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Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’

• tarwater11 7y ago
  It seems like the easy answer is to kick human drivers off the road, right? That will eliminate a great deal of the unpredictability. Start with a small section of a city, and if the results are good, people will want to expand it.
  • exhilaration 7y ago
    Also bicyclists, and also human pedestrians -- they decide to cross roads at the craziest times. A city without humans is what we need.
    • mirceal 7y ago
      this sounds exactly what machines silently taking over would say
  • _jal 7y ago
    Yeah, no. I will become one of those people who beats up robots. I live in San Francisco, and the reason I put up with the cost and garbage and stupidity in large part is because I don't need a car. Cars already own non-urban everything, and can stay there. We need to be moving in the other direction. How's that ban on cars on Market St. going?
• accnumnplus1 7y ago
  So, the singularity isn't imminent?
  • mirceal 7y ago
    if and when are 2 separate questions. i’m giving the singularity anywhere between 500-2000 years to happen if we manage to stay alive as a species
• rorykoehler 7y ago
  No one will ever need more than 64kb ram - Bill Gates
  • tyingq 7y ago
    He didn't say that, and it was 640k at the time.
  • spoppy 7y ago
    It’s usually ‘640kb ought to be enough for anybody’ Which probably wasn’t actually from Bill Gates https://www.computerworld.com/article/2534312/the--640k--quote-won-t-go-away----but-did-gates-really-say-it-.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2534312/the--640k--quo...
  • sodafountan 7y ago
    I think that's a misinterpretation of the quote, Gates didn't say "More than 64kb of Ram may never be possible" he simply argued against its practicality at the time.
• malvosenior 7y ago
  > It’s much more difficult to prepare self-driving cars for unusual circumstances — pedestrians crossing the road when cars have the green light, cars making illegal turns. Researchers call these “corner cases,” although in city traffic they occur often. These are difficult to deal with as human drivers too. This article is pretty light on details and basically pins the lack of progress on a couple of Tesla crashes. The thing is, regular people crash cars every day. I'd much rather share the road with self-driving cars than cars driven by humans. Especially with the advent of smart phones, not a day goes by that I don't see multiple people heads down messing with Instagram while driving. This technology is a lot closer to reality than the article makes it seems I think.
• casefields 7y ago
  Nothing makes a huge group of us cringe more, than people saying it's just around the corner. The worst part is it also comes from people who should know better. >Waymo’s CEO, John Krafcik, has admitted that a self-driving car that can drive in any condition, on any road, without ever needing a human to take control—usually called a “level five” autonomous vehicle—will basically never exist. At the Wall Street Journal’s D.Live conference, Krafcik said that “autonomy will always have constraints.” It will take decades for self-driving cars to become common on roads. Even then, they will not be able to drive at certain times of the year or in all weather conditions. In short, sensors on autonomous vehicles don’t work well in snow or rain—and that may never change. https://www.cnet.com/news/alphabet-google-waymo-ceo-john-krafcik-autonomous-cars-wont-ever-be-able-to-drive-in-all-conditions/ https://www.cnet.com/news/alphabet-google-waymo-ceo-john-kra... https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/07/the-dream-of-driverless-cars-is-dying/ https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/07/the-dream-of-driverless-...
  • acollins1331 7y ago
    You'd be surprised how well the lidar systems on these actually do see in the rain. Snow and ice is another story, and hydroplaning as well, but again it's not the sensors hampering it here. It's the logic. It's much more complicated than it first appeared, and right now the AI for detection and recognition is light years beyond where the self driving car logic is. You can watch a few YouTube videos of people training networks to drive cars (and also look at how well every company is currently doing) to see how difficult it is to get an AI solution for driving behavior.
    • sandworm101 7y ago
      They work well when they are working. Things a different when something blocks the lens, when a mirror bounces the laser back on itself, or when the laser's view is obstructed by something (ussually the road) that isnt up to code. Then the concept of lidar as reliable or even useful comes into question. Forget the math of driving, it is beyond today's lidar to tell whether there is frost on its own lens, a very basic safety proceedure.
    • oblio 7y ago
• deleted 7y ago
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• ChuckNorris89 7y ago
  Self-driving tech muggle here. Could someone explain to me why any average Joe with minimal intellect can drive a car using only a pair of eyes but it's difficult to build a fully self-driving car even with 8+ cameras, GPS, LIDAR and other sensors us humans don't have?
  • huntertwo 7y ago
    We got brains, a learning system better than anything we could ever hope to create using current AI/ML technologies.
  • api 7y ago
    We're using a lot of sensory data to compensate for the fact that the "AI" driving the car is really dumb. It lacks any meta-level understanding of the problem domain and is essentially a stimulus-response system similar to a very simple insect or even a single celled organism. We can drive a car with much more limited sensory input because we have a very high level cognitive model of what we are doing. Better model equals better decision making on far less information. Slight tangent: Having kids was an interesting chance to observe how far we are from "real AI." You can show a 3 year old one example of an object and after a few seconds they can subsequently identify that object in any lighting condition or from any angle. They can identify it with one eye closed. They can identify variations of it, pictures of it, and line drawings of it. One example, seconds. The human brain absolutely destroys any AI/ML we have.
