6 ms·

Wonder how many more times this can get declared before the PR value works as a net loss.

tsenkov 10y ago
I think that's happening already, among engineers at least. There should be some healthy dose of inspiring "propaganda", but this got out of hand - everybody claims "they have it". I am so sick of this endless stream of lies, that I'm not even going to read the article. The next thing I am going to read on the topic would read something like "X has a viable self-driving car - it's hitting the market later this year.".
- thinkloop 10y ago
  You'll still have to endure the definition-stretching phase. I'm going to start really paying attention when pedaless cars are declared.
  - ars 10y ago
    > when pedaless cars are declared. That won't happen till General AI. How would you do something as simple as drive the car onto a lift to change the oil without pedals and a steering wheel? Or there is a concert and you need to drive onto the grass to park?
    - TillE 10y ago
      Solving a couple tiny problems really doesn't require human-level general intelligence. At the very worst you'd have a touchscreen with simple overrides. People talk as if there's some infinite number of unique edge cases when driving a dang car, but there simply isn't that much you actually do with a vehicle. Real deal no-drivers-license-required automated vehicles are coming pretty soon; maybe not in 5 years, but definitely within 20.
      - Piskvorrr 10y ago
        Been hearing that line, verbatim, since I was a kid. "Cars will be self-driving long before you'd ever need to learn driving. You won't need that skill, just like we never needed horse-riding." Well, I've had a driving license for decades, but apparently the marketing slogan still manages to impress people. P.T.Barnum would be proud.
        marcosdumay 10y ago
        I remember hearing this as a kid. But it was mostly speculation, it would be insane to believe it to the extent that one even starts to plan for it. We are in a completely different situation today.
    - ema 10y ago
      You plan the path on a high resolution map on the center console. When decision speed is a non issue this is a quite nice interface because you can double check the entire path before the wheels turn.
      - Piskvorrr 10y ago
        "(6) It is easier to move a problem around (...) than it is to solve it." In other words, now you need a hi-res, current map to show. Where does the data for that come from? (Oh wait, don't tell me: Magic!)
        ema 10y ago
        The cameras of the self driving car of course. I assume converting these inputs into maps that are usable enough for this purpose is much easier than driving a car in city conditions. So _if_ we get self driving cars we also get live updated maps of the surrounding circle with a radius ~20m.
        Piskvorrr 10y ago
        Which can now see behind corners, underground and over terrain. Magic, I say, pure magic!
        apk17 10y ago
        Not that people actually driving cars off the road are capable of this now. I'd often wish for a remote control when parking in constricted spaces.
        Piskvorrr 10y ago
        They are not - but then you're back to driving, although using the touchscreen. Completely different from the original proposition "tell the car where to go, it will do the rest". You're just exposing a different control API to the human controlling the car (a.k.a. driver), that's hardly driverless. TL;DR: "remote control" != "self-driving"
    - VMG 10y ago
      My guess is people will change their expectations of what they can do with a car. Maybe it will not work on unusual terrain anymore. Maintenance procedures might also change and involve remote controls or other specialized types of control.
      - cdubzzz 10y ago
        I have a lot of trouble envisioning that. I definitely would not want a car that I can't take off road as needed. At least half the people on the street where I live have one truck among other cars and many cars are parked in lawns. How quickly do you think perceptions about this could change? The only thing I can think that would sell me on the idea is a really low price point, e.g. sub-$10k to get a new, driverless, road-only vehicle. But I would only want that in addition to a "real" car.
