15 ms·

Toyota's Gill Pratt on Self-Driving Cars and the Reality of Full Autonomy

190 points by mcspecter 10y ago

blazespin 10y ago
So much wrong with this logic: "If autonomous cars are even just 1 percent safer than humans, we should still be using them." Does that "humans" include drunks, idiots, and teenagers? If so, I'm sorry, I would never use that car. I'd like to think I drive 2x safer than the average idiot out there.
- jwilliams 10y ago
  I took that statement to refer to the cumulative effect of autonomous cars -- Those people you describe are already on the road with you, whatever car you're in.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- maxerickson 10y ago
  Why not encourage the drunks, idiots, and teenagers to use them though?
- stale2002 10y ago
  Then you do not have to. Other people can, and should though.
lefstathiou 10y ago
There is a great proverb that reads "man who says it cannot be done, should not interrupt man doing it." If you removed Tesla from the equation, Level 4 autonomy would be half a decade away... it's pretty sad how far behind the industry is from this perennially cash strapped upstart.
- rootusrootus 10y ago
  Do you mean half a century? Unless I'm misunderstanding, Tesla isn't likely to have a Level 4 car anytime in the next five years either.
- EmployedRussian 10y ago
  Has Tesla delivered L4 car yet? Elon's claims notwithstanding, Tesla may actually be half a decade away from L4. > It's pretty sad how far behind ... Maybe they are just trying to not over-promise and under-deliver?
- unityByFreedom 10y ago
  > If you removed Tesla from the equation, Level 4 autonomy would be half a decade away... it's pretty sad how far behind the industry is from this perennially cash strapped upstart. This is simply untrue. Volvo will have a release this year. The notion that Tesla are the only ones innovating because they're the only ones using the public as guinea pigs is hogwash. Mobileye, Tesla's original self driving technology, isn't even part of Tesla. They have other clients.
  - johansch 10y ago
    Some Volvo press on that: http://blog.caranddriver.com/meet-the-first-real-family-slated-to-get-keys-to-volvos-self-driving-xc90/ http://blog.caranddriver.com/meet-the-first-real-family-slat...
millstone 10y ago
> if autonomous cars are even just 1 percent safer than humans, we should still be using them We could improve safety by at least 1% in lots of other ways: lowering speed limits, requiring rear view cameras, raising the licensing age and requiring more frequent tests, cracking down on drunk driving, etc. Building a fully autonomous vehicle seems unnecessarily elaborate to get a 1% safety.
- pdonis 10y ago
  > Building a fully autonomous vehicle seems unnecessarily elaborate to get a 1% safety. Not if the vehicle also gives you functionality that doesn't currently exist. Freeing humans from having to do the driving has a huge potential value over and above the value of the safety improvement. The other safety improvements you mention don't; in fact they have less net value than the safety improvement, since they also have costs--not the cost of installing the technology, but the cost of getting where you're going more slowly, having to take driving tests more frequently, having to drive your children around till they reach an older age, etc.
  - rimantas 10y ago
    > Freeing humans from having to do the driving has a huge > potential value Except that it does not. What would have a value is getting rid of the need to be in traffic at all, no matter self or not self driving car you use.
    - hueving 10y ago
      >Except that it does not You contradicted here but provided nothing to back it up? Why don't you think freeing people from driving has value?
    - aninhumer 10y ago
      Uh yes it does? Even if there's still traffic, being able to sit through it doing some work/reading a book/watching a movie is a huge advantage compared to babysitting the steering wheel the whole time.
cperciva 10y ago
We need a level between Level 4 (the vehicle can operate autonomously in almost all conditions) and Level 5 (no manual control): Level 4.5, wherein the vehicle and operate autonomously in almost all conditions and can identify and safely stop in other conditions. If there's a severe blizzard and my car can't see the road in front of it and we're in a 4G dead zone and it can't get an accurate enough GPS fix to figure out where it's going, I'd be perfectly happy if it safely pulled over to the side of the road and stopped. Heck, I'd prefer to have it safely pull over rather than trying to continue based on some premise of "this vehicle be able to navigate under all possible conditions".
- arebop 10y ago
  I think you've misunderstood level 4; it seems to be defined as you suggest 4.5 ought to be: [http://www.sae.org/misc/pdfs/automated_driving.pdf http://www.sae.org/misc/pdfs/automated_driving.pdf ]; the car has to operate safely after autonomous mode is enabled, even if the human has no further interactions (even if the car requests human intervention).
  - cperciva 10y ago
    It seems like the definition of level 4 is a bit ambiguous; your link defines it as operating without human intervention, but only in "some driving modes". I've seen this interpreted as meaning that the vehicle can operate without human intervention as long as the driving mode does not change, but may still require human intervention if the conditions change (e.g., it starts snowing, or you exit the highway).
    - exDM69 10y ago
      The key distinction here is that a Level 4 is safe even when the driver does not intervene. If it starts snowing, the car will park by the side of the road if the driver isn't there to pick up the wheel. Level 3 is when you have ample time before the switchover, and Level 2 is when the driver must be there in a matter of seconds.
- rubidium 10y ago
moflome 10y ago
I personally tried to give the Google car "hard miles" by cutting it off in traffic last year. I believe I was being helpful, but I feel bad about scaring the "driver."
- dsfyu404ed 10y ago
  Why wouldn't you cut it off if you saw it coming? You know it's gonna drive to the letter of the law. Do you really want to get stuck behind that?
  - ashark 10y ago
    Y'know, that's a good point. Flow of traffic on several highways around here is 15mph above the speed limit. People are going to hate self driving cars on those unless the speed limit goes up. Maneuvers to avoid or pass them may well make the highways more dangerous, while human drivers are still in the majority.
  - cdetrio 10y ago
    The article links to Rodney Brooks, who mentioned this in a recent blog post http://rodneybrooks.com/unexpected-consequences-of-self-driving-cars/ http://rodneybrooks.com/unexpected-consequences-of-self-driv...: > At least one manufacturer is afraid that human drivers will bully self driving cars operating with level two autonomy, so they are taking care that in their level 3 real world trials the cars look identical to conventional models, so that other drivers will not cut them off and take advantage of the heightened safety levels that lead to autonomous vehicle driving more cautiously.
jayjay71 10y ago
It's refreshing to see an article like this among the many other articles predicting self-driving cars will be here in ~2 years. Volvo has committed to selling level 4 vehicles by the end of this year (in limited locations) - I'd love for them to follow through and see how good their technology really is. I suspect the transition will be far more gradual than most people are willing to admit, and take decades instead of years. Keep in mind, serious research into self-driving cars started in the 80's, and then there was a huge increase in interest in the 2000's because of the DARPA challenges. After that Google took interest, and recently the major automakers have become serious about it as well. But it's worth noting that originally Chris Urmson had predicted Google would be selling fully autonomous cars today, and instead Google lost a lot of their talent in the last year including Urmson and there is no public deadline for selling a product. I think progress is great and self-driving cars are awesome, but I don't believe they're just around the corner.
- imh 10y ago
