategies
- analyst74 11y agoBeing able to assess people is completely different from being judgmental. The former is a result of experience and social intelligence; the latter is mix of bad attitude and superiority complex.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- javajosh 11y agoI'd like to give him the benefit of the doubt and say that this is a comment on how smart people often accept stifling constraints on their thought and actions "because that's how it's done." It is my belief that this self-driving car project is really a kind of first for Hotz. He's famous for finding and exploiting the error-modes in what other people built; now he's actually building something. Methinks he's about to learn a lot about himself and the nature of the world. He's clearly extremely smart, so I'm actually rather excited for him!
- J0-onas 11y agoSo how does his technology/software react on dangers? The video only shows how he keeps his lane...
- reviseddamage 11y agoProbably really bad now, or doesn't react at all and also probably will collide in critical and dangerous positions. But that is also not the future. The future is how does it interact in non-dangerous positions long-term while other cars are self-driving in compliance.
- dexterdog 11y agoIs it that hard to detect a clear danger like a car that suddenly stopped in front of you on the highway?
- reviseddamage 11y agoit is. humans are really bad at that.
- dubbel 11y agoNot hard to detect for the sensors, the questions is how (if) the software reacts. He uses an artificial neural network to make the driving decisions. You train them by showing millions of situations (images of the surroundings, information about the cars current state and information about the imminent past in this case) and the wanted reactions/solution/answer (how to drive in this case). Hotz probably has enough "normal" data, because you hold the line all the time when driving and apparently there were enough situations where the car in front slowed down and he slowed down. From the latter case you could guess that the car would break more rapidly if the car in front stops more rapidly than in the training sessions with a human driver (you would have to test that, as you usually cannot just look at the trained neural network and see that, because they become insanely complex after a certain depth). But probably the car never "saw" bricks falling of the truck before you or even a kid running from the left side. Those are edge cases, that are unlikely to happen, especially on a motor way. But I'd still like to know whether his software would just apply the nearest trained case and see it as noise, or notice that something is off here and alarm the driver. Definitely a cool project, don't get me wrong. But I get kind of sad when the work of thousands of scientists who worked on the theory and the work of Tesla, Google and big car manufacturers gets dismissed by "but look at this guy" (in general, not directed at you).
- blinkingled 11y ago>At Google, he found very smart developers who were often assigned mundane tasks like fixing bugs in a Web browser; at Facebook, brainy coders toiled away trying to figure out how to make users click on ads. I'm not sure those two are equally horrible though - fixing complex bugs requires using lot of skills and the high you get when you finally nail it is nothing to miss. Getting people to click on ads though - that's genuinely depressing.
- Jonovono 11y agoOk cool, you find one of them enjoyable. He (subject of the article) finds them both terrible.
- blinkingled 11y agoYes, anyone can find anything enjoyable or terrible - but the point I was trying to make was that most hackers enjoy bug fixing by nature and Geohot seems to be exceptional that he despises bug fixing as mundane.
- Cyph0n 11y agoHackers enjoy bug finding or simply building new stuff. Why would they like fixing bugs? Why would any developer enjoy it for that matter? Yes, it's something necessary that all developers should know how to do, but that doesn't make it enjoyable.
- blinkingled 11y agoA nagging bug is ultimately one more thing you don't understand. I don't know about anyone else but as someone who loves to take apart things I don't sleep well when I find there's something out there that I don't understand. Besides bugs are a given if you're building something new and if you don't find them interesting you're not going to fix the most challenging ones. If you ever followed Linux kernel development you'll find many hackers enjoy fixing challenging bugs.
- JustSomeNobody 11y agoSo its more a fancy autopilot than a self driving car.
- sp332 11y agoYou're aware that "auto pilot" literally means "self driver", right?
- Johnny555 11y agoYet few people would call an airplane with auto-pilot a "self-flying plane", even with advanced autopilot that can take off and land itself. Autopilot is understood to mean a limited computer assist that can help with routine tasks, but not expected to allow a plane to fly without a pilot.
- JustSomeNobody 11y agoIt means staying on a set course. Not the same thing, right?