        chx 10y ago
        Noone will have cars any more. Especially not just parking around in a residential street. It's just so inefficient. You haul one via your app and that's it.
        apk17 10y ago
        I doubt that. Cars are, besides being a transportation means, also a moving trunk, and that makes them non-interchangable to a degree.
      - nradov 10y ago
        The vast majority of car users take their vehicles at least slightly off road. I don't mean running a jeep through the Rubicon Trail, just simple common stuff like parking in a snow-covered lot at a ski resort with a human attendant pointing you where to park. How is a self-driving car ever going to handle that short of AGI?
    - ableal 10y ago
      > drive the car onto a lift There will be an app for that? Hey, James Bond was driving from the backseat with a Nokia 9000 (?) a few movies ago.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- stale2002 10y ago
  Really? You know that there are 10s of thousands of self driving cars on the road RIGHT NOW, that you as a consumer can buy tomorrow. Tesla sells thems, and they work.
  - j_jochem 10y ago
    Tesla cars are not autonomous as stated by Tesla themselves.
    - stale2002 10y ago
      You press a button, take your hands off the wheel, and it drives down the highway. That is absolutely self driving. If half of your driving time is done by the car, that is still a massive benefit to consumers. End to end autonomity, Is even better, of course, but I think that everyone is selling short the in between 95% self driving. Even TINY features, like autobraking in emergencies, has the potential to save tens of thousands of lives every year, if it got fully deployed in all cars. And for jobs, highway driving is 90% of what truck drivers do. If you have highway self driving (which we DO, right now!), then there goes most truck driver jobs.
      - vidarh 10y ago
        I agre with you part way. Of course it is still a massive benefit. But fully autonomous driving is still transformative in entirely different ways that makes it hard to treat the evolutionary steps as all that exciting even though many of them probably should be.
        semi-extrinsic 10y ago
        > Of course it is still a massive benefit. Could you ELI5 what the massive benefit is? The system requires you to be alert and focused on the road the entire time. We know for a fact e.g. from the aviation industry that having a human sitting alert but doing nothing increases human response time and decreases the correctness rate of their actions, which is one reason why airplanes don't regularly land on autopilot, even though the tech has been there for a long time. In fact, auto-land on airliners is only used in very low visibility, low wind conditions, or for training to ensure pilots use it at least semi-annually. The huge benefit of autopilot on airplanes and ships is that for normal operation out on the ocean or up in the sky, it's sufficiently safe that the pilot/captain can focus his attention elsewhere for long periods of time.
- Piskvorrr 10y ago
  "Driverless" is the new "flying." Also, human-like translation Real Soon Now (yes, yes, I've read that last week's article. And the last year's one. And the one before that. It's turtles all the way down to Babbage.).
  - wavefunction 10y ago
    I've never seen a flying car. I have driven in traffic next to, in front of, and behind Google's driverless cars, though.
    - Piskvorrr 10y ago
      Fair point, perhaps we might get there within a decade or two. (OTOH, nobody has ever seen an actual driverless car, either: those cars are "driverless unless driver intervention is needed" cars - a circular definition if I ever saw one. "90% there" is not "done", never mind the marketing)
Traubenfuchs 10y ago
It's just like battery innovations. If those were true our phones and notebooks would have power until eternity already.

