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Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock

• jtbayly 8y ago
  Waymo seems to be the only question mark in my mind making me doubt my bet that we're a decade or more away from usable self-driving cars. If Waymo has truly solved the problem while everybody else is just trying to catch up and/or bluffing, I guess I wouldn't be that surprised. Edited to add: The reason is that they've apparently ordered 10's of thousands of these cars. Can they really use that many only in good-weather places with perfect roads? It seems unlikely that they are just that stupid to spend that much money without being confident that their plan will work. One last option would be that they intend to put 10's of thousands of them on the road just to exponentially speed up the data collection that they've decided is necessary to truly get the system up to par.
  • rbranson 8y ago
    I tend to agree. Waymo ordered 62,000 Chrysler Pacificas with delivery slated for late 2018. Base retail on the hybrid model is $40,000USD. Even if they got an unbelievably generous 50% discount, that means they're $1.24B USD serious, excluding the cost of the additional autonomous driving equipment. So this will either be one of the biggest debacles in Google/Alphabet's history, or they really are ready to go.
    • Fricken 8y ago
      Waymo has also ordered 20k Jaguar I-paces. Rumour is they have invested about 11 billion in R&d so far, and I'm crudely estimating the cost of their 80k upcoming robotaxis to be around 12 billion. Alphabet is committed. Waymo estimates about 50 trips per day will be served per vehicle. At that rate, 80k robotaxis is enough to displace most of the taxi/rideshare services in the southwestern United States, though I'm not expecting to see all of them on the roads until 2022 or so. Waymo has a ton of work ahead of them. Mapping and validating in the ~100 square mile area of Chandler has taken them about 18 months so far, and supposedly they are on the verge of a commercial launch. Every city they hope to deploy in has differing signage, differing driving habits, and many funky intersections and road anomalies that need specific attention.
      • rbranson 8y ago
        In this scenario there's no moat for Lyft/Uber either. If Waymo can meet demand, they'll be able to undercut ride sharing prices so deeply that most consumers will switch overnight. Banks will be falling over themselves to provide the massive credit they'll need to bankroll the expansion.
        • CPLX 8y ago
          > they'll be able to undercut ride sharing prices Why? I see comments like this constantly. But does anyone ever do even a basic spreadsheet to explain the unit economics of this argument? Low skilled people who can drive are pretty cheap and plentiful. Even if self-driving tech is flawless (spoiler: it's not and won't be soon) it still only replaces part of their responsibilities. Someone will still have to clean the cars for example. Presumably there will be some required level of human monitoring, etc. Conversely, capital and highly reliable technology isn't free. You can calculate pretty easily the rate at which it's profitable to substitute technology for labor, this is a trade-off we've literally been making for centuries. One one side you have plentiful cheap low skilled labor. On the other you have lasers, fast computers, graphics cards, cameras, and the associated programming inspection and maintenance costs. Why do we think the latter side is going to be cheaper in anything remotely like the near term?
          • Fricken 8y ago
            Waymo doesn't have a business model if it isn't cheaper. It probably won't be much cheaper in the near term.
            • CPLX 8y ago
              That's not true at all. There are a lot more use cases for self driving technology than taxi services. In fact I'm continuously perplexed as to why this specific use case, which is obviously the most challenging and likely to be the last to reach the market, is always first in these discussions.
    • jcfrei 8y ago
      Waymo might also tell a different story: They've realized that a fundamental breakthrough in self-driving cars is unlikely to happen in the next decade and therefore there's no point in waiting any longer to perfect the technology - and instead rely on remote controlling of the cars for difficult situations. They can still gradually improve the self-driving systems but from a business perspective it might make sense to capture as much market share as possible right now.
      • saas_co_de 8y ago
        This is right on. Waymo is not an autonomous car in the way people typically imagine them. More like a remote control street car on a digital track.
        • Animats 8y ago
          It doesn't work that way. Waymo's remote control does not even support direct manual remote control. It just lets the remote operator give some direction to the onboard systems.
          • saas_co_de 8y ago
            I am giving an analogy. Street car on digital track is the first part of it. The remote control aspects are there as well. It is not "direct" remote control. It is like a drone. You give a direction and the onboard computers execute on it. Direct remote control is not possible because of latency. But it also seems that the commercial launches of these vehicles might be dependent on 5G networks being available (lower latency, better reliability) in which case the remote control capabilities will be greatly enhanced before launch.
            • Animats 8y ago
              There's another startup, for self-driving trucks, which does have direct remote control. Their idea is that the trucks are self-driving for long-haul, and then the final non-Interstate part is remote controlled.[1] [1] https://phantom.auto/ https://phantom.auto/
    • a9a 8y ago
      In all of these deal announcements, the key words are “up to”. That’s very different from a confirmed 62k order, and in all announcements related to that agreement timing of delivery was unconfirmed [0]. [0] https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/05/31/business/waymo-chrysler-minivans.html https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/05/31/business/waymo-chrysle...