- sp332 11y agoA "fancy autopilot" can take off and land.
- rasz_pl 11y agoIts right there in the article, he is trying to beat Mobileye - a lane following technology Tesla rebranded as autopilot.
- samfisher83 11y agoThe guys hacked the PS3. That guy can build a self driving car.
- daemonk 11y agoIt looks like he has various sensors for gathering driving data. But how do you really know when you have gathered enough dimensions of data in this situation? How do you train for edge cases? I imagine there will still have to be some hard rules in case the AI encounters edge cases.
- hias 11y agoSorry, but how can this be legal? With his homemade solution, he is not only endangering himself but all the other people in the cars around him. Usually before you are allowed to use something like this on a public road your stuff has to be tested and approved by the state. At least this is how it is in Europe, does this not matter in the states?
- bosdev 11y agoHe's sitting behind the wheel ready to take over, it's not quite the same as making a cup of tea while the car drives itself.
- hias 11y agoYes, but what if his system suddenly decides to turn hard right for no reason while driving fast and he runs into another car, human, tree, whatever and he has no chance to react quickly enough? This is different to a PS3 crashing because he made some error.
- imgeohot 11y agoThe steering is massively torque limited by the car's EPS module(5x lower limit than Tesla). It can't turn hard right, it can lazily list to the right, giving you tons of time to react. I actually have put a lot of thought into safety :)
- skykooler 11y agoHow do you train it for emergency situations (i.e. a car suddenly turning left in front of you)? I'd imagine it would be hard to get many of those in the training data set.
- jonnycowboy 11y agoEasy, you drive in a simulator! (ie: backfeed/simulate LIDAR and camera data using a video game (GTA5 for example)). Then try to simulate lots of near-crashes, reactions to traffic lights, signs, etc. Hotz's code just reacts to inputs. Simulate the inputs and you can run any training case you want.
- lavezzi 11y agoProbably best that he's working on his own, doesn't seem like the kind of guy you'd want to work alongside.
- copperx 11y agoOr people tinkering with far more interesting things...
- pjc50 11y agoThe 21" monitor portrait-style in the car is fantastic. The testing of a hacked-together system on the public road is not. He probably won't kill anyone, but if he were to I suspect he'd get the book thrown at him in the way that everyday death-by-DUI drivers don't. Actually I'll go futher with this criticism: we've just seen drones being FAA regulated because users were unable to refrain from doing dangerous or nuisance things with them, such as flying near airports. DIY self-driving car research is similarly likely to damage the concept if it goes wrong.
- ZanyProgrammer 11y agoThat screen looks like the mother of all distractions.
- bpicolo 11y agoWhich theoretically doesn't matter if the car drives itself.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- cake 11y agoYes, holy shit does it look unsafe ! There's a good reason began on closed courses, imagine a kernel panic locking the car on a busy freeway...
- shopkins 11y agoBut unlike drones, he is in the vehicle the entire time and can easily intervene. The article does a good job of explaining the inherent danger someone (and those around him) faces when attempting something like this. The point is that he's attempting to push the boundaries and not asking for permission -- generally the conditions required to innovate. Maybe that should be celebrated before you bust out the "b-b-but it's dangerous!"
- SuperKlaus 11y ago"George Hotz will be a panelist at Bloomberg Businessweek Design 2016 on April 11, 2016."