    • mirceal 7y ago
      not quite true. when you show a kid something new you are literally exposing the kid to the thing thousands/millions of times. different angles, rotation, heck even if you’re just looking without touching from a fixed position your eyes will sample it a lot (saccades of your eye). you also connect/map the object to your prior knowledge. with an AI/ML model you’re starting from scratch. what makes learning “easy” for humans is the incremental nature of it + millions of years of evolution also: humans can drive a car better than a machine because the roads are designed for humans and the other drivers are humans. the machines would destroy us at driving if the roads were optimized for machines.
• api 7y ago
  "Never" is kind of equally absurd. It's just a brutally hard problem.
  • mhermher 7y ago
    You will never define a complete and consistent algebra. You will never exactly measure the momentum and position of a particle. They're not brutally hard problems, they're not possible. We know that there are a set of things that are impossible. Why is recreating human intelligence in silicon beyond that consideration?
    • chillacy 7y ago
      Things are impossible till they aren’t. It’s not like we solved Go the board game, but we did build some killer AI which has now surpassed all human players. And that was within a matter of years: first it was a fluid game of human intelligence impossible for a machine, then it was obvious machines could be better.. but look at this other thing humans are still better at.
      • beat 7y ago
        Google's AlphaZero AI went from not knowing chess at all to beating the best current software (Stockfish) in mere hours. It's a whole new world out there.
        • reroute1 7y ago
          For playing computer games maybe. Chess is such a simple proposition compared to real life and you are only comparing this AI against other AI...
          • beat 7y ago
            Stockfish isn't an AI, just an expert system. It was designed from the ground up to play chess. AlphaZero is generalized AI. It was designed to learn how to do things - like play chess. The fact that it easily beat a custom-designed expert system with only a few hours of learning time is incredible. It's a different order of complexity altogether. It may not be human intelligence, but it's a great deal closer to how humans function than how machines (like Stockfish) function.
• mojuba 7y ago
  > ... "autonomous vehicles" will be a reality for "ordinary people" in less than five years, Google co-founder Sergey Brin said Tuesday. That's from 2012 [1] [1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2491635/self-driving-cars-a-reality-for--ordinary-people--within-5-years--says-google-s-sergey-b.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2491635/self-driving-c...
  • bryanlarsen 7y ago
    Waymo had autonomous vehicles in Arizona giving selected members of the public rides without safety drivers in November 2017. They since stopped. So if you really stretch you can call that an accurate prediction.
• serioussecurity 7y ago
  Despite high hopes, incompetent new comers discover they can't compete in new industry...
• rwmj 7y ago
  We don't need self-driving cars that can go anywhere (ie. level 5) for them to be widely useful. A car that only worked in bright sunshine on a preprogrammed set of roads would be immediately useful to me.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • tyingq 7y ago
    Semi trucks, solely on well done roads (Interstates in the US) seem more likely to happen sooner. There's an obvious strategy for "ports", dealing with exceptions, etc.
    • qznc 7y ago
      Robo taxis in retirement communities also seem likely to me. https://voyage.auto/ https://voyage.auto/
    • wbrinkley 7y ago
      Tesla frequently talks about platooning when touting their Semi. "Self-driving" by almost blindly following a human-driven lead vehicle doesn't seem that far off. But I'm not looking forward to the day when I see a "train" of semi trucks speeding down the interstate only a foot or two apart from each other!
      • AnimalMuppet 7y ago
        That could work, for the platoon, while on the interstate. It might not work for other vehicles on the interstate, though. If there's not room to pull in between them, then you have to pass all of them at one time. If you're a semi that wants to drive 1 or 2 MPH faster than them, that's going to be a very long, slow, pass. It will be even worse if it's in hilly country, where the semi attempting to pass may have higher speed on flat ground, but less power for climbing. That could block both lanes for a really long time. Human drivers in cars (some of whom want to drive faster than semis, and have more horsepower per ton at their disposal) will be very annoyed. Then you get one "train" trying to pass another, and things get even worse. Then the train gets off the interstate. They hit a traffic light. Less than all of the train makes it through the light in one cycle. Now what?
• lanrh1836 7y ago
  Curious how a self driving car would’ve responded in the NYC blackout, and to Good Samaritans directing traffic at various intersections
• georgecmu 7y ago
  But the billions of dollars in investment are here and now.
• gwbas1c 7y ago
  The following will happen before self-driving cars: - Robotic trash cans that perfectly sort recyclables and compostables without any contamination - Drones that fly around and kill invasive plants - Landscapers that show up with robotic lawnmowers - A dishwasher that can load and unload itself automatically - My Tesla can keep in its lane when it passes an on ramp (ect) The problem, IMO, with self-driving cars is that there are other AI problems that are easier to solve. Until we start seeing more "consumer AI" in lower-risk products, self-driving cars will always be something coming in the future.