    • chrischen 8y ago
      You can always sell the cars if it fails.
    • brudgers 8y ago
      At the scale of Alphabet, $1.25B about 1% of of 2017 revenue and about 5% of operating income. [1] Alphabet isn't betting the future on it. Relative to the automotive industry sixty thousand vehicles in 2018 compares to about 100,000,000 vehicles worldwide per year. [2] Compared to the number of cars in my driveway and the balance of my checking account, the numbers are big. At industrial scale, they are small. If all 60k vehicles were registered in California, it would look like rounding error on the 36,000,000 vehicles registered there. [3] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet_Inc. [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_industry#By_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_industry#By_year [3] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/5aa16cd3-39a5-402f-9453-0d353706cc9a/official.pdf?MOD=AJPERES https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/5aa16cd3-39a5-402f...
      • Symmetry 8y ago
        Corporations like Alphabet don't spend 1% of their revenue on something unless they're very confident it will pan out.
        • brudgers 8y ago
          Alphabet spent $12.5 billion on Motorola Mobility in 2011 and sold it to Lenovo for $3 billion three years later. The lost $9+ billion? Nobody really noticed. For Alphabet, $1 billion is mad money, not the rent. Self driving cars are a moonshot.
          • ipsum2 8y ago
            The 9 billion was spent on patents. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola#Motorola_Mobility_deal_by_Google https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola#Motorola_Mobility_dea... Specifically, this section: "According to the filing, Google and Motorola began discussions about Motorola's patent portfolio in early July, as well as the "intellectual property litigation and the potential impact of such litigation on the Android ecosystem". Although the two companies discussed the possibility of an acquisition after the initial contact by Mr. Rubin, it was only after Motorola pushed back on the idea of patent sale that the acquisition talks picked up steam. The turning point came during a meeting on July 6. At the meeting, Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha discussed the protection of the Android ecosystem with Google senior vice president Nikesh Arora, and during that talk Jha told Arora that "it could be problematic for Motorola Mobility to continue to exist as a stand-alone entity if it sold a large portion of its patent portfolio". In connection with these discussions, the two companies signed a confidentiality and non-disclosure agreement that allowed Google to do due diligence on the company's patent portfolio."
    • jellicle 8y ago
      No. The annual production of Pacificas is only 65K vehicles or so. Google ordered those vehicles in the same way that airplanes are bought. The "62,000" is over many years, and is purely speculative, and cancellable/modifiable as needed. Google is buying a couple thousand Pacificas in the near future. That's it. It's more or less a commitment to keep buying a couple thousand a year for the next however-many years, in exchange for a discount. It is NOT the case that Google is going to open a big box and find 62,000 vehicles inside in late 2018.
  • ebikelaw 8y ago
    All journalists covering the self-driving car beat are basically required to ignore Waymo so they can continue writing “When will cars drive themselves? Experts say nobody knows” articles. If you ignore Waymo it’s a race; if you include Waymo it’s not. This article makes the further error of assuming “AI” is required for self-driving cars, rather than just a shitload of code.
    • sandworm101 8y ago
      >> “When will cars drive themselves? Experts say nobody knows” articles. Nobody knows because it has yet to happen. We have all seen demos and studies but that doesn't convince anyone not involved in the tech. Cars will be capable of driving themselves when I see one, sans humans, ask to merge in front of me on the highway. It will happen when I see one navigate the lineup to the ferry I take every week. It will happen when I see one accurately obey hand signals from a human directing traffic. Not youtube vids. It will happen when I see it with my own eyes. Just like electric cars, we will have to see them on the roads playing the game we all play every day. Until that tipping point, driverless remains a myth that happens in a faraway place. So put them on the road. Let's give it a try. Maybe it works. Maybe it doesn't and people die and they sue. That's been part of driving since day one. Roll the dice. I'm sick of the endless debates.
      • rifung 8y ago
        > So put them on the road. Let's give it a try. Maybe it works. Maybe it doesn't and people die and they sue. That's been part of driving since day one. Roll the dice. I'm sick of the endless debates. Well I'd certainly hope that there is a high level of confidence that they don't kill people BEFORE they're put on the road with other people.
        • the8472 8y ago
          All we need is that they don't kill more people than average human drivers do per passenger-mile. Assuming ride-sharing we could even let them be a little more deadly than human drivers and still save lives.
  • ianamartin 8y ago
    I don't really see Waymo as being far ahead at this point. Uber pretty clearly stole Waymo's work. So unless Waymo had a major breakthrough since then that wasn't related to the basically everything Uber got then everyone is pretty much on the same page: promising it's almost here but in reality still about 10 years out or more.
    • TaylorAlexander 8y ago
      Uber stole a small portion of Waymos work several years ago. They supposedly stole some lidar designs. There’s also code and personnel that Uber doesn’t have. In my mind, Waymo is miles ahead of Uber.
