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Automakers Are Rethinking the Timetable for Fully Autonomous Cars

155 points by AndrewBissell 7y ago

deleted 7y ago
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pfarnsworth 7y ago
After seeing some autonomous cars in action, I believe they are 20 years away. In that sense I mean a fully automated driverless car that you can command to do what you want. It would be great if you could buy a car, have it bring you to work while you read or slept, then after dropping you off, go earn money while it was ubering people around until it was time to pick you up. But I highly doubt this will happen in less than 20 years at this point. There's just too much lacking. It needs real artificial intelligence, not just machine learning and pattern matching. The car needs to know "that's a paper bag flying in the wind I'm about to hit", or "that truck in front of me is stopped."
- llukas 7y ago
  > "that truck in front of me is stopped." Easy if you're not Tesla and have lidar.
- nradov 7y ago
  Considering that we have made ~0 progress toward true AGI, I'm skeptical that level 5 autonomous driving will arrive even within 20 years.
  - tim333 7y ago
    We certainly don't have true AGI but there has been progress in that general direction eg Deepmind's AlphaZero, StarCraft and this thing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17313937 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17313937
    - nradov 7y ago
      No those aren't progress toward AGI at all. They are tremendously impressive technical achievements, but from an AGI perspective they're basically just parlor tricks. The reality is that for AGI we don't even know which direction to go yet so it's literally impossible to determine whether we're making forward progress toward the goal. Show me a computer as smart as mouse and then I'll believe we're making progress toward AGI.
panpanna 7y ago
Multiple companies are currently testing level 5 autonomous fleets in some European cities. I think the article misses that you can't reach 5 without efficient and secure v2x.
- frosted-flakes 7y ago
  V2X?
  - eb3c90 7y ago
    Apparently vehicle to everything [1]. The car industry seems to love V2* terminology. V2H is connecting an electric vehicle to a home to provide power in an emergency. [1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/v/v2x-vehicletovehicle-or-vehicletoinfrastructure.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/v/v2x-vehicletovehicle-or... [2] https://thedriven.io/2018/10/19/v2g-whats-the-state-of-play-with-vehicle-to-grid-vehicle-to-home-technology/ https://thedriven.io/2018/10/19/v2g-whats-the-state-of-play-...
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- wpietri 7y ago
  Could you point to some evidence that somebody has actually achieved level 5? Hopefully with a clear description of what the limitations are (e.g., weather, geography, time of day). Claims are easy. Especially claims of testing.
  - panpanna 7y ago
    I don't know the details, these were from companies I never heard of. But these were driving around in fairly busy European streets with zero human interaction. (Don't like the new HN atmosphere were people down vote any comment they don't like)
    - wpietri 7y ago
      It's not any comment; it's a bold claim with no evidence. Also, it's not clear to me that you understand the levels. A car "driving around in fairly busy European streets with zero human interaction" is evidence of level 3, nothing higher.
MegaButts 7y ago
Based on what I hear from those in the know, the perception is that it's decades away instead of years. And an even more complicated problem isn't whether or not they can make it work with considerable constraints (geofence, no highways, avoid several spots that are hard to handle, weather, assistance via remote operation when stuck), but how to do it profitably. The cars are expensive. The maintenance is expensive. The ongoing cleaning, charging, and prepping of vehicles is expensive. Constantly updating HD maps is expensive. Of course the engineers to keep everything running smoothly are expensive. And the small army of people you need to actually talk to and help customers - something Google has basically never done before - is expensive. I love the idea of self-driving cars and I really can't wait until they're ready. But I'd say that's going to happen about as quickly as changing the infrastructure in this country. Personally I'd rather have better public transit anyway.
- maximus1983 7y ago
  TBH this is the pareto principle at work. Sure you can get a car roughly driving around the city autonomously (there are basic self driving cars back in the 1950s that drove on a wire track) but getting it perfect is where the vast majority of effort is going to be expended.
- joe_the_user 7y ago
  Yes, The thing about self-driving you can get to 90% or 99% or even 99.9% success and then find the cost of closing part of that extra sliver of non-success is the same as all the work you've done. Especially since testing those corners cases is hard since they are unusual. There's even some part of the sliver that even is "AI complete". Very small but you don't know where it is, etc. But I'd say that's going to happen about as quickly as changing the infrastructure in this country. Key point! Automation has traditionally been much, much easier when you are engineering a situation where you control all the variables. Automated factories are common. Automated warehouses are coming. Automated dock systems exist. In these situation, there's a hard border between "inside" and "outside". Roads are generally regular but the border between insight and outside fuzzy. Google can run it's self-driving taxis in a suburb in Arizona where roads are as regular as could be imagined but expanding beyond that is much, much hard than one imagines. Note: I recommend this blog which periodically tracks progress in self-driving cars as well as making intelligent, critical comments on current AI. https://blog.piekniewski.info/ https://blog.piekniewski.info/
quotemstr 7y ago
How much of this delay is just perfectionism and excess risk aversion? In pretty much any pursuit, demanding perfection ensures that you'll never be finished. Based on what I'm seen, autonomous vehicles already work. Waymo's cars have driven millions of miles. Other companies have working systems too. The technology is already at the point where it's useful. I understand wanting to keep people safe, but the benefits of this technology so are enormous that I'd rather companies launch now and iterate than spend decades wringing every last disengagement out of the system while the carnage on our highways continues. I feel like we're in one of those situations where everyone is just afraid to be first. Meanwhile, people die every day.
- frosted-flakes 7y ago
  You'd rather have car companies release beta software to millions of cars than stick with the status quo? This isn't the Windows 10 Insider Preview. Cars can kill people, and production vehicles should never contain beta software, which is beta because it's buggy/untested/unreliable.
  - quotemstr 7y ago
    No software is perfect --- and that goes for the wetware in our heads too. Why would you want people to keep dying on the roads just so we can avoid shipping imperfect-but-still-superhuman autonomous driving vehicles? We need a more nuanced outlook than "Disengagement! NO RELEASE!".
    - frosted-flakes 7y ago
      Do you think beta software belongs in airplanes too? We sure could do with a lot more 737 MAX incidents.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - CamperBob2 7y ago
areoform 7y ago
I have made this prediction multiple times throughout the last 8 years based on my knowledge of robotics. I have argued with family members who are VCs as well as enthusiastic technical observers based on simple first principles reasoning. It is highly unlikely that completely autonomous vehicles will be present on the streets - interacting with humans, cars, and random events in real-time - within the next decade. What is more feasible and likely to occur is that large chunks of trucking may become "automated" in the form of a hyper-advanced cruise control, but these vehicles will lack Level 5 autonomy for their whole route. To understand why, requires a deeper examination of where this technology came from; Stanley, Thrun’s robotic car that was acquired by Google and is the basis for Waymo’s tech. Thrun notes; > “In the last Grand Challenge, it didn't really matter whether an obstacle was a rock or a bush, because either way you'd just drive around it," says Sebastian Thrun, an associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering. "The current challenge is to move from just sensing the environment to understanding the environment." http://news.stanford.edu/pr/2007/pr-junior-021407.html http://news.stanford.edu/pr/2007/pr-junior-021407.html More precisely, to interact and function in the wild, the robot needs to understand, distinguish, and model the properties of wildly different entities. And these entities aren't just other people - they are everything in its environment. And this includes random events like; people walking into traffic, objects falling onto the road, sudden rain and hail, or just potholes. This is not a problem that can be trivially solved with better sensors or cheaper LIDAR. It is a conceptual problem that can not be trivially brute forced nor simulated in advance as each unique permutation is just different enough to confound existing models. Even if such different and confounding events are six sigma in nature and have a probability of occurring 0.00034% for every mile driven, then at 3.22 trillion miles/year (https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/02/21/516512439/record-number-of-miles-driven-in-u-s-last-year https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/02/21/516512439...) Americans will experience 10,948,000 anomalies per year. Or, about 20.8 events per minute. 