  My great worry with self-driving cars is that they shouldn't be right around the corner, but they might be anyways. Marketing departments might move faster than engineering, smooth-talking the buyers into taking uninformed risks in order to expand the company's training data.
  - woofyman 10y ago
    If NHSTA does its job, this shouldn't be an issue in the USA at least.
    - imh 10y ago
      I know they can deal with the risks, but what about the "informed" part? My pet peeve with Tesla's marketing dept is that there are tons of Tesla drivers who seem to think the autopilot is more capable than it is: https://youtu.be/qnZHRupjl5E https://youtu.be/qnZHRupjl5E Those people are surely not aware of the risks they are taking, so I'd bet even the more responsible users aren't aware of its limits.
imh 10y ago
I hate this rhetoric about "saving even one life." It's closer to "saving five lives but killing four people who otherwise would have lived." Some people say that's the same thing. I disagree.
- CPLX 10y ago
  That is genuinely insightful, and is most certainly a political problem to address.
  - unityByFreedom 10y ago
    > That is genuinely insightful, and is most certainly a political problem to address. Why is that a political problem?
    - woofyman 10y ago
      People accept that humans are imperfect and cause accidents. Accepting that computers will make mistakes and kill people is another story. Especially if the owner of the car is a 1 percenter or a mega corporation and it kills an innocent bystander.
      - notahacker 10y ago
        Also, people aren't that accepting of human imperfection and expect to see people have licences taken away and jailed where they've been deemed to be behaving recklessly (even if they've racked up huge numbers of miles with no previous incidents)
    - CPLX 10y ago
      Because if your family member is violently killed by a robot car doing something that seems inexplicable to the human mind, and with a fact pattern that doesn't match up with normal human error accidents you're used to, you're not likely to be consoled with a reminder that four people you've never met supposedly are still alive because they weren't killed in some place you've never been by a human driver that never took the wheel.
komodo 10y ago
a genie offers you a deal. "I will prevent all car accidents that cause death for an entire year. In exchange, at the end of that year, I will randomly kill people, one by one, until as many as XX% of the prevented deaths are 'repaid'. The 1% safety people would take the deal at 99% repaid deaths. But I think most people would only be comfortable with a number much lower.
- loafa 10y ago
  Well, it's not that equivalent a situation. I'd feel personally responsible for the particular set of individuals killed by the genie rather than some other set of individuals. That's too much responsibility for me, I didn't ask for this crap, I should know better than to trust random genie bargains.
  - taneq 10y ago
    In the least convenient universe (and therefore the most useful for examining this moral quandary), you don't have the luxury of dodging the question. If you choose to tell the genie to do nothing, then you're choosing for X people to die to save Y. (The scenario needs work, though - it should be Y people chosen from the road users in question, not just Y random humans.)
- aaron695 10y ago
  Do you get the bodies that are left over from the genie? Are their organs usable? Sounds like a no brainer if they are? Or does the genie reduce the people killed by the ones no longer saved by organ donations from car accidents? The genie might have to bring people back to life. This might make people uncomfortable.
- XorNot 10y ago
  I take the deal, then try and find a way to kill the genie. Also try and make it target the purveyors of stupid hypothetical arguments. This example is not in even remotely close to any situation autonomous vehicles can present.
JohnJamesRambo 10y ago
It's funny, Uber is betting the farm on autonomous cars becoming reality and reading this reminds us of just how far away that is.
- Gargoyle 10y ago
  Uber's main use cases aren't necessarily the "hard miles" discussed in the article.
  - Neliquat 10y ago
    Being a taxi seems even more rigourous, your point is invalid.
    - Gargoyle 10y ago
      Uber knows the pickup and destination of every trip before it begins. Which means they know the route before it begins. Which means they can assess route and conditions to see if they are suitable for autonomous cars. So they roll out slowly, expanding the possible trips covered as their technology advances. Since they have such fine control over which routes and which conditions the cars will be expected to perform in, they're actually ideally positioned to work with this technology.
- stale2002 10y ago
  What? This article is talking about level 5 autonomy. AKA, "works literally everywhere and all the time". Uber only needs to get to level 4 to change the world.
  - falcolas 10y ago
    If Uber gets to only level 4, it still needs drivers to handle those cases that the car can't handle. Doesn't really change the world.
chrischen 10y ago
It's easy to accept this when you realize that nobody has even managed to make a generally useful voice assistant yet, how ludicrous the "close to self driving" claim is.
- threeseed 10y ago
  I have to agree. Especially a car that can work worldwide. For example here in Australia we have an animal called a Kangaroo which when a car approaches will move completely randomly. This includes at the last second jumping straight in front of a car. Most drivers from these areas know to slow down and attempt to drive in the middle of the road if at all possible. Surely weird situations like this which require local knowledge exist all across the world. But I've yet to see any acknowledgement that this is useful.
  - prawn 10y ago
    I'm sure this is easily considered and the car can slow down in such situations. I believe deer are skittish too. Why would you need to see any public acknowledgement of something so basic/obvious from very advanced teams working privately on issues like this? For city driving, these systems need to account for kids straying onto roads, read temporary/roadwork signage, all sorts of random things.
  - qball 10y ago
    >But I've yet to see any acknowledgement that this is useful. I think that the reason why this isn't acknowledged (by people who should know) is likely to be a political one. Examining the solution that I typically seen given for this problem should explain why. First, the assumption is that driving algorithms are updated to account for any edge case (for instance, an unpredictable animal jumped out this time) after it occurs, so that case is then guaranteed to not re-occur. This presents a problem: anyone who's ever worked with software before knows that that's an impossibility until a sufficient number of incidents happen in nearly identical ways, or until a fix is manually applied (which itself could take a very long time). But we fall back on the second part of our argument, statistics. The fact that you're going to crash into something you wouldn't before is outweighed by more than one other person not crashing in a place where the computer can predict and avoid a crash more effectively than a human. This too, presents a problem, if you also consider the implication that the availability of manual-driving cars will likely be degraded in some way after the introduction of self-driving ones (from having increased cost/regulation/insurance premiums or simply being banned entirely). If we discount these "weird" situations and fail to make allowances for them, people will get hurt where they wouldn't otherwise (even if the local or global sum of deaths is reduced). The benefits skew in favor of cities where traffic behavior is/will be much more consistent. So it's best if local knowledge can't be useful- why complicate the matter or feed skeptics talking points if you don't need to?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Negitivefrags 10y ago
I made a bet with someone recently that within 10 years you will not be able to buy a self driving car off the lot that can drive someone around that doesn't have a licence. It's a testament to Tesla's propaganda that he took the bet. I look forward to claiming my $500 in 10 years time.
- erikpukinskis 10y ago
  So does he.