      • Judgmentality 8y ago
        > In my mind, Waymo is miles ahead of Uber. I'd say many millions of miles, actually :) https://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/waymo-7-million-test-miles/ https://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/waymo-7-million-test-mile...
  • zwieback 8y ago
    I'm sure Waymo will make a lot of progress with their massive investment but using SV money as an indicator for a project's ultimate success seems unwise at this point. I think the real question is whether the big investors in self-driving cars will make progress creating virtual rails for their vehicles, e.g. roads where we can keep pedestrians out.
    • the-dude 8y ago
      That is a train or a tram, not a car.
      • zwieback 8y ago
        yeah, a tram for one or a few passengers that can go off the rails for the final quarter mile
      • Piskvorrr 8y ago
        And? (Oh wait, not-a-car is the scariest thing ever on that continent)
    • IanCal 8y ago
      > roads where we can keep pedestrians out. Aren't major roads pedestrian free in the US? Motorways and major roads are in the UK.
      • dingaling 8y ago
        Only motorways in the UK, and roads designated under special classification. I've walked and cycled along multilane A-roads. It's not fun but it's legal.
  • Shivetya 8y ago
    While I agree they are closest of all the competitors with published numbers they are still very far off from human drivers and just looking at the linked articles within the original article do make it clear they have a long way to go. the key difference is the level of caution Waymo is exercising. So how do we get a determination of which disengagement events would have possibly lead to a crash? Plus I am still not convinced these numbers are even going to remotely similar over roads not heavily mapped and imaged. I think the hope many have for AV is that is allows for driving in the worst of conditions but in the end we will have AV for limited access or very tightly monitored road ways only. Which in itself is not a bad idea, rush hours could much safer and efficient with HOV/Express lanes redone to explicitly support AV. We certainly aren't going to be able to get people to drive more lawfully when most think they are the better driver when compared to others.
  • TYPE_FASTER 8y ago
    > Can they really use that many only in good-weather places with perfect roads? I would hazard a guess that yes, that's pretty much the Southwestern US year round, if you include Southern CA. There are enough metro areas, and enough new sprawling development, to put those vehicles to work.
  • czr 8y ago
    >Can they really use that many only in good-weather places with perfect roads? Waymo supposedly processes their lidar signals to detect other cars with reasonable accuracy even in snow/rain(https://youtu.be/UrJ4-AUL4U0?t=9m41s https://youtu.be/UrJ4-AUL4U0?t=9m41s). They only operate in pre-mapped areas so they should be able to follow lanes just fine even if the actual markings are obscured (by weather or by poor maintenance). This kind of approach (mapping everything beforehand and using lidar for perception) is used by other players as well, and seems the most likely to work for short term level 4. Trying to do everything without the benefits of lidar and high-res maps (what e.g. Tesla are doing) is a more general solution, and cheaper hardware-wise, but will take longer to get right.
    • freerobby 8y ago
      Thanks for posting that Waymo vid, that's the best processing of Lidar in adverse conditions that I've seen. I think the million dollar question is how far Waymo (or others) can push noise reduction with Lidar. The video seems impressive in isolation, but if you compare it to what Nvidia was doing with cameras two years ago (object recognition in snow/fog that appears to outperform humans[1]), it quickly becomes apparent that Lidar is still nowhere close. But maybe they can get it good enough to bridge us between specific and general techniques. Personally, I'm long on the camera-based approach because I think reliable autonomy will require a generalized vision solution, and once you've achieved that, the Lidar is redundant. 1: https://youtu.be/HJ58dbd5g8g?t=7m20s https://youtu.be/HJ58dbd5g8g?t=7m20s
  • sandworm101 8y ago
    Read the contract if you can. I guarantee that they have not put down a billion dollars for all those cars. This isn't like ordering from Amazon. This is a complicated delivery contract. It will have stages. Money will be owed according to a schedule. If things don't work out, there will be many places where delivery can be delayed or the order canceled. Waymo has to have a plan to pay for this in the long run, but they aren't today putting down all the cash. If you are buying 10,000 cars, what you are essentially doing is taking on that car manufacturer as a partner. You are betting that you will need the cars, and they are bettering that you will be around to pay for them. Everything remains speculative.
  • Zigurd 8y ago
    Re "It seems unlikely that they are just that stupid to spend that much money without being confident that their plan will work." Motorola?
