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I've been saying this for a while. The problem is that people are mostly familiar with the rate of overcoming traditional technical challenges (e.g., making yo

• QAPereo 9y ago
  It really makes the insane gamble of the Uber VC's ultimately terminal.
  • devmunchies 9y ago
    That's what happens when you invest in hype. There's no way we'll be able to hail an autonomous Uber in the next 5 years, which is an eternity in startup land.
  • chapmindustries 9y ago
    I strongly disagree. Uber has markets that make money and they release new services all the time. There are ways for them to stay in the black if they scale things back and fine tune different markets. Someone is going to be the first in self driving cars. Uber has a tremendous demand for them. It would be stupid to not at least be trying to be the first one on the scene.
    • QAPereo 9y ago
      Someone will be first, but the Uber VCs will be an old cautionary tale by then IMO.
  • alphonsegaston 9y ago
    Maybe for this particular investment, but I'm pretty sure the wider intention was to legitimize business practices where the poor live tenuous lives as an app-directed servant class. Uber made this kind of neo-feudalism so socially acceptable that we now celebrate "Uber-for-X" as "innovation."
    • QAPereo 9y ago
      To be fair, few outside of SV do celebrate that.
    • rainbowmverse 9y ago
      It already happened before Uber, except now the app is in the hands of the person being exploited, not the managers creating optimized schedules that make it near impossible for individuals to hold enough jobs to pay the bills.
      • alphonsegaston 9y ago
        That's nice PR to assuage the guilt of people building this kind of tech, but it's really not working out that way: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jun/17/uber-drivers-homeless-assault-travis-kalanick https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jun/17/uber-drivers...
        • rainbowmverse 9y ago
          You must have replied to the wrong post. This agrees with my point that this kind of tech is abusive, but doesn't address my point that it's a long-standing problem older than Uber. Managers in retail and food service have used scheduling software to screw workers over for years. Uber just shifts the technology into the hands of people it exploits (smartphone app instead of scheduling software in the manager's office + calling in to get hours/find out you aren't getting any). You seemed to imply that this is a new phenomenon that isn't yet legitimized. It's been around for a long time. It was and continues to be a problem, but Uber is just a microcosm of it.
• strebler 9y ago
  You've hit the nail on the head - audio recognition is quite poor after (a lot of) concerted effort over decades. Driving a car safely is significantly more difficult (and dangerous). That being said, Toyota's (and Subaru's) approach is the smart way forward - add sensors and capabilities that augment the human, but leave the human always responsible and in control. In order for a crash to happen, the human AND the machine BOTH have to miss it. Once the machine is good enough (and we figure out what "good enough" means), then it can take over driving. But not before.
  • jason_pomerleau 9y ago
    Once the machines are better than humans at a macro level, insurance companies will notice, and I think this will cause widespread adoption pretty quickly.
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    • lern_too_spel 9y ago
      California allows drivers to self-insure. The existing auto insurers are going to lose that business to automated taxi fleets.
    • strebler 9y ago
      This has already started - look up the discount some insurers give to owners of Subarus that are equipped with EyeSight. The numbers show their collision avoidance is making roads safer. Also, interesting fact: Subaru is achieving these impressive stats using stereo vision, not lidar.
      • dboreham 9y ago
        I recently bought a Subaru, and I agree. However, this is in no way at all related to "self driving cars" (which don't actually exist and therefore nobody knows how the insurance companies and general public will react to the liability/safety/skin-in-the-game issues).
• oblio 9y ago
  Even better than speech recognition, handwriting recognition. Hello, Apple Newton, may you rest in peace. I'm not convinced we'll have handwriting recognition within my lifetime, and if we do I imagine that shortly after I'll go looking for Sarah Connor :)
  • ricardobeat 9y ago
    Go to your closest Apple store, choose an iPad Pro and try an app called 'Nebo'. Let us know when you find Sarah :)
    • oblio 9y ago
      I'd be useless, I'd have to take my mother, the proverbial doctor, to try it out :o)
  • Animats 9y ago
    Automated reading of checks and of envelopes is working very well. Automated envelope reading is now so good that the USPS only has one center in the US where humans look at images of envelopes. They just look at the hard cases, and if they show up there, they're really hard.