  - Neliquat 10y ago
    Wanna make a bet?
    - erikpukinskis 10y ago
      It's a bad bet because Tesla doesn't sell out of lots, and Google won't either. If you reformulate the bet as "it will be possible to legally ride in a driverless cab without a license somewhere in the world by the end of 2027" I'll take the bet for $20. I think you might win your original bet on the technicality of car sales lots being averse to selling these kinds of things and ride sharing services being early movers, and more amenable to insurance. Being able to keep cars in a specific service area will help.
- ralfd 10y ago
  Who will win the bet if a person without drivers license can rent a car driging her around? (Uber)
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Ericson2314 10y ago
Gotta appreciate that shout-out to formal methods!
sytelus 10y ago
Approximately 35,000 people died in car accidents in 2015. That's almost 100 people each day. Imagine you had self-driving car that was exactly as good as humans. This car will kill 100 people each day despite of being human-level competent. It has slim chance of surviving public outrage and lawsuits. This points to the fact that self-driving cars needs to be few thousand times better than humans. As in all machine learning problems, as you get along the curve, progress becomes much more expensive for next 1% improvement than last 2% improvement. One way to circumvent this is establish special lanes for self-driving cars where things are much more controlled, well defined and cars in that lane can communicate with each other to avoid crashes. Long segments of highways might be great candidates. This can heat up the virtuous cycle where people buy self-driving cars to be in that lane which pressures authorities to make more lanes available for them and eventually most lanes are for self-driving cars.
- randcraw 10y ago
  35k die per year in the US alone. Worldwide it's more like 1.25 million. http://www.who.int/gho/road_safety/mortality/traffic_deaths_number/en/ http://www.who.int/gho/road_safety/mortality/traffic_deaths_... You don't need autocars to be 1000 times better than humans. You just need them to be equally good as the average driver ALL THE TIME, such that they're never distracted, sleepy, driving unlawfully, etc. The occasional lapse in driver competence is the cause for the vast majority of crashes. I suspect the limitations of driver (or autocar) perception plays a small role in most accidents when compared to lapses. As residents of a developed country, with a very low death rate per mile driven, we also see traffic risks very differently than the world's norm. The annual death rate per 100k motor vehicles in the US is 13; in India it's 130 in Africa it's 574. In the more unsafe countries, I suspect driver error is the cause of 99% of accidents. Replacing human driver decisions with autocars would reduce worldwide driver fatality risk enormously, reducing perhaps 90% of global traffic fatalities -- about one million people a year.
Animats 10y ago
This is Toyota, which is coming from behind here. They started work on self-driving last summer, which was late to be getting into it. They hired Gill Pratt, who took over the MIT Leg Lab after Raibert left, but never did much with it. His job was to start to build up an organization to work on self-driving. So he has to make excuses for Toyota being behind. Toyota recent technology direction isn't looking good. Instead of selling battery electric cars, they're selling hydrogen fuel cell cars in California.[1] Nobody is buying. Their electric cars are mini-cars. Something went wrong over there. Pratt has some legitimate criticisms. But many of the really hard but rare problems can be solved by stopping, or going really slow. When you're going really slow, your sensor data from LIDAR is very good and you should have a full ground profile. If you have to inch your way through a field of rocks, that can be done. Remember, the DARPA Grand Challenge cars of 10 years ago could drive off road. As for "why did it do that" issues, that's mostly a problem for those self-driving systems where machine learning is connected directly between camera and steering wheel. Those are easy to build and give the illusion of working, but are not going to work in hard cases. You want a world model and object recognition, like Google. You can tell how well your object recognition is working by checking its results at long range against its results at short range. [1] https://ssl.toyota.com/mirai/fcv.html https://ssl.toyota.com/mirai/fcv.html
- HeavenBanned 10y ago
  They're waiting because they'll copy the right technology (they're basically saying they won't offer anything less than Stage 5 which is smart) from competitors when it happens and becomes economically feasible. I don't think they're going to run out to make Corollas with 20K LIDARs slapped on just yet. Give it time. Tesla likes to brag, but honestly a little steering now and then doesn't count. With this tech, I think all-or-nothing is the safest approach given you're not a research power-house like Google. Let someone else stumble upon the solution then copy it.
- grogenaut 10y ago
  If you go really slow on a freeway with low visibility you get rear ended at highway speed. Which doesn't work out well for you. Or the other person. Heck if you go real slow on a highway and traffic isn't... you get rear ended at highway speed.
general_ai 10y ago
Ha-le-freaking-lujah! I've been saying the same for years, ever since I completed the Udacity self-driving car AI course (taught by Sebastian Thrun, then head guru of autonomous vehicle research at Google). 70% of the problem was solved in mid-90's, by Ernst Dickmanns et al, Daimler Benz had autonomous cars on the autobahn. After billions of dollars and two decades, we solved another 20% of the problem. The remaining 10% is not going to be conclusively solved in the next 20 years at least, not under the current constraints. Now if roads are outfitted with instrumentation for autonomous vehicles, _and_ human drivers are prohibited on such roads, _then_ we _might_ see full autonomy. But not before. If it were up to me, I'd focus on this instrumentation instead: RF guide wires/tags for car localization on the pavement, machine readable signage (even in fog, snow, and heavy rain -- conditions with which cameras and LIDARs cannot deal in principle), inter-car coordination mesh networks and security thereof, autonomous vehicle readable road work signage, police gear to direct traffic of autonomous vehicles, and so on and so forth. There. Hundred billion dollars worth of startups in one paragraph. As things stand, you can only be fully autonomous at 25mph in California where it never rains, as long as there's no fog, no road work, and no one has messed up the markings on the pavement.
- mojuba 10y ago
  > police gear to direct traffic of autonomous vehicles Absolutely, been saying this for years (yes, me too :). We will eventually achieve a lot more autonomy and robotization of driving, but it will require massive infrastructural changes, much like the transition from horses to cars.
- exDM69 10y ago
  Yes! A bit of common sense would be useful here. The current generation of self-driving cars is fairly impressive already, but what I'd like to see is a city full of them. I have a feeling that self-driving only works as long as the majority of drivers are human drivers. It's trivially easy to come up with traffic situations that could lead to a deadlock by blidndly following the rules. Humans will use hand signals, eye contact or someone will violate the rules a little or make way when they don't strictly have to in order to ensure that traffic flows. I think that car-to-car and/or car-to-road communications will be required before large scale deployment is possible. And I have not heard from a cross-manufacturer effort of creating a protocol for such communication. Although I do understand why the automotive industry is hell bent on getting their level 2 autonomy out there. Money from the customers is needed to keep the R&D effort going. I personally did not understand why anyone would want a Level 2 car where you have to be constantly on the lookout until I visited Silicon Valley and drove a stint on US Hwy 101 in rush hour. And I guess this is the initial target market for the self-driving car industry: wealthy individuals who have a stressful morning commute in stop'n'go traffic. Money from these early adopters will go to funding the R&D for the next generation in the hopes that Level 4/5 will some day become reality. But in my conservative estimate, that's still years away from being adopted en masse. There may be a significant minority of them on the road in 3-5 years but I can't imagine it working very well if they were in the majority.