• frgtpsswrdlame 8y ago
  This has been hanging out there for a while it's just that it never got much mainstream press. I wonder what it is specifically about the concept of "AI" that makes it so prone to the magical thinking that drives these boom-bust cycles. "I tell adult audiences not to expect it in their lifetimes. And I say the same thing to students" "Merely dealing with lighting conditions, weather conditions, and traffic conditions is immensely complicated. The software requirements are extremely daunting. Nobody even has the ability to verify and validate the software. I estimate that the challenge of fully automated cars is 10 orders of magnitude more complicated than [fully automated] commercial aviation." - June 2015, Steve Shladover, transportation researcher at the University of California, Berkeley https://www.automobilemag.com/news/the-hurdles-facing-autonomous-vehicles/ https://www.automobilemag.com/news/the-hurdles-facing-autono... "While I enthusiastically support the research, development, and testing of self-driving cars, as human limitations and the propensity for distraction are real threats on the road, I am decidedly less optimistic about what I perceive to be a rush to field systems that are absolutely not ready for widespread deployment, and certainly not ready for humans to be completely taken out of the driver’s seat." - March 2016, Mary Cummings, director of the Humans and Autonomy Laboratory at Duke https://www.commerce.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/c85cb4ef-8d7f-40fb-968c-c476c5220a3c/8BC0CC7E137483CEFD0C928ECB14E74E.cummings-senate-testimony-2016.pdf https://www.commerce.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/c85cb4ef... "With autonomous cars, you see these videos from Google and Uber showing a car driving around, but people have not taken it past 80 percent. It's one of those problems where it's easy to get to the first 80 percent, but it's incredibly difficult to solve the last 20 percent. If you have a good GPS, nicely marked roads like in California, and nice weather without snow or rain, it's actually not that hard. But guess what? To solve the real problem, for you or me to buy a car that can drive autonomously from point A to point B—it's not even close. There are fundamental problems that need to be solved." - September 2016, Herman Herman, director of the Carnegie-Mellon University Robotics Institute https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d7y49y/robotics-lab-uber-gutted-says-driving-cars-are-not-even-close-carnegie-mellon-nrec https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d7y49y/robotics-l...
  • tonysdg 8y ago
    I'd argue that it's because (true/hard) AI represents, in many ways, the "final frontier" of scientific research. Not in a literal sense -- they'll always be something else to study. But the notion of creating a thinking machine is, in many ways, the ultimate goal of studying nature and the world around us: to allow us to understand the processes and phenomenon at work well-enough to be able to capture/manipulate/recreate them at will. This isn't new though -- "thinking machines" have captivated audiences for millenia. See the Antikythera mechanism [1], the Turk [2], and so on. The ability to replicate the capabilities of our own brains is intoxicating -- it finally signals that we, homo sapiens, understand our own minds well-enough to recreate their abilities at will. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk
• adrianN 8y ago
  The crashes that the article claims came from edge-cases that the engineers didn't account for weren't, in fact, edge-cases. The Tesla crashes are due to the way Tesla's system works, it doesn't recognize stationary hazards. Similarly Uber's system failed to brake for a hazard that it could clearly see. That's not an edge-case, it doesn't have to know that the object is a woman pushing a bicycle. It's a solid object moving steadily into the car's trajectory.
  • brookhaven_dude 8y ago
    Edges cases are what really matters in this case! Isn't there a saying that 80% of the code is written to handle 20% of the cases?
    • Stanleyc23 8y ago
      but the problem is that you need to properly resolve base cases before starting on edge cases. The fact that base case scenarios are not properly solved hints at major problems in execution.
    • ltdanimal 8y ago
      I think you have that flipped. 20% of code covers 80%. As you try to get to 100% coverage of all possible scenarios the complexity gets in some cases exponentially harder as all the low hanging fruit is picked
      • the-dude 8y ago
        So he is exactly right : 80% of the code handles edges cases. You are the one who is flipped.
        • cozzyd 8y ago
          20% of code covers 80%. 80% of code covers 19%.
    • the-dude 8y ago
• georgeecollins 8y ago
  Rodney Brooks gave an interview that was recently reposted on ArsTechnica. He has so much real world experience productizing AI and robotics that no one else really compares. He is not pessimistic just realistic about self driving cars. And he has great reasons why true autonomy is going to take a long time.
  • totaldick 8y ago
    Rodney Brooks has a history of skepticism about AI (said in 2009 that he doesn't think AI is even possible), as does Gary Marcus (who's been anti-deep learning since 2011). "AI is hype" hit pieces always quote them.
    • georgeecollins 8y ago
      I assume you are trolling, but in case someone misses your user name: To say that the director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence lab for ten years and the founder of the a successful AI workstation company and the most successful robotics company in the world "has a history of skepticism about AI" is idiotic.
      • the-pigeon 8y ago
        Why? There's certainly people who work with particular tech that are pessimistic or optimistic about it.
        • georgeecollins 8y ago
          True. But if you listen to his interview it is clear that he is neither pessimistic nor optimistic. He recognizes that unanticipated breakthroughs are likely. His point is that there are too many unsolved problems for a quick development of useful driverless cars. He goes through the issues in some detail, but to offer one: real world drivers need to break the law all the time in order to not get stuck in traffic. How do you decide when it is OK to break the law? Who will accept the liability associated with a car that sometimes breaks the law. Etc.
• mathiasben 8y ago
  As long as software is composed of primitive language derived statements and "functional" logic (IF, WHEN, WHILE, DO, GOTO, etc...) AI will remain a fantasy.