    • YSFEJ4SWJUVU6 9y ago
      Unfortunately you can't augment a level 5 self-driving car with human resources in an analogous way.
      • unityByFreedom 9y ago
        Well, we use humans to learn from mistakes in both cases and improve the technology. The big difference is a mistake in a car is more likely to cause injury than a misdelivered letter.
• rayiner 9y ago
  > and Siri/Alexa/Cortana are barely becoming usabl And at least Siri is completely useless without a data connection.
• jessriedel 9y ago
  I use Google voice dictation to transcribe emails and text messages on my phone constantly. Not like "I tried it for a week and then went back". I have been using it daily for months. It's now vastly faster than typing it in by hand on a phone, and even the per-word error rate is actually better than mobile typing.
  • Fricken 9y ago
    Google voice isn't perfect, but it hears better than I do.
  • leereeves 9y ago
    That's not to say that voice dictation is good enough to trust your life to (as in autonomous driving), just that mobile typing is even worse.
    • jessriedel 9y ago
      The interesting distinction isn't between life-dependent and non-life-dependent, it's between worse-than-human and better-than-human. I wouldn't "trust my life" to never making a typing error, and yet I trust my life to the driving my fingers do...and statistically, I have a small but real chance of death.
      • leereeves 9y ago
        Personally, if the car isn't going to drive significantly better than a human, I'd rather drive myself. I prefer to be responsible for my own safety.
• vamin 9y ago
  I disagree with the analogy to speech recognition. What makes speech recognition difficult is that it's highly dependent on context (sounds the same, but means something different depending on surrounding words, what the conversation is about, or even who you're speaking with). With driving, you should be able to make a good decision with just the instantaneous state, given enough information about that state (objects, velocities, etc). You can argue about what constitutes "enough information," but it seems plausible to me that given enough sensors we could meet or exceed the amount of information taken in by a pair of human eyes on a swivel.
  • garrybelka 9y ago
    By context you mean a timeline of events while speech recognition is actually dependent on that timeline. Same applies to situational state recognition in driving. E.g., to derive speed, acceleration and direction of objects.
    • PeterisP 9y ago
      No, in this context (pun intended) of speech recognition, the context means external context, i.e., understanding lots of information about the topic of that speech, knowing what would the speaker might plausibly be trying to say, what real world entities might be involved, and how are they called/spelled - all kinds of information that is not included in the original audio data, things that the listener would know based on life experience.
  • rayiner 9y ago
    Im skeptical you can do real autonomous driving without context. In DC, we have roads that flow one direction part of the day and another direction the other part. We've got roads that will be shut down unpredictably when there is a diplomatic event. We've got constant construction, where a two lane road might be reduced to one lane with a human holding a sign or using hand signals to usher cars through on their turns. How does a self-driving car handle that without understanding context?
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• manmal 9y ago
  Granted, but there is arguably a lot more money behind autonomous driving than there ever was behind speech recognition and synthesis. It was a different problem space, but the situation is probably comparable to the space race - the winner will dominate a new market of hundreds of billions in size. The motivation is really really strong, and with it comes lots of funding and talent.
• dperfect 9y ago
  A little more context on the speech recognition part: I remember going to a trade show (many years ago) where a representative from one of the major speech recognition companies was showing off the technology. He wasn't just dictating text, but was also using the software to control the computer. I was floored by it. I was 100% convinced we had arrived at that dream of intelligent voice-computer interaction. I've felt the same way after watching various autonomous driving demos (like Tesla's[1]). But then I remember my experience of actually trying the same speech recognition software myself; under unrehearsed real-world conditions with edge cases and human mistakes, the technology performed terribly. Any "intelligence" I'd seen in the demo was essentially smoke and mirrors. Granted, current autonomous vehicle technology incorporates a lot more artificial intelligence than those speech recognition demos ever did, but the challenge is also significantly greater (and more life-critical). Sure, your sensors and cameras might be able to read signage correctly in 99% of conditions, but when there's graffiti on the sign at night during heavy rain, all bets are off. The human driver may have difficulty also, but the human driver has real intelligence and life experience in a variety of domains, enabling them to make inferences based on more than just statistical probabilities. In my opinion, prior to solving all the edge cases at an acceptable level using AI, we'll solve a different problem allowing us to sidestep many of those challenges; we'll incrementally start building (and converting to) smart roads where only smart vehicles are allowed. Obviously it won't be everywhere, but the most important routes will be covered, and your safety on those routes will be much higher than it would be on traditional roads with AI or human drivers. [1] https://www.tesla.com/videos/autopilot-self-driving-hardware-neighborhood-long https://www.tesla.com/videos/autopilot-self-driving-hardware...
