21 ms·

Previously I worked at Waymo for a year on the perception module of the self driving car. Based on what I know about the state of the art of computer vision, I

Previously I worked at Waymo for a year on the perception module of the self driving car. Based on what I know about the state of the art of computer vision, I can pretty much guarantee that current Tesla cars will never be autonomous. This is probably a huge risk for the investors of Tesla, because currently Tesla is selling a fully-autonomous option on its car which will never happen with current hardware. We need several breakthroughs in computer vision for no-fail image based object detection, and you will need higher resolution cameras, and much much more compute power to be able to process all the images. It's hard to estimate when we will reach that level of advancement in computer vision, my most optimistic wild guess is 10-20 years. And then Tesla will need to upgrade all those cameras and install a dedicated TPU which should be at least 10x or probably more faster than the nVidia chip they have installed on their cars, and they should do it for zero dollars because they have already sold the option. It is kinda amazing that Elon Musk is selling cars based on speculative future breakthroughs in technology. That must be a first.

jasonhansel 8y ago
I think the real potential issue for self-driving cars is that they need to have an understanding of how people's minds work, to understand their gestures, intentions, and movements. This requires, not just visual processing, but something closer to AGI. (Not an expert, so feel free to correct me.)
- dogma1138 8y ago
  Not really, you don’t really gauge traffic by looking at the drivers firstly you can’t see most of them secondly it’s dangerous to assume their intention which is why we have things like right of way and road signs. The big issue is still in terms of processing speed and sensor fusion and Tesla isn’t leading the pack in either. As far as wide scale autonomous driving goes for it to be good enough there needs to be an agreeable and verifiable decision making model for all manufacturers to follow and for regulators to validate, this could be as simple as never to perform an action that would cause a collision but that’s not exactly an ideal model either because you might then get a silly decision such as you don’t engage the breaks to slow down because you’ll end up hitting the car in front of you in either case. Sadly I’m seeing too many people that tend to complicate things and chase the red herrings when it comes to autonomous driving such as “ethics” while it’s an interesting philosophical exercise in the real world it’s not the important part as when it comes to accidents the vast majority of drivers act on basic instinct and don’t weight the orphan vs the disabled veteran simply because they don’t have that data nor the capacity to incorporate it into their decision making process. First we need to get sensors that don’t get confused by oddly placed traffic cones, birds and shadows the rest is pretty much irrelevant at this point.
  - throwaway2048 8y ago
    Yep tons of focus on philosophical sideshows like the trolley problem in these discussions, when autonomous cars just plain _do not work_ in the general case.
    - dogma1138 8y ago
      People can’t solve a trolley problem either while driving (or at all). If you have enough time to stop if say a kid just jumped in front of you you will stop, if you don’t you don’t have enough time to process all the information around you and gauge the most optimal outcome if you swerve you swerve but that is likely going to happen regardless of what jumps out in front of you simply because that what your instincts are telling you to do. The best thing an autonomous vehicle can offer is a better response time so you’ll be more likely to stop or to slow down to non/less than fatal velocity.
      - throwaway2048 8y ago
        Nobody is saying people have solved it either, I am saying that the question is at best a distraction.
        dogma1138 8y ago
        Yeah it’s a complete distraction, even if you were living in some dystopian world where each car could ping everyone around it to gauge their citizen score and select the lowest score citizen to run over in this Kobayashi Maru scenario your cars would be much safer if they didn’t waste CPU cycles on this nonsense but rather just focus on the road. Drivers are drivers doesn’t matter if it’s humans or robots distracting them with nonsense wouldn’t make them better or safer but rather quite the opposite.
        Chris_Chambers 8y ago
        You should be banned from continuing to participate in this thread. Half of the comments are from you and we already understand what your position is.
- username223 8y ago
  This. Sharing a street with others requires human communication: a driver waves to a pedestrian wanting to use a crosswalk, or a pedestrian waves a driver through before doing so, or they both pause before one or the other goes first. Our streets aren't designed for robots, and while they may work on controlled-access highways in the not-too-distant future, I don't expect to see self-driving cars on city streets within the next few decades.
- jononor 8y ago
  The general ability to understand others (and oneself) to the level of intentions etc is often referred to as Theory of Mind. Seen from the task of autonomous driving, what is needed is a strong predictive model for what other cars/drivers are going to do, based on current observations. Considering that driving is a quite more narrow space than all possible human behavior, this is hopefully[0] solvable using something close to existing approaches. 0. Otherwise I don't think self-driving cars is happening soon.
codeulike 8y ago
[Tesla would need to].. and install a dedicated TPU which should be at least 10x or probably more faster than the nVidia chip they have installed on their cars That is literally what Tesla have announced they are doing next. I've got no opinion on your other points, but if you've missed that news, you're not really following Tesla very closely. It's a drop in replacement chip set designed by Jim Keller.
- throwaway2048 8y ago
  I doubt Tesla has multiple (more like dozens of) major industry first sensor and AI breakthroughs, regardless of how closely OP follows them or not.
  - fastball 8y ago
    OP seems to be operating under the premise that such a system must be "no-fail". That is not what Tesla is going for.
    - empath75 8y ago
      Considering that they’ve already killed a couple of people, that’s a given.
      - grey-area 8y ago
        Humans kill over 100 people per day in traffic accidents in the US alone - I don’t think no-fail (0 deaths) is a reasonable requirement, just being safer than humans is enough. I do agree with the OPs skepticism though - full autonomy is 10 years away.
        mehrdadn 8y ago
        > Humans kill over 100 people per day in traffic accidents in the US alone - I don’t think no-fail (0 deaths) is a reasonable requirement, just being safer than humans is enough. This is a fallacy. People don't just look at safety statistics. The actual manner/setting in which something can kill you matters a ton too. There's a huge difference between a computer that crashes in even the most benign situations and one that only crashes in truly difficult situations, even if the the first one isn't any more frequent than the second. Hypothetical example: you've stopped behind a red light and your car randomly starts moving, and you get hit by another car. Turns out your car has a habit of glitching like this every 165,000 miles or so (which seems to be the average accident rate) for no apparent reason. Would you be fine this car? I don't think most people would even come close to finding this acceptable. They want to be safe when they haven't done anything dangerous -- they want to be in reasonable control of their destiny. P.S. people are also more forgiving of each other than computers. E.g. a 1-second reaction time can be pretty acceptable for a human but, but if the computer I'd trusted with my life had that kind of reaction time it would get defenestrated pretty quickly.
steelframe 8y ago