  • jfoutz 8y ago
    This is hard to parse. All software that can be represented as if and goto (and some sort of assignment i suppose)? when, while and do are just if and goto. alpha go is all just if and goto. I'm not sure what you're looking for or alluding to. Is there some other operation that isn't just if and goto? because i think any function you come up with, i can just make a big table of inputs that result in specific outputs. Heck, decrement and jump if zero is enough. I'm not convinced at all that specific operations are limiting us somehow. Could you elaborate?
    • jtbayly 8y ago
      I believe what he's saying is that we don't "think" in if/then statements. So true AI will never be intelligent-like if you judge intelligence as thinking like us.
      • vntok 8y ago
        What do you mean? Neurons work exactly like if/then statements. If (input > level) {transmit information}
        • jtbayly 8y ago
          Ummm.... no. You might be able to make the case that a neuron can be simulated with a very complex set of if-then statements, but that assumes that we can know everything about the state of a dozen inputs, which we can't. At any rate, the brain is not a computer: https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-informati...
          • 8y ago
• samirparikh 8y ago
  I work on self-driving cars. Imho, companies need to collaborate on certain aspects like perception instead of competing. The vehicle is basically blind beyond the range of the sensors or if you miss a detection. Collaboration on these issues will lead to faster progress instead of competing.
  • chronic821 8y ago
    > Imho, companies need to collaborate on certain aspects like perception instead of competing. I also work on self-driving cars. Why would I share technological innovations with another company?
    • TaylorAlexander 8y ago
      So people don’t die. This is an example where companies could put people over profits and share what they’ve learned to keep things safe. I don’t see a lot of research papers (I see none) coming out of Waymo, Tesla, Uber, or Cruise.
      • samirparikh 8y ago
        This is another form of collaboration. You could publish your innovations in some technical forum w/o code and it'll automatically drive the industry forward since SOTA results will be available. Right now, no one really knows the performance of the Waymo system. Millions of miles doesn't mean a lot. I can do billions of miles in a parking lot with no cars or pedestrians. Even millions of miles on road doesn't say anything about the performance of the components.
      • agumonkey 8y ago
        Indeed it's economically worthy to have a safe market rather than a rushed one that will backfire.
      • robszumski 8y ago
        Is there a business model for providing detection data to other fleets in real time? This is a stretch of the word "collaboration" but it could possibly prevent deaths while leaving the IP in the hands of the company.
• dsnuh 8y ago
  This is tangentially related, and something I have wondered, so I will ask it here. Does anyone know how self driving cars will react to attempts by law enforcement officers to pull over the vehicle?
  • vamin 8y ago
    They will pull over.
    • jtbayly 8y ago
      One would hope! lol. But seriously, how do you know this? Just curious.
    • devy 8y ago
      Another attack surface for self-driving cars
      • dsnuh 8y ago
        That was my line of thinking.
      • bryanlarsen 8y ago
        Sure, if you're willing to risk going to jail for impersonating a law enforcement officer.
        • polski-g 8y ago
          People are. See South Africa, Brazil, etc.
        • dsnuh 8y ago
          Fair enough. I'm sure some would be willing to do that, but likely not many. I do think it is going to be very interesting to work out some of the scenarios if we do get to Johnny Cab style self driving cars.
• intopieces 8y ago
  The story of computation in general — “The Rise of the Machines” — has been more about humans becoming more like machines than the other way around. The question is not “will computers ever be able to drive as well as a human?”. It’s “Will humans remake their driving systems to fit a sufficiently intelligent computer-driven model?” I believe the answer, as the US ages and falls below replacement rate, is yes. We are already fully invested in the age of benevolent machines, and there is no turning back.
• Zhenya 8y ago
  I'm continually astounded by the Tesla hasbara: "Tesla and a host of other imitators already sell a limited form of Autopilot" Imitators? You mean GM, Mercedes and VAG that have had these systems for longer than Tesla are just bad copies of the glorious Tesla autopilot? Unreal.
  • xutopia 8y ago
    Cadillac super cruise(GM) is only capable of handling itself on a limited set of highways. Tesla's nearly anywhere. Mercedes is considered subpar compared to GM's system in nearly all independent reviews.
    • Zhenya 8y ago
      Maybe because their safety bar is a bit higher than Tesla?
  • takk309 8y ago
    I read this as Tesla is also an imitator. There system is not autonomous driving, it is just a poor imitation of autonomous driving. Tesla, GM, etc. are all just advanced cruise control.
  • freerobby 8y ago
    All due respect, have you used any of the Autopilot clones? There are endless debates about what's better on paper, but everybody I know who's actually used them says Autopilot is much more mature. Comma.ai seems to be right on their tail, but it's an aftermarket system requiring a fair bit of DIY (so it's not very accessible yet for most end users). Tesla was first to market with auto steering, and seems to have the most mature offering, so framing them as the market leader seems pretty accurate to me.
    • Zhenya 8y ago
      But the other companies aren't imitators even if what you're saying holds true. They have products that did, before or at the same time, similar functions. Did they actually copy Tesla once the functionality was released on the Model S? The answer is 'no'.