20.8 anomalies per minute is a pretty big number. That’s a potential accident every 3 seconds or so. And that’s a six sigma estimate. It is hard to emphasize how hard six sigma performance is for the current generation of autonomous vehicle hardware. You might dispute the numbers, but they are meant to be an illustration and an intuitive explanation for why this problem is Hard with a capital H. Unlike some professionals, I don’t believe Strong AI is necessary to solve this problem, but Weak AI is still a form of AI. Technology that's just out of reach today. At this point, people counter with Google’s cars. After all, seeing is believing, and haven’t they been seen to run successfully for millions of miles at this point? Yes, but... Waymo/Google's success is hard to replicate. No one else can bend the rules far enough to achieve their headway. Most of us forget that before starting the project, Google used LIDAR to create highly detailed maps of every environment their cars will ever be in. Engineers then captured standard human driving on that route over and over across different hours. These elements were then combined within their model to pre-compute routes before any real world driving happened. Google was able to achieve its miraculous results because of its ownership of GMaps, Street View and the resources to deploy a fleet to map everything in advance. No one else has these resources. No one else can acquire them cheaply. And even Alphabet, a trillion-ish dollar corporation can't replicate this package for the entire world. Maybe someone will figure out a way to create precise sub-eighth-of-an-inch level 3D models of environments using drones and satellite images, but until that time this technology is too expensive to deploy. It is hard to emphasize how important a distinction this is. The "only" thing a Google/Waymo robot does in real-time is that it checks the difference between the recorded dataset and whatever the real-time LIDAR + camera feed is saying. Or in other words, for every point of the route, Google has generated an expected set of values, and any deviations from these are used by the car to make real-time decisions. https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intelligence/how-google-self-driving-car-works https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-inte... However, even this partial solution is tempting. Because it works. But, sadly, that's not the whole story. What gets lost in the re-telling of this story is that this technique means that the cars can't work in unstructured environments. They are unsafe for most roads, especially uncontrollable, unpredictable and narrow residential roads. It's why these cars exist inside strict geo-fences even when they're ferrying passangers around, like in Phoenix. Where the car seems to mostly serve the downtown area with very little residential coverage (caveats apply, I couldn't find a map). But, even getting this far is a huge technical achievement, even if it's not the fundamental breakthrough we've been looking for. We should be prudent, but optimistic. There are a lot of smart people out there who are working on this problem right now. They are figuring out really clever ways to deal with these edge cases and they will solve this problem. Even if it's not on the hype cycle's schedule. With that in mind, I'd like to suggest a better model for thinking about Driverless Vehicles is another Google service, Translate. It's quite good, but when was the last time someone translated an entire book with it (and it came out to be readable/sensible)? The system's performance - due to its statistical roots - seems to be fundamentally asymptotic w.r.t. the data presented to it. It can't be improved beyond a certain point even if you throw more data at it. I suspect that the current generation of driverless vehicles will be the same. http://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/papers/elephants.pdf http://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/papers/elephants.pdf http://arxiv.org/pdf/1604.00289.pdf http://arxiv.org/pdf/1604.00289.pdf Before the needed breakthrough happens, it is likely that the cutting edge won't advance beyond Level 3 in the next decade; > I would guess Tesla’s position on this would be that most of the time, yes, you can rely on it, but because Tesla has no idea when you won’t be able to rely on it, you can’t really rely on it. https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self-driving/fatal-tesla-autopilot-crash-reminds-us-that-robots-arent-perfect https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/sel... And that's okay. We might not have driverless cars by 2020, but we probably will by the mid 2030's and that sounds pretty darn fantastic to me.
siruncledrew 7y ago
From a marketing/business perspective for the automotive industry, my hypothesis is that it’s in their interest to favor publicizing the ‘best-case scenario’ earliest dates over realistic target dates for these kinds of milestones to hype the public up and make a company look like they are ahead of the pack in innovation. This is the sentiment I gathered from also looking back at previous announcements in various industries (see r/retrofuturism on reddit) where a CEO will say that something is 5 years away when in practicality it’s at least 5 years away from being 5 years away.
YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
>> “It’s really, really hard,” Krafcik said during a live-streamed tech conference. “You don’t know what you don’t know until you’re actually in there and trying to do things.” Now, where was that Rodney Brooks interview? Ah, here it is: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/2nd-Part-RB-for-Ars-Transcript-2.pdf https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/2nd-P... >> Rob Reid: (...) Why do you think these people and others are overestimating the rate of development in this field? >> Rodney Brooks: I think they're making a bunch of mistakes. I asked them when did the first car drive down a freeway for 10 miles at 50 miles an hour. They know that the Google cars did that in 2004 or 2005. It was actually done in Germany in 1987. >> Rob Reid: Wow. >> Rodney Brooks: When are we going to get the first car, hands off the steering wheel, feet off the pedals, drive coast to coast in the US? Yeah, well, it actually happened in 1995 with the Navlab Project from Carnegie Mellon University. My point is, everyone thinks, oh this is just a [inaudible 00:44:50], this is going to happen quickly. It's been around a long time to get to where we are. I have now demonstrated to them that their scale is wrong, their start point is wrong. It has taken a lot longer to get to where we are now. So, to anyone who had any understanding of the technology it must have been obvious for a long, long time that "it's really, really hard" and that it wouldn't just take a few years after the time that Google announced the Google car. I struggle to believe that Krafcik is not one of those people, or that major automotive company CEOs are not. Basically, those people have been bullshitting everyone and they're still bullshitting everyone, and they were probably not even interested in developing self-driving cars in the first place, it was all just some stupid marketing game supported by a very excitable tech press and a gullible public.
- save_ferris 7y ago
  Your point reminds me a bit of Theranos, and how they were able to coast on a completely fraudulent but awe-inspiring idea. It might not be related, but whenever I read stories this, I'm reminded of the ways that tech is marketed in the world. It's impossible for the public to understand whether or not a certain technology is feasible, practical, or even possible, but marketing teams get an unbelievable amount of leeway when marketing products and services. And they get to do it without really telling you what data is collected and how it's used, etc., etc. The power asymmetry between what tech companies are allowed to say versus the limited technical understanding of the public is brutal, and not getting any better.
chrischen 7y ago
I don’t understand the obsession or even the belief that fully autonomous driving is around the corner. When has anyone, much less Google, released a product that worked at such advanced levels from day 1 and starting from no product in the market? They should deploy autonomous cars at limited production scales in specific environments, and build it out from there—but we haven’t even seen that yet.
- StreamBright 7y ago
  I don’t understand how can anybody take it seriously an approach that relies on statistics for self driving cars. Even if it is 95% correct who would risk getting killed 5% of the time while driving?
  - detaro 7y ago
    Of course not 95/5%, but we rely on statistics that all kinds of bad cases will likely not happen every time we enter traffic. What the right statistic is, how to get good data on it, and mentally accept it and the loss of perceived control, that's going to be interesting.
    - tim333 7y ago
      Self driving probably won't really take off until it's clearly safer than human driving. Tesla's iffy autopilot statistics don't really do that yet.
- anoncareer0212 7y ago
  That's exactly what you're seeing Waymo do, they've been operating a paid taxi service at scale outside Phoenix for 6+ months
  - chrischen 7y ago
    Yes so the logical conclusion would be to scale that up, in whatever limited capacity it is currently serving.
amgin3 7y ago
Having 5+ companies each pouring billions into trying to make this technology a reality separately is ridiculous. All these companies should come together and work on a standardized single solution that can be shared between them. It will come much faster and be less expensive if they are pooling their resources.
- amgin3 7y ago
  yeah okay downvote me for presenting a reasonable solution. This website is full of fucking morons, I'm done here.
- selimthegrim 7y ago
  Everyone here worships at the temple of competition
- whenchamenia 7y ago
  But what if they standardized on some compromise, as they tend to? That alone would set progress back, not foreward. Think if there are multiple orgs with billions to throw at it, the more the merrier. If there were just a few with a few million each, your plan makes much better sense. At some point the beuracracy of collectivism overshadows its usefulness.
  - asdff 7y ago
    I dare you to name a good technology that came about due to a race of proprietary competition and not in close collaboration with the best talent in the field. It really is a waste to bin all this engineering talent apart just because their free backpacks have a different logo embroidered. You could have two engineers struggling with the exact same problem sitting in the same uber pool ride to work and they wouldn't be able to speak a word of it to each other due to shortsightedness by shareholders. There will be a point where a clear winner emerges, 5 competing companies turns to 3 and turns to 1, and all those hours and hours of engineering effort by the failures becomes a moot point. It's not like the 1 company that emerges will hire another 5 companies worth of engineering either, this is redundant work. You wouldn't even be able to learn from these failures until decades after the fact in a blog post from a retired engineer no longer bound to an NDA.
_cs2017_ 7y ago
> Krafcik went on to say that the auto industry might never produce a car capable of driving at any time of year, in any weather, under any conditions. What's the likely business model for Waymo if level 5 autonomy is unattainable? Also, what did he mean by "never"? Did he mean "within our lifetimes" or something? A strangely confusing statement for a CEO of a self driving company.
- xenospn 7y ago
  There are areas of the country with relatively stable weather and mild conditions (no snow, no storms, etc). Could work reasonably well there.
  - _cs2017_ 7y ago
    I thought the conditions he is concerned about are not merely bad weather. Doesn't his statement hint at giving up on self driving in SF/NYC/London urban traffic?
Derek_MK 7y ago
Related article: > Tesla Will Have Full Autonomy in 2020, Musk Says
- jgalt212 7y ago
  I believe virtually everything I read, and I think that is what makes me more of a selective human than someone who doesn't believe anything. David St. Hubbins
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
  Tesla has an advantage here in that they don't feel the need for their autonomy to be particularly safe.
- lm28469 7y ago
  Reminds me of Uber ex CEO saying he'd buy every single autonomous car Tesla will build by 2020. The dream is slowly fading away, Tesla, or any car really, won't be fully autonomous for a long time, Uber economic model doesn't make sense anymore because 90% of it was base don removing drivers entirely. It's like a dream built on top of a dream... https://www.businessinsider.com/top-vc-claims-uber-ceo-said-he-wants-to-buy-500000-self-driving-cars-from-tesla-2015-7?IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/top-vc-claims-uber-ceo-said-...
nixarian 7y ago
Sounds like the solution is to change roads
sxp 7y ago