  • ghaff 9y ago
    Possibly. I think it's more likely that systems get good enough that you can turn over control to them on certain limited access roads. Perhaps construction zones are required to transmit some sort of alert signal that requires a driver to take over within 60 seconds or something along those lines. This could be a big improvement for both safety and driving comfort and seems as if it would be a much more amenable to solving over, say, a 10 year horizon than a cross-town Manhattan taxi ride at rush hour.
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• ageofwant 9y ago
  Intercontinental planes are mostly autonomous. Trains are autonomous. Massive mine dump trucks are fully autonomous. These things are in use today and has been for almost a decade. They need not be perfect to be useful, they only need to be better than the average human driver. Toyota is way behind in the game. What do you expect them to say about the competition?
  • jpindar 9y ago
    Not all trains are autonomous, and they have been known to crash due to operator error.
    • lb1lf 9y ago
      Besides, trains run on tracks, each of which accomodates one train at any given time and rarely intersect; additionally, there's all sorts of signalling and safety infrastructure embedded with the track... In stark contrast with lane-swerving cars, intersections everywhere, temporary rerouting because of roadworks &c. Running trains must be orders of magnitude simpler than fully autonomous vehicles. As for planes, they have a massive benefit in being engineered and maintained for levels of reliability no car can ever hope to achieve, having an awful lot of empty air around them (not to mention being able to move in the Z plane, too, to avoid collisions. I don't doubt there are many lessons to be learned by designers of autonomous vehicles from work already put down in the fields of trains and planes - however, I'd argue they are very different problems.
  • semi-extrinsic 9y ago
    > intercontinental planes are mostly autonomous This is a highly disingenious use of the word autonomous. Airplane "autopilots" are given a set of waypoints and will fly a straight line between those. That's been possible with cars since (at least) the 1960s too; today it's easy enough that you could give it as an end-of-term project for a bunch of robotics undergrads. It's also completely useless outside of very specialized situations like the mining dump trucks you mention.
  • mandevil 9y ago
    Planes are a good argument for the opposite. Do you ever wonder why there are two pilots on every commercial airliner? It's not because airlines like paying so many more pilots- notice how fast flight engineer/navigator positions disappeared as flight management technology and GPS made them unnecessary. But still two pilots are there on every commercial flight, why? Simple answer: the airline industry has learned, through a lot of lessons in blood over decades, that even with automation you really need a pilot who is always ready to intervene right this second, not in three minutes after they've mentally caught up to what the situations is. And in order to provide that sort of guarantee over many hours, you need two pilots, so they can switch off responsibility. That's because commercial airliners on cruise, way above any animals, terrain, etc. still have situations where immediate human intervention is safety critical. (And when pilot minds fall behind the power curve the result is things like AF447, so it seems like the industry is right about the importance of this human monitoring and intervention.) So if this well studied, easier externals problem requires someone on ready for immediate intervention at all times, how quickly do you think that a much harder problem like driving is going to get solved sufficient to allow human free driving?
• snambi 9y ago
  "ok google" is pretty good, in answering.
• Pigo 9y ago
  I agree with you, We all hope we'll have amazing self-driving cars real soon, it's just funny watching the responses here. If you try to say autonomous cars may not be a perfect solution and available in 6 months, or SpaceX may not have a thriving colony on Mars in 6 years, then you will ruffle some feathers. I think guys that have lived through disappointing hype before have some perspective to share.