Hello, fellow "former Waymo dev." What you said is one of the many reasons that I replaced my Model X with an I-PACE. While I support the movement-away-from-gas part of their mission, I can no longer support Tesla as a business. I'm now focusing my energy toward advocating sustainable migration to general EV technology.
- WilliamSt 8y ago
  Sometimes when I go to hacker news, I feel really poor.
  - dmix 8y ago
    You can walk onto any city street and see the occasional person people driving nice cars too. Does that make you feel poor too?
    - pxndx 8y ago
      I don't see these other people as fellow developers, but as golf-playing executives or their children. I'm aware that not everyone here is a dev, but we mostly have similar careers.
      - jniedrauer 8y ago
        I live on about 30% of my salary. Unless you're in the bay area or have a family to support, that's plausible (and honestly pretty comfortable) for most developers. If you wanted that car, you could have it.
      - solatic 8y ago
        Not everyone here lives in the US. Making SV salaries here, where 99+% of people are making under $80k/year, would be obscene. If I had access to that kind of money, I'd be putting it into better housing (penthouse?) long before ever thinking of buying a car like that.
  - madengr 8y ago
wukerplank 8y ago
> my most optimistic wild guess is 10-20 years Woah, that's a long time! What are the problems in computer vision that need to be solved?
- dmitriid 8y ago
  Adversarial attacks. Extrapolating from incomplete data. Consistent performance in any/most lightning conditions: night, dusk, low hanging sun over an icy road. Fog. Any combination of the above. Humans while not perfect are capable if making split-second decisions on incomplete data under a surprising range if conditions based on the fact that our brains are an unmatched pattern-matching beast feeding off of our experience.
  - bsder 8y ago
    Boy, are you an optimist. Humans are LOUSY in almost all of those conditions as well as much less challenging ones--we engineer the road in an attempt to deal with human imperfections. The I-5/I-805 intersection in California used to have a very slight S-curve to it--there would be an accident at that point every single day. Signs. Warning markers. Police enforcement. NOTHING worked. They eventually just had to straighten the road. Humans SUCK at driving. Most humans have a time and landmark-based memory of a path and they follow that. Any deviation from that memory and boom accident. This is the problem I have with the current crop of self-driving cars. They are solving the wrong problem. Driving is two intertwined tasks--long-term pathing, which is mostly spatial memorization, and immediate response, which is mostly station keeping with occasional excursions into real-time changes. Once they solve station-keeping, the pathing will come almost immediately afterward.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - hbarka 8y ago
      You make a succinct point. Can you elaborate on the difference between Station Keeping and Lane Keeping, what is generally available now as LKAS?
StreamBright 8y ago
There is the energy limitation as well. All the equipment needed to do self driving today requires more energy than you can sustainably draw from typical cars. Please if you downvote at least leave a comment why you think I am wrong. This is a well known fact in the autopilot community.
- p1esk 8y ago
  What equipment and how much energy?
  - StreamBright 8y ago
    https://www.wired.com/story/self-driving-cars-power-consumption-nvidia-chip/ https://www.wired.com/story/self-driving-cars-power-consumpt...
    - p1esk 8y ago
      Thanks, do you know how much power Tesla’s autopilot equipment consumes? I assume that almost all that power goes into the vision chips?
vladislav 8y ago
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/546066/googles-ai-masters-the-game-of-go-a-decade-earlier-than-expected/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/546066/googles-ai-masters... are you willing to put money on your time estimate?
- hungryhobo 8y ago
  Processing an image and extract understanding is exponentially harder than processing a go board
  - _Microft 8y ago
    I think the point he wanted to make is that even an educated guess can be a decade off.
    - pintxo 8y ago
      To illustrate this: https://xkcd.com/1425/ https://xkcd.com/1425/
  - vladislav 8y ago
    computer vision is clearly much harder than go. the point is that the forefront of AI is moving quite rapidly, and the consequence are bound to catch the casual observer (or even an expert) off guard.
    - tim333 8y ago
      Also Musk seems quite confident https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8dEYm8hzLo&t=9m00s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8dEYm8hzLo&t=9m00s
lanevorockz 8y ago
I don't understand the scepticism, self-driving cars are already a reality and are working very efficiently in controlled environments. Anyone working on logistics already heavily relies on it. Another point, the "dedicated TPU" is also a myth. Neural Networks inference is very cheap and current nvidia hardware is able to run neural networks that would take years to train.
- hellllllllooo 8y ago
  > Anyone working on logistics already heavily relies on it. Care to elaborate? Sources?
  - badpun 8y ago
    AFAIK there are some self-driving cars, that follow guiding lines painted on the ground, already deployed in warehouses, production plants etc.
    - hellllllllooo 8y ago
      Industrial robotics applications are limited in scope and the environment is adjusted to make the problem easier than for autonomous driving on roads. Even then there are issues that mean often a human operator/supervisor is needed. General autonomous vehicles systems are not widely used in industry if at all. Making a system that works on roads with other cars and pedestrians and varying quality of road markings and infrastructure is a different problem entirely. Tesla is trying to do this with a limited set of sensors and compute compared to others with makes it even less feasible. Waymo is by far the furthest ahead and they don't claim that full autonomy is close like Musk is claiming.
- thebruce87m 8y ago
  None of the roads I drive on are controlled environments.
  - ozim 8y ago
joenathanone 8y ago
You haven't been keeping up, Tesla is doing exactly that, look into AP3 hardware.
- close04 8y ago
  > Tesla is doing exactly that Not arguing that they're taking steps in that direction but the implication that they're anywhere reasonably close to the goal is unrealistic. It's like saying we can travel to space so we have all we need to get to the nearest star.
- Judgmentality 8y ago
  AP3 is not going to be nearly good enough. It's just the next step in keeping the "we sell full self-driving hardware as a feature but's it's not ready yet" promise alive. It's not years away, it's decades away. And for a frame of reference, the computers (as in the actual processors, ram, memory, etcetera) in cars a la Waymo and Cruise cost more than the cars, so it's not an insignificant cost. That's completely ignoring the lidar issue and the fact that state-of-the-art just isn't good enough even when you have an extra $100k in hardware, have spent billions training your models, and have remote operators to help you out of sticky situations. But yeah, okay, Elon Musk said it's going to happen. He also said they were going to have it years ago and we're still waiting on that cross-country trip from New York to Los Angeles that never materialized.
  - rohit2412 8y ago
    We know how it ends though. We'll see them roll out an error-prone stop-sign+traffic-light detection as fsd beta, and everyone will act like that was what was promised. Just like Lane keeping assist is "autopilot".
    - avs733 8y ago
      Facebook: move fast and break things Tesla: drive fast and break people.
    - Judgmentality 8y ago
syntaxing 8y ago
Do you have any opinion on the new HW3 which is a custom ASIC for CNNs or something like that? Would love to know how that stands compared to other possible ASICs at Waymo.
hellllllllooo 8y ago