- jpfr 11y agoPrototypical case of the 80/20 rule. He has implemented the happy case. But that system is nothing people realistically would want to drive their cars. What he did is impressive. But the results are not that outlandish for a talented person. 1) Hook up a computer to the CAN-Bus network of the car [1] and attach a bunch of sensor peripherals. 2) Drive around for some time and record everything to disk. 3) Implement some of the recent ideas from deep reinforcement learing [2,3]. For training, feed the system with the oberservations from test drives and reward actions that mimick the reactions of actual drivers. In 2k lines of code he probably does not have a car model that can be used for path planning [4] (with tire slippage, etc.). So his system will make errors in emergency situations. Especially since the neural net has never experienced most emergencies and could not learn the appropriate reactions. And guess what, emergency situations are the hard part. Driving on a freeway with visible lane markings is easy. German research projects autonomously drove on the Autobahn since the 80s [5]. Neural networks were used for the task since about the same time [6]. [1] http://www.instructables.com/id/Hack-your-vehicle-CAN-BUS-with-Arduino-and-Seeed-C/ http://www.instructables.com/id/Hack-your-vehicle-CAN-BUS-wi... [2] http://arxiv.org/abs/1509.02971 http://arxiv.org/abs/1509.02971 [3] http://arxiv.org/abs/1504.00702 http://arxiv.org/abs/1504.00702 [4] http://www.rem2030.de/rem2030-wAssets/docs/downloads/07_Konferenzbeitraege/Ruf-Ziehn-et-al-2014-Evaluation-of-an-Analytic-Model__ICMC2014.pdf http://www.rem2030.de/rem2030-wAssets/docs/downloads/07_Konf... [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_Prometheus_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_Prometheus_Project [6] http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2874&context=compsci http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2874&c...
- bcohn91 11y agoWhy is the first comment on HN minimizing this truly impressive project? Of course it's not perfect, he's ONE person.
- Aleman360 11y agoBecause this article reinforces our bizarre cultural notion that one person deserves all the credit for some innovation. Nevermind the ridiculous amount of engineering that was required to build all the tools he's using and the order of magnitude more engineering required to make this a safe, mass producible product. But nah, let's just praise the founder, allow him to get rich while we all do the dirty work.
- et2o 11y agoI love this guy's personality.
- jaybosamiya 11y ago> The last people with jobs will be AI programmers Geohotz makes a decent point. The way the industrial revolution reduced manual labour, and made thinkers and tinkerers much more valuable, the advent of AI (true AI, mind you, not the tiny stuff that we currently assume) might actually make us obsolete. It is a peaceful and yet terrifying thought.
- dominotw 11y agoCan you point to one such job where someone lost his/her job to "AI"?
- ProAm 11y agoLook at any automated warehouse these days. Pickers, stockers, warehouse managers..... Those are going by the way side.
- dominotw 11y agoWould you consider those machines AI?
- emerongi 11y agoNarrow AI, yes. If it simulates a human action and adapts to the environment to a small degree (e.g can recognize a screw bolt and pick it up even if it is in a different location every time), it's a narrow AI.
- ProAm 11y agoIt can do even more than that. Warehouse organization, putting high usage/fast moving objects towards the front of the warehouse, reorganizing based on usage and expiration, restocking, kit packaging etc... Goes way beyond just picking things up with a fork lift and moving them to a different location. All things a person or team of people used to get paid in the 6 digits for are now just run by robots and AI.
- dominotw 11y agoWould be interesting to see demo that is not just car self-driving in a straight(ish) line.
- paragpatelone 11y ago"His self-funded experiment could end with Hotz humbly going back to knock on Google’s door for a job." The biggest thing here IMO is this is self-funded. Any startup trying to do what he is doing in this environment would have raised $50 Million, hired 100's of engineers from top notch schools, become accepted in YC, and have Marc Andreessen, Paul Graham, Sam Altman and all singing their praises. Kudos to him for being self-funded.
- bgp 11y agoCreating 1 job is better than hundreds?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- eterpstra 11y agoWell, Hotz did state that, “The truth is that work as we know it in its modern form has not been around that long, and I kind of want to use AI to abolish it. I want to take everyone’s jobs. Most people would be happy with that, especially the ones who don’t like their jobs. Let’s free them of mental tedium and push that to machines. In the next 10 years, you’ll see a big segment of the human labor force fall away. In 25 years, AI will be able to do almost everything a human can do. The last people with jobs will be AI programmers.”
- samstave 11y agoBullshit. It's a nice dream, but the idea of AI and robots doing dishes, picking strawberries, washing cars, cooking meals will never happen. The best AI cannot beat a population of Mexicans who are basically the glue that holds out modern society together. If you wanted to see how the U.S. Will completely come to a screeching halt, it would be if the rapture took place and only claimed all Mexicans. Our entire way of life depends on them. AI will never replace them.