>Krafcik went on to say that the auto industry might never produce a car capable of driving at any time of year, in any weather, under any conditions. “Autonomy will always have some constraints,” he added. This is an out-of-context quote. Right before that, the linked CNET article said "John Krafcik, head of the self-driving car unit of Google parent company Alphabet, said that though driverless cars are "truly here," they aren't ubiquitous yet. ". There is a big jump between L4 & L5 autonomy which is what Krafcik was discussing. But even achieving L4 (which is what Waymo has in its Phoenix tests) at mass scale will revolutionize the industry since it means cheap robocabs for large portions of the US for much of the year. The other companies are still struggling with L2 & L3, but Waymo's lead appears to be getting larger based on the public results they are showing. Tesla is the only one that's close since it has a public L2 system.
Creationer 7y ago
We might have to contemplate that we need to change our roads if we want automomous cars. We have lanes for carpooling - why not lanes for autonomous vehicles? The road surface could have special markers to centre the vehicle, and to position it in the correct lane for a certain destination. This could be a single lane in a highway, with shorter distances between cars (relying on the quicker reaction speeds of computers and the modern, well-maintained brakes of the cars themselves), allowing humans to overtake and recognise them easily. Then we need a standard method of communication between vehicles - braking, movement etc. - rather than relying on cameras and radar. Remove as many variables as possible and the task becomes much easier. Heck, we'll need a new method of charging road users for road use, without gas taxes, so we might as well introduce a standardised road pricing scheme as well (that takes into account vehicle size, weight, time, and location to calculate the price/km - and can communicate that to the end-user to allow them to optimise their travel).
- chipperyman573 7y ago
  You can't rely on what other cars are telling you because a bad actor could create a device that sends out false information that leads to crashes (send out "I'm now accelerating from 50mph to 60mph" then brake immediately, or even just not accelerate and continue to go 50mph). You could of course solve this by verifying all the information sent by cars, but then you have negated any benefits because you have to be able to detect anything they could send in a message.
  - Creationer 7y ago
    I think the potential for 'bad actors' on the roads is significantly reduced just by eliminating the human driver!
    - chipperyman573 7y ago
      How come? As it stands, anyone can be a bad actor but their impact is limited, and it requires a pretty big sacrifice (their health). For example, nothing is stopping someone from driving the wrong way on the highway other than a couple of Do Not Enter signs, but by crashing their car into oncoming traffic they risk losing just as much as the people they crash into.
ux-app 7y ago
Yeah full autonomy that matches or exceeds human driving is a loooong way away for sure. Closing the gap is not just about sensing the environment, but also understanding it. That's (probably) a Hard AI problem. Why is no one looking at retrofitting existing roads with markers that the car can use to follow? I've read suggestions of using magnetic markers which would have the added benefit of working through snow. Roads get new lines marked all the time, seems like embedding a magnetic marker at the same time would be quite feasible. This would basically be a tram line on every street. Who cares if the car needs to hand off to the human in the event of road works or missing markers? Those are fairly rare events on my commute at least.
- jonathanwallace 7y ago
  Some are working on this. Check out https://theray.org https://theray.org.
- nradov 7y ago
  Lane following isn't the hardest problem to solve. Current autonomous vehicle technology can follow lanes pretty well. The problem is with avoiding collisions while doing so, like if a pedestrian steps into the lane. And if the vehicle discovers a magnetic marker is missing, by that point it's too late to hand off to a human. The human might not be paying attention. The lag time is too long for safety.
- superkuh 7y ago
  Winter driving in cold regions is hard. Knowing where the middle of the road is and the car's position relative to it is only the very start of the problem. In regions that have roads not cleared of snow for multiple days the lane positions change. The evolution of the position of the lanes is not strongly defined by where the previous lines were. The obvious spot to drive for a human would contradict the magnetic, ground penetrating radar database, or whatever marker is used. Markers of any type would be useful for awareness of car self position but not sufficient for what the lane has become. Even as a human you have to guess sometimes because it's not possible to sense it. You just have to know what humans would do. Machines aren't great at heuteristics and guessing what humans might do.
netwanderer3 7y ago
Uber is screwed. They clearly stated in their SEC filing that the possibility of deploying full autonomous cars will significantly impact their future earnings.
- scythe 7y ago
  That would be true even if they believed the chance that autonomous cars would succeed was 1%. If it happens, it will still significantly impact their earnings.
cletus 7y ago
Colour me not surprised in the least. Speaking as someone in tech talking to others in tech I'm constantly surprised how optimistic people are about the timetable for fully self-driving cars. Honestly, I think we're still 20+ years away. Here's another thing to consider: people act differently when its a machine vs a person they're affecting. There are countless examples of this eg: - I live in a building with a doorman. The main purpose of a doorman is to be a person to prevent criminal action from starting. After all a person can be fooled, distracted or bribed but people seem less inclined to mess with an unpredictable person vs, say, an unmanned security system on a similar building. - Forget humans, this applies to animals. It's well-documented that just having a dog (or even saying you do) reduces the likelihood you'll get burgled. Thieves will generally pick easier, more predictable prey. - ... and this brings us back to cars. Reading some of the coverage of Waymo, Uber, Tesla, etc you see that other drivers act in ways around a car they realize has no human driver than they would if it were a human-driven car. Cutting it off, messing with it, etc. How exactly does an autonomous car deal with that aspect of human nature?
- varelse 7y ago
  The CEO of Aurora (who previously led self-driving cars at Google) agrees with you... https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/23/18512618/how-long-will-it-take-to-phase-in-driverless-cars https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/23/18512618/how-long-will-it...
- snowwrestler 7y ago
  Driving is a social activity. You’re interacting with other humans, with only their behavior (and maybe the occasional gesture) from which to infer intent. From that perspective, think of what a computer has to “know” in order to get along? It’s way more complex than just following the road and not hitting things. Maybe the best chance for a fully autonomous driving experience is some city that takes the next step beyond congestion pricing and reserves their dense core for autonomous vehicles. If computers only have to deal with other computers, and pedestrians, that seems a much more tractable problem.
  - nradov 7y ago
8bitsrule 7y ago
"Within a generation ... the problem of creating 'artificial intelligence' will substantially be solved." - Marvin Minsky, 1967, Computation
killjoywashere 7y ago
Einstein's annus mirabilis was 1905 and it took decades of determined, international promotion of the Einstein brand, World War 2, a letter from Einstein to Roosevelt, plus another 6 years and 33 billion 1945 dollars (473B USD today), and a staggering collective of the smartest minds to ever walk the Earth in an existential race against a mortal enemy to develop nuclear weapons. NASA's shuttle project started in 1969, cost $200B, was shut down in 2011 and never got close to it's planned 50 launches per year. This stuff is hard.
- tachyonbeam 7y ago
  I have a book from 1982 that predicts fully self-driving cars by 1995.
- dx034 7y ago
  But both of these were mostly science problems. Self driving cars are about making machines interact with humans. That has never been solved before. Self driving in itself wouldn't be an issue, it's the other humans on the road that make it so hard to solve. One of the main problems for manufacturers is that we have never before solved a similar problem, so there's nothing to compare it to.
  - asdff 7y ago
    >it's the other humans on the road that make it so hard to solve. Humans, cats and dogs, deer, tumbling rocks, low flying seagulls, tumbling trashbags or a toppled trashbin bin, palm fronds, drunk people jaywalking, drunk guy in a jeter jersey directing traffic after a yankees game, edgy teenagers pulling the invisible rope trick (or just yanking a sheet on a string), puddles reflecting humans on the sidewalk, blind turns and hidden driveways, competitors self driving tech, the metawars that will result by trying to raise a competitors accident rates (and not doing that would be leaving money on the table).
- beefield 7y ago
  > This stuff is hard. Luckily we attract our best minds with highest salaries to solve the pressing problem how to get people click more ads. (Yes, sarcasm.)
q845712 7y ago
One of the things the article names is the challenges caused by snow, ice, etc. I realize I'm in the minority, but I actually think there's lots of conditions that we shouldn't be driving in -- conditions where the obscured lines of sight, slipperiness of the road, etc, actually mean that we should either be off the road entirely, or traveling at speeds far far below normal. I know this happens, but I honestly believe that it should be far more common -- so common that it would likely take a chunk out of the economy. For instance you're driving on the freeway and it starts to rain -- can you really reduce your speed, and/or leave an extra "car length" between the car in front of you, so that you'll still have time to stop if needed? In my experience, no one else wants to slow down, so it's safer for me to keep up with the slowest traffic than to go what I would now deem a safe speed.
- skywhopper 7y ago
  I am sure there are plenty of studies out there about this, that would be more useful than speculating. There’s an increased risk, but is it that much greater than typical driving risk? I’m sure more accidents happen in bad weather but I don’t think it’s anywhere near “no one should drive in the rain at night” level of panic you suggest. But regardless of the extreme cases, there are plenty of scenarios in which human drivers may be slightly impaired Which current state of the art autonomous technology is not just impaired, but entirely helpless: simple, common road construction, missing or obscured lane markings, precipitation of any sort, malfunctioning stoplights, delivery trucks or dumpsters in the lane, negotiating a busy parking lot, any atypical road usage of any sort, roundabouts, dirt roads, unmapped roads, stationary objects... Humans can handle all of these situations without special training or instructions.
- dbish 7y ago