Exactly. Claiming to be close to solving production problems that haven't been solved in robotics research in nice controlled environments is nuts. Either people at Tesla are so smart they are making many huge breakthroughs in the technology (hint: they're not) or the are exaggerating and lying to sell cars despite the dangers of selling systems based on heuristics that could cost lives.
copperx 8y ago
Perhaps an easier and quicker fix (although extremely costly) is to outfit all roadways with aids for autonomous driving. Otherwise, we will have to wait decades for the technology to be mature enough.
- hrktb 8y ago
  I wonder though if the roadway maintenance would be good enough to have that work reliably. The car would still have to react to misconfigured , misplaced or defective aids. Even if it’s not just negligeance, if an accident were to move the markers, would it cascade accidents until these markers are fixed ? In the end, it seems we’d still need cars way clever than what we have now for it to be trustworthy.
  - bobthepanda 8y ago
    The fatal Tesla crash into a highway barrier a while back was because of faded highway markings. Many localities can barely keep the lines painted. Many more have all sorts of adverse weather conditions (e.g., snow and slush) that make road markings hard to see. The chances of this being a workable solution, at least in the US, is nil.
    - nikofeyn 8y ago
      that crash wasn’t because of the markings. saying so, although maybe accurate, softens the issue. it was because tesla has a poor autonomous system that couldn’t plainly see a road splitting and instead hit a barrier at full speed wit no braking. the markers were a contributor since all teslas seem to mainly do is stay between the lines they see.
- nikofeyn 8y ago
  yea, just like we’ve been able to outfit all roads properly for aiding human drivers. you mentioned it’s costly, but this just won’t or can’t happen. we don’t even properly maintain our roads.
- sorenjan 8y ago
alexandros 8y ago
You make no mention of HW3, which will be installed on the cars that bought FSD for free, and includes Tesla's own chip, (I assume some kind of TPU) designed by Jim Keller. It has been described by Tesla as having 100x the FPS processing capability that the nvidia PX2, the one they use now, has [1]. So they're more or less in full agreement with, and have been working on making happen, the things you say need to be done, for the past 3-4 years. Tesla's head of AI is Andrej Karpathy, who many in this community hold in high esteem. I know this is "argument by authority", but we're working with a black box here, so it will have to do. Do you really think he is wasting his best years on a project that anyone in the field can "guarantee" will never happen? Or could it be that he knows something you don't? By the way, it seems you also don't know that they hold most FSD revenue in reserve on their financials, it's not being spent. So if they need to return it, they can. [1]: https://www.inverse.com/article/47683-tesla-elon-musk-just-detailed-a-i-chip-that-will-power-full-self-driving https://www.inverse.com/article/47683-tesla-elon-musk-just-d...
- ma2rten 8y ago
  Andrej Karpathy just finished his PhD and he was offered an executive position at a major public company. Also, he is not wasting his time. His department is building something that is actually used in cars today. It's just not the self-driving software that Elon is pitching.
  - chrinic83 8y ago
    > Andrej Karpathy just finished his PhD and he was offered an executive position at a major public company. Since when is middle management with an org size of 80 an "executive position"?
  - chronic932 8y ago
    > Andrej Karpathy just finished his PhD and he was offered an executive position at a major public company. Since when is middle management with an org size of 80 an "executive position"? > His department is building something that is actually used in cars today. So do the departments at Cruise, Waymo, BMW, and even universities. Karpathy isn't special -- and neither is Tesla Autopilot's progress.
grecy 8y ago
Of course, self-driving cars don't have to be perfect, they only have to be better than human drivers. Then they'll go mainstream, and they'll keep getting better and better, while human drivers don't.
- sorenjan 8y ago
  No, they have to be much better than human drivers, close to perfect. We all know and expect that people make mistakes, and if a driver kills themselves by mistake that's on them. But if you buy a machine to drive you and it kills you because the engineers made a mistake, that's a different thing. That's much less tolerated, and rightly so, even if it isn't 100% logical by your standard. It's not just about mean number of accidents per driven km, it's also about accountability and blame.
  - grecy 8y ago
    I understand that many people will view it that way, but there is another way to view it. Every single time I get in a vehicle, the people coming towards me might be talking on their phone, drunk or whatever. There is a very real chance I will be injured or killed on a daily basis even if I drive perfectly, and nothing beyond my abilities happens. In the same way that seat belts and airbags and automatic braking improved safety, imperfect self-driving cars will improve overall safety. The important thing to note is that seat belts, airbags and automatic braking a far from perfect, and thousands of people a year still die even though they are using them. People still use them, because it is safer than the alternative - which imperfect self driving cars will be too.
    - ivanbakel 8y ago
      So what? People will not accept a computer driver, even if it manages a significant improvement on the current rate of car accidents, because there is a real psychological barrier. Your counterargument of "but it's an improvement" would miss that point. Humans are prone to all sorts of fallacies, especially surrounding "destiny" and our own influence over our lives - that's why ideas like "bad things happen to bad people" are so popular. That kind of problem is not surmountable by statistical fact. You cannot sway the majority of road users to trust a machine that way. They want to be in control, because it makes them feel something that the computer can't - safe in their own hands.
ma2rten 8y ago
Elon Musk also keeps fear mongering about AI (which is what made him invest in OpenAI). His success made him overconfident about, thinking he knows more about a field than the experts.
jfoster 8y ago
Can you be more specific about the limitations of state of the art image based object detection? Is it skewed toward false positives or false negatives? What accuracy is considered state of the art? Do you mean classification of an object in an image, or merely recognising that there is an object there?
Consultant32452 8y ago
>for no-fail image based object detection This is not the standard we need to meet. It's obviously the goal, but autonomous driving doesn't have to be perfect, it has to be better than the median human driver. Well, we need that plus a regulatory environment that handles the liability in such a way that results in countless lives saved, even though some might die due to imperfect autonomous driving. I've long been of the belief that in order to get real autonomous driving we'll have to re-engineer major roadways. Today they're designed to maximize effectiveness of human sensors. I'm convinced that there must be a way to maximize effectiveness of non-human sensors without harming the effectiveness of human sensors. I don't know what that looks like. It might look like putting passive RFID in the reflectors on the road, or some other thing not yet imagined. But I do think that will ultimately be the future.
- rtkwe 8y ago
  I keep seeing people say that and in a society wide kind of way I think that's true yes but I think for people to actually accept it it will have to be better. Everyone thinks they're a better driver than they are and all the failures and crashes will be attributable to either the autopilot or the passenger-driver. Also if we're going to need roads upgraded for autopilot it's going to be much much more limited. Roadworks take so long and we can barely keep roads together in some states.
  - Consultant32452 8y ago