  • LeanderK 7y ago
    > - Robotic trash cans that perfectly sort recyclables and compostables without any contamination Sorting trash is (at least to me) a surprisingly complicated problem. The frauenhofer here in karlsruhe is working on bulk sorting using computer vision with various sensors (sorting black plastic: https://www.fraunhofer.de/en/press/research-news/2016/June/sorting-black-plastics-according-to-type.html https://www.fraunhofer.de/en/press/research-news/2016/June/s... and sorting bulk goods: https://www.iosb.fraunhofer.de/servlet/is/15954/ https://www.iosb.fraunhofer.de/servlet/is/15954/) If automated, it probably makes sense to not sort the stuff in your home, but instead by your trash-collector companies.
    • Ididntdothis 7y ago
      I wish there was much more research in that area. It’s a very hard problem and the benefit would be enormous. All the brain power that goes into ever better surveillance and selling ads would be much better used there.
  • nabla9 7y ago
    Good points. Sorting waste and other stuff in a controlled environment is a problem domain that will provide huge increase in productivity and material efficiency when it becomes common. There are companies working on it. https://zenrobotics.com/ https://zenrobotics.com/
  • AtlasBarfed 7y ago
• acollins1331 7y ago
  On highway is where it's at. City corner cases are going to be Impossible for a long time, but caravans of self driving trucks could easily happen in the next couple years. It already happens with a person in the front vehicle that is followed closesly in a train by robotic vehicles.
  • nradov 7y ago
    GM is already selling "Super Cruise" vehicles with level 4 autonomous capability on a limited set of controlled access highways. https://www.cadillac.com/world-of-cadillac/innovation/super-cruise https://www.cadillac.com/world-of-cadillac/innovation/super-...
    • mc_blue 7y ago
      Super Cruise is considered level 2, not level 4.
  • rimliu 7y ago
    And moose runs out on the road, what's then? No matter how fast the data will be passed down the line, following closer than the braking distance will not be safe. And there are black ice, puddles, etc.
    • acollins1331 7y ago
      If the vehicles apply their brakes at the same time they could be bumper to bumper. That's how things work.
• hateful 7y ago
  I think it would happen this way: firstly you would automate things that go on a track - like trains - which I think we already have. Then secondly you could have certain lanes or roads that are designed for specific self-driving vehicles. This could help buses and trucks (in certain areas) get around. Then you would keep adding more of those, until many roads have those and very few manual lanes. It wouldn't immediately work in a big established city, but some existing highways or interstates can be fitted easily. Anywhere that has an HOV/Carpool/EV lane can be refitted to be an automated driving lane. Think of it like the Cash Only vs. Easy Pass toll lanes. At first there was 1-2 Easy Pass lanes, then the cash lane was just 1-2 - now we automate them reading license plates. So to sum up, I think that the self driving will start in very specific areas, and then those specific areas would be expanded until they are the only areas. Especially if those roads contain automated taxi (Uber, Lyft, etc) which you can call with your mobile device. The main reason a lot of people drive is because public transportation in their area is junk and you have to go by it's schedule and route. But having a point-point self-driving option is way more convenient. It's like the subway, but it doesn't need tracks.
  • brk 7y ago
    This has been my line of thought as well, autonomous vehicle will slowly emerge over time. We are not waiting on 1 or 2 big tech breakthroughs alone, but also on a lot of infrastructure and regulatory changes, which take a lot of time to enact. I would wager we are at least a decade away from self-driving cars being a common part of daily life, in the sense that the average driver would see them on the road somewhat regularly. And probably 2 decades away from self-driving cars being an "everymans" vehicle and/or delivering on the concept of not having to own a vehicle and instead summoning one when needed, or putting your autonomous vehicle to work for you while you are not using it.
  • mikestew 7y ago
    I think your prediction will turn out to be as closer or closer than any other. Certainly more on the money than the breathless “won’t be a problem in a few years when self-driving...” But as I read your probably-on-the-money prediction, I was thinking “here we go again, dumping money for the two-ton wheelchairs while alternative transportation goes begging again.” Where’s my fucking barrier-protected bike lane? Or any bike lane at all? Frankly, if that’s how it goes, I wonder if it happens at all. “Separate lanes for wealthy tech workers” is how that’s going to go. You know why we can’t even get bike lanes? Because people bitch and moan because they don’t personally use it. Expand that to an empty lane of moving traffic while the plebs sit in traffic.
• satyavh 7y ago
  Even if it will be technically possible, and I'm pretty sure some day that will be solved. That's the easiest part. The biggest hurdle for self-driving cars will be ethics, such as 'the car brakes for a child suddenly crossing the street but then kills the old woman' or perhaps even make decisions based upon social status. Lots of options here. Those ethics have to be agreed upon, and they will likely differ per culture, state, country, etc. It's a political and sociological challenge. It will be interesting crossing borders. And then those ethics need to be implemented in software. I would refrain from saying it's never going to happen, but I doubt very much this will happen in our lifetime.