saosebastiao 10y ago
It's been a while since I've looked at the actual numbers, but from what I recall (the point could be made over a reasonable approximation of X), >80% of the spoken words in an average english speaking adult's spoken language corpus exist in the vocabulary of the average english speaking kindergartner. In other words, it takes us two-ish years to learn how to use our vocal cords, and another two to three years to get to 80% of an adult's vocabulary. And yet it takes another 12 years just to increase our vocabularies a handful of percent and to become fairly proficient at piecing together those words into coherent and mature enough communication for full time employment. And that is just one example. Learn 90% of Haskell in one afternoon...learn the rest over the next two decades of your life. Learn 90% of derivatives trading from one book, but spend the rest of your life learning the rest. They aren't examples so much as they are a fact of life: There is an extremely long tail to learning, and extrapolation of where you will be given how fast you've learned up to some arbitrary point will be impossible. Self driving cars aren't just learning the rules of the road. They are learning human spatial sensory perception and fast heuristics for ad hoc path planning that have been evolved over several millenia. And yes, they are becoming extremely capable extremely quickly...but you won't be able to extrapolate linearly to get to a point where they can take over.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  Most 12 year olds could handle being a cashier.
- CobrastanJorji 10y ago
  I'm not sure that's right. Googling around suggests that the average 5 year old knows somewhere between 3000 and 10000 words, and the average adult knows somewhere between 15000-20000 words. So I think saying a five year old has even 50% of an adult's total vocabulary is probably generous. Of course, if you meant that a five year old would understand about 80% of the words spoken by an adult over the course of a day, 80% sounds like a very conservative guess. Not that it affects your point at all, I'm just thinking about words now. And while I'm on the subject, XKCD's "Thing Explainer," a book on how things work using only the 1000 most common words, is great fun.
tapmap 10y ago
www.mobilityx.co
tapmap 10y ago
just found this www.mobiltyx.co
Shivetya 10y ago
Way back I remember when William Shatner's TekWar was brought to TV. One scene that stood out was when the lead was driving into town, it appeared that limited access roads; US interstate type; were done by car driving itself. a similar idea would do quite a bit to move the technology forward and increase acceptance. we already have projects that create toll and hov lanes. why can't these also be equipped to assist self driving cars with their tasks? While I think the Tesla videos were cool, even GM did something similar recently in San Francisco, they are still pretty much scripted events. Tesla is guilty of exploiting the over trusting side of the issue simply by product naming but some of their demos could lead people into assuming far too much ability; will that become a legal liability?
tarcyanm 10y ago
I love the idea of self driving cars but it scares me that no one seems to remember the history of the 5th Generation project (I was a kid in the 80s) and other AI hype-dreams over the years. It has always been the case that approximate solutions can be found for 85% of cases, which has given the illusion of a nearly solved problem. There is a lot of hype regarding deep learning, but I have struggled to find a concise definition apart from the fact that it is now relatively easy to work with monstrously big networks. Backprop and related algorithms have been around for decades. From what I remember of neural nets, one huge drawback was that they would be close to un-debuggable. The learning contained in the net would be inscrutable to a human, to all intents and purposes. Failure data could be recorded and replayed, but any actual reason for failure would frequently not be found. So, tweak the network, resize some layers and try again... I can think of several reasons why that's fundamentally unsuitable to the problem of driving. I was in Egypt recently, and the sheer amount of lane crossing, merging, pedestrians ducking through multiple lanes of traffic, roadside obstacles, donkey-drawn vehicles etc would be 100% impervious to even a level 3 solution today. I believe the same would be true in India and many other parts of Africa. So, I really hope that we are not falling blindly into another 5th Generation sinkhole here. History should have taught us better.
throw2016 10y ago
It's refreshing to get a perspective that scopes the true scale of the problem and addresses technical, societal and moral issues. This seems to be a more responsible and comprehensive engineering perspective than the frenzy and hand waving that accompanies most self driving topics here. Overestimating AI with little to no data and vastly underestimating not only human driving but the varied traffic conditions they operate in doesn't seem like a realistic or responsible way to solve the problem.
ohstopitu 10y ago
Everyone is discussing about how autonomous cars will react to various situations. However, the real question is - once we have walled gardens, who'll control it - the manufacturers or the government? By that I mean, all automated cars (especially level 5) would need some kind of network connection (both cellular and mesh) - which means "your" car (if you own one - which from the looks of how things are shaping is going to be highly unlikely), could easily be stopped for variety of reasons with or without your permissions. It could be hacked by 3 letter agencies, or by hackers who can than case mass disruption. While I'm not against self driving cars, I'm very cautious against the "self-driving are the best - they'll reduce death on the road and if you don't support it you are a death loving luddite who can't get on with the times" school of thought. We saw what happened with we gave up control on our phones, and that's slowly happening to our computers (sure, most of readers here can run/use linux, but linux on desktops still has a much lower market share compared to Windows 10). I just feel like it's not the right future that I imagined as a kid watching star trek and it's disappointing. EDIT: another unrelated point I'd like to add is the fact that if we want to have autonomous cars on the road - we'd need co-operation between various companies (which would be easy - we have browser vendors do that, why not car companies?), but more importantly, we need a huge overhaul of our infrastructure for autonomous cars and we need to outlaw humans driving cars on such roads).
nmeofthestate 10y ago
It's great to see this posted on HN, which in the past has suffered from an excess of gung-ho robocar advocacy IMO.
ramzyo 10y ago
I found this quote from Dr. Pratt particularly salient, "But fundamentally a thing your readers should know is that this really comes down to testing. Deep learning is wonderful, but deep learning doesn’t guarantee that over the entire space of possible inputs, the behavior will be correct. Ensuring that that’s true is very, very hard to do."
emodendroket 10y ago
This is really excellent.
DonHopkins 10y ago
Is this the same Gil (with one l) Pratt of the MIT Leg Lab? (Not to be confused with the MIT Lego Lab! ;) Are they different people, or did he change the spelling of his name when he moved from legs to wheels? Or is he developing walking cars for Toyota? Actually his first name is spelled two different ways on this one page, and he looks like the same person, so maybe he changes the spelling of his name frequently: http://images.sciencesource.com/preview/BA4147.html http://images.sciencesource.com/preview/BA4147.html