  Absolutely agree. People don't realize how long it takes to stop your car when the roads are wet, and they keep going at high speed. I think the digital speed limit signs that are adjustable should be used more often to greatly reduce speed limits and discourage the standard 55mph+ since the coefficient of friction can be half or less then during dry conditions (not to mention loss of visibility). http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Mechanics/frictire.html http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Mechanics/frictir...
SubiculumCode 7y ago
It was always clear to me that to accelerate the arrival of autonomous driving providing more consistent and controlled roadways would be key. That is why freeway driving will come well before any autonomous city street driving.Even the freeway is not consistent enough, but could more easily be adapted to some standard much more easily than, say, the roads in NYC.
jaimex2 7y ago
It's awesome watching the race play out. It very much does look like at this point that Tesla are on a spint to the finish line while everyone else took a wrong turn near the start following Google.
- rayiner 7y ago
  What on earth makes you say that? Tesla’s whole model seems like a bust—unlikely to evolve beyond cruise control+.
  - tim333 7y ago
    It depends a bit whether you believe their CEO or not.
    - jaimex2 7y ago
      I do. Media circus aside Musk has a reputation of delivering working solutions to hard problems. If they still had Chriss Latner heading Autopilot I'd be skeptical, but they have Andrej Karpathy who is a god when it comes to machine learning and computer vision.
  - olau 7y ago
    If you watch the presentation at the Tesla Autonomy Day, the dude in charge of their deep neural network explained that they think basing the whole system upon cameras is necessary since HD maps and LIDAR are too limiting. Basically, the network needs to be able to see what people are doing to drive safely. They've devised a method of upon training data for their network and is basically iterating through the problems, finding training data and counter-training data, as far as I understood the presentation. Whether this is going to work or not, we shall see.
    - pas 7y ago
      Have they solved the world model problem, or mentioned anything about that? If not, they are lost in noise. Video streams are so full of maybe signals, and ML loves that. As long as they don't have a fundamental (sub)system that knows how much space it needs to safely proceed at the current speed, how the 99.99% of the roads of the world work geometrically, and how to infer this from visual data, they are in trouble. (That said, I guess Karpathy is perfectly aware of this.)
bayareanative 7y ago
Hmm. I was driving a rental Hyundai that has auto-lane steering. I constantly wondered if it would follow the wrong path at choice decision opportunities (exits and forks) or side-swipe another vehicle trying to follow a lane. It's quite aggressive in basically overriding the driver's input without significant force and not notifying audibly when it disables itself (except for a visual indicator, a small icon in the cluster turns from green to white, but it requires "polling" behavior of constantly looking down).
- de_watcher 7y ago
  You can feel if it's on or off from the resistance. It requires you to apply force to the wheel anyway, otherwise there is an no-hands-on-the-wheel alert.
zaroth 7y ago
If safe, reliable, autonomous driving is a decade away that’s half a million lives lost. If it’s two decades away then a million. The incentives are there to make this work. The funding is there to make this work. The technology is actually there to make this work, if you can change some of the rules to get there. It’s worth over a trillion dollars annually to make this work. It’s the great infrastructure product of the 2020s and we should get fucking started already.
- asdff 7y ago
  Are self driving cars going to eliminate traffic deaths? Tesla already has a body count.
  - zaroth 7y ago
    Eliminate totally? Of course not. But we have a long way to go before 1 fatality per 1 billion miles would be a bad thing. That would be an order of magnitude improvement. I think we can get two orders of magnitude in 10 years. Autonomy absolutely will have a body count. It cannot save every single driver. And so if we want to be able to enjoy the benefits of autonomy that saves almost every single driver, we better get comfortable with the notion that some people will die in self driving cars. If we can’t accept that the technology will never be perfect we will just keep dooming 30,000 people (in the US alone) to die each year, not to mention countless maimings (2 million actually) and property damage.
beefield 7y ago
I would be 99% happy regarding autonomous driving if I got a platooning hardware kit installed into my car so that on highway I could connect behind another car/truck that is going to same direction than me and take a nap or watch a movie. This should be easier problem than full self driving car by orders of magnitude, and I do not quite understand why platooning gets so small share of the self-driving hype.
- badpun 7y ago
  The first driver ("platoon commander") would still need to be human. I'm not sure people would sign up for this, as your error could result in deaths of people in cars following you.
  - beefield 7y ago
    The we should have problems finding bus drivers? Anyway, I am more thinking the platoon commanders would be truck drivers that already have legal requirements for rest and no capability for speeding in highway.
ErikAugust 7y ago
If we are rethinking the timetable of the self-driving car, is it safe to rethink the whole future path of transportation? Do cars have to be it?
kieranmaine 7y ago
After reading this I'm thinking Tesla claims of being close to achieving level 5 autonomy aren't pure hot air. Toyota's requirement of "8.8 billion test miles for safe deployment of self-driving vehicles", puts Tesla well on the path to this. I found articles online stating Autopilot has driven 1 - 1.2 billion miles. Assuming that they've gathered many more miles of test data of human driving, then at least they have the raw data on which to iterate their platform. Whilst I'm still skeptical I've gained a new appreciation of how pushing the autopilot package allowed them to gain a big advantage in terms of raw data.
- shawabawa3 7y ago
  I personally think Tesla simply doesn't have the sensors for self-driving. I imagine the huge amount of data they've collected is largely useless because they aren't collecting the right data (e.g. LIDAR, radar, higher definition video)
  - pas 7y ago
    They probably have the right data for safe disengagement. If they can solve that, the rest truly can be incrementally added.
- skohan 7y ago
  After riding in a Model X recently using Autopilot I am less skeptical than before.
- usrusr 7y ago
  Racking up a very high number of fair weather easy miles has zero effect on the machine's ability to tackle more difficult situations.
  - kieranmaine 7y ago
    Very valid point, but Tesla's fleet will drive in a greater variety of weather than Waymo's, potentially gathering a better data set. However as another comment points out it could all be garbage data.
dalbasal 7y ago
Geo-fencing counts, IMO. "Driver assist" does not. Full autonomy respresents an economic paradigm, geo fenced or not. When private cars went mainstream, the economic cascade was so broad that no one could have predicted it. Supermarkets, for example, and the subsequent impact on food industry was a side effect of private cars. Suburbs. Disneyland... Self driving is such a change. Starting from geo-fencing is just a constraint on how fast the change happens. Private cars were limited by affordability instead. There's always something. Once these cars are on (geo-fenced) roads, infrastructure (eg signs) and vehicle can start adapting to eachother. There will be real economic pressures to "open up" roads and highways to autonomous driving. The tech problems in the space are so interesting, we forget about other aspects. Ultimately though, geo-fencing or any other hack could get us to the point where product problems get solved without a 1:1 relationship to solving tech problems.
Proven 7y ago
Everyone but Tony Stark. A year from now it won't matter though because Tesla will be bankrupt.
MR4D 7y ago
AI Winter is coming. (Sorry to riff on GoT, but I couldn’t resist)
jillesvangurp 7y ago
I think there's another thing going on here and we've seen a similar pattern before with electrical cars about 10 years ago. Ten years ago was when most of the car industry believed it had decades to adapt to full EV. It turns out that they had much less than a decade. By 2017 most manufacturers were scrambling to accelerate timelines for internal R&D when they realized competitors had other timelines and were about to grab some serious market share. This is now playing out in the market. Several ICE production lines have been shut down (GM, Ford, etc). Most manufacturers have launched or are about to launch full EVs. At this point several manufacturers are putting billions in making mass production happen in the next few years. I predict the same will happen with autonomous driving. Most manufacturers are completely unprepared for it and behind with their R&D. They are actively looking to buy as much time as they can get because they know they won't be there. However, some manufacturers are ahead of the curve here and it's not just Tesla. When this stuff gets good enough, it means some manufacturers will have a huge competitive advantage over basically everything else. Everything you read about this needs to be put in this context. In other words, some manufacturers are dragging their heels here and it's the same manufacturers that are also struggling to adapt to full EV. And they are using the same strategies to manipulate the timelines. Think futuristic looking concept cars that will never drive, lots of lobbying about how cool their R&D is, and a distinct lack of commitment to any timelines, combined with regular reports on serious safety issues that are obviously going to delay everything by decades. That's what this article says. What it translates to is: several manufacturers are getting to level 5 autonomy in the next few years and it is going to take decades for everybody else to catch up and mass produce this stuff. Tesla is probably over confident about the timelines but well on track to making lots of progress in the next few years nevertheless. Waymo looks like they are making progress as well. However, they are held back by the notion that they are more of a pure tech play and less of manufacturing/logistics play. In other words, they are dependent on the before mentioned manufacturers dragging their heels. IMHO several manufacturers are close enough to solving most of the issues here that there are going to be a few leaps forward in the next few years. These leaps are going to force the agenda for the rest of the industry. Mostly the timelines for autonomous and a switch to full EV are actually aligned. By the time most cars will be EVs, most of them will also be fully autonomous. That's roughly 15-20 years from now. Plenty of time to tackle any remaining issues with sensors, snow, and other edge cases. Yes, that's hard but people are throwing billions at these problems and making rapid progress. The first level 5 cars might be on the market within as little as 2-5 years. The biggest hurdle here is non technical: legislation. Tesla is being ambitious here (obviously) but even in 5 years they'd have the market largely to themselves.