- noir_lord 11y ago
- michael_h 11y agoHe thinks machines will take care of much of the work tied to producing food and other necessities. Humans will then be free to plug into their computers and get lost in virtual reality. Well, that's an astronomically depressing future.
- shpx 11y agoSaid a person who probably spends 10 hours a day staring at a computer
- orky56 11y agoThe more technology can seamlessly take care of the foundation of humanity's needs, the better. Leisure is a very new concept and only came about when humans were able to destress from not having to worry about their next meal or getting attacked by predators. Despite all the progress, much of humanity still faces some basic problems due to inequality and access to resources. Technology combined with some other cultural and structural changes can do away with those issues for good.
- michael_h 11y agoOf course, but once our needs are seamlessly taken care of we're going to just "plug into our computers and get lost in virtual reality"? That is the depressing bit.
- orky56 11y agoI think he's made the assumption that virtual reality would be the ultimate form of leisure since as the article states, it would allow us to experience things our world can't create on its own. We'll leave it up to each individual to decide whether that's depressing or the ultimate goal.
- jrk_ 11y agoHey, I thought the same when reading this paragraph! :) Are you in for living in the woods and preying for food when humanity becomes a society of degenerate VR junkies?
- politician 11y agoIf a self-driving car is designed around neural networks, then does that remove the liability dilemma introduced when such a car is involved in an accident? The car panicked and crashed. If we could move the liability to the car itself, then maybe we could just add the car to its own insurance policy, you know, as if it were a dependent, like a teenage driver.
- _yosefk 11y agoWow, here's a ton of possibilities! The neural net powered bank computer stole your money and used it to pay the CEO a bonus - move the liability to the computer! The possibilities are endless.
- politician 11y agoI meant to say that the liability moves to the guardian which is how common insurance schemes work when dependents are involved. Clearly, you can't meaningfully punish computers. Hah, or banks, for that matter.
- quantumgoo 11y agoIf it passes the written and driving tests at the local DMV, should the car be given a driver's license?
- knodi123 11y agono, because that's silly.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- antoniuschan99 11y agoHe seems like a pretty cool and level headed person. If you watch the video, they're working on phase 3 of car automation which is basically when you're on the highway (or on the smaller roads) and the car takes over for you. It seems like google is working on phase 4, which I feel is basically too far off (no reason for us to need cars that can drive themselves without anyone in it). Also, Tesla, Mercedes, those are all phase 3 (Autosteer). Also pretty cool he's working in his garage :P.
- baby 11y agohe says phase 3 takes 99% of your driving task. So I guess it would be way more than that.
- yoodenvranx 11y agoI think this number of "99%" is only valid for the large US suburbs which are way easier to navigate than a typical small town in Germany/Europe. Over here we have so many narrow streets, millions of pedestrians and bicycles, construction zones and so on. More often than not it is difficult for a human to figure out what is going on so it will be much harder for a car to do the same.
- baby 11y agoYup, I thought about Marseille the other day and I don't see how a self-driving car could drive there.
- reneherse 11y agoFor comparison, a similar hacker spirit underpins Tesla Motors propulsion tech: Back in the early 2000's, there was a young engineer driving around Palo Alto in a brilliantly hacked electric Porsche 944, which would do about 130mph on the highway. His name was JB Straubel, and nowadays he's Tesla's CTO. Best of luck to Hotz!
- RIMR 11y agoThis the same guy that Sony wanted to put in prison for figuring out how to run code on the PS3... That stunt is also what lead to a coordinated attack against PSN that took the service down for more than a month.
- free2rhyme214 11y agoLink?
- giancarlostoro 11y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iUvuaChDEg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iUvuaChDEg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Computer_Entertainment_America,_Inc._v._Hotz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Computer_Entertainment_Am...
- ck2 11y agoI really liked Hotz until he went to work for the dark side (google's android security) and decided to make smartphones harder to root instead of easier.
- anchpop 11y agoI dunno, it's still pretty easy. I think if google really wanted to they could make it quite a bit harder. And fixing exploits that give apps root access would prevent malicious apps from abusing it, no?