    I'm thinking about a time scale much longer than silicon valley is accustomed to. Moderate use highways are repaved about every 10 years. The highest use roadways are repaved every 2-3 years. Cars will need to be able to fall back to current-ish mechanisms for the foreseeable future, but we could get the locations where most human miles are driven repaved with some new tech within a decade. There's more than one moving target here. One is when regulators allow the vehicles on the roads en masse. I think that should be at the point they're "better than the median driver." As far as user acceptance, I think once the price-point of automated driving as a service is cheaper than private ownership it will take care of itself. It will likely take a human generation or two to get the majority of people in autonomous cars. My parents are quickly nearing the age that they will lose their independence/ability to drive. I would love the ability to put them in an autonomous car that is even a little bit worse than the median driver.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
_cs2017_ 8y ago
> [we will reach] no-fail image based object detection level of advancement [...] my most optimistic wild guess is 10-20 years You mean using cameras without LIDARs right? Presumably Waymo itself (cameras + LIDARs) is roughly at that level of advancement today. In 10-20 years LIDARs should improve dramatically as well, in both price and performance. So I'm guessing cars will continue to rely on both technologies even when cameras become viable by themselves. BTW, did you enjoy working at Waymo? Would you recommend the perception group as an employer?
erikpukinskis 8y ago
> It is kinda amazing that Elon Musk is selling cars based on speculative future breakthroughs in technology. That must be a first. It is. But it's not that unusual these days: it's basically a Kickstarter! Well, not exactly. Kickstarter projects have no responsibility to ever deliver. They just have to make a good faith effort. Tesla has to eventually deliver some version of full self driving to customers, but they made sure not to say when. So it's hard for me to see the legal liability for them. How can someone sue for a product that was never guaranteed a delivery date? Worst case would be a lot of customers demanding refunds: which I doubt Tesla would fight. So I guess that's the liability on the books: some % of $5000 refunds. But a lot of customers will be happy with whatever they deliver whenever they deliver it. It doesn't feel like an existential risk to me. Part of why it doesnt faze me is Tesla has so many knobs they can dial here. They can decide where FSD is enabled: if it works only on roads where the autopilot is highly confident, and only during good weather conditions, that probably fulfills their legal obligations. This is why I think self-driving bears are wrong.... They argue computers will never be able to handle every corner case, which is true. But it only needs to work for one slice of drivers in one location for there to be a market, and from there it's just an iterative process to grow the service area. It's like arguing my ice cream shop will fail because many people are lactose intolerant, pale, vegan, etc. Sure, but to have a successful business I just need one customer, then two, then four. And I get to choose which customers I court. Tesla is the same wrt FSD.
nradov 8y ago
I was driving the other day and stopped behind a stop sign at a 4-way intersection. A police car was already stopped at the same intersection, to my left. Since he had the right of way I waited for him to proceed. But after a few seconds without moving he flashed his high beams, which I understood to mean that he was waiting for something and was yielding to me. Now that's not a standard signal for yielding in the California Vehicle Code but most humans can figure it out. These are the type of odd little situations that come up all the time in real world driving. I can't understand how anyone would expect level 4+ autonomous driving to work on a widespread basis without some tremendous breakthroughs in AGI.
- linkregister 8y ago
  These situations can result in the vehicle notifying the human driver, or for fully-driverless operation, remote operator taking control of the vehicle (at greater expense, of course).
  - nradov 8y ago
    Level 3 autonomy such as you describe is generally considered unsafe because the human driver may not have been paying attention and lacks the context to safely take control. Remote operation is a total non-starter. Our existing cellular networks lack the bandwidth and redundancy for safety critical applications. What happens if the local tower is down because the cooling system failed or a construction crew accidentally cut the backhaul fiber?
- KKKKkkkk1 8y ago
  Do you really need AGI to understand that some drivers don't respect the right-of-way rules at 4-way intersections? And even if you don't detect the high beams flashing, do you need AGI to know that you shouldn't lock yourself out of the intersection purely based on your place in the queue?
  - nradov 8y ago
    Regardless of the possible solutions for that one particular situation, my point was that odd unpredictable situations come up all the time in real world driving. We can't hope to code rules in advance for every possible situation. In the general case is it possible to handle unexpected situations without true AGI? That remains an unanswered question.
justAnotherNET 8y ago
I'm surprised this is the top comment on HN given the crowds more technical background. Most are apparently unaware of HW3, which is surprise surprise ~10x faster than the current (2.5) Nvidia chip. They are also upgrading users who bought FSD for free... which was the plan all along.
throwawaw434234 8y ago
I can understand the weariness about Tesla, but now Mobileye is claiming they can drive with vision sensors only. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZwax1tb3vo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZwax1tb3vo
kazinator 8y ago
> you will need higher resolution cameras I'm skeptical a bit. We confirm or disprove this by getting human test subjects to drive cars, using nothing but video feed from exactly same cameras. If the humans perform significantly better, then that shows that there is a lot of work to be done independently of the camera resolution. I could drive reasonably safely without my glasses (equivalent to a massive reduction in resolution); I just wouldn't be able to read direction signs and such. I'd have to drive right up to a parking sign to get the exact days and hours of the parking restrictions and such, but I wouldn't run over a pedestrian, or go the wrong way down some lane.
- tim333 8y ago
  Curious about this, I had a look at some Tesla camera footage, the youtube video on this site https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-dashcam-autopilot-cameras-first-look/ https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-dashcam-autopilot-cameras-fi... As a human driver I'd say you could drive ok with that although looking into the distance the images are annoyingly blurry compared to what I'd see by naked eye driving normally. Maybe comparable to driving in the rain with so so windscreen wipers.
  - londons_explore 8y ago
    I'd say it's marginal if I'd be able to drive safely with vision like that. quite a lot of the time, the vertical 'smear' prevents me seeing what something is or if it's moving towards me, and the dynamic range is too poor to make out black cars on a black background.
shostack 8y ago
In your opinion, how much does that timeline change if policy/infrastructure also evolves to support the growth with things like dedicated autonomous lanes and roads, shared network data from vehicles in those lands (ie. vehicle from Manufacturer A 10 cars up stops short and sends that event to the network so cars further back can start breaking even earlier and less aggressively), etc.?
warrenm 8y ago
I think the overreliance/overfocus on any given individual technology (especially computer vision) is a major issue It should be a blended, combined approach: FLIR, LIDAR, RADAR, USONAR, CV, etc There doesn't need to be The One True Technology To Rule Them All™