155 points by AndrewBissell 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

After seeing some autonomous cars in action, I believe they are 20 years away. In that sense I mean a fully automated driverless car that you can command to do what you want. It would be great if you could buy a car, have it bring you to work while you read or slept, then after dropping you off, go earn money while it was ubering people around until it was time to pick you up. But I highly doubt this will happen in less than 20 years at this point. There's just too much lacking. It needs real artificial intelligence, not just machine learning and pattern matching. The car needs to know "that's a paper bag flying in the wind I'm about to hit", or "that truck in front of me is stopped."

llukas 7y ago
> "that truck in front of me is stopped." Easy if you're not Tesla and have lidar.
nradov 7y ago
Considering that we have made ~0 progress toward true AGI, I'm skeptical that level 5 autonomous driving will arrive even within 20 years.
- tim333 7y ago
  We certainly don't have true AGI but there has been progress in that general direction eg Deepmind's AlphaZero, StarCraft and this thing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17313937 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17313937
  - nradov 7y ago
    No those aren't progress toward AGI at all. They are tremendously impressive technical achievements, but from an AGI perspective they're basically just parlor tricks. The reality is that for AGI we don't even know which direction to go yet so it's literally impossible to determine whether we're making forward progress toward the goal. Show me a computer as smart as mouse and then I'll believe we're making progress toward AGI.

panpanna 7y ago

Multiple companies are currently testing level 5 autonomous fleets in some European cities. I think the article misses that you can't reach 5 without efficient and secure v2x.

frosted-flakes 7y ago
V2X?
- eb3c90 7y ago
  Apparently vehicle to everything [1]. The car industry seems to love V2* terminology. V2H is connecting an electric vehicle to a home to provide power in an emergency. [1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/v/v2x-vehicletovehicle-or-vehicletoinfrastructure.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/v/v2x-vehicletovehicle-or... [2] https://thedriven.io/2018/10/19/v2g-whats-the-state-of-play-with-vehicle-to-grid-vehicle-to-home-technology/ https://thedriven.io/2018/10/19/v2g-whats-the-state-of-play-...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
wpietri 7y ago
Could you point to some evidence that somebody has actually achieved level 5? Hopefully with a clear description of what the limitations are (e.g., weather, geography, time of day). Claims are easy. Especially claims of testing.
- panpanna 7y ago
  I don't know the details, these were from companies I never heard of. But these were driving around in fairly busy European streets with zero human interaction. (Don't like the new HN atmosphere were people down vote any comment they don't like)
  - wpietri 7y ago
    It's not any comment; it's a bold claim with no evidence. Also, it's not clear to me that you understand the levels. A car "driving around in fairly busy European streets with zero human interaction" is evidence of level 3, nothing higher.

MegaButts 7y ago

Based on what I hear from those in the know, the perception is that it's decades away instead of years. And an even more complicated problem isn't whether or not they can make it work with considerable constraints (geofence, no highways, avoid several spots that are hard to handle, weather, assistance via remote operation when stuck), but how to do it profitably. The cars are expensive. The maintenance is expensive. The ongoing cleaning, charging, and prepping of vehicles is expensive. Constantly updating HD maps is expensive. Of course the engineers to keep everything running smoothly are expensive. And the small army of people you need to actually talk to and help customers - something Google has basically never done before - is expensive. I love the idea of self-driving cars and I really can't wait until they're ready. But I'd say that's going to happen about as quickly as changing the infrastructure in this country. Personally I'd rather have better public transit anyway.

maximus1983 7y ago
TBH this is the pareto principle at work. Sure you can get a car roughly driving around the city autonomously (there are basic self driving cars back in the 1950s that drove on a wire track) but getting it perfect is where the vast majority of effort is going to be expended.
joe_the_user 7y ago
Yes, The thing about self-driving you can get to 90% or 99% or even 99.9% success and then find the cost of closing part of that extra sliver of non-success is the same as all the work you've done. Especially since testing those corners cases is hard since they are unusual. There's even some part of the sliver that even is "AI complete". Very small but you don't know where it is, etc. But I'd say that's going to happen about as quickly as changing the infrastructure in this country. Key point! Automation has traditionally been much, much easier when you are engineering a situation where you control all the variables. Automated factories are common. Automated warehouses are coming. Automated dock systems exist. In these situation, there's a hard border between "inside" and "outside". Roads are generally regular but the border between insight and outside fuzzy. Google can run it's self-driving taxis in a suburb in Arizona where roads are as regular as could be imagined but expanding beyond that is much, much hard than one imagines. Note: I recommend this blog which periodically tracks progress in self-driving cars as well as making intelligent, critical comments on current AI. https://blog.piekniewski.info/ https://blog.piekniewski.info/

quotemstr 7y ago

How much of this delay is just perfectionism and excess risk aversion? In pretty much any pursuit, demanding perfection ensures that you'll never be finished. Based on what I'm seen, autonomous vehicles already work. Waymo's cars have driven millions of miles. Other companies have working systems too. The technology is already at the point where it's useful. I understand wanting to keep people safe, but the benefits of this technology so are enormous that I'd rather companies launch now and iterate than spend decades wringing every last disengagement out of the system while the carnage on our highways continues. I feel like we're in one of those situations where everyone is just afraid to be first. Meanwhile, people die every day.

frosted-flakes 7y ago
You'd rather have car companies release beta software to millions of cars than stick with the status quo? This isn't the Windows 10 Insider Preview. Cars can kill people, and production vehicles should never contain beta software, which is beta because it's buggy/untested/unreliable.
- quotemstr 7y ago
  No software is perfect --- and that goes for the wetware in our heads too. Why would you want people to keep dying on the roads just so we can avoid shipping imperfect-but-still-superhuman autonomous driving vehicles? We need a more nuanced outlook than "Disengagement! NO RELEASE!".
  - frosted-flakes 7y ago
    Do you think beta software belongs in airplanes too? We sure could do with a lot more 737 MAX incidents.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - CamperBob2 7y ago

areoform 7y ago

I have made this prediction multiple times throughout the last 8 years based on my knowledge of robotics. I have argued with family members who are VCs as well as enthusiastic technical observers based on simple first principles reasoning. It is highly unlikely that completely autonomous vehicles will be present on the streets - interacting with humans, cars, and random events in real-time - within the next decade. What is more feasible and likely to occur is that large chunks of trucking may become "automated" in the form of a hyper-advanced cruise control, but these vehicles will lack Level 5 autonomy for their whole route. To understand why, requires a deeper examination of where this technology came from; Stanley, Thrun’s robotic car that was acquired by Google and is the basis for Waymo’s tech. Thrun notes; > “In the last Grand Challenge, it didn't really matter whether an obstacle was a rock or a bush, because either way you'd just drive around it," says Sebastian Thrun, an associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering. "The current challenge is to move from just sensing the environment to understanding the environment." http://news.stanford.edu/pr/2007/pr-junior-021407.html http://news.stanford.edu/pr/2007/pr-junior-021407.html More precisely, to interact and function in the wild, the robot needs to understand, distinguish, and model the properties of wildly different entities. And these entities aren't just other people - they are everything in its environment. And this includes random events like; people walking into traffic, objects falling onto the road, sudden rain and hail, or just potholes. This is not a problem that can be trivially solved with better sensors or cheaper LIDAR. It is a conceptual problem that can not be trivially brute forced nor simulated in advance as each unique permutation is just different enough to confound existing models. Even if such different and confounding events are six sigma in nature and have a probability of occurring 0.00034% for every mile driven, then at 3.22 trillion miles/year (https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/02/21/516512439/record-number-of-miles-driven-in-u-s-last-year https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/02/21/516512439...) Americans will experience 10,948,000 anomalies per year. Or, about 20.8 events per minute. 20.8 anomalies per minute is a pretty big number. That’s a potential accident every 3 seconds or so. And that’s a six sigma estimate. It is hard to emphasize how hard six sigma performance is for the current generation of autonomous vehicle hardware. You might dispute the numbers, but they are meant to be an illustration and an intuitive explanation for why this problem is Hard with a capital H. Unlike some professionals, I don’t believe Strong AI is necessary to solve this problem, but Weak AI is still a form of AI. Technology that's just out of reach today. At this point, people counter with Google’s cars. After all, seeing is believing, and haven’t they been seen to run successfully for millions of miles at this point? Yes, but... Waymo/Google's success is hard to replicate. No one else can bend the rules far enough to achieve their headway. Most of us forget that before starting the project, Google used LIDAR to create highly detailed maps of every environment their cars will ever be in. Engineers then captured standard human driving on that route over and over across different hours. These elements were then combined within their model to pre-compute routes before any real world driving happened. Google was able to achieve its miraculous results because of its ownership of GMaps, Street View and the resources to deploy a fleet to map everything in advance. No one else has these resources. No one else can acquire them cheaply. And even Alphabet, a trillion-ish dollar corporation can't replicate this package for the entire world. Maybe someone will figure out a way to create precise sub-eighth-of-an-inch level 3D models of environments using drones and satellite images, but until that time this technology is too expensive to deploy. It is hard to emphasize how important a distinction this is. The "only" thing a Google/Waymo robot does in real-time is that it checks the difference between the recorded dataset and whatever the real-time LIDAR + camera feed is saying. Or in other words, for every point of the route, Google has generated an expected set of values, and any deviations from these are used by the car to make real-time decisions. https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intelligence/how-google-self-driving-car-works https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-inte... However, even this partial solution is tempting. Because it works. But, sadly, that's not the whole story. What gets lost in the re-telling of this story is that this technique means that the cars can't work in unstructured environments. They are unsafe for most roads, especially uncontrollable, unpredictable and narrow residential roads. It's why these cars exist inside strict geo-fences even when they're ferrying passangers around, like in Phoenix. Where the car seems to mostly serve the downtown area with very little residential coverage (caveats apply, I couldn't find a map). But, even getting this far is a huge technical achievement, even if it's not the fundamental breakthrough we've been looking for. We should be prudent, but optimistic. There are a lot of smart people out there who are working on this problem right now. They are figuring out really clever ways to deal with these edge cases and they will solve this problem. Even if it's not on the hype cycle's schedule. With that in mind, I'd like to suggest a better model for thinking about Driverless Vehicles is another Google service, Translate. It's quite good, but when was the last time someone translated an entire book with it (and it came out to be readable/sensible)? The system's performance - due to its statistical roots - seems to be fundamentally asymptotic w.r.t. the data presented to it. It can't be improved beyond a certain point even if you throw more data at it. I suspect that the current generation of driverless vehicles will be the same. http://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/papers/elephants.pdf http://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/papers/elephants.pdf http://arxiv.org/pdf/1604.00289.pdf http://arxiv.org/pdf/1604.00289.pdf Before the needed breakthrough happens, it is likely that the cutting edge won't advance beyond Level 3 in the next decade; > I would guess Tesla’s position on this would be that most of the time, yes, you can rely on it, but because Tesla has no idea when you won’t be able to rely on it, you can’t really rely on it. https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self-driving/fatal-tesla-autopilot-crash-reminds-us-that-robots-arent-perfect https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/sel... And that's okay. We might not have driverless cars by 2020, but we probably will by the mid 2030's and that sounds pretty darn fantastic to me.