- deftnerd 11y ago@imgeohot - Before launch, you should look into a communications protocol between the vehicles. It appears to me that the new LiFi standard might be perfect. You might be able to use the laser range finders themselves to communicate between vehicles. What to communicate? I'm not sure, to be honest. Road conditions or notifications of the position of obstacles is one obvious thing. Advertising the current version of the software and pushing signed OS upgrade binaries is another. Voice/Video chat with other vehicles in range would be cool, as is media syncing and discovery. Building in some kind of Bitcoin based payment protocol would be fun too. You could load your cars Bitcoin wallet with some funds and tip cars around you all over the LiFi. I'm not saying you need to build all that stuff, just put in a good hackable messaging protocol into the system before wide release :-) Great work man. Good to see people with a good hacker ethos accomplish really cool things.
- sp332 11y agoThe cars could signal a turn ahead of time, or indicate how hard they're about to brake. With a large enough network, they could even predict traffic patterns and choose a different route.
- frik 11y agoHe must have rich patents or a sponsor. The Lidar isn't cheap (50k).
- shpx 11y agoIf you read the article, it says he gets money from hacking competitions.
- sureshv 11y ago$8k - http://velodynelidar.com/vlp-16.html http://velodynelidar.com/vlp-16.html
- frik 11y agoIt looked like the VLP-32. The VLP-16 is pretty new, I am surprised it's already available, last time I checked it wasn't. Google cars use the VLP-64 which costs 70+k.
- erjjones 11y agoSelf-Driving cars are very exciting but we know it can be done - super cool that Hotz got this working. Now he could really impress the community if he could solve 6 additional concepts http://gizmodo.com/6-simple-things-googles-self-driving-car-still-cant-han-1628040470?trending_test_four_a&utm_expid=66866090-68.Fycr7CNTRMO9chDASrU7Hg.1&utm_referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F http://gizmodo.com/6-simple-things-googles-self-driving-car-...
- hcrisp 11y ago“I don’t care about money,” he says. “I want power. Not power over people, but power over nature and the destiny of technology." This has echoes of J.R.R. Tolkien: Anyway all this stuff is mainly concerned with Fall, Mortality, and the Machine. By the last I intend all use of external plans or devices (apparatus) instead of development of the inherent inner powers or talents -- or even the use of these talents with the corrupted motive of dominating: bulldozing the real world, or coercing other wills. The Machine is our more obvious modern form though more closely related to Magic than is usually recognised. . . . The Enemy in successive forms is always 'naturally' concerned with sheer Domination, and so the Lord of magic and machines.
- ericjang 11y agoDuring my internship at Google I watched Hotz give a talk on QIRA and his Pwnium exploit. George Hotz working his magic on the computer is the most fucking legit thing I have seen in my life.
- whiteshadow 11y agoWas that talk made available online? Would be curious to see it!
- ericjang 11y agoRegrettably, not on the Internet. If you get a job at Google you might be able to search for it on the intranet :)
- tragomaskhalos 11y ago"“Hold this,” he says, dumping a wireless keyboard in my lap before backing out of the garage. “But don’t touch any buttons, or we’ll die.”" Quality.
- giancarlostoro 11y agoHe does a bit of interesting projects, hacking the iPhone, Android and even the PS3 to the point of being sued by Sony [1]. Geohot has potential, so it will be interesting what we see him accomplish, hopefully some company doesn't swoop in and ruin his progress. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iUvuaChDEg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iUvuaChDEg
- devy 11y agoThe article mentioned Elon's delaying tactic. I wonder what would happen if Hotz's idea/project was bought out by Tesla.
- Wonnk13 11y agoCan anyone recommend a AI/economics book regarding the implications of a population where jobs are no longer necessary?
- suhastech 11y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU Also, a book with the same name
- dangirsh 11y agoI met Hotz at SpaceX, and can assure you he's not as cocky as this article makes him out to be.
- pfista 11y agoIs it really the best approach to only train from real world scenarios without any programmed constraints? Most humans are terrible drivers and there's a reason so many people die every year in car accidents. It seems like his approach might be more organic but it'd also be really hard to provide training data around emergency situations as others have mentioned here.