jasonhansel 8y ago

I think the real potential issue for self-driving cars is that they need to have an understanding of how people's minds work, to understand their gestures, intentions, and movements. This requires, not just visual processing, but something closer to AGI. (Not an expert, so feel free to correct me.)

dogma1138 8y ago
Not really, you don’t really gauge traffic by looking at the drivers firstly you can’t see most of them secondly it’s dangerous to assume their intention which is why we have things like right of way and road signs. The big issue is still in terms of processing speed and sensor fusion and Tesla isn’t leading the pack in either. As far as wide scale autonomous driving goes for it to be good enough there needs to be an agreeable and verifiable decision making model for all manufacturers to follow and for regulators to validate, this could be as simple as never to perform an action that would cause a collision but that’s not exactly an ideal model either because you might then get a silly decision such as you don’t engage the breaks to slow down because you’ll end up hitting the car in front of you in either case. Sadly I’m seeing too many people that tend to complicate things and chase the red herrings when it comes to autonomous driving such as “ethics” while it’s an interesting philosophical exercise in the real world it’s not the important part as when it comes to accidents the vast majority of drivers act on basic instinct and don’t weight the orphan vs the disabled veteran simply because they don’t have that data nor the capacity to incorporate it into their decision making process. First we need to get sensors that don’t get confused by oddly placed traffic cones, birds and shadows the rest is pretty much irrelevant at this point.
- throwaway2048 8y ago
  Yep tons of focus on philosophical sideshows like the trolley problem in these discussions, when autonomous cars just plain _do not work_ in the general case.
  - dogma1138 8y ago
    People can’t solve a trolley problem either while driving (or at all). If you have enough time to stop if say a kid just jumped in front of you you will stop, if you don’t you don’t have enough time to process all the information around you and gauge the most optimal outcome if you swerve you swerve but that is likely going to happen regardless of what jumps out in front of you simply because that what your instincts are telling you to do. The best thing an autonomous vehicle can offer is a better response time so you’ll be more likely to stop or to slow down to non/less than fatal velocity.
    - throwaway2048 8y ago
      Nobody is saying people have solved it either, I am saying that the question is at best a distraction.
      - dogma1138 8y ago
        Yeah it’s a complete distraction, even if you were living in some dystopian world where each car could ping everyone around it to gauge their citizen score and select the lowest score citizen to run over in this Kobayashi Maru scenario your cars would be much safer if they didn’t waste CPU cycles on this nonsense but rather just focus on the road. Drivers are drivers doesn’t matter if it’s humans or robots distracting them with nonsense wouldn’t make them better or safer but rather quite the opposite.
        Chris_Chambers 8y ago
        You should be banned from continuing to participate in this thread. Half of the comments are from you and we already understand what your position is.
username223 8y ago
This. Sharing a street with others requires human communication: a driver waves to a pedestrian wanting to use a crosswalk, or a pedestrian waves a driver through before doing so, or they both pause before one or the other goes first. Our streets aren't designed for robots, and while they may work on controlled-access highways in the not-too-distant future, I don't expect to see self-driving cars on city streets within the next few decades.
jononor 8y ago
The general ability to understand others (and oneself) to the level of intentions etc is often referred to as Theory of Mind. Seen from the task of autonomous driving, what is needed is a strong predictive model for what other cars/drivers are going to do, based on current observations. Considering that driving is a quite more narrow space than all possible human behavior, this is hopefully[0] solvable using something close to existing approaches. 0. Otherwise I don't think self-driving cars is happening soon.

codeulike 8y ago

[Tesla would need to].. and install a dedicated TPU which should be at least 10x or probably more faster than the nVidia chip they have installed on their cars That is literally what Tesla have announced they are doing next. I've got no opinion on your other points, but if you've missed that news, you're not really following Tesla very closely. It's a drop in replacement chip set designed by Jim Keller.

throwaway2048 8y ago
I doubt Tesla has multiple (more like dozens of) major industry first sensor and AI breakthroughs, regardless of how closely OP follows them or not.
- fastball 8y ago
  OP seems to be operating under the premise that such a system must be "no-fail". That is not what Tesla is going for.
  - empath75 8y ago
    Considering that they’ve already killed a couple of people, that’s a given.
    - grey-area 8y ago
      Humans kill over 100 people per day in traffic accidents in the US alone - I don’t think no-fail (0 deaths) is a reasonable requirement, just being safer than humans is enough. I do agree with the OPs skepticism though - full autonomy is 10 years away.
      - mehrdadn 8y ago
        > Humans kill over 100 people per day in traffic accidents in the US alone - I don’t think no-fail (0 deaths) is a reasonable requirement, just being safer than humans is enough. This is a fallacy. People don't just look at safety statistics. The actual manner/setting in which something can kill you matters a ton too. There's a huge difference between a computer that crashes in even the most benign situations and one that only crashes in truly difficult situations, even if the the first one isn't any more frequent than the second. Hypothetical example: you've stopped behind a red light and your car randomly starts moving, and you get hit by another car. Turns out your car has a habit of glitching like this every 165,000 miles or so (which seems to be the average accident rate) for no apparent reason. Would you be fine this car? I don't think most people would even come close to finding this acceptable. They want to be safe when they haven't done anything dangerous -- they want to be in reasonable control of their destiny. P.S. people are also more forgiving of each other than computers. E.g. a 1-second reaction time can be pretty acceptable for a human but, but if the computer I'd trusted with my life had that kind of reaction time it would get defenestrated pretty quickly.

steelframe 8y ago

Hello, fellow "former Waymo dev." What you said is one of the many reasons that I replaced my Model X with an I-PACE. While I support the movement-away-from-gas part of their mission, I can no longer support Tesla as a business. I'm now focusing my energy toward advocating sustainable migration to general EV technology.