190 points by mcspecter 10y ago

So much wrong with this logic: "If autonomous cars are even just 1 percent safer than humans, we should still be using them." Does that "humans" include drunks, idiots, and teenagers? If so, I'm sorry, I would never use that car. I'd like to think I drive 2x safer than the average idiot out there.

jwilliams 10y ago
I took that statement to refer to the cumulative effect of autonomous cars -- Those people you describe are already on the road with you, whatever car you're in.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
maxerickson 10y ago
Why not encourage the drunks, idiots, and teenagers to use them though?
stale2002 10y ago
Then you do not have to. Other people can, and should though.

lefstathiou 10y ago

There is a great proverb that reads "man who says it cannot be done, should not interrupt man doing it." If you removed Tesla from the equation, Level 4 autonomy would be half a decade away... it's pretty sad how far behind the industry is from this perennially cash strapped upstart.

rootusrootus 10y ago
Do you mean half a century? Unless I'm misunderstanding, Tesla isn't likely to have a Level 4 car anytime in the next five years either.
EmployedRussian 10y ago
Has Tesla delivered L4 car yet? Elon's claims notwithstanding, Tesla may actually be half a decade away from L4. > It's pretty sad how far behind ... Maybe they are just trying to not over-promise and under-deliver?
unityByFreedom 10y ago
> If you removed Tesla from the equation, Level 4 autonomy would be half a decade away... it's pretty sad how far behind the industry is from this perennially cash strapped upstart. This is simply untrue. Volvo will have a release this year. The notion that Tesla are the only ones innovating because they're the only ones using the public as guinea pigs is hogwash. Mobileye, Tesla's original self driving technology, isn't even part of Tesla. They have other clients.
- johansch 10y ago
  Some Volvo press on that: http://blog.caranddriver.com/meet-the-first-real-family-slated-to-get-keys-to-volvos-self-driving-xc90/ http://blog.caranddriver.com/meet-the-first-real-family-slat...

millstone 10y ago

> if autonomous cars are even just 1 percent safer than humans, we should still be using them We could improve safety by at least 1% in lots of other ways: lowering speed limits, requiring rear view cameras, raising the licensing age and requiring more frequent tests, cracking down on drunk driving, etc. Building a fully autonomous vehicle seems unnecessarily elaborate to get a 1% safety.

pdonis 10y ago
> Building a fully autonomous vehicle seems unnecessarily elaborate to get a 1% safety. Not if the vehicle also gives you functionality that doesn't currently exist. Freeing humans from having to do the driving has a huge potential value over and above the value of the safety improvement. The other safety improvements you mention don't; in fact they have less net value than the safety improvement, since they also have costs--not the cost of installing the technology, but the cost of getting where you're going more slowly, having to take driving tests more frequently, having to drive your children around till they reach an older age, etc.
- rimantas 10y ago
  > Freeing humans from having to do the driving has a huge > potential value Except that it does not. What would have a value is getting rid of the need to be in traffic at all, no matter self or not self driving car you use.
  - hueving 10y ago
    >Except that it does not You contradicted here but provided nothing to back it up? Why don't you think freeing people from driving has value?
  - aninhumer 10y ago
    Uh yes it does? Even if there's still traffic, being able to sit through it doing some work/reading a book/watching a movie is a huge advantage compared to babysitting the steering wheel the whole time.

cperciva 10y ago

We need a level between Level 4 (the vehicle can operate autonomously in almost all conditions) and Level 5 (no manual control): Level 4.5, wherein the vehicle and operate autonomously in almost all conditions and can identify and safely stop in other conditions. If there's a severe blizzard and my car can't see the road in front of it and we're in a 4G dead zone and it can't get an accurate enough GPS fix to figure out where it's going, I'd be perfectly happy if it safely pulled over to the side of the road and stopped. Heck, I'd prefer to have it safely pull over rather than trying to continue based on some premise of "this vehicle be able to navigate under all possible conditions".

arebop 10y ago
I think you've misunderstood level 4; it seems to be defined as you suggest 4.5 ought to be: [http://www.sae.org/misc/pdfs/automated_driving.pdf http://www.sae.org/misc/pdfs/automated_driving.pdf ]; the car has to operate safely after autonomous mode is enabled, even if the human has no further interactions (even if the car requests human intervention).
- cperciva 10y ago
  It seems like the definition of level 4 is a bit ambiguous; your link defines it as operating without human intervention, but only in "some driving modes". I've seen this interpreted as meaning that the vehicle can operate without human intervention as long as the driving mode does not change, but may still require human intervention if the conditions change (e.g., it starts snowing, or you exit the highway).
  - exDM69 10y ago
    The key distinction here is that a Level 4 is safe even when the driver does not intervene. If it starts snowing, the car will park by the side of the road if the driver isn't there to pick up the wheel. Level 3 is when you have ample time before the switchover, and Level 2 is when the driver must be there in a matter of seconds.
rubidium 10y ago

moflome 10y ago

I personally tried to give the Google car "hard miles" by cutting it off in traffic last year. I believe I was being helpful, but I feel bad about scaring the "driver."

dsfyu404ed 10y ago
Why wouldn't you cut it off if you saw it coming? You know it's gonna drive to the letter of the law. Do you really want to get stuck behind that?
- ashark 10y ago
  Y'know, that's a good point. Flow of traffic on several highways around here is 15mph above the speed limit. People are going to hate self driving cars on those unless the speed limit goes up. Maneuvers to avoid or pass them may well make the highways more dangerous, while human drivers are still in the majority.
- cdetrio 10y ago
  The article links to Rodney Brooks, who mentioned this in a recent blog post http://rodneybrooks.com/unexpected-consequences-of-self-driving-cars/ http://rodneybrooks.com/unexpected-consequences-of-self-driv...: > At least one manufacturer is afraid that human drivers will bully self driving cars operating with level two autonomy, so they are taking care that in their level 3 real world trials the cars look identical to conventional models, so that other drivers will not cut them off and take advantage of the heightened safety levels that lead to autonomous vehicle driving more cautiously.

jayjay71 10y ago

It's refreshing to see an article like this among the many other articles predicting self-driving cars will be here in ~2 years. Volvo has committed to selling level 4 vehicles by the end of this year (in limited locations) - I'd love for them to follow through and see how good their technology really is. I suspect the transition will be far more gradual than most people are willing to admit, and take decades instead of years. Keep in mind, serious research into self-driving cars started in the 80's, and then there was a huge increase in interest in the 2000's because of the DARPA challenges. After that Google took interest, and recently the major automakers have become serious about it as well. But it's worth noting that originally Chris Urmson had predicted Google would be selling fully autonomous cars today, and instead Google lost a lot of their talent in the last year including Urmson and there is no public deadline for selling a product. I think progress is great and self-driving cars are awesome, but I don't believe they're just around the corner.