- 1024core 11y agoLike most hard problems, it's easy to pick off the low-hanging fruit and claim that you have solution. Self-driving cars (in some form or the other, under some loose definition of "self" and "driving") have been around since the 20s. But it still remains a vexing problem. It is quite easy to program a car to stay between 2 cars and follow the car in front. It is quite another to have the same car drive on (a) a road without lane markings; (b) in adverse weather conditions (snow, anybody? Hotz should take the car to Tahoe); (c) in traffic anomalies (ambulance/cop approaching from behind; accident/debris in front; etc. etc.); and so on. No offense to GeoHot, but I'd love to see his system work in rush-hour 101 traffic; or cross the Bay Bridge, where (coming to SF) the lanes merge arbitrarily. The key challenges are not only to drive when there's traffic; but to also drive when there's NO traffic, because lane markings, etc. are practically nonexistent in many places. Having said all that, I still admire his enthusiasm and drive(no pun intended). Tinker on!
- darkmighty 11y agoTBH, since it's a training based system it's "just" a matter of making sure the training set is large enough, including the situations you mentioned (assuming the training method is robust, generalizes well, etc). I would love someone knowledgeable to give an estimate, but I would guess you need at least a handful (10+?1000+?) of examples of each edge case (involving bicycles, pedestrians, weird road designs, street signs, and so on) -- and there are many of them I suspect (at least 100s?). Estimating you'd take about 1 hour between experiencing a tricky scenario while driving around, this should put the number of hours at something like 100,000+ -- not easy to come up with by himself (that's about 50+ years of driving 6 hours a day). Mobileye is doing something interesting by curating the reliable parts of the dataset (e.g. they have curated databases of traffic signs for each region) -- again not something you could do own your own, and seemingly archaic (hence GeoHot's criticism), but if you can afford it can speed up the training significantly. Tesla is a massive resource here because they already have a huge fleet of internet connected cars proving enough data to fill the aforementioned training set in a matter of days or months: let's estimate their fleet at 40,000 cars -- then they could fill that minimum dataset in less than a day, and in a month they might have a 100x safety margin. Of course, there's a big technical problem of relaying all that video (maybe they just relay prediction failures), but the data is there. Another fundamental problem with exclusively hands-off training (and little optimal control theory, etc) is picking up bad habits from drivers -- even the best algorithms will have a hard time and be only about as good as a good driver in each scenario, in the best case -- since the training data is acting as a ground truth.
- ginsmar 11y agoGreat!
- pakled_engineer 11y agoHis AI strategy that doesn't use IF statements sounds influenced from the Sussman & Radul paper the Art of the Propagator. In this related course you also learn how to program AI decisions based on pattern matching like him giving space to a cyclist and the AI later doing the same https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6.945/ https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6.945/
- mschuster91 11y agoThe fuck. Hotz is awesome... The only coder with a skillset so diverse yet immersive I know is Fabrice Bellard. I'd love to see them on a team together... probably will invent true AI O.o
- ixtli 11y agoIt's somewhat frustrating that he continues to get the credit for "hacking the iphone" when he was neither the first nor the only person on the project. The "iPhone Dev Team" was a group of five to ten people who built tools to jailbreak the phone and unlock the radio. If anything, the first person was a guy called Nightwatch who was also associated with various .tif exploits to unlock the PSP. As near as I could tell at the time he worked in some capacity for a South American university. Geohot worked only on the baseband unlock and was forced out of the closed discussions when he released exploits before everyone had time to prepare. This is important because some peoples participation in the project could have potentially affected their employment. Luckily I don't know that anything bad happened, but suffice it to say the kid is not a team player.
- kaizendc 11y agoTake some time to watch his YouTube video explaining the iPhone hack. He starts the video by giving credit to other people involved in the project.
- ixtli 11y agoNice. Can you link me? I was involved in the project :)
- willchronic 11y agowhat was your osx86 handle? I was also involved in the early times but don't recognize your name.