• zwieback 8y ago
  How much better than human drivers do self-driving cars have to be to succeed? If you take a metric like fatalities or damage per mile I'm guessing we ask our robots to be much better than humans, even though it doesn't really make sense. Over time the differential will come down but a better intermediate strategy would be to keep humans away from robot cars until collision avoidance techniques improve substantially.
  • Retortoise 8y ago
    But the thing is most safety features can be applied to a regular car and we'd see a significant decrease in accidents. Adaptive cruise control and pre-collision breaking haves existed as premium packages. The biggest added safety feature I can think of self driving cars is sleeping at the wheel, CDC estimates up to 6000 fatal crashes a year but I wonder how much modern safety features would reduce it if it was required on all cars.
  • mdorazio 8y ago
    FWIW, I've heard the "100x safer" number tossed out at conferences on ADAS. I.e. an autonomous vehicle needs to crash 100x less frequently, kill 100x less people, etc. for the public to truly accept it as better than human drivers. Logically, this doesn't make any sense, but taking control away from people leads to some psychological hurdles.
  • carapace 8y ago
    I had this argument the other day with someone else. You can't make a robot that goes out in public and kills random people. You just can't do that. Okay? Q: "What if the robot looks just like a car and there's a person inside the robot watching TV? Can it kill random people then?" Still no. Q: "But people do that all the time! Tens of thousands of people die or are maimed by traffic collisions every year! My robot can't join the fray?" Still no. It's insane and horrible that we set up a death and mayhem lottery and that we force everyone-- children, old people, pregnant ladies, folks in wheelchairs, ev-er-ee-one -- to play it whether they want to or not. That's a bad thing we shouldn't do. But it still doesn't make it okay for you to make a robot that goes out in public and kills random people. If you make a robot, send it into the world, and it kills someone, you are a murderer and you should go to jail, even if your robot looks like a car and there's a person riding inside it. - - - - - We could make a self-driving golf cart that never went fast enough to be able to injure people and it could take my mom (who has dementia and can't drive or ride the bus on her own anymore) to the doctor and back safely. We could build that today, with existing technology, there's a market for it, and it wouldn't kill anyone. Self-driving cars are a fetish that distracts from solving real problems! (One day that won't be true, let's not kill too many more people until then, hey?) - - - - - Humans drive really well. Like really really crazy good well. When I first realized how well people drive it made me consider that Guardian Angels might be a real thing. But then I learned more about how the motor cortex worked and some of the uncanniness faded. We should be so lucky as to have robots that drive as well as we do. In the meantime, the industry should concentrate on incrementally automating traffic and stop trying to bite off more than current technology can chew. What we're seeing now is hubris driven by ego and greed. And it's killing people.
• dawhizkid 8y ago
  As someone who worked at a ridesharing co, I'm also really curious about the ops side of things, like how will passengers behave when there's no driver in the car? Will people try to have sex, do drugs, make a mess? What happens when someone vomits in the car or is very drunk (actually a very common problem in ridesharing)?
  • mulletbum 8y ago
    They change the interiors of the car to accommodate. There is a reason the public transportation doesn't feel like my Ford Fusion. It is made for lots of different butts to be in and if a mess is caused they come in and spray it out. A bus for example can be cleaned with a pressure washer (sometimes inside and out.) Seats, headboards, etc. etc. can all be put on by snaps or simple screws. Anything stolen can easily be monitored and the last occupant can be charged for it. There are a lot of ways to get this done and make it extremely cheap and durable.
  • Jyaif 8y ago
    This is also my main concern. It's the reason (non autonomous) car sharing is failing in France: the people behave like pigs and the cars are disgusting. One solution would be to add censors to check after each ride if the interior of the car has been degraded.
  • jonknee 8y ago
    You have a credit card on file for anyone who gets in, it seems pretty easy to police. Even the most simple method of a button on the app to report a problem with the car when it arrives would work fine.
  • randcraw 8y ago
    All commercial AV services will put cameras inside the car to ensure that you don't misbehave. You'll have no more right to privacy in an AV than you do today in taxis when the cabbie looks at you in the rear view mirror. Less, probably. They'll successfully promote the practice as offering greater security and warning you when you leave something behind.
  • sgregnt 8y ago
• comesee 8y ago
  > “Rather than building AI to solve the pogo stick problem, we should partner with the government to ask people to be lawful and considerate,” he said. “Safety isn’t just about the quality of the AI technology.” Wow. What a goal post move. I don't think this is how successful technology spreads. Governments usually accomodate tech because it proves itself in the market, not vice versa.
  • microcolonel 8y ago
    Also, good luck marketing a product which only works when everyone is lawful and considerate, and otherwise has a considerable chance of killing occupants or pedestrians.
    • adrianN 8y ago
      Cars that you can buy today are such a product. As are kitchen knives.