imh 10y ago
My great worry with self-driving cars is that they shouldn't be right around the corner, but they might be anyways. Marketing departments might move faster than engineering, smooth-talking the buyers into taking uninformed risks in order to expand the company's training data.
- woofyman 10y ago
  If NHSTA does its job, this shouldn't be an issue in the USA at least.
  - imh 10y ago
    I know they can deal with the risks, but what about the "informed" part? My pet peeve with Tesla's marketing dept is that there are tons of Tesla drivers who seem to think the autopilot is more capable than it is: https://youtu.be/qnZHRupjl5E https://youtu.be/qnZHRupjl5E Those people are surely not aware of the risks they are taking, so I'd bet even the more responsible users aren't aware of its limits.

imh 10y ago

I hate this rhetoric about "saving even one life." It's closer to "saving five lives but killing four people who otherwise would have lived." Some people say that's the same thing. I disagree.

CPLX 10y ago
That is genuinely insightful, and is most certainly a political problem to address.
- unityByFreedom 10y ago
  > That is genuinely insightful, and is most certainly a political problem to address. Why is that a political problem?
  - woofyman 10y ago
    People accept that humans are imperfect and cause accidents. Accepting that computers will make mistakes and kill people is another story. Especially if the owner of the car is a 1 percenter or a mega corporation and it kills an innocent bystander.
    - notahacker 10y ago
      Also, people aren't that accepting of human imperfection and expect to see people have licences taken away and jailed where they've been deemed to be behaving recklessly (even if they've racked up huge numbers of miles with no previous incidents)
  - CPLX 10y ago
    Because if your family member is violently killed by a robot car doing something that seems inexplicable to the human mind, and with a fact pattern that doesn't match up with normal human error accidents you're used to, you're not likely to be consoled with a reminder that four people you've never met supposedly are still alive because they weren't killed in some place you've never been by a human driver that never took the wheel.

komodo 10y ago

a genie offers you a deal. "I will prevent all car accidents that cause death for an entire year. In exchange, at the end of that year, I will randomly kill people, one by one, until as many as XX% of the prevented deaths are 'repaid'. The 1% safety people would take the deal at 99% repaid deaths. But I think most people would only be comfortable with a number much lower.

loafa 10y ago
Well, it's not that equivalent a situation. I'd feel personally responsible for the particular set of individuals killed by the genie rather than some other set of individuals. That's too much responsibility for me, I didn't ask for this crap, I should know better than to trust random genie bargains.
- taneq 10y ago
  In the least convenient universe (and therefore the most useful for examining this moral quandary), you don't have the luxury of dodging the question. If you choose to tell the genie to do nothing, then you're choosing for X people to die to save Y. (The scenario needs work, though - it should be Y people chosen from the road users in question, not just Y random humans.)
aaron695 10y ago
Do you get the bodies that are left over from the genie? Are their organs usable? Sounds like a no brainer if they are? Or does the genie reduce the people killed by the ones no longer saved by organ donations from car accidents? The genie might have to bring people back to life. This might make people uncomfortable.
XorNot 10y ago
I take the deal, then try and find a way to kill the genie. Also try and make it target the purveyors of stupid hypothetical arguments. This example is not in even remotely close to any situation autonomous vehicles can present.

JohnJamesRambo 10y ago

It's funny, Uber is betting the farm on autonomous cars becoming reality and reading this reminds us of just how far away that is.

Gargoyle 10y ago
Uber's main use cases aren't necessarily the "hard miles" discussed in the article.
- Neliquat 10y ago
  Being a taxi seems even more rigourous, your point is invalid.
  - Gargoyle 10y ago
    Uber knows the pickup and destination of every trip before it begins. Which means they know the route before it begins. Which means they can assess route and conditions to see if they are suitable for autonomous cars. So they roll out slowly, expanding the possible trips covered as their technology advances. Since they have such fine control over which routes and which conditions the cars will be expected to perform in, they're actually ideally positioned to work with this technology.
stale2002 10y ago
What? This article is talking about level 5 autonomy. AKA, "works literally everywhere and all the time". Uber only needs to get to level 4 to change the world.
- falcolas 10y ago
  If Uber gets to only level 4, it still needs drivers to handle those cases that the car can't handle. Doesn't really change the world.

chrischen 10y ago

It's easy to accept this when you realize that nobody has even managed to make a generally useful voice assistant yet, how ludicrous the "close to self driving" claim is.

threeseed 10y ago
I have to agree. Especially a car that can work worldwide. For example here in Australia we have an animal called a Kangaroo which when a car approaches will move completely randomly. This includes at the last second jumping straight in front of a car. Most drivers from these areas know to slow down and attempt to drive in the middle of the road if at all possible. Surely weird situations like this which require local knowledge exist all across the world. But I've yet to see any acknowledgement that this is useful.
- prawn 10y ago
  I'm sure this is easily considered and the car can slow down in such situations. I believe deer are skittish too. Why would you need to see any public acknowledgement of something so basic/obvious from very advanced teams working privately on issues like this? For city driving, these systems need to account for kids straying onto roads, read temporary/roadwork signage, all sorts of random things.
- qball 10y ago
  >But I've yet to see any acknowledgement that this is useful. I think that the reason why this isn't acknowledged (by people who should know) is likely to be a political one. Examining the solution that I typically seen given for this problem should explain why. First, the assumption is that driving algorithms are updated to account for any edge case (for instance, an unpredictable animal jumped out this time) after it occurs, so that case is then guaranteed to not re-occur. This presents a problem: anyone who's ever worked with software before knows that that's an impossibility until a sufficient number of incidents happen in nearly identical ways, or until a fix is manually applied (which itself could take a very long time). But we fall back on the second part of our argument, statistics. The fact that you're going to crash into something you wouldn't before is outweighed by more than one other person not crashing in a place where the computer can predict and avoid a crash more effectively than a human. This too, presents a problem, if you also consider the implication that the availability of manual-driving cars will likely be degraded in some way after the introduction of self-driving ones (from having increased cost/regulation/insurance premiums or simply being banned entirely). If we discount these "weird" situations and fail to make allowances for them, people will get hurt where they wouldn't otherwise (even if the local or global sum of deaths is reduced). The benefits skew in favor of cities where traffic behavior is/will be much more consistent. So it's best if local knowledge can't be useful- why complicate the matter or feed skeptics talking points if you don't need to?