WilliamSt 8y ago
Sometimes when I go to hacker news, I feel really poor.
- dmix 8y ago
  You can walk onto any city street and see the occasional person people driving nice cars too. Does that make you feel poor too?
  - pxndx 8y ago
    I don't see these other people as fellow developers, but as golf-playing executives or their children. I'm aware that not everyone here is a dev, but we mostly have similar careers.
    - jniedrauer 8y ago
      I live on about 30% of my salary. Unless you're in the bay area or have a family to support, that's plausible (and honestly pretty comfortable) for most developers. If you wanted that car, you could have it.
    - solatic 8y ago
      Not everyone here lives in the US. Making SV salaries here, where 99+% of people are making under $80k/year, would be obscene. If I had access to that kind of money, I'd be putting it into better housing (penthouse?) long before ever thinking of buying a car like that.
- madengr 8y ago

wukerplank 8y ago

> my most optimistic wild guess is 10-20 years Woah, that's a long time! What are the problems in computer vision that need to be solved?

dmitriid 8y ago
Adversarial attacks. Extrapolating from incomplete data. Consistent performance in any/most lightning conditions: night, dusk, low hanging sun over an icy road. Fog. Any combination of the above. Humans while not perfect are capable if making split-second decisions on incomplete data under a surprising range if conditions based on the fact that our brains are an unmatched pattern-matching beast feeding off of our experience.
- bsder 8y ago
  Boy, are you an optimist. Humans are LOUSY in almost all of those conditions as well as much less challenging ones--we engineer the road in an attempt to deal with human imperfections. The I-5/I-805 intersection in California used to have a very slight S-curve to it--there would be an accident at that point every single day. Signs. Warning markers. Police enforcement. NOTHING worked. They eventually just had to straighten the road. Humans SUCK at driving. Most humans have a time and landmark-based memory of a path and they follow that. Any deviation from that memory and boom accident. This is the problem I have with the current crop of self-driving cars. They are solving the wrong problem. Driving is two intertwined tasks--long-term pathing, which is mostly spatial memorization, and immediate response, which is mostly station keeping with occasional excursions into real-time changes. Once they solve station-keeping, the pathing will come almost immediately afterward.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - hbarka 8y ago
    You make a succinct point. Can you elaborate on the difference between Station Keeping and Lane Keeping, what is generally available now as LKAS?

StreamBright 8y ago

There is the energy limitation as well. All the equipment needed to do self driving today requires more energy than you can sustainably draw from typical cars. Please if you downvote at least leave a comment why you think I am wrong. This is a well known fact in the autopilot community.

p1esk 8y ago
What equipment and how much energy?
- StreamBright 8y ago
  https://www.wired.com/story/self-driving-cars-power-consumption-nvidia-chip/ https://www.wired.com/story/self-driving-cars-power-consumpt...
  - p1esk 8y ago
    Thanks, do you know how much power Tesla’s autopilot equipment consumes? I assume that almost all that power goes into the vision chips?

vladislav 8y ago

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/546066/googles-ai-masters-the-game-of-go-a-decade-earlier-than-expected/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/546066/googles-ai-masters... are you willing to put money on your time estimate?

hungryhobo 8y ago
Processing an image and extract understanding is exponentially harder than processing a go board
- _Microft 8y ago
  I think the point he wanted to make is that even an educated guess can be a decade off.
  - pintxo 8y ago
    To illustrate this: https://xkcd.com/1425/ https://xkcd.com/1425/
- vladislav 8y ago
  computer vision is clearly much harder than go. the point is that the forefront of AI is moving quite rapidly, and the consequence are bound to catch the casual observer (or even an expert) off guard.
  - tim333 8y ago
    Also Musk seems quite confident https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8dEYm8hzLo&t=9m00s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8dEYm8hzLo&t=9m00s

lanevorockz 8y ago

I don't understand the scepticism, self-driving cars are already a reality and are working very efficiently in controlled environments. Anyone working on logistics already heavily relies on it. Another point, the "dedicated TPU" is also a myth. Neural Networks inference is very cheap and current nvidia hardware is able to run neural networks that would take years to train.

hellllllllooo 8y ago
> Anyone working on logistics already heavily relies on it. Care to elaborate? Sources?
- badpun 8y ago
  AFAIK there are some self-driving cars, that follow guiding lines painted on the ground, already deployed in warehouses, production plants etc.
  - hellllllllooo 8y ago
    Industrial robotics applications are limited in scope and the environment is adjusted to make the problem easier than for autonomous driving on roads. Even then there are issues that mean often a human operator/supervisor is needed. General autonomous vehicles systems are not widely used in industry if at all. Making a system that works on roads with other cars and pedestrians and varying quality of road markings and infrastructure is a different problem entirely. Tesla is trying to do this with a limited set of sensors and compute compared to others with makes it even less feasible. Waymo is by far the furthest ahead and they don't claim that full autonomy is close like Musk is claiming.
thebruce87m 8y ago
None of the roads I drive on are controlled environments.
- ozim 8y ago

joenathanone 8y ago

You haven't been keeping up, Tesla is doing exactly that, look into AP3 hardware.

close04 8y ago
> Tesla is doing exactly that Not arguing that they're taking steps in that direction but the implication that they're anywhere reasonably close to the goal is unrealistic. It's like saying we can travel to space so we have all we need to get to the nearest star.
Judgmentality 8y ago
AP3 is not going to be nearly good enough. It's just the next step in keeping the "we sell full self-driving hardware as a feature but's it's not ready yet" promise alive. It's not years away, it's decades away. And for a frame of reference, the computers (as in the actual processors, ram, memory, etcetera) in cars a la Waymo and Cruise cost more than the cars, so it's not an insignificant cost. That's completely ignoring the lidar issue and the fact that state-of-the-art just isn't good enough even when you have an extra $100k in hardware, have spent billions training your models, and have remote operators to help you out of sticky situations. But yeah, okay, Elon Musk said it's going to happen. He also said they were going to have it years ago and we're still waiting on that cross-country trip from New York to Los Angeles that never materialized.
- rohit2412 8y ago
  We know how it ends though. We'll see them roll out an error-prone stop-sign+traffic-light detection as fsd beta, and everyone will act like that was what was promised. Just like Lane keeping assist is "autopilot".
  - avs733 8y ago
    Facebook: move fast and break things Tesla: drive fast and break people.
  - Judgmentality 8y ago

syntaxing 8y ago

Do you have any opinion on the new HW3 which is a custom ASIC for CNNs or something like that? Would love to know how that stands compared to other possible ASICs at Waymo.