- ixtli 11y agoIt was ixtli. I wrote iPHUC and still own the repo, i think: https://code.google.com/p/iphuc/source/browse/trunk/AUTHORS https://code.google.com/p/iphuc/source/browse/trunk/AUTHORS
- willchronic 11y ago
- hellofunk 11y agoI don't know what's going to happen with this project of his, but this certainly is an interesting article: >Sitting cross-legged on a dirty, formerly cream-colored couch in his garage, Hotz philosophizes about AI and the advancement of humanity. “Slavery did not end because everyone became moral,” he says. “The reason slavery ended is because we had an industrial revolution that made man’s muscles obsolete. For the last 150 years, the economy has been based on man’s mind. Capitalism, it turns out, works better when people are chasing a carrot rather than being hit with a stick. We’re on the brink of another industrial revolution now. The entire Internet at the moment has about 10 brains’ worth of computing power, but that won’t always be the case.
- coldtea 11y agoRegarding slavery that's a fatalistic attitude that's not very good for the advancement of human societies. The other side of the coin of his "technology outgrew slavery, and thus we got rid of it", is that if tomorrow's technology demands some moral monstrosity, to "work better", we can't but bend over and accept it. Neither human struggles (from the civil war to MLK and Rosa Parks), nor desires and leadership come into any of this, neither is "working better" (towards what? for what purpose? etc) defined.
- hellofunk 11y agoI agree. But still quite an interesting article, one of the more entertaining reads I've had in a while.
- tim333 11y agore >slavery ended is because we had an industrial revolution that made man’s muscles obsolete I think that's basically wrong also. It fits better with the advent of the printing press than the steam engine.
- edward 11y agoHe is hiring: http://comma.ai/hiring.html http://comma.ai/hiring.html
- tmalsburg2 11y agoSurprised that no one else commented on this: It is completely mad and irresponsible to test a self-driving car on a public highway especially since the one who has built it admits that he has no idea what it is doing. Hotz is putting other people's lives in grave danger and everyone is applauding him for that.
- rocky1138 11y agoHardly. Way worse stuff happens on the road by dumber people. I bet if he was pulled over, cops would probably be impressed then order it towed to his house. No charges.
- tmalsburg2 11y agoWhat do you think would happen if his contraption caused an accident with multiple fatalities?
- jimmies 11y ago>the one who has built it admits that he has no idea what it is doing When did he do that?
- tmalsburg2 11y agoNo time to read the article again to find the quote but the problem is really inherent to the technology. It is very difficult to know what a neural network extracted from the training data, and therefore it is extremely hard to know how it will behave in the future and especially in emergency situations that were not part of the training data.
- kevando 11y ago> 99%
- samlittlewood 11y agoInteresting to see an nvidia shield box on his shelves [0] - I've been playing with one, and the Tegra X1 SoC in there is an absolute beast. Nvidia are pushing this chip for automotive, supported by freely available learning and vision toolkits. I'd not be surprised to see some interest and support from nvidia on this (if not, then they should REALLY look into it). [0] http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-george-hotz-self-driving-car/img/feat_hotz52__03.jpg http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-george-hotz-self-driv...
- hokkos 11y agoThe NVidia Jetson TX1 platform is indeed very interesting, it has the VisionWorks API with lot of CUDA accelerated primitive useful for autonomous driving : SLAM, Optical Flow, ... https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/visionworks https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/visionworks
- pyoung 11y agoLooks like the car he is using already comes with adaptive cruise control and lane keeping assist[1]. Can someone with more knowledge on the subject chime in on how/what he is doing that improves upon those? [1] http://www.acura.com/Features.aspx?model=MDX&modelYear=2016&context=Interior#lane_keeping_assist_system http://www.acura.com/Features.aspx?model=MDX&modelYear=2016&...
- bparsons 11y agoGood to see smart people working on something actually useful, and not another group chat or instagram clone app.
- nascentmind 11y agoYes it is. Such smart people should be working on these things and should be encouraged. Of course his system is still a lot rough and a lot of work has to go into it but he is just one person doing a lot of thinking. In the interview he has a lot of enthusiasm which is really nice.