  • bryanlarsen 7y ago
    I believe that this scenario is very over-blown. If you're in a situation where you have to choose between swerving into another car or hitting a child that darts out onto the street then the question really is: why were you in that situation in the first place? At 20mph pedestrian collisions are almost invariably non-fatal and emergency stops are almost instantaneous. So if you're on a street where a child can appear instantly, why are you going faster than 20mph in the first place?
    • leetcrew 7y ago
      a child can appear instantly on any street. they can even run into the highway if their parent pulls onto the shoulder for a bathroom break or something. of course, it's much more likely to happen in a neighborhood than on the highway, so we drive slower in the neighborhood. but anything that can happen eventually will, so there ought to be some policy. that said, I think there is a certain segment of the population that gets overly excited about mapping the trolley problem onto autonomous driving. I expect that little will change other than the liable party (the car driver vs the company) and it will mostly work out.
      • bryanlarsen 7y ago
        Exactly. The maximum safe speed in a neighborhood is 20mph, and the maximum safe speed passing a stopped car on the freeway is a lot less than 60mph.
• jsnider3 7y ago
  Given that people feel confident falling asleep in their Teslas while it drives, I think the writer should just lower their standards.
• skywhopper 7y ago
  This has been obvious all along to anyone who has ever driven or used a computer before and thought about the reality for more than a couple of minutes. But the press and VCs bought into the hype from the likes of Uber who needed to keep generating huge new investment to stay afloat and Tesla which is run by a delusional snake oil salesman who had a single hit with the Model S. The shocking examples of crazy unexpected behavior in the article like street sweepers that do exactly what they are supposed to be doing and cyclists who don’t follow traffic rules blow my mind. Next we’ll learn that some streets have poorly painted lines or that road construction exists or that most human drivers exceed posted speed limits or that there is weather other than sunny and clear.
  • saiya-jin 7y ago
    > Tesla which is run by a delusional snake oil salesman Dude, you may not like Musk personally (which is glaringly obvious), but at least stick to the facts - he triggered much needed car industry transformation more than anybody else in recent times. industry itself wouldn't change itself so rapidly even if planet would be burning, that's obvious. And mankind gravely needs it now. Plus small detail about revolutionizing whole commercial space industry in extremely effective way. Mankind now gravely needs more of these 'snake oil salesmen', even with their missteps
    • mhermher 7y ago
      What did he trigger exactly that wasn't triggered by regulation? He just exploited some regulations to keep his structurally bankrupt company afloat long enough. Tried the same with Solar City and failed BTW.
      • toomuchtodo 7y ago
        No other automaker is building EVs at the scale Tesla is (nor has built out global EV charging infrastructure to support those vehicles being built and sold). No EV being sold today meets the standards set by Tesla's vehicles sold in 2013.
• maskedinvader 7y ago
  Id take this article with a large pinch of salt, considering their previous predictions about technology. case in point below: "Hence, if it requires, say, a thousand years to fit for easy flight a bird which started with rudimentary wings, or ten thousand for one which started with no wings at all and had to sprout them ab initio, it might be assumed that the flying machine which will really fly might be evolved by the combined and continuous efforts of mathematicians and mechanicians in from one million to ten million years--provided, of course, we can meanwhile eliminate such little drawbacks and embarrassments as the existing relation between weight and strength in inorganic materials. "[Emphasis added.] The New York Times, Oct 9, 1903, p. 6. see -> https://11points.com/11-ridiculously-terrible-predictions-made-new-york-times/ https://11points.com/11-ridiculously-terrible-predictions-ma...
  • brk 7y ago
    Your best case example is a statement made over a century ago?
    • maskedinvader 7y ago
      well if you see the link I posted, there are 11 examples from various points in the past. I was just making the point that their track record with technology predictions isn't stellar.
  • ljcn 7y ago
    That last point about materials is interesting. Commercial extraction of aluminium was only discovered in the late 1880s and Duralumin (an early alloy) wouldn't be invented until 1909. Thanks to these discoveries and the Great War the prediction was way off.
• kpU8efre7r 7y ago
  Could be saying that to defeat competition. Don't bother trying it's decades away! And Ford is notoriously behind the rest of the pack so I'd believe even less of what they say as well. I don't listen to executives with a stake in the game regardless of which side they are playing. The barriers to this seem mosly man made. Regulations, restrictions, taxi lobby, trucker unions, etc. A lot of it depends on where the line is drawn for safety or versatility. Does one vehicle need to operate in all climates with 0 accidents a year? Simply being safer than humans is easy- we are already there. I'd be happy to even see more and more driver assist to the point where you can't crash even if you jerk the wheel and try to. I think the bar has been set incredibly high, almost impossibly out of reach, by people interested in things staying the same.
  • peteradio 7y ago
    > Simply being safer than humans is easy- we are already there. Seriously?
    • kpU8efre7r 7y ago
      Just Waymo was driving over 1 million miles a month in 2018. How many people have they killed? The fact that an autonomous vehicle or Tesla "autopilot" fatality makes national news is telling. It's not commonplace.