hellllllllooo 8y ago

Exactly. Claiming to be close to solving production problems that haven't been solved in robotics research in nice controlled environments is nuts. Either people at Tesla are so smart they are making many huge breakthroughs in the technology (hint: they're not) or the are exaggerating and lying to sell cars despite the dangers of selling systems based on heuristics that could cost lives.

copperx 8y ago

Perhaps an easier and quicker fix (although extremely costly) is to outfit all roadways with aids for autonomous driving. Otherwise, we will have to wait decades for the technology to be mature enough.

hrktb 8y ago
I wonder though if the roadway maintenance would be good enough to have that work reliably. The car would still have to react to misconfigured , misplaced or defective aids. Even if it’s not just negligeance, if an accident were to move the markers, would it cascade accidents until these markers are fixed ? In the end, it seems we’d still need cars way clever than what we have now for it to be trustworthy.
- bobthepanda 8y ago
  The fatal Tesla crash into a highway barrier a while back was because of faded highway markings. Many localities can barely keep the lines painted. Many more have all sorts of adverse weather conditions (e.g., snow and slush) that make road markings hard to see. The chances of this being a workable solution, at least in the US, is nil.
  - nikofeyn 8y ago
    that crash wasn’t because of the markings. saying so, although maybe accurate, softens the issue. it was because tesla has a poor autonomous system that couldn’t plainly see a road splitting and instead hit a barrier at full speed wit no braking. the markers were a contributor since all teslas seem to mainly do is stay between the lines they see.
nikofeyn 8y ago
yea, just like we’ve been able to outfit all roads properly for aiding human drivers. you mentioned it’s costly, but this just won’t or can’t happen. we don’t even properly maintain our roads.
sorenjan 8y ago

alexandros 8y ago

You make no mention of HW3, which will be installed on the cars that bought FSD for free, and includes Tesla's own chip, (I assume some kind of TPU) designed by Jim Keller. It has been described by Tesla as having 100x the FPS processing capability that the nvidia PX2, the one they use now, has [1]. So they're more or less in full agreement with, and have been working on making happen, the things you say need to be done, for the past 3-4 years. Tesla's head of AI is Andrej Karpathy, who many in this community hold in high esteem. I know this is "argument by authority", but we're working with a black box here, so it will have to do. Do you really think he is wasting his best years on a project that anyone in the field can "guarantee" will never happen? Or could it be that he knows something you don't? By the way, it seems you also don't know that they hold most FSD revenue in reserve on their financials, it's not being spent. So if they need to return it, they can. [1]: https://www.inverse.com/article/47683-tesla-elon-musk-just-detailed-a-i-chip-that-will-power-full-self-driving https://www.inverse.com/article/47683-tesla-elon-musk-just-d...

ma2rten 8y ago
Andrej Karpathy just finished his PhD and he was offered an executive position at a major public company. Also, he is not wasting his time. His department is building something that is actually used in cars today. It's just not the self-driving software that Elon is pitching.
- chrinic83 8y ago
  > Andrej Karpathy just finished his PhD and he was offered an executive position at a major public company. Since when is middle management with an org size of 80 an "executive position"?
- chronic932 8y ago
  > Andrej Karpathy just finished his PhD and he was offered an executive position at a major public company. Since when is middle management with an org size of 80 an "executive position"? > His department is building something that is actually used in cars today. So do the departments at Cruise, Waymo, BMW, and even universities. Karpathy isn't special -- and neither is Tesla Autopilot's progress.

grecy 8y ago

Of course, self-driving cars don't have to be perfect, they only have to be better than human drivers. Then they'll go mainstream, and they'll keep getting better and better, while human drivers don't.

sorenjan 8y ago
No, they have to be much better than human drivers, close to perfect. We all know and expect that people make mistakes, and if a driver kills themselves by mistake that's on them. But if you buy a machine to drive you and it kills you because the engineers made a mistake, that's a different thing. That's much less tolerated, and rightly so, even if it isn't 100% logical by your standard. It's not just about mean number of accidents per driven km, it's also about accountability and blame.
- grecy 8y ago
  I understand that many people will view it that way, but there is another way to view it. Every single time I get in a vehicle, the people coming towards me might be talking on their phone, drunk or whatever. There is a very real chance I will be injured or killed on a daily basis even if I drive perfectly, and nothing beyond my abilities happens. In the same way that seat belts and airbags and automatic braking improved safety, imperfect self-driving cars will improve overall safety. The important thing to note is that seat belts, airbags and automatic braking a far from perfect, and thousands of people a year still die even though they are using them. People still use them, because it is safer than the alternative - which imperfect self driving cars will be too.
  - ivanbakel 8y ago
    So what? People will not accept a computer driver, even if it manages a significant improvement on the current rate of car accidents, because there is a real psychological barrier. Your counterargument of "but it's an improvement" would miss that point. Humans are prone to all sorts of fallacies, especially surrounding "destiny" and our own influence over our lives - that's why ideas like "bad things happen to bad people" are so popular. That kind of problem is not surmountable by statistical fact. You cannot sway the majority of road users to trust a machine that way. They want to be in control, because it makes them feel something that the computer can't - safe in their own hands.

ma2rten 8y ago

Elon Musk also keeps fear mongering about AI (which is what made him invest in OpenAI). His success made him overconfident about, thinking he knows more about a field than the experts.

jfoster 8y ago

Can you be more specific about the limitations of state of the art image based object detection? Is it skewed toward false positives or false negatives? What accuracy is considered state of the art? Do you mean classification of an object in an image, or merely recognising that there is an object there?

Consultant32452 8y ago

>for no-fail image based object detection This is not the standard we need to meet. It's obviously the goal, but autonomous driving doesn't have to be perfect, it has to be better than the median human driver. Well, we need that plus a regulatory environment that handles the liability in such a way that results in countless lives saved, even though some might die due to imperfect autonomous driving. I've long been of the belief that in order to get real autonomous driving we'll have to re-engineer major roadways. Today they're designed to maximize effectiveness of human sensors. I'm convinced that there must be a way to maximize effectiveness of non-human sensors without harming the effectiveness of human sensors. I don't know what that looks like. It might look like putting passive RFID in the reflectors on the road, or some other thing not yet imagined. But I do think that will ultimately be the future.