- dkns 11y agoAbsolutely exciting stuff. Imagine if you have 100, 1000 or 10000 cars each with deep learning software on board. Have them all upload data after each drive to central repository and download updates from other cars. You might start without stuff like 'react to that deer that just jumped on the road' but when you have 10 000 or 100 000 cars that learn and share their knowledge between them you'll quickly learn a lot of corner cases.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- myztic 11y ago(This is completely Off-Topic but it's been bothering me for such a long time now and I never got sufficient answers) Why am I seeing Ubuntu on Screens of developers, experts, et cetera in Cover Stories such as these, most of the time with the 100% plain Ubuntu Desktop with all the craziness that comes with it? It feels like this is the case 90% of the time. Two more (recent) examples I can remember: 1) Fyodor (Guy behind nmap) running plain Ubuntu on a Notebook while giving a speech at a conference 2) Developers at Honda (Video was an Asimo promotional video) running plain Ubuntu Since in my personal opinion Ubuntu is not the technically superior choice in these cases (though that can be debated), it can not simply be explained with it being backed by a company, there being support you can buy for the system if you need it. What motivates technically extremely skilled people to use "Plain Ubuntu" instead of one of the many alternatives? I really don't understand, please enlighten me! (I actually think it's worth "spending" some Karma on this if I for once get a satisfying answer)
- Daneel_ 11y agoMost of these people have passed the stage of caring about the desktop itself. I would say they are simply interested in a bash shell that sits on a reliable, well maintained, stable distro with good community knowledge. When you spend all your time at a prompt you don't really care about unity vs cinnamon vs anything else. Debian is stable and has fantastic package management, and Ubuntu builds on that with a vibrant community and wide support. For these users, Ubuntu 'just works' and lets them get on with what they want to do. It's about as simple as that.
- grahamannett 11y agocurious what myztic would recommend as well? ubuntu may not be 'ideal' but it works and installs a lot easier than arguably any other linux distro. i have no problem using debian/arch/etc but if you are just trying to get up and going ubuntu seems to always be the easiest.
- nascentmind 11y agoI personally use xubuntu. What myztic meant was using "plain ubuntu" instead of alternatives like xubuntu, lubuntu or kubuntu. Xubuntu is medium light for me and is fast. Previously I had only fluxbox on Kubuntu for the KDE apps which was extremely fast but with bugs in fluxbox I switched.
- jacquesm 11y ago> ‘I know everything there is to know.’ Except the law when it comes to exceptions for being in control of your vehicle at all times. Somebody take this guys license before he kills someone due to a divide-by-zero. Testing this in an abandoned parking lot would be ok with me (probably still against the law but fine). In traffic is a definite no.
- mandeepj 11y ago> In the coming weeks, Hotz intends to start driving for Uber so he can rack up a lot of training miles for the car. Really? I did not expected this from him. Why don't he put his sensors\cameras\kit on few other hundred\thousand cars and pay them some money or get some early adopters.
- nojvek 11y agoI really like his 4 stage definition of self driving car. I don't really care about the fully autonomous like the google car. I've driven the adaptive cruise control VW in europe and that was an amazing experience. The only thing missing was lane control which this guy has done. Personally, where self driving really shines is long trips on the highway. All I really want is smarter cruise control that can stay on one lane and not bump into anything, and ideally send an alarm if it thinks it needs help.
- pedrodelfino 11y agoWhat a cool article!
- macawfish 11y agoThis one takes the cake for me: “It scares me what Facebook is doing with AI,” Hotz says. “They’re using machine-learning techniques to coax people into spending more time on Facebook.”
- iamleppert 11y agoCan we get some third party verification here? I live in Potrero and would like to take a ride in his car, or at least help out with his project... hit me up man!!
- nascentmind 11y agoCongrats geohot. Come up with a good development framework for people to build on and it would be awesome. This is good innovation and engineering. Like the article said it sure beats writing code to make people click ads or fixing some obscure deadbeat bug in some useless software which nobody uses.
- tuxguy 11y agohttp://comma.ai/hiring.html http://comma.ai/hiring.html
- joe563323 11y agoResponse from Elonmusk https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/677403793651175424 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/677403793651175424
- Allamaprabhu 11y agoBut my intuition say. Google has fairly large amount of data. Their cars drove much distance than his leading them more space to test. More data to test more intelligent systems will be.