      • crispyambulance 7y ago
        It's not sufficient for these systems to just be "better" than humans in terms of accidents/mile/vehicle, they have to be FAR BETTER than humans. Today, when accidents occur, blame and liability goes to the responsible parties. We're talking about millions of accidents and millions of drivers. If you suddenly have a car that drives, the blame and liability for all accidents then gets focused like a giant magnifying glass onto ONE (or a few) companies which have made the self-driving car. I don't know how many accidents/mile/vehicle is the "magic number" but I expect it is going to have to be far far far lower than what it is now. Otherwise, these self-driving car vendors won't be able to survive the legal onslaught.
• d--b 7y ago
  Just to play the devil's advocate: the level at which autonomous vehicles operate today was unthinkable in 2000. Literally unthinkable. The progress in AI has been a massive step forward in a very short amount of time. We may be years away, but the truth is we are one or two "massive breakthrough" away. These could happen tomorrow, or in 50 years, or never at all.
  • qznc 7y ago
    "Literally unthinkable" is too much. Here is a self-driving van back in 1993: https://youtu.be/JTnBiTIvGqY https://youtu.be/JTnBiTIvGqY Sure, it is an empty highway. I guess that is what you mean by "the level at which autonomous vehicles operate today". Still, people surely were thinking about Waymo like performance.
• melling 7y ago
  They mean in America, right? Because I’m sure China will simply build dedicated roads to kickstart the process. Dedicated self-driving roads for trucks to move products would likely be profitable. There’s no need to solve the entire problem for self-driving to be worthwhile.
  • magpi3 7y ago
    How would that be different from railroads? Aren't those already dedicated to moving products and large amounts of people? And wouldn't they be much easier for machines to navigate?
    • melling 7y ago
      Your lack of imagination is disappointing. That’s why it’s great to see China innovating where the rest of the world won’t. https://thenextweb.com/cars/2019/04/15/how-chinas-new-highway-for-self-driving-cars-will-boost-its-av-ambitions/ https://thenextweb.com/cars/2019/04/15/how-chinas-new-highwa... You have a bit more flexibility with roads. If you want to add a lane for cars, for example. You could have restricted periods for cars only. Trucks could filter off main arteries to make late night deliveries within cities where roads become self-driving only during certain hours. Drivers could also meet trucks at exits. In the US, it would be great to drive to Florida in the winter with your car so you don’t need to rent a car once you arrive.
  • petschge 7y ago
    These are called railways and every civilized country already has them.
    • NateEag 7y ago
      I believe you misspelled "small." The US does actually have railroads, but it's so huge that it's utterly unreasonable to build enough railways to be a major contender for general transit. At least, that's my perspective as a US citizen who commutes by train daily.
• bryanlarsen 7y ago
  The really interesting thing (to me) is that Waymo operated self-driving cars on public streets in Arizona without safety drivers during November 2017 but stopped within a month. (google waymo "november 7 2017") Why did they stop? I'm sure it was partially because they realized there were some situations it wasn't handling properly, but my conjecture is mostly that expectations have changed. I bet that Waymo cars are massively safer than human drivers in many situations, and that they're not as safe in a few others, and that there are a bunch of situations they don't handle well and "freeze up" or otherwise behave unpredictably. Waymo has probably realized that the bar isn't "as good as a human" but "significantly better than humans".
• hamilyon2 7y ago
  We need to regulate corner cases just like we did with trains, regular cars, medicine, e.t.c Someone supposed dedicated lanes - that is goog thinking, dedicated intersections is the next step. No pedestrians allowed, but no lights whatsoever. Then, a section of city where regular cars cannot drive, and pedestrian areas are automaticaly driven at reasonably low speeds.
• JustSomeNobody 7y ago
  I don't understand why independent full automated self-driving is the goal. This just leads to competing "standards" so to speak. I think auto manufacturers should be working with governments to create smarter roadways and define an automated driving standard. You'd have smarter cars that would be able to link up in trains on the roadways. They'd be more efficient aerodynamically. It would be safer. You'd have "road ranger" style e-vehicles that could link up and charge you without ever stopping. And you could help fund it all using tax payer money.
• sunstone 7y ago
  The ugly part of this is that if drivers get used to self driving in reasonable weather then, in the one percent of the time (or less) when conditions get really horrible, their driving skills won't be up to the challenge. However as self driving becomes common investment will be made to make roads easier for self driving technology and extend the technologies usefulness. Even now in snow storms when temperatures are just below freezing human drivers have a hard time coping. If self driving just has to do better than that. It doesn't have to be perfect.
• celeritascelery 7y ago
  I have been saying this for years. Even if self driving cars handle 99% of situations correctly, they don’t become feasible until they can do that last 1%, which is 100x more difficult then previous 99. The reality is, if the car drives itself, people will be doing other things in the car and will be unable to respond to emergencies.
  • bryanlarsen 7y ago
    If they get in a situation they cannot handle, the car can stop and pull over to the side of the road before asking the human to take over. And it can refuse to navigate to areas where it wouldn't be able to do that. (And if you're in an area where an emergency stop is unsafe, it's unsafe for human drivers too. Getting rear-ended for an emergency stop is that fault of the following car for that reason.)
