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Latest to Quit Google’s Self-Driving Car Unit: Top Roboticist
- karma_vaccum123 10y agoA car project seems complex enough that it demands its own org and will flounder as a division inside a company with other primary motivations (Google: Ads, Apple: phones).
- dougk16 10y agoAgreed, but the tension there seems to be that it also demands an org with enough money to buy small countries. Not just for the R&D either but also to sway public opinion, change existing laws and create favorable new ones, and for lawsuit armor. Probably a bunch more wetware-associated costs. In fact R&D might end up being a tiny slice of spending.
- ocdtrekkie 10y agoI'd find a company being able to do many of those things to be kinda scary/bad. If the technology can actually stand on its own and pass rigorous independent testing, law and opinion will follow. The only reason you need to influence these things artificially, is if something isn't all there under the hood.
- Paul-ish 10y agoThis is overly idealistic. Many people are afraid of technologies they don't understand, and self driving cars will certainly be a technology people don't understand. I can already imagine the scaremongering headlines about self driving cars "assassinating" their passengers or pedestrians. Countering fear and uncertainty may take effort, and effort = money.
- ocdtrekkie 10y agoThe reason there's currently fear and uncertainty is because there's good reason to be. Tesla's troubles with people improperly understanding that their feature is a "beta" and watching Harry Potter on the highway aside, Google has routinely avoided mentioning their disengagement figures and "would-be accidents" avoided solely because they have professional test drivers, while repetitively citing how many total miles they've driven. The technology ISN'T there yet, but some PR departments are going full throttle that it is. This sort of disingenuous marketing is what causes these incidents, and causes these headlines to be blown out of proportion. Nobody's flipped out about car manufacturers having cars that can parallel park themselves and brake themselves to prevent collisions. Reason why: It's tested, it's reliable enough for a Detroit company to advertise it, and it's not oversold as "autopilot" or "self-driving". It just is.
- skybrian 10y agoHow do you know? The question is whether they're safer than human drivers and I think it's hard to tell from the public evidence.
- csallen 10y agoI disagree with your first sentence. I know at least two people who've flat out told me they wouldn't trust computers driving their cars or even other cars on the highway regardless of how pristine their driving records were. Don't underestimate irrationality.
- ocdtrekkie 10y agoI bet we can find at least two people in this thread who would ALREADY trust a Google Self-Driving Car. Clearly, the guy watching Harry Potter while his Tesla flew down the highway towards a semi truck trusted his Tesla... and it cost him his life. For everyone you can find who will, without reason, be afraid of this technology, you will find someone who will, without reason, trust it implicitly.
- purpleidea 10y ago
- honkhonkpants 10y agoThere is no reason why an ads person from Google and a car person from X would ever cross paths.
- Animats 10y agoThey might both take Google's in-house machine learning course.
- kalleboo 10y agoIsn't that why Google reorganized into Alphabet? Google and X are separate subsidiaries under Alphabet.
- oh_sigh 10y agoSelf driving cars were in google X, which has basically no relation to ads besides for being funded by them indirectly.
- Animats 10y agoUrmson quit? Wow. That's a bad sign. He was the guy who seemed to be keeping that project on track, making it better, more capable, safer, and not killing anybody. His boss, John Krafcik, came from Hyundai, and is an old-line car guy. He goes all the way back to the days of the old GM Fremont/NUMMI plant, the building Tesla now occupies. His statements are about "partnering" - he's saying that Google's place is to be a parts supplier to the auto industry. Maybe Urmson just didn't want to move to Novi, MI, where Krafcik is moving the self-driving car effort.
- mathattack 10y agoNovi, MI is very different than Mountain View, CA! Convincing people to accept winter will be difficult. It's one thing if it's a "Let's change the world!" pitch from a technical genius. It's another if it's "Let's supply GM" from a business genius.
- andrewjf 10y agoI moved from Farmington Hills, MI (across the street from Novi) to San Jose, no way I'd go back there. 70% because of the winter.
- samcheng 10y agoI was just thinking about how the Google Self-Driving Car effort has become more aggressive recently. On a five-mile drive through Mountain View this afternoon (on El Camino and a residential neighborhood) I saw FOUR of the little bubble cars, and one of the Lexuses. Of course, on each of the cars I saw closely, the operator had their hand on the joystick...
- majewsky 10y agoMaybe they're testing convoy algorithms now. I can easily imagine autonomous vehicles forming convoys, using some short-distance communication to synchronize and thus optimize their movements.
- vanboxel 10y agoI actually studied exactly that! The optimal calculations for headway distance get a bit involved, but I coded up a modest algorithm and simple simulator. https://github.com/dvbuntu/oddities https://github.com/dvbuntu/oddities
- ocdtrekkie 10y agoGotta rack up those miles, man. They're all on the same stretches of road they've been driving for years, but Google sells that "miles driven" stat hard.
- simplemath 10y agoThat, and actually increasing the dataset...
- obmelvin 10y agoObviously you do need to drive in other areas, particularly to get different weather conditions. However, even driving in the same area different incidents are encountered everyday - it is not a waste of training.
- 10y ago
- ChuckMcM 10y agoOuch, I interviewed with Chris when I was looking around inside Google for a new gig. At the time he was "the guy", Sebastian had this great vision but Chris was the guy making it happen. I hope he does something new and exciting.
- radicality 10y agoAm I the only one that found that title difficult to parse and understand? For a moment I thought the guy's name is Latest.
- kilroy123 10y agoYou know, my gut just tells me Google isn't really going to do much with the self driving car thing. I think the technology will eventually become a reality. The real car companies will be the ones to deploy it.
- perseusprime11 10y agoI will not be surprised if Urmson ends up at Tesla.