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Negitivefrags 10y ago

I made a bet with someone recently that within 10 years you will not be able to buy a self driving car off the lot that can drive someone around that doesn't have a licence. It's a testament to Tesla's propaganda that he took the bet. I look forward to claiming my $500 in 10 years time.

erikpukinskis 10y ago
So does he.
- Neliquat 10y ago
  Wanna make a bet?
  - erikpukinskis 10y ago
    It's a bad bet because Tesla doesn't sell out of lots, and Google won't either. If you reformulate the bet as "it will be possible to legally ride in a driverless cab without a license somewhere in the world by the end of 2027" I'll take the bet for $20. I think you might win your original bet on the technicality of car sales lots being averse to selling these kinds of things and ride sharing services being early movers, and more amenable to insurance. Being able to keep cars in a specific service area will help.
ralfd 10y ago
Who will win the bet if a person without drivers license can rent a car driging her around? (Uber)

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Ericson2314 10y ago

Gotta appreciate that shout-out to formal methods!

sytelus 10y ago

Approximately 35,000 people died in car accidents in 2015. That's almost 100 people each day. Imagine you had self-driving car that was exactly as good as humans. This car will kill 100 people each day despite of being human-level competent. It has slim chance of surviving public outrage and lawsuits. This points to the fact that self-driving cars needs to be few thousand times better than humans. As in all machine learning problems, as you get along the curve, progress becomes much more expensive for next 1% improvement than last 2% improvement. One way to circumvent this is establish special lanes for self-driving cars where things are much more controlled, well defined and cars in that lane can communicate with each other to avoid crashes. Long segments of highways might be great candidates. This can heat up the virtuous cycle where people buy self-driving cars to be in that lane which pressures authorities to make more lanes available for them and eventually most lanes are for self-driving cars.

randcraw 10y ago
35k die per year in the US alone. Worldwide it's more like 1.25 million. http://www.who.int/gho/road_safety/mortality/traffic_deaths_number/en/ http://www.who.int/gho/road_safety/mortality/traffic_deaths_... You don't need autocars to be 1000 times better than humans. You just need them to be equally good as the average driver ALL THE TIME, such that they're never distracted, sleepy, driving unlawfully, etc. The occasional lapse in driver competence is the cause for the vast majority of crashes. I suspect the limitations of driver (or autocar) perception plays a small role in most accidents when compared to lapses. As residents of a developed country, with a very low death rate per mile driven, we also see traffic risks very differently than the world's norm. The annual death rate per 100k motor vehicles in the US is 13; in India it's 130 in Africa it's 574. In the more unsafe countries, I suspect driver error is the cause of 99% of accidents. Replacing human driver decisions with autocars would reduce worldwide driver fatality risk enormously, reducing perhaps 90% of global traffic fatalities -- about one million people a year.

Animats 10y ago

This is Toyota, which is coming from behind here. They started work on self-driving last summer, which was late to be getting into it. They hired Gill Pratt, who took over the MIT Leg Lab after Raibert left, but never did much with it. His job was to start to build up an organization to work on self-driving. So he has to make excuses for Toyota being behind. Toyota recent technology direction isn't looking good. Instead of selling battery electric cars, they're selling hydrogen fuel cell cars in California.[1] Nobody is buying. Their electric cars are mini-cars. Something went wrong over there. Pratt has some legitimate criticisms. But many of the really hard but rare problems can be solved by stopping, or going really slow. When you're going really slow, your sensor data from LIDAR is very good and you should have a full ground profile. If you have to inch your way through a field of rocks, that can be done. Remember, the DARPA Grand Challenge cars of 10 years ago could drive off road. As for "why did it do that" issues, that's mostly a problem for those self-driving systems where machine learning is connected directly between camera and steering wheel. Those are easy to build and give the illusion of working, but are not going to work in hard cases. You want a world model and object recognition, like Google. You can tell how well your object recognition is working by checking its results at long range against its results at short range. [1] https://ssl.toyota.com/mirai/fcv.html https://ssl.toyota.com/mirai/fcv.html

HeavenBanned 10y ago
They're waiting because they'll copy the right technology (they're basically saying they won't offer anything less than Stage 5 which is smart) from competitors when it happens and becomes economically feasible. I don't think they're going to run out to make Corollas with 20K LIDARs slapped on just yet. Give it time. Tesla likes to brag, but honestly a little steering now and then doesn't count. With this tech, I think all-or-nothing is the safest approach given you're not a research power-house like Google. Let someone else stumble upon the solution then copy it.
grogenaut 10y ago
If you go really slow on a freeway with low visibility you get rear ended at highway speed. Which doesn't work out well for you. Or the other person. Heck if you go real slow on a highway and traffic isn't... you get rear ended at highway speed.

general_ai 10y ago

Ha-le-freaking-lujah! I've been saying the same for years, ever since I completed the Udacity self-driving car AI course (taught by Sebastian Thrun, then head guru of autonomous vehicle research at Google). 70% of the problem was solved in mid-90's, by Ernst Dickmanns et al, Daimler Benz had autonomous cars on the autobahn. After billions of dollars and two decades, we solved another 20% of the problem. The remaining 10% is not going to be conclusively solved in the next 20 years at least, not under the current constraints. Now if roads are outfitted with instrumentation for autonomous vehicles, _and_ human drivers are prohibited on such roads, _then_ we _might_ see full autonomy. But not before. If it were up to me, I'd focus on this instrumentation instead: RF guide wires/tags for car localization on the pavement, machine readable signage (even in fog, snow, and heavy rain -- conditions with which cameras and LIDARs cannot deal in principle), inter-car coordination mesh networks and security thereof, autonomous vehicle readable road work signage, police gear to direct traffic of autonomous vehicles, and so on and so forth. There. Hundred billion dollars worth of startups in one paragraph. As things stand, you can only be fully autonomous at 25mph in California where it never rains, as long as there's no fog, no road work, and no one has messed up the markings on the pavement.

mojuba 10y ago
> police gear to direct traffic of autonomous vehicles Absolutely, been saying this for years (yes, me too :). We will eventually achieve a lot more autonomy and robotization of driving, but it will require massive infrastructural changes, much like the transition from horses to cars.
exDM69 10y ago
Yes! A bit of common sense would be useful here. The current generation of self-driving cars is fairly impressive already, but what I'd like to see is a city full of them. I have a feeling that self-driving only works as long as the majority of drivers are human drivers. It's trivially easy to come up with traffic situations that could lead to a deadlock by blidndly following the rules. Humans will use hand signals, eye contact or someone will violate the rules a little or make way when they don't strictly have to in order to ensure that traffic flows. I think that car-to-car and/or car-to-road communications will be required before large scale deployment is possible. And I have not heard from a cross-manufacturer effort of creating a protocol for such communication. Although I do understand why the automotive industry is hell bent on getting their level 2 autonomy out there. Money from the customers is needed to keep the R&D effort going. I personally did not understand why anyone would want a Level 2 car where you have to be constantly on the lookout until I visited Silicon Valley and drove a stint on US Hwy 101 in rush hour. And I guess this is the initial target market for the self-driving car industry: wealthy individuals who have a stressful morning commute in stop'n'go traffic. Money from these early adopters will go to funding the R&D for the next generation in the hopes that Level 4/5 will some day become reality. But in my conservative estimate, that's still years away from being adopted en masse. There may be a significant minority of them on the road in 3-5 years but I can't imagine it working very well if they were in the majority.