    • umanwizard 7y ago
      So I’ll still need to have a drivers license to use an autonomous vehicle? That pretty much defeats the whole purpose, at least for me.
      • bryanlarsen 7y ago
        Or you'll need to call a tow truck when it gets disabled, or you'll need a stage 5 vehicle rather than stage 4, or you'll have to subscribe to an emergency low-speed teleoperation service that has been hypothesized.
      • mrep 7y ago
        Not for the millions of Americans that commute to work everyday. That'll free up so much free time.
• iron0013 7y ago
  Is it just me, or is the Argo CEO interviewed for every single article that's pessimistic about self-driving cars?
• celeritascelery 7y ago
  I honestly think that even when we do get full self driving cars, you won’t be able to own one. They will be rideshare only. The reality is that autonomous vehicles are so complex that you need advanced mapping of very well known conditions to make this feasible. Companies will make these sort of maps for major cities where they run their ride service but anywhere else cars will just not be advanced enough to handle unexpected conditions. Self driving cars will only ever work under controlled circumstances such as well known cities and suburbs.
  • dzader 7y ago
    basically everything you said is wrong
  • rossdavidh 7y ago
    It is also the case that the downtown area of cities is often the place where parking your own car is the most problematic, so being able to use a self-driving rideshare would be really helpful for that reason also.
• rmolin88 7y ago
  >Waymo’s CEO, John Krafcik, has admitted that a self-driving car that can drive in any condition, on any road, without ever needing a human to take control—usually called a “level five” autonomous vehicle—will basically never exist. At the Wall Street Journal’s D.Live conference, Krafcik said that “autonomy will always have constraints.” It will take decades for self-driving cars to become common on roads. Even then, they will not be able to drive at certain times of the year or in all weather conditions. In short, sensors on autonomous vehicles don’t work well in snow or rain—and that may never change. This reminds me of the time Bill Gates allegedly said: "640K ought to be enough for anybody", taking about RAM memory. Why would you say it will never happen? That is just silly. It may be decades out, today sensors may have a long way to go. But it's just silly to say it will NEVER happen. Never say never!
  • landryraccoon 7y ago
    > In short, sensors on autonomous vehicles don’t work well in snow or rain This is a curious line of reasoning for me. Why are humans allowed to drive in snow or rain though? Your sensors work considerably worse in snow or rain, and there is abundant evidence over the entire history of cars that humans butcher each other with motor vehicles in snow or rain constantly. The bar is simply that an autonomous car has to be significantly less likely to cause an injury in snow or rain than a human is.
    • refurb 7y ago
      The problem is that with current technology (as I understand it), it doesn't just make a self-driving car worse in the rain or snow, it makes it so it can't drive at all.
    • shareIdeas 7y ago
      5G will give vehicle position better than GPS, will they use this instead of sensors for Lane detection?
      • untog 7y ago
        Lane detection isn't really the big problem here, though. It's whether there is an obstacle on the road in front of you.
• pretendscholar 7y ago
  Strong but brittle is how you could describe most automated systems. They are superhuman in the right context but fail comically if you alter the context just slightly out of what the system can handle. I think the best way forward is to set up infrastructure on roads to help the partially autonomous systems. Its important to not let great get in the way of good.
• luckydata 7y ago
  Having seen the evolution of AI in fits and starts from the early days to now I don't understand why the skeptical stance is still default. We have made enormous progress in the last five years and I don't see why it's not possible to get to human-like performance in the next decade. I argue it would be surprising if we don't get there relatively soon.
  • jopsen 7y ago
    Yes, especially with massive competing investments in the subject.
• almost_usual 7y ago
  Serious question, do you think Self-Driving vehicles would be as heavily invested in if cellphones did not exist?
• tabtab 7y ago
  We don't need all-or-nothing. A good many people stay off the road anyhow during poor weather, and those who do go out usually stay on familiar routes, such as to work or their favorite grocery store. If self-driving cars/buses stick to a subset of streets and don't go out in big storms, they can still be widely useful. Set up (require) a universal network/database of road conditions on the main streets that all self-driving vehicles can tap into. If a problem arises, it then only directly affects the first bot-vehicle that encounters it instead of all of them that use the road. It's internet-like packet switching. Thus, bots may get "confused" easier than humans, but they can also take advantage of automation to work around confusing areas. The upsides of automation thus counter the down-sides. The biggest cost of taxis and buses is the driver. If you remove that, then "hitching a ride" is a lot more affordable to those who can't or don't drive.
  • seibelj 7y ago
    By admitting this fact you dramatically reduce the value of self driving cars and thus the inflated valuations of companies trying to create them. It is an uncomfortable truth.
    • tabtab 7y ago
      Once their quantity reaches a threshold, it will quickly become the primary mode of transportation, and expand onto more streets. Many youngsters don't even want to drive these days, I've noticed. They'd rather sit in a bot car/tram and surf social media. The desire for the product will grow.