siruncledrew 7y ago

From a marketing/business perspective for the automotive industry, my hypothesis is that it’s in their interest to favor publicizing the ‘best-case scenario’ earliest dates over realistic target dates for these kinds of milestones to hype the public up and make a company look like they are ahead of the pack in innovation. This is the sentiment I gathered from also looking back at previous announcements in various industries (see r/retrofuturism on reddit) where a CEO will say that something is 5 years away when in practicality it’s at least 5 years away from being 5 years away.

YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago

>> “It’s really, really hard,” Krafcik said during a live-streamed tech conference. “You don’t know what you don’t know until you’re actually in there and trying to do things.” Now, where was that Rodney Brooks interview? Ah, here it is: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/2nd-Part-RB-for-Ars-Transcript-2.pdf https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/2nd-P... >> Rob Reid: (...) Why do you think these people and others are overestimating the rate of development in this field? >> Rodney Brooks: I think they're making a bunch of mistakes. I asked them when did the first car drive down a freeway for 10 miles at 50 miles an hour. They know that the Google cars did that in 2004 or 2005. It was actually done in Germany in 1987. >> Rob Reid: Wow. >> Rodney Brooks: When are we going to get the first car, hands off the steering wheel, feet off the pedals, drive coast to coast in the US? Yeah, well, it actually happened in 1995 with the Navlab Project from Carnegie Mellon University. My point is, everyone thinks, oh this is just a [inaudible 00:44:50], this is going to happen quickly. It's been around a long time to get to where we are. I have now demonstrated to them that their scale is wrong, their start point is wrong. It has taken a lot longer to get to where we are now. So, to anyone who had any understanding of the technology it must have been obvious for a long, long time that "it's really, really hard" and that it wouldn't just take a few years after the time that Google announced the Google car. I struggle to believe that Krafcik is not one of those people, or that major automotive company CEOs are not. Basically, those people have been bullshitting everyone and they're still bullshitting everyone, and they were probably not even interested in developing self-driving cars in the first place, it was all just some stupid marketing game supported by a very excitable tech press and a gullible public.

save_ferris 7y ago
Your point reminds me a bit of Theranos, and how they were able to coast on a completely fraudulent but awe-inspiring idea. It might not be related, but whenever I read stories this, I'm reminded of the ways that tech is marketed in the world. It's impossible for the public to understand whether or not a certain technology is feasible, practical, or even possible, but marketing teams get an unbelievable amount of leeway when marketing products and services. And they get to do it without really telling you what data is collected and how it's used, etc., etc. The power asymmetry between what tech companies are allowed to say versus the limited technical understanding of the public is brutal, and not getting any better.

chrischen 7y ago

I don’t understand the obsession or even the belief that fully autonomous driving is around the corner. When has anyone, much less Google, released a product that worked at such advanced levels from day 1 and starting from no product in the market? They should deploy autonomous cars at limited production scales in specific environments, and build it out from there—but we haven’t even seen that yet.

StreamBright 7y ago
I don’t understand how can anybody take it seriously an approach that relies on statistics for self driving cars. Even if it is 95% correct who would risk getting killed 5% of the time while driving?
- detaro 7y ago
  Of course not 95/5%, but we rely on statistics that all kinds of bad cases will likely not happen every time we enter traffic. What the right statistic is, how to get good data on it, and mentally accept it and the loss of perceived control, that's going to be interesting.
  - tim333 7y ago
    Self driving probably won't really take off until it's clearly safer than human driving. Tesla's iffy autopilot statistics don't really do that yet.
anoncareer0212 7y ago
That's exactly what you're seeing Waymo do, they've been operating a paid taxi service at scale outside Phoenix for 6+ months
- chrischen 7y ago
  Yes so the logical conclusion would be to scale that up, in whatever limited capacity it is currently serving.

amgin3 7y ago

Having 5+ companies each pouring billions into trying to make this technology a reality separately is ridiculous. All these companies should come together and work on a standardized single solution that can be shared between them. It will come much faster and be less expensive if they are pooling their resources.

amgin3 7y ago
yeah okay downvote me for presenting a reasonable solution. This website is full of fucking morons, I'm done here.
selimthegrim 7y ago
Everyone here worships at the temple of competition
whenchamenia 7y ago
But what if they standardized on some compromise, as they tend to? That alone would set progress back, not foreward. Think if there are multiple orgs with billions to throw at it, the more the merrier. If there were just a few with a few million each, your plan makes much better sense. At some point the beuracracy of collectivism overshadows its usefulness.
- asdff 7y ago
  I dare you to name a good technology that came about due to a race of proprietary competition and not in close collaboration with the best talent in the field. It really is a waste to bin all this engineering talent apart just because their free backpacks have a different logo embroidered. You could have two engineers struggling with the exact same problem sitting in the same uber pool ride to work and they wouldn't be able to speak a word of it to each other due to shortsightedness by shareholders. There will be a point where a clear winner emerges, 5 competing companies turns to 3 and turns to 1, and all those hours and hours of engineering effort by the failures becomes a moot point. It's not like the 1 company that emerges will hire another 5 companies worth of engineering either, this is redundant work. You wouldn't even be able to learn from these failures until decades after the fact in a blog post from a retired engineer no longer bound to an NDA.

_cs2017_ 7y ago

> Krafcik went on to say that the auto industry might never produce a car capable of driving at any time of year, in any weather, under any conditions. What's the likely business model for Waymo if level 5 autonomy is unattainable? Also, what did he mean by "never"? Did he mean "within our lifetimes" or something? A strangely confusing statement for a CEO of a self driving company.

xenospn 7y ago
There are areas of the country with relatively stable weather and mild conditions (no snow, no storms, etc). Could work reasonably well there.
- _cs2017_ 7y ago
  I thought the conditions he is concerned about are not merely bad weather. Doesn't his statement hint at giving up on self driving in SF/NYC/London urban traffic?

Derek_MK 7y ago

Related article: > Tesla Will Have Full Autonomy in 2020, Musk Says

jgalt212 7y ago
I believe virtually everything I read, and I think that is what makes me more of a selective human than someone who doesn't believe anything. David St. Hubbins
6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
Tesla has an advantage here in that they don't feel the need for their autonomy to be particularly safe.
lm28469 7y ago
Reminds me of Uber ex CEO saying he'd buy every single autonomous car Tesla will build by 2020. The dream is slowly fading away, Tesla, or any car really, won't be fully autonomous for a long time, Uber economic model doesn't make sense anymore because 90% of it was base don removing drivers entirely. It's like a dream built on top of a dream... https://www.businessinsider.com/top-vc-claims-uber-ceo-said-he-wants-to-buy-500000-self-driving-cars-from-tesla-2015-7?IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/top-vc-claims-uber-ceo-said-...

nixarian 7y ago

Sounds like the solution is to change roads

sxp 7y ago

>Krafcik went on to say that the auto industry might never produce a car capable of driving at any time of year, in any weather, under any conditions. “Autonomy will always have some constraints,” he added. This is an out-of-context quote. Right before that, the linked CNET article said "John Krafcik, head of the self-driving car unit of Google parent company Alphabet, said that though driverless cars are "truly here," they aren't ubiquitous yet. ". There is a big jump between L4 & L5 autonomy which is what Krafcik was discussing. But even achieving L4 (which is what Waymo has in its Phoenix tests) at mass scale will revolutionize the industry since it means cheap robocabs for large portions of the US for much of the year. The other companies are still struggling with L2 & L3, but Waymo's lead appears to be getting larger based on the public results they are showing. Tesla is the only one that's close since it has a public L2 system.