rtkwe 8y ago
I keep seeing people say that and in a society wide kind of way I think that's true yes but I think for people to actually accept it it will have to be better. Everyone thinks they're a better driver than they are and all the failures and crashes will be attributable to either the autopilot or the passenger-driver. Also if we're going to need roads upgraded for autopilot it's going to be much much more limited. Roadworks take so long and we can barely keep roads together in some states.
- Consultant32452 8y ago
  I'm thinking about a time scale much longer than silicon valley is accustomed to. Moderate use highways are repaved about every 10 years. The highest use roadways are repaved every 2-3 years. Cars will need to be able to fall back to current-ish mechanisms for the foreseeable future, but we could get the locations where most human miles are driven repaved with some new tech within a decade. There's more than one moving target here. One is when regulators allow the vehicles on the roads en masse. I think that should be at the point they're "better than the median driver." As far as user acceptance, I think once the price-point of automated driving as a service is cheaper than private ownership it will take care of itself. It will likely take a human generation or two to get the majority of people in autonomous cars. My parents are quickly nearing the age that they will lose their independence/ability to drive. I would love the ability to put them in an autonomous car that is even a little bit worse than the median driver.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

_cs2017_ 8y ago

> [we will reach] no-fail image based object detection level of advancement [...] my most optimistic wild guess is 10-20 years You mean using cameras without LIDARs right? Presumably Waymo itself (cameras + LIDARs) is roughly at that level of advancement today. In 10-20 years LIDARs should improve dramatically as well, in both price and performance. So I'm guessing cars will continue to rely on both technologies even when cameras become viable by themselves. BTW, did you enjoy working at Waymo? Would you recommend the perception group as an employer?

erikpukinskis 8y ago

> It is kinda amazing that Elon Musk is selling cars based on speculative future breakthroughs in technology. That must be a first. It is. But it's not that unusual these days: it's basically a Kickstarter! Well, not exactly. Kickstarter projects have no responsibility to ever deliver. They just have to make a good faith effort. Tesla has to eventually deliver some version of full self driving to customers, but they made sure not to say when. So it's hard for me to see the legal liability for them. How can someone sue for a product that was never guaranteed a delivery date? Worst case would be a lot of customers demanding refunds: which I doubt Tesla would fight. So I guess that's the liability on the books: some % of $5000 refunds. But a lot of customers will be happy with whatever they deliver whenever they deliver it. It doesn't feel like an existential risk to me. Part of why it doesnt faze me is Tesla has so many knobs they can dial here. They can decide where FSD is enabled: if it works only on roads where the autopilot is highly confident, and only during good weather conditions, that probably fulfills their legal obligations. This is why I think self-driving bears are wrong.... They argue computers will never be able to handle every corner case, which is true. But it only needs to work for one slice of drivers in one location for there to be a market, and from there it's just an iterative process to grow the service area. It's like arguing my ice cream shop will fail because many people are lactose intolerant, pale, vegan, etc. Sure, but to have a successful business I just need one customer, then two, then four. And I get to choose which customers I court. Tesla is the same wrt FSD.

nradov 8y ago

I was driving the other day and stopped behind a stop sign at a 4-way intersection. A police car was already stopped at the same intersection, to my left. Since he had the right of way I waited for him to proceed. But after a few seconds without moving he flashed his high beams, which I understood to mean that he was waiting for something and was yielding to me. Now that's not a standard signal for yielding in the California Vehicle Code but most humans can figure it out. These are the type of odd little situations that come up all the time in real world driving. I can't understand how anyone would expect level 4+ autonomous driving to work on a widespread basis without some tremendous breakthroughs in AGI.

linkregister 8y ago
These situations can result in the vehicle notifying the human driver, or for fully-driverless operation, remote operator taking control of the vehicle (at greater expense, of course).
- nradov 8y ago
  Level 3 autonomy such as you describe is generally considered unsafe because the human driver may not have been paying attention and lacks the context to safely take control. Remote operation is a total non-starter. Our existing cellular networks lack the bandwidth and redundancy for safety critical applications. What happens if the local tower is down because the cooling system failed or a construction crew accidentally cut the backhaul fiber?
KKKKkkkk1 8y ago
Do you really need AGI to understand that some drivers don't respect the right-of-way rules at 4-way intersections? And even if you don't detect the high beams flashing, do you need AGI to know that you shouldn't lock yourself out of the intersection purely based on your place in the queue?
- nradov 8y ago
  Regardless of the possible solutions for that one particular situation, my point was that odd unpredictable situations come up all the time in real world driving. We can't hope to code rules in advance for every possible situation. In the general case is it possible to handle unexpected situations without true AGI? That remains an unanswered question.

justAnotherNET 8y ago

I'm surprised this is the top comment on HN given the crowds more technical background. Most are apparently unaware of HW3, which is surprise surprise ~10x faster than the current (2.5) Nvidia chip. They are also upgrading users who bought FSD for free... which was the plan all along.

throwawaw434234 8y ago

I can understand the weariness about Tesla, but now Mobileye is claiming they can drive with vision sensors only. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZwax1tb3vo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZwax1tb3vo

kazinator 8y ago

> you will need higher resolution cameras I'm skeptical a bit. We confirm or disprove this by getting human test subjects to drive cars, using nothing but video feed from exactly same cameras. If the humans perform significantly better, then that shows that there is a lot of work to be done independently of the camera resolution. I could drive reasonably safely without my glasses (equivalent to a massive reduction in resolution); I just wouldn't be able to read direction signs and such. I'd have to drive right up to a parking sign to get the exact days and hours of the parking restrictions and such, but I wouldn't run over a pedestrian, or go the wrong way down some lane.

tim333 8y ago
Curious about this, I had a look at some Tesla camera footage, the youtube video on this site https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-dashcam-autopilot-cameras-first-look/ https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-dashcam-autopilot-cameras-fi... As a human driver I'd say you could drive ok with that although looking into the distance the images are annoyingly blurry compared to what I'd see by naked eye driving normally. Maybe comparable to driving in the rain with so so windscreen wipers.
- londons_explore 8y ago
  I'd say it's marginal if I'd be able to drive safely with vision like that. quite a lot of the time, the vertical 'smear' prevents me seeing what something is or if it's moving towards me, and the dynamic range is too poor to make out black cars on a black background.

shostack 8y ago

In your opinion, how much does that timeline change if policy/infrastructure also evolves to support the growth with things like dedicated autonomous lanes and roads, shared network data from vehicles in those lands (ie. vehicle from Manufacturer A 10 cars up stops short and sends that event to the network so cars further back can start breaking even earlier and less aggressively), etc.?

warrenm 8y ago

I think the overreliance/overfocus on any given individual technology (especially computer vision) is a major issue It should be a blended, combined approach: FLIR, LIDAR, RADAR, USONAR, CV, etc There doesn't need to be The One True Technology To Rule Them All™