    • pas 7y ago
      The safe self driving is possible, but currently it is awkward, results in honking (because slow speed). That is still valuable for the occasional take me home from the pub mode. The rest of the time it should work with me and disengage prematurely if there's something going on.
      • tabtab 7y ago
        Re: "results in honking (because slow speed)" Too bad. Cowboy Driving is obsolete.
• beat 7y ago
  It doesn't have to work perfectly - it just has to work better than humans. Our sensors ain't real great in snow and rain, either.
  • ben_w 7y ago
    It needs slightly more than that: when it fails, it needs to be able to demonstrate that no human would’ve succeeded in its place. This isn’t a moral or a technical issue, just public relations. If a system reduces road deaths from ~30,000 per year to 365 per year, but one of those deaths was it mistaking a grey skirt for an open road [1], there will still be calls for its use to be outlawed — basically what’s happening now with antivaxxers, and they’re hard enough to deal with when all the evidence is against them. [1] just to give a concrete example
    • AtlasBarfed 7y ago
      By "fail" you mean crash, or it detects that it's uncertainty gets too large and it pulls over safely, forcing you to wait or take over yourself? Insurance companies will force the adoption once they become proven safe. The added insurance costs for luddites will price them out of the market.
      • Majromax 7y ago
        > The added insurance costs for luddites will price them out of the market. What added insurance costs? It's not like adding self-driving cars to the road will make manual driving more dangerous. No safety technology could make insuring self-driving cars any cheaper than free. Would free car insurance act as enough inducement to drive the fearful away from their steering wheels?
        • bluGill 7y ago
          When people realize the self driving cars are better the damage claims from human accidents can go up. Right now if you kill a kid with your car you get 7 months in jail and your insurance company pays a $150,000 (these are real numbers from a 3 year old that I was really close to). If self driving cars are really that much better courts will start handing out much larger judgments.
• sam_goody 7y ago
  It is phenomenally simpler to have autonomous driving in an area where the only things on the road are autonomous and there is a standard for interacting cross manufacturer. Many new cars, and in some countries all new cars (by law), have enough sensors to be made self driving. Standards are already being worked on. A basic level of autonomy - good enough for an area without human drivers - is being worked on by every car manufacturer. At some point, the vast majority of cars on the road (at least in cities where leasing and turnover s highe) will have the capability to be autonomous. At that point I expect the car manufacturers to work with the larger cities to make central city areas autonomous only. Software updates will be pushed to all those existing cars, and overnight there will be self-driving on a level which is sustainable. Once that happens, it will push people to upgrade to newer cars, expanding the number of autonomous-capable cars, and by extension allowing for the expansion of autonomous only areas. As autonomous becomes more standard and accepted in the public conscious, solutions that will look obvious in hindsight will deal with many areas that we consider fringe now. I read that Fedex originally claimed there would be areas they would never service. Even if they were right, it is less of a deal than they thought it would be. Same thing will happen with autonomous cars.
  • gregkerzhner 7y ago
    I can see self driving cars and trucks on long haul freeways, but to me it seems like self driving in city centers is going to be the hardest, not first problem that is solved. Even if other drivers are taken out of the equation, there are still so many variables in a city to account for. Pedestrians, bicyclists, Lime scooters (I guess these will be self driving too?), dogs, construction, etc... The only way I see self driving cars dealing with all this in the near future is if the roads were totally fenced off from everything else so that only self driving cars were on them more like trains. However, this seems like such a big infrastructure investment (and just a big change overall) that I just don't see it happening within the next few years. Our cities (at least in America) can't even put in bike lanes, or provide reliable trains, which is a 200 year old technology, so how are we to expect them to completely overhaul our infrastructure to help a technology that barely even exists?
  • milesokeefe 7y ago
• Causality1 7y ago
  After Musk's announcement that Tesla will stop selling cars to consumers after cracking Level 5 autonomy, I've stopped even looking forward to it because he's right. Why would a manufacturer sell a self-driving car for $50000 when they can make $300000 off of it as a taxi over its lifetime? Why would anyone make a non self driving car when for a couple thousand dollars in parts they can make money off of it for a decade? Level 5 self-driving is the death of private car ownership. That may sound great to people living in a city but for those of us to whom visiting family means dirt roads it's stomach-churning.
• HALtheWise 7y ago
  When read literally, there is no way that any system ever, human or automatic, will be able to drive on "any road" with "perfect safety". Crazy freak accidents happen, and human drivers regularly aren't able to handle them. On top of that, most people just can't safely drive in thick fog, icy conditions, or pouring rain. No amount of intelligence will allow a car to drive through a sufficiently flooded street. Just like with human cars, the important metric is just whether they can drive acceptably safely in the environments that they attempt to go. There's enough low-hanging fruit from faster reaction times and 360 sensing to make that feasible without needing to solve the AI-complete problem. Nobody's asking them to be able to drive at 70 MPH through a fog bank in Alaska with ice on the road, even if that is technically part of the requirements for Level 5 that even humans can't obtain.