Creationer 7y ago

We might have to contemplate that we need to change our roads if we want automomous cars. We have lanes for carpooling - why not lanes for autonomous vehicles? The road surface could have special markers to centre the vehicle, and to position it in the correct lane for a certain destination. This could be a single lane in a highway, with shorter distances between cars (relying on the quicker reaction speeds of computers and the modern, well-maintained brakes of the cars themselves), allowing humans to overtake and recognise them easily. Then we need a standard method of communication between vehicles - braking, movement etc. - rather than relying on cameras and radar. Remove as many variables as possible and the task becomes much easier. Heck, we'll need a new method of charging road users for road use, without gas taxes, so we might as well introduce a standardised road pricing scheme as well (that takes into account vehicle size, weight, time, and location to calculate the price/km - and can communicate that to the end-user to allow them to optimise their travel).

chipperyman573 7y ago
You can't rely on what other cars are telling you because a bad actor could create a device that sends out false information that leads to crashes (send out "I'm now accelerating from 50mph to 60mph" then brake immediately, or even just not accelerate and continue to go 50mph). You could of course solve this by verifying all the information sent by cars, but then you have negated any benefits because you have to be able to detect anything they could send in a message.
- Creationer 7y ago
  I think the potential for 'bad actors' on the roads is significantly reduced just by eliminating the human driver!
  - chipperyman573 7y ago
    How come? As it stands, anyone can be a bad actor but their impact is limited, and it requires a pretty big sacrifice (their health). For example, nothing is stopping someone from driving the wrong way on the highway other than a couple of Do Not Enter signs, but by crashing their car into oncoming traffic they risk losing just as much as the people they crash into.

ux-app 7y ago

Yeah full autonomy that matches or exceeds human driving is a loooong way away for sure. Closing the gap is not just about sensing the environment, but also understanding it. That's (probably) a Hard AI problem. Why is no one looking at retrofitting existing roads with markers that the car can use to follow? I've read suggestions of using magnetic markers which would have the added benefit of working through snow. Roads get new lines marked all the time, seems like embedding a magnetic marker at the same time would be quite feasible. This would basically be a tram line on every street. Who cares if the car needs to hand off to the human in the event of road works or missing markers? Those are fairly rare events on my commute at least.

jonathanwallace 7y ago
Some are working on this. Check out https://theray.org https://theray.org.
nradov 7y ago
Lane following isn't the hardest problem to solve. Current autonomous vehicle technology can follow lanes pretty well. The problem is with avoiding collisions while doing so, like if a pedestrian steps into the lane. And if the vehicle discovers a magnetic marker is missing, by that point it's too late to hand off to a human. The human might not be paying attention. The lag time is too long for safety.
superkuh 7y ago
Winter driving in cold regions is hard. Knowing where the middle of the road is and the car's position relative to it is only the very start of the problem. In regions that have roads not cleared of snow for multiple days the lane positions change. The evolution of the position of the lanes is not strongly defined by where the previous lines were. The obvious spot to drive for a human would contradict the magnetic, ground penetrating radar database, or whatever marker is used. Markers of any type would be useful for awareness of car self position but not sufficient for what the lane has become. Even as a human you have to guess sometimes because it's not possible to sense it. You just have to know what humans would do. Machines aren't great at heuteristics and guessing what humans might do.

netwanderer3 7y ago

Uber is screwed. They clearly stated in their SEC filing that the possibility of deploying full autonomous cars will significantly impact their future earnings.

scythe 7y ago
That would be true even if they believed the chance that autonomous cars would succeed was 1%. If it happens, it will still significantly impact their earnings.

cletus 7y ago

Colour me not surprised in the least. Speaking as someone in tech talking to others in tech I'm constantly surprised how optimistic people are about the timetable for fully self-driving cars. Honestly, I think we're still 20+ years away. Here's another thing to consider: people act differently when its a machine vs a person they're affecting. There are countless examples of this eg: - I live in a building with a doorman. The main purpose of a doorman is to be a person to prevent criminal action from starting. After all a person can be fooled, distracted or bribed but people seem less inclined to mess with an unpredictable person vs, say, an unmanned security system on a similar building. - Forget humans, this applies to animals. It's well-documented that just having a dog (or even saying you do) reduces the likelihood you'll get burgled. Thieves will generally pick easier, more predictable prey. - ... and this brings us back to cars. Reading some of the coverage of Waymo, Uber, Tesla, etc you see that other drivers act in ways around a car they realize has no human driver than they would if it were a human-driven car. Cutting it off, messing with it, etc. How exactly does an autonomous car deal with that aspect of human nature?

varelse 7y ago
The CEO of Aurora (who previously led self-driving cars at Google) agrees with you... https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/23/18512618/how-long-will-it-take-to-phase-in-driverless-cars https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/23/18512618/how-long-will-it...
snowwrestler 7y ago
Driving is a social activity. You’re interacting with other humans, with only their behavior (and maybe the occasional gesture) from which to infer intent. From that perspective, think of what a computer has to “know” in order to get along? It’s way more complex than just following the road and not hitting things. Maybe the best chance for a fully autonomous driving experience is some city that takes the next step beyond congestion pricing and reserves their dense core for autonomous vehicles. If computers only have to deal with other computers, and pedestrians, that seems a much more tractable problem.
- nradov 7y ago

8bitsrule 7y ago

"Within a generation ... the problem of creating 'artificial intelligence' will substantially be solved." - Marvin Minsky, 1967, Computation

killjoywashere 7y ago

Einstein's annus mirabilis was 1905 and it took decades of determined, international promotion of the Einstein brand, World War 2, a letter from Einstein to Roosevelt, plus another 6 years and 33 billion 1945 dollars (473B USD today), and a staggering collective of the smartest minds to ever walk the Earth in an existential race against a mortal enemy to develop nuclear weapons. NASA's shuttle project started in 1969, cost $200B, was shut down in 2011 and never got close to it's planned 50 launches per year. This stuff is hard.

tachyonbeam 7y ago
I have a book from 1982 that predicts fully self-driving cars by 1995.
dx034 7y ago
But both of these were mostly science problems. Self driving cars are about making machines interact with humans. That has never been solved before. Self driving in itself wouldn't be an issue, it's the other humans on the road that make it so hard to solve. One of the main problems for manufacturers is that we have never before solved a similar problem, so there's nothing to compare it to.
- asdff 7y ago
  >it's the other humans on the road that make it so hard to solve. Humans, cats and dogs, deer, tumbling rocks, low flying seagulls, tumbling trashbags or a toppled trashbin bin, palm fronds, drunk people jaywalking, drunk guy in a jeter jersey directing traffic after a yankees game, edgy teenagers pulling the invisible rope trick (or just yanking a sheet on a string), puddles reflecting humans on the sidewalk, blind turns and hidden driveways, competitors self driving tech, the metawars that will result by trying to raise a competitors accident rates (and not doing that would be leaving money on the table).
beefield 7y ago
> This stuff is hard. Luckily we attract our best minds with highest salaries to solve the pressing problem how to get people click more ads. (Yes, sarcasm.)

q845712 7y ago

One of the things the article names is the challenges caused by snow, ice, etc. I realize I'm in the minority, but I actually think there's lots of conditions that we shouldn't be driving in -- conditions where the obscured lines of sight, slipperiness of the road, etc, actually mean that we should either be off the road entirely, or traveling at speeds far far below normal. I know this happens, but I honestly believe that it should be far more common -- so common that it would likely take a chunk out of the economy. For instance you're driving on the freeway and it starts to rain -- can you really reduce your speed, and/or leave an extra "car length" between the car in front of you, so that you'll still have time to stop if needed? In my experience, no one else wants to slow down, so it's safer for me to keep up with the slowest traffic than to go what I would now deem a safe speed.

skywhopper 7y ago
I am sure there are plenty of studies out there about this, that would be more useful than speculating. There’s an increased risk, but is it that much greater than typical driving risk? I’m sure more accidents happen in bad weather but I don’t think it’s anywhere near “no one should drive in the rain at night” level of panic you suggest. But regardless of the extreme cases, there are plenty of scenarios in which human drivers may be slightly impaired Which current state of the art autonomous technology is not just impaired, but entirely helpless: simple, common road construction, missing or obscured lane markings, precipitation of any sort, malfunctioning stoplights, delivery trucks or dumpsters in the lane, negotiating a busy parking lot, any atypical road usage of any sort, roundabouts, dirt roads, unmapped roads, stationary objects... Humans can handle all of these situations without special training or instructions.
dbish 7y ago
Absolutely agree. People don't realize how long it takes to stop your car when the roads are wet, and they keep going at high speed. I think the digital speed limit signs that are adjustable should be used more often to greatly reduce speed limits and discourage the standard 55mph+ since the coefficient of friction can be half or less then during dry conditions (not to mention loss of visibility). http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Mechanics/frictire.html http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Mechanics/frictir...