saosebastiao 10y ago

It's been a while since I've looked at the actual numbers, but from what I recall (the point could be made over a reasonable approximation of X), >80% of the spoken words in an average english speaking adult's spoken language corpus exist in the vocabulary of the average english speaking kindergartner. In other words, it takes us two-ish years to learn how to use our vocal cords, and another two to three years to get to 80% of an adult's vocabulary. And yet it takes another 12 years just to increase our vocabularies a handful of percent and to become fairly proficient at piecing together those words into coherent and mature enough communication for full time employment. And that is just one example. Learn 90% of Haskell in one afternoon...learn the rest over the next two decades of your life. Learn 90% of derivatives trading from one book, but spend the rest of your life learning the rest. They aren't examples so much as they are a fact of life: There is an extremely long tail to learning, and extrapolation of where you will be given how fast you've learned up to some arbitrary point will be impossible. Self driving cars aren't just learning the rules of the road. They are learning human spatial sensory perception and fast heuristics for ad hoc path planning that have been evolved over several millenia. And yes, they are becoming extremely capable extremely quickly...but you won't be able to extrapolate linearly to get to a point where they can take over.

maxerickson 10y ago
Most 12 year olds could handle being a cashier.
CobrastanJorji 10y ago
I'm not sure that's right. Googling around suggests that the average 5 year old knows somewhere between 3000 and 10000 words, and the average adult knows somewhere between 15000-20000 words. So I think saying a five year old has even 50% of an adult's total vocabulary is probably generous. Of course, if you meant that a five year old would understand about 80% of the words spoken by an adult over the course of a day, 80% sounds like a very conservative guess. Not that it affects your point at all, I'm just thinking about words now. And while I'm on the subject, XKCD's "Thing Explainer," a book on how things work using only the 1000 most common words, is great fun.

tapmap 10y ago

www.mobilityx.co

tapmap 10y ago

just found this www.mobiltyx.co

Shivetya 10y ago

Way back I remember when William Shatner's TekWar was brought to TV. One scene that stood out was when the lead was driving into town, it appeared that limited access roads; US interstate type; were done by car driving itself. a similar idea would do quite a bit to move the technology forward and increase acceptance. we already have projects that create toll and hov lanes. why can't these also be equipped to assist self driving cars with their tasks? While I think the Tesla videos were cool, even GM did something similar recently in San Francisco, they are still pretty much scripted events. Tesla is guilty of exploiting the over trusting side of the issue simply by product naming but some of their demos could lead people into assuming far too much ability; will that become a legal liability?

tarcyanm 10y ago

I love the idea of self driving cars but it scares me that no one seems to remember the history of the 5th Generation project (I was a kid in the 80s) and other AI hype-dreams over the years. It has always been the case that approximate solutions can be found for 85% of cases, which has given the illusion of a nearly solved problem. There is a lot of hype regarding deep learning, but I have struggled to find a concise definition apart from the fact that it is now relatively easy to work with monstrously big networks. Backprop and related algorithms have been around for decades. From what I remember of neural nets, one huge drawback was that they would be close to un-debuggable. The learning contained in the net would be inscrutable to a human, to all intents and purposes. Failure data could be recorded and replayed, but any actual reason for failure would frequently not be found. So, tweak the network, resize some layers and try again... I can think of several reasons why that's fundamentally unsuitable to the problem of driving. I was in Egypt recently, and the sheer amount of lane crossing, merging, pedestrians ducking through multiple lanes of traffic, roadside obstacles, donkey-drawn vehicles etc would be 100% impervious to even a level 3 solution today. I believe the same would be true in India and many other parts of Africa. So, I really hope that we are not falling blindly into another 5th Generation sinkhole here. History should have taught us better.

throw2016 10y ago

It's refreshing to get a perspective that scopes the true scale of the problem and addresses technical, societal and moral issues. This seems to be a more responsible and comprehensive engineering perspective than the frenzy and hand waving that accompanies most self driving topics here. Overestimating AI with little to no data and vastly underestimating not only human driving but the varied traffic conditions they operate in doesn't seem like a realistic or responsible way to solve the problem.

ohstopitu 10y ago

Everyone is discussing about how autonomous cars will react to various situations. However, the real question is - once we have walled gardens, who'll control it - the manufacturers or the government? By that I mean, all automated cars (especially level 5) would need some kind of network connection (both cellular and mesh) - which means "your" car (if you own one - which from the looks of how things are shaping is going to be highly unlikely), could easily be stopped for variety of reasons with or without your permissions. It could be hacked by 3 letter agencies, or by hackers who can than case mass disruption. While I'm not against self driving cars, I'm very cautious against the "self-driving are the best - they'll reduce death on the road and if you don't support it you are a death loving luddite who can't get on with the times" school of thought. We saw what happened with we gave up control on our phones, and that's slowly happening to our computers (sure, most of readers here can run/use linux, but linux on desktops still has a much lower market share compared to Windows 10). I just feel like it's not the right future that I imagined as a kid watching star trek and it's disappointing. EDIT: another unrelated point I'd like to add is the fact that if we want to have autonomous cars on the road - we'd need co-operation between various companies (which would be easy - we have browser vendors do that, why not car companies?), but more importantly, we need a huge overhaul of our infrastructure for autonomous cars and we need to outlaw humans driving cars on such roads).

nmeofthestate 10y ago

It's great to see this posted on HN, which in the past has suffered from an excess of gung-ho robocar advocacy IMO.

ramzyo 10y ago

I found this quote from Dr. Pratt particularly salient, "But fundamentally a thing your readers should know is that this really comes down to testing. Deep learning is wonderful, but deep learning doesn’t guarantee that over the entire space of possible inputs, the behavior will be correct. Ensuring that that’s true is very, very hard to do."

emodendroket 10y ago

This is really excellent.

DonHopkins 10y ago

Is this the same Gil (with one l) Pratt of the MIT Leg Lab? (Not to be confused with the MIT Lego Lab! ;) Are they different people, or did he change the spelling of his name when he moved from legs to wheels? Or is he developing walking cars for Toyota? Actually his first name is spelled two different ways on this one page, and he looks like the same person, so maybe he changes the spelling of his name frequently: http://images.sciencesource.com/preview/BA4147.html http://images.sciencesource.com/preview/BA4147.html