• com2kid 9y ago
  > I can't help but think about speech recognition 20 years ago. Many of the hot software packages claimed something like 96% accuracy, and that sounded great on paper. People thought intelligent voice-computer interfaces were just around the corner, yet here we are in 2017, and Siri/Alexa/Cortana are barely becoming usable (but still frustratingly lacking in many situations). Computer speech recognition now has a greater accuracy than human speech recognition, but the types of use cases for talking to a computer are much less sensitive to error. Short snippets and phrases that are designed to get something done right now. Compare ordering paper towels with Alexa, to asking a friend for a paper towel when your hands are messy. If your friend mishears you, they can just look over, see your dirty hands, and figure out you probably asked for a paper towel. Alexa has no such benefit, computers are held to a much higher bar. > People thought intelligent voice-computer interfaces were just around the corner, I would argue it isn't recognition accuracy that makes complex scenarios hard. I've seen context aware recognition being rolled out for keyboards recently (Android's keyboard does it now days, it'll correct the past word based on what the next word is), and it seems like Android does the same for speech reco, based at least on observed behavior during use, but I'm just guessing. The real hard part is making computers smart enough to do useful things. We are a long way off from "Book tickets at The Altair for between 6pm and 7:30pm next Friday and add the reservation to my calendar and my wife's calendar" being possible in all but a few contrived scenarios. (Now that said, the above scenario is getting easier and easier if you ignore voice, ML is good at figuring out emails that have schedules in them, and forwarding them to other people is now simple, everything is much better than 5 years ago!)
  • qwdqwd 9y ago
    > Computer speech recognition now has a greater accuracy than human speech recognition Bollocks. I'm frequently misunderstood by telephone speech menus and never by humans on the phone.
  • qyv 9y ago
    Isn't that kind of the point though? Yes, computers can hear better than humans, but they fail miserably at understanding the meaning of what they are hearing and responding with the appropriate actions. This is exactly the same issue that is/will be faced with self driving/driverless cars.
• 1_2__4 9y ago
  Every time this gets brought up here people scoff. Nobody seems to be willing to notice that tech companies have for quite a while now been misrepresenting the pace of innovation in areas that not-coincidentally are attempts at diversifying revenue streams by hitting new tech home runs. See also: Glass, any of the other nonsense coming out of Google X (Loon? Cyber contacts?), drone delivery, digital assistants, and so forth. Not to say cool stuff isn't happening in all these fields but we are not just a few short years away from the tech being viable.
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  • kyrra 9y ago
    To Loon's defense, it actually worked well in the recent flooding on Peru[0]. [0] https://blog.x.company/helping-out-in-peru-9e5a84839fd2 https://blog.x.company/helping-out-in-peru-9e5a84839fd2
• aedron 9y ago
  I think instrumenting the roads in one way or another will go a long way to enable real autonomous vehicles. Sure it's expensive, but on the upside it might actually work in this century. We just need to define a standard and let the free market go to work.
• eighthnate 9y ago
  Until we get a very generalized form of AI, I think cities will have to be remodeled to assist self-driving cars. Places like NYC ( manhattan ) can be easily converted into a self-driving car city given it's grid-like layout and I can easily see china building cities around the idea of self-driving cars. I don't think the technical aspects are as difficult for the 99.99% of the cases. It is the 0.01% of unknowns that will be difficult to overcome. But we can minimize that by modifying or building cities specifically for self-driving cars. The most difficult part I think is the legal/regulatory issues. This is why I see self-driving cars taking off in china/asia first before the US. They'll probably limit it to city limits initially. And when the technology is mature enough, broaden it to the entire country.
• koffiezet 9y ago
  I absolutely disagree. Self-driving cars are complex, but not unmanageable. > What people don't realize is that full autonomous driving will require more than just faster/smaller/cheaper technical innovation - it will require the refinement of innovations that probably haven't even been invented/researched yet. Like what? Object detection/recognition? Better sensors? Path/trajectory prediction? Vehicle control? Sensors and processing/unifying their data? The hardest part is letting all these building work together, and then produce a mass-production product from it, but we do have the base technologies, companies like Google, Tesla and Volvo have proven already that. The problem comes down to software, and Toyota has the problem that it's a hardware-focused company. In the car-industry, just like in any industry, software will become more and more important, and Toyota - just like many other car-companies - simply doesn't have an answer here since they don't understand it.