      • vonzeppelin 8y ago
        Kitchen knives don't kill people. People kill people.
      • comesee 8y ago
        Not in the same way, there is accountability when a driver or knife wielder uses them dangerously. He's arguing for putting the accountability on pedestrians, which would be the equivalent of putting accountability on a murder victim. "Hey, it's not the murderers fault, the victim shouldnt walk around in bad neighborhoods."
      • microcolonel 8y ago
        The expectation with cars is not that everyone is lawful and considerate, but that everyone has a decent chance of being held accountable for their actions.
      • Piskvorrr 8y ago
        Quite the opposite. Non-autonomous cars are a product that works despite virtually nobody keeping the rules completely, and most drivers being inconsiderate.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• mactitan 8y ago
  -A decision was made to do nothing based on ambiguity in perception, and the emergency braking was turned off because it got too many false alarms from the sensor” So instead of solving this problem it was decided to go forward;abominable. At least the truth came out.
• the-pigeon 8y ago
  This article talks about issues with deep learning than admits it's not used on these projects. Making most of the article not relevant to self driving cars despite being about them.
  • mcherm 8y ago
    Despite PURPORTING to be about them, probably because news about self-driving cars tends to get eyeballs and Hacker News upvotes.
• matthewaveryusa 8y ago
  One major aspect a lot of comments aren't capturing is that autonomous vehicles create a platform that goes beyond moving people around. Forget about the passengers during peak demand, that's already a given -- what about all that cargo that can be moved either with passengers or during off-peak demand hours?
• Animats 8y ago
  Another bad article. As I keep pointing out, the way you start to do automatic driving is by first profiling the terrain to see where you can go. If it's not flat road, you don't go there. Doesn't matter why it's not flat. Then try to classify other road objects and predict their behavior. This only matters for moving objects. Waymo gets this, as we know from Urmson's talk at SXSW a few years back. Most of the DARPA Grand Challege vehicles got this, because they had to drive off-road, where you have to profile terrain or else. Tesla does not get this. Cruise may or may not get this. Uber - well, Uber's system detected the pedestrian and ran into her anyway, which should end with someone in jail. There's this mindset that you just throw deep learning at camera images and automatic driving comes out. Musk claimed that. It didn't work. We don't hear much from Tesla about self-driving any more. Udacity's self-driving course is also deep learning based. As for how much testing is required, read the California DMV accident reports.[1] This gives you a sense of what the real-world problems are. 25 minor accidents so far this year. Mostly Cruise. The most common problem, especially with Waymo, is being rear-ended while cautiously entering an intersection with limited visibility. Their system will start forward to get a better view, then detect cross traffic and stop. What may help there is some convention such as rapidly flashing the brake lights when a sudden stop is likely and there's a vehicle close behind. On the LIDAR front, Continental's flash LIDAR is already working well enough that drone makers are buying it. Continental is ready to produce that thing in volume, but they need volume orders from automakers before the price comes down. [1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/autonomousveh_ol316+ https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/auton...
  • Eridrus 8y ago
    I don't know what's up with Uber, and why they crashed into any object in the middle of a freeway with no other cars nearby, but Deep Learning is part of everyone's systems, including Waymo. Terrain analysis is great, for static terrain, but once you need to classify what objects are, or predict where they are going to go, that gets a lot less feasible as the only approach.
  • zawerf 8y ago
    > The most common problem, especially with Waymo, is being rear-ended while cautiously entering an intersection with limited visibility. Their system will start forward to get a better view, then detect cross traffic and stop This actually highlights a really hard problem that (perfect) self driving will need to solve: theory of mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind Not only does the AI need to empathize and predict how typical humans react, they also need to be easy for humans to empathize with. Humans typically use themselves as a template for a reasonable range of reactions. So when the capabilities don't match up (like needing to scoot up to process how to cross where a typical human wouldn't need to), it will violate their expectation of you. So in this case being cautious is considered a crazy and erratic behavior to a human. (e.g., "what were you thinking?! why did you stop!? shouldn't you've seen that the road was empty?!")
• gwbas1c 8y ago
  When will we have self-driving cars? When we can get rid of recycle bins, because we've finally figured out how to get our robots to sort our trash for us!
  • tsycho 8y ago
    I know that the actual system is currently terrible in many places, wherein the recycle and trash are mixed together and re-sorted by humans. Ignoring that for the moment... There are some practical reasons for recycle bins, or at least for separating out paper. Paper can get damaged if mixed with liquids or other foods/compostable material, and harder or not worth recycling. Keeping it separate from the very beginning increases the ability and efficiency of recycling => less dead trees.
  • carapace 8y ago
    You make light, but, uh... > ...sophisticated trash-sorting robots are now turning up at recycling plants across the nation. > The robots — most of which have come online only within the past year — are just as accurate as human workers and up to twice as fast. https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/how-robots-are-reshaping-one-dirtiest-most-dangerous-jobs-ncna866771 https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/how-robots-are-reshapin... The future is coming on strong.