I think that's happening already, among engineers at least. There should be some healthy dose of inspiring "propaganda", but this got out of hand - everybody claims "they have it". I am so sick of this endless stream of lies, that I'm not even going to read the article. The next thing I am going to read on the topic would read something like "X has a viable self-driving car - it's hitting the market later this year.".

thinkloop 10y ago
You'll still have to endure the definition-stretching phase. I'm going to start really paying attention when pedaless cars are declared.
- ars 10y ago
  > when pedaless cars are declared. That won't happen till General AI. How would you do something as simple as drive the car onto a lift to change the oil without pedals and a steering wheel? Or there is a concert and you need to drive onto the grass to park?
  - TillE 10y ago
    Solving a couple tiny problems really doesn't require human-level general intelligence. At the very worst you'd have a touchscreen with simple overrides. People talk as if there's some infinite number of unique edge cases when driving a dang car, but there simply isn't that much you actually do with a vehicle. Real deal no-drivers-license-required automated vehicles are coming pretty soon; maybe not in 5 years, but definitely within 20.
    - Piskvorrr 10y ago
      Been hearing that line, verbatim, since I was a kid. "Cars will be self-driving long before you'd ever need to learn driving. You won't need that skill, just like we never needed horse-riding." Well, I've had a driving license for decades, but apparently the marketing slogan still manages to impress people. P.T.Barnum would be proud.
      - marcosdumay 10y ago
        I remember hearing this as a kid. But it was mostly speculation, it would be insane to believe it to the extent that one even starts to plan for it. We are in a completely different situation today.
  - ema 10y ago
    You plan the path on a high resolution map on the center console. When decision speed is a non issue this is a quite nice interface because you can double check the entire path before the wheels turn.
    - Piskvorrr 10y ago
      "(6) It is easier to move a problem around (...) than it is to solve it." In other words, now you need a hi-res, current map to show. Where does the data for that come from? (Oh wait, don't tell me: Magic!)
      - ema 10y ago
        The cameras of the self driving car of course. I assume converting these inputs into maps that are usable enough for this purpose is much easier than driving a car in city conditions. So _if_ we get self driving cars we also get live updated maps of the surrounding circle with a radius ~20m.
        Piskvorrr 10y ago
        Which can now see behind corners, underground and over terrain. Magic, I say, pure magic!
        apk17 10y ago
        Not that people actually driving cars off the road are capable of this now. I'd often wish for a remote control when parking in constricted spaces.
        Piskvorrr 10y ago
        They are not - but then you're back to driving, although using the touchscreen. Completely different from the original proposition "tell the car where to go, it will do the rest". You're just exposing a different control API to the human controlling the car (a.k.a. driver), that's hardly driverless. TL;DR: "remote control" != "self-driving"
  - VMG 10y ago
    My guess is people will change their expectations of what they can do with a car. Maybe it will not work on unusual terrain anymore. Maintenance procedures might also change and involve remote controls or other specialized types of control.
    - cdubzzz 10y ago
      I have a lot of trouble envisioning that. I definitely would not want a car that I can't take off road as needed. At least half the people on the street where I live have one truck among other cars and many cars are parked in lawns. How quickly do you think perceptions about this could change? The only thing I can think that would sell me on the idea is a really low price point, e.g. sub-$10k to get a new, driverless, road-only vehicle. But I would only want that in addition to a "real" car.
      - chx 10y ago
        Noone will have cars any more. Especially not just parking around in a residential street. It's just so inefficient. You haul one via your app and that's it.
        apk17 10y ago
        I doubt that. Cars are, besides being a transportation means, also a moving trunk, and that makes them non-interchangable to a degree.
    - nradov 10y ago
      The vast majority of car users take their vehicles at least slightly off road. I don't mean running a jeep through the Rubicon Trail, just simple common stuff like parking in a snow-covered lot at a ski resort with a human attendant pointing you where to park. How is a self-driving car ever going to handle that short of AGI?
  - ableal 10y ago
    > drive the car onto a lift There will be an app for that? Hey, James Bond was driving from the backseat with a Nokia 9000 (?) a few movies ago.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
stale2002 10y ago
Really? You know that there are 10s of thousands of self driving cars on the road RIGHT NOW, that you as a consumer can buy tomorrow. Tesla sells thems, and they work.
- j_jochem 10y ago
  Tesla cars are not autonomous as stated by Tesla themselves.
  - stale2002 10y ago
    You press a button, take your hands off the wheel, and it drives down the highway. That is absolutely self driving. If half of your driving time is done by the car, that is still a massive benefit to consumers. End to end autonomity, Is even better, of course, but I think that everyone is selling short the in between 95% self driving. Even TINY features, like autobraking in emergencies, has the potential to save tens of thousands of lives every year, if it got fully deployed in all cars. And for jobs, highway driving is 90% of what truck drivers do. If you have highway self driving (which we DO, right now!), then there goes most truck driver jobs.
    - vidarh 10y ago
      I agre with you part way. Of course it is still a massive benefit. But fully autonomous driving is still transformative in entirely different ways that makes it hard to treat the evolutionary steps as all that exciting even though many of them probably should be.
      - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
        > Of course it is still a massive benefit. Could you ELI5 what the massive benefit is? The system requires you to be alert and focused on the road the entire time. We know for a fact e.g. from the aviation industry that having a human sitting alert but doing nothing increases human response time and decreases the correctness rate of their actions, which is one reason why airplanes don't regularly land on autopilot, even though the tech has been there for a long time. In fact, auto-land on airliners is only used in very low visibility, low wind conditions, or for training to ensure pilots use it at least semi-annually. The huge benefit of autopilot on airplanes and ships is that for normal operation out on the ocean or up in the sky, it's sufficiently safe that the pilot/captain can focus his attention elsewhere for long periods of time.
Piskvorrr 10y ago
"Driverless" is the new "flying." Also, human-like translation Real Soon Now (yes, yes, I've read that last week's article. And the last year's one. And the one before that. It's turtles all the way down to Babbage.).
- wavefunction 10y ago
  I've never seen a flying car. I have driven in traffic next to, in front of, and behind Google's driverless cars, though.
  - Piskvorrr 10y ago
    Fair point, perhaps we might get there within a decade or two. (OTOH, nobody has ever seen an actual driverless car, either: those cars are "driverless unless driver intervention is needed" cars - a circular definition if I ever saw one. "90% there" is not "done", never mind the marketing)

Traubenfuchs 10y ago

It's just like battery innovations. If those were true our phones and notebooks would have power until eternity already.