SubiculumCode 7y ago

It was always clear to me that to accelerate the arrival of autonomous driving providing more consistent and controlled roadways would be key. That is why freeway driving will come well before any autonomous city street driving.Even the freeway is not consistent enough, but could more easily be adapted to some standard much more easily than, say, the roads in NYC.

jaimex2 7y ago

It's awesome watching the race play out. It very much does look like at this point that Tesla are on a spint to the finish line while everyone else took a wrong turn near the start following Google.

rayiner 7y ago
What on earth makes you say that? Tesla’s whole model seems like a bust—unlikely to evolve beyond cruise control+.
- tim333 7y ago
  It depends a bit whether you believe their CEO or not.
  - jaimex2 7y ago
    I do. Media circus aside Musk has a reputation of delivering working solutions to hard problems. If they still had Chriss Latner heading Autopilot I'd be skeptical, but they have Andrej Karpathy who is a god when it comes to machine learning and computer vision.
- olau 7y ago
  If you watch the presentation at the Tesla Autonomy Day, the dude in charge of their deep neural network explained that they think basing the whole system upon cameras is necessary since HD maps and LIDAR are too limiting. Basically, the network needs to be able to see what people are doing to drive safely. They've devised a method of upon training data for their network and is basically iterating through the problems, finding training data and counter-training data, as far as I understood the presentation. Whether this is going to work or not, we shall see.
  - pas 7y ago
    Have they solved the world model problem, or mentioned anything about that? If not, they are lost in noise. Video streams are so full of maybe signals, and ML loves that. As long as they don't have a fundamental (sub)system that knows how much space it needs to safely proceed at the current speed, how the 99.99% of the roads of the world work geometrically, and how to infer this from visual data, they are in trouble. (That said, I guess Karpathy is perfectly aware of this.)

bayareanative 7y ago

Hmm. I was driving a rental Hyundai that has auto-lane steering. I constantly wondered if it would follow the wrong path at choice decision opportunities (exits and forks) or side-swipe another vehicle trying to follow a lane. It's quite aggressive in basically overriding the driver's input without significant force and not notifying audibly when it disables itself (except for a visual indicator, a small icon in the cluster turns from green to white, but it requires "polling" behavior of constantly looking down).

de_watcher 7y ago
You can feel if it's on or off from the resistance. It requires you to apply force to the wheel anyway, otherwise there is an no-hands-on-the-wheel alert.

zaroth 7y ago

If safe, reliable, autonomous driving is a decade away that’s half a million lives lost. If it’s two decades away then a million. The incentives are there to make this work. The funding is there to make this work. The technology is actually there to make this work, if you can change some of the rules to get there. It’s worth over a trillion dollars annually to make this work. It’s the great infrastructure product of the 2020s and we should get fucking started already.

asdff 7y ago
Are self driving cars going to eliminate traffic deaths? Tesla already has a body count.
- zaroth 7y ago
  Eliminate totally? Of course not. But we have a long way to go before 1 fatality per 1 billion miles would be a bad thing. That would be an order of magnitude improvement. I think we can get two orders of magnitude in 10 years. Autonomy absolutely will have a body count. It cannot save every single driver. And so if we want to be able to enjoy the benefits of autonomy that saves almost every single driver, we better get comfortable with the notion that some people will die in self driving cars. If we can’t accept that the technology will never be perfect we will just keep dooming 30,000 people (in the US alone) to die each year, not to mention countless maimings (2 million actually) and property damage.

beefield 7y ago

I would be 99% happy regarding autonomous driving if I got a platooning hardware kit installed into my car so that on highway I could connect behind another car/truck that is going to same direction than me and take a nap or watch a movie. This should be easier problem than full self driving car by orders of magnitude, and I do not quite understand why platooning gets so small share of the self-driving hype.

badpun 7y ago
The first driver ("platoon commander") would still need to be human. I'm not sure people would sign up for this, as your error could result in deaths of people in cars following you.
- beefield 7y ago
  The we should have problems finding bus drivers? Anyway, I am more thinking the platoon commanders would be truck drivers that already have legal requirements for rest and no capability for speeding in highway.

ErikAugust 7y ago

If we are rethinking the timetable of the self-driving car, is it safe to rethink the whole future path of transportation? Do cars have to be it?

kieranmaine 7y ago

After reading this I'm thinking Tesla claims of being close to achieving level 5 autonomy aren't pure hot air. Toyota's requirement of "8.8 billion test miles for safe deployment of self-driving vehicles", puts Tesla well on the path to this. I found articles online stating Autopilot has driven 1 - 1.2 billion miles. Assuming that they've gathered many more miles of test data of human driving, then at least they have the raw data on which to iterate their platform. Whilst I'm still skeptical I've gained a new appreciation of how pushing the autopilot package allowed them to gain a big advantage in terms of raw data.

shawabawa3 7y ago
I personally think Tesla simply doesn't have the sensors for self-driving. I imagine the huge amount of data they've collected is largely useless because they aren't collecting the right data (e.g. LIDAR, radar, higher definition video)
- pas 7y ago
  They probably have the right data for safe disengagement. If they can solve that, the rest truly can be incrementally added.
skohan 7y ago
After riding in a Model X recently using Autopilot I am less skeptical than before.
usrusr 7y ago
Racking up a very high number of fair weather easy miles has zero effect on the machine's ability to tackle more difficult situations.
- kieranmaine 7y ago
  Very valid point, but Tesla's fleet will drive in a greater variety of weather than Waymo's, potentially gathering a better data set. However as another comment points out it could all be garbage data.

dalbasal 7y ago

Geo-fencing counts, IMO. "Driver assist" does not. Full autonomy respresents an economic paradigm, geo fenced or not. When private cars went mainstream, the economic cascade was so broad that no one could have predicted it. Supermarkets, for example, and the subsequent impact on food industry was a side effect of private cars. Suburbs. Disneyland... Self driving is such a change. Starting from geo-fencing is just a constraint on how fast the change happens. Private cars were limited by affordability instead. There's always something. Once these cars are on (geo-fenced) roads, infrastructure (eg signs) and vehicle can start adapting to eachother. There will be real economic pressures to "open up" roads and highways to autonomous driving. The tech problems in the space are so interesting, we forget about other aspects. Ultimately though, geo-fencing or any other hack could get us to the point where product problems get solved without a 1:1 relationship to solving tech problems.

Proven 7y ago

Everyone but Tony Stark. A year from now it won't matter though because Tesla will be bankrupt.

MR4D 7y ago

AI Winter is coming. (Sorry to riff on GoT, but I couldn’t resist)

jillesvangurp 7y ago

I think there's another thing going on here and we've seen a similar pattern before with electrical cars about 10 years ago. Ten years ago was when most of the car industry believed it had decades to adapt to full EV. It turns out that they had much less than a decade. By 2017 most manufacturers were scrambling to accelerate timelines for internal R&D when they realized competitors had other timelines and were about to grab some serious market share. This is now playing out in the market. Several ICE production lines have been shut down (GM, Ford, etc). Most manufacturers have launched or are about to launch full EVs. At this point several manufacturers are putting billions in making mass production happen in the next few years. I predict the same will happen with autonomous driving. Most manufacturers are completely unprepared for it and behind with their R&D. They are actively looking to buy as much time as they can get because they know they won't be there. However, some manufacturers are ahead of the curve here and it's not just Tesla. When this stuff gets good enough, it means some manufacturers will have a huge competitive advantage over basically everything else. Everything you read about this needs to be put in this context. In other words, some manufacturers are dragging their heels here and it's the same manufacturers that are also struggling to adapt to full EV. And they are using the same strategies to manipulate the timelines. Think futuristic looking concept cars that will never drive, lots of lobbying about how cool their R&D is, and a distinct lack of commitment to any timelines, combined with regular reports on serious safety issues that are obviously going to delay everything by decades. That's what this article says. What it translates to is: several manufacturers are getting to level 5 autonomy in the next few years and it is going to take decades for everybody else to catch up and mass produce this stuff. Tesla is probably over confident about the timelines but well on track to making lots of progress in the next few years nevertheless. Waymo looks like they are making progress as well. However, they are held back by the notion that they are more of a pure tech play and less of manufacturing/logistics play. In other words, they are dependent on the before mentioned manufacturers dragging their heels. IMHO several manufacturers are close enough to solving most of the issues here that there are going to be a few leaps forward in the next few years. These leaps are going to force the agenda for the rest of the industry. Mostly the timelines for autonomous and a switch to full EV are actually aligned. By the time most cars will be EVs, most of them will also be fully autonomous. That's roughly 15-20 years from now. Plenty of time to tackle any remaining issues with sensors, snow, and other edge cases. Yes, that's hard but people are throwing billions at these problems and making rapid progress. The first level 5 cars might be on the market within as little as 2-5 years. The biggest hurdle here is non technical: legislation. Tesla is being ambitious here (obviously) but even in 5 years they'd have the market largely to themselves.