• tempz 8y ago
  What is the most optimistic benefit of a driverless car? If we put aside creation of unemployment, putting limits on what human drivers will be able to do, and similar dystopian outlooks, what are the benefits for the masses? People who cannot drive will be able to use cars as people who can. Is this good? Are interesting places on the planet going to have the same fate as Internet did, when it transformed from elite audiences in 90s to tragedy of commons today?
• s2g 8y ago
  > argues the problem is less about building a perfect driving system than training bystanders to anticipate self-driving behavior Can we stop listening to him now? I'm joking, he's an expert of course, but seriously that's a pretty dumb view. It's exactly the sort of thing I expect from a SV "disruptor" type. > “Rather than building AI to solve the pogo stick problem, we should partner with the government to ask people to be lawful and considerate,” he said. “Safety isn’t just about the quality of the AI technology.” Just crazy. These people just really do not seem to care if they kill people. They are engaging in foolish behavior rushing ahead with a technology that's not ready and thinking they can just paper over the gaps with laws and patches.
• pwaai 8y ago
  Well thankfully the Google CEO is not some super salesman like Elon Musk who is trying to emulate Steve Jobs and failing hard with Tesla. I would bet the farm on Waymo, they realized it takes a long time to build a level 4 autonomous vehicle, so no doubt they were being poached by Uber which all failed. Likely the problem is one of numbers. The sheer amount of data, and the traffic data Google has access to, all of this adds to a superior safety experience. Meanwhile a level 2 masquerading as level 3 autopilot should be up for some serious scrutiny, especially if it's true that there appears to be some issue with the autopilot on the Tesla.
• alkonaut 8y ago
  The Q isn’t when complete autonomy arrives, but how much autonomy we will add before the cost of adding more is vastly greater than having on-call humans take over. At that point the ROI of the research will fall as all you gain in going from 99.05 to 99.10 % autonomy is a few employees across a whole fleet of vehicles. I agree with the pessimists: driving is 99% a mindless activity that even a mediocre AI will handle soon. But the last percent requires not just a better AI but a human. At least as long as it drives with other people in an environment designed for people.
• jonplackett 8y ago
  QUESTION: Is this really and AI problem or is it a sensor problem. I mean, if there’s a big blob of something solid in the road in front of you, it doesn’t really matter what it is does it. You still have to not run into it. It seems that because these poor AIs are relying on LIDAR and even just radar and cameras with Tesla, that they aren’t confident enough in that data to stop if they sense a big blob of something in the road. If you gave any of these AIs a really high quality 3D rendering of the area around them I would presume they’d do a damn fine job of navigating it and not running into anything. At that point it’s just a computer game. So either we need better sensors or better algorithms for extracting better 3D data from the existing ones. It’s not like these fatalities are caused by particularly crazy problems. It’s not that a kid ran behind an ice cream van and the AI couldn’t predict it would run into the road like a human would. It’s just that they make dumb decisions a learner driver wouldn’t make because they can’t see the road properly.
• n_ary 8y ago
  More I read about AV, more I get the idea that, these AVs need to think to some extent like a human driver. My notion is that, these AV research focus blindly on making individual cars think too much. Am curious what happens if the thinking and data-collection is distributed instead, like swarm intelligence, each AV nearby can broadcast what it sees and where it is(extends the vision of each car in a given location beyond it's own sensors); front car suddenly breaks/had an accident/roadblock/switched to human intervention => all following cars will negotiate if they should bypass(reporting car will be parking) or wait (reporting car will use another lane); a car is on a blind turn => oncoming traffic from both sides can negotiate if this car should attempt the turn because others are far enough/slow enough to let it turn safely or wait until they are gone(high speed so not enough time for turning car before that one approaches); a road is very confusing so all cars following should switch to/request human intervention with ample time ... etc and given how cellular phones switch nicely between different towers and areas, we can use similar tech to allow all nearby cars to communicate ... that is communicate, coordinate and decide. Now this have some issues like privacy, drivers with bad intention can feed bad data to cause mass confusion, legitimacy of data received etc ... which can probably be an interesting place to borrow some ideas from blockchain to verify legitimacy etc ... I think instead of focusing too much on ml, try to incorporate other techs which solve minor but similar issues is a good idea. Disclaimer: I do not claim to have full/partial/enough understanding of any AV technology/blockchain/distributed computing/swarm intelligence etc... so my comment is more or less an opinion based on what I think may be interesting, which may or may not be already thought by and discarded for not-enough viability by the AV research.
• tonyquart 8y ago
  Talking about self-driving cars, I always interested in the legal aspect of these cars. What's the regulation, what are the driver's (or passenger?) responsibilities, and what are the automakers' responsibilities. I have just read a nice information related to this matter at https://www.lemberglaw.com/self-driving-autonomous-car-accident-injury-lawyers-attorneys/ https://www.lemberglaw.com/self-driving-autonomous-car-accid.... It's always interesting to talk about this future technology.