  • ghaff 7y ago
    It's actually not a very useful quote because, as you say, taken literally it's an impossibly high bar. What is required to be useful is either 1.) Demonstrably better than human (whatever that means exactly) for a well-defined subset of roads and conditions such as interstate highways under some subset of weather or 2.) Demonstrably better than human for any roads and conditions that a typical adult human would typically be able to navigate door-to-door safely. 1. is a very useful driver assist system, and likely a big win for safety, but you still need a sober adult driver available to take over with reasonable notice. 2. is what you need for robo-taxis to be practical.
    • bobthepanda 7y ago
      There are open questions about whether or not intermediate levels of automation might actually be more dangerous because they lull human drivers into a false sense of security, so I don't even know that 1 is necessarily sufficient.
      • ghaff 7y ago
        My assumption with 1 is in the vein of "we're approaching an exit in two miles. Please be ready to take over." i.e. planned disengagement. Yes, any automation system that may fail by going "OMG. Do something now!" is worse than useless. I'm not sure the question is even open.
• Edmond 7y ago
  Detractors of self-driving cars are always eager to lap up a story like this as proof that it will never happen or it would take decades...."Years" doesn't mean decades, even 10 yrs is a relative short time, i owned my last care for about 13 yrs. Some proponents of self driving cars might have gotten too ahead of the hype train but nevertheless, self-driving is here and soon would be common place. It would obviously take some time to turn over the current inventory of non-self-driving cars but even that would happen faster than most people anticipate. Americans already replace their cars quite often and it is hard to think of a more compelling nudge to replace your car than the prospect of not having to actively drive it. As for the outstanding technical challenges, I am often baffled when people point to that as a reason for skepticism...it is the whole point of the endeavor, to solve those problems.
  • untog 7y ago
    > As for the outstanding technical challenges, I am often baffled when people point to that as a reason for skepticism...it is the whole point of the endeavor, to solve those problems. Right, but that's an absolutely massive issue. I could say that I am embarking on a project to enable me to flap my arms and fly, you might say that's not possible, but I say that's the whole point of the endeavor, to solve these problems! The article outlines many very real problems that do not have answers. We can hand-wave and say "well, we'll solve them" but until we have any idea how, and the time it'll take to do them, "years" absolutely does mean decades, if not longer. > self-driving is here No, it isn't.
  • aeturnum 7y ago
    The question of "how much and how fast" matters more than you give it credit for, I think. Take drones - drones are "here" in some sense. You can buy one, they work. But there's a big question about how common drones will be and what they will be used for. How much we care about drone regulations, safety, tracking, etc, will depend a lot on how often we see them. Right now they're rare-ish, but if delivery-by-drone works they could be very common. The same is true of self driving cars. Of course we will have some number of self driving cars and self-driving features will probably exist on most new cars eventually. But how many and how much they can do matters a lot! I think people point out existing problems to suggest that the magnitude and universality of the technology is still unknown and impactful.
• growlist 7y ago
  I'd be quite happy if they could just drive up and down the motorway themselves in reasonable conditions. Seems like we're pretty close to that already, and that hasn't even required wiring them all up to talk to each other.
• pif 7y ago
  Every time I read about autonomous cars, I wonder if these points have ever been discussed: - Yielding to an emergency vehicle with sirens on. - Moving backwards to a safe and large enough spot when the route is too narrow to fit self-driving car and oncoming huge lorry (and there is no line marking the limit between road and ravine). - Upon instructions from authority, recognizing that the highway is closed due to an accident and, no matter what the driving code says, you actually have to make a U-turn on the highway and follow the crowd. Alternatively, just take that route (yes, the one with the large no-entry sign at the beginning) or that narrow path in the wood (yes, it exists, even if Google Maps isn't aware of it). At the bare minimum, park yourself off the road and let the others move on. - Verifying whether a queue is forming behind you. Listening to the honkers, they may be right. When you are an obstacle to the most part of traffic, moving to the side and letting others pass from time to time is sincerely appreciated.
  • AtlasBarfed 7y ago
    - a broadcast radio signal and microphones can detect sirens. That seems easy. - that's just flow analysis and basic perceptions of the environment. At a minimum, just tell the driver to take over. - highways will benefit from convergent infrastructure, and alerts like this will be part and parcel of highway driving automation. Flying does this already, basically. - sensors have 360 degree vision, and mesh networking between cars would help solve this, and automatically call towing/traffic control emergency vehicles to help with disabled cars I don't worry about any of those situations, those can be readily incorporated into certification and testing of the algorithms/systems.
    • pif 7y ago
      > a broadcast radio signal... > ...just tell the driver... > ...alerts like this will be part and parcel of highway driving automation... > ...mesh networking between cars... You are not talking about autonomous cars.
• geogra4 7y ago
  I would be immensely happy even if it was just on interstates/major highways in clear weather. That's at least 80% of the worst and most mind-numbing driving right there. The rest I don't have a problem doing myself.
• gfodor 7y ago
  I can't read the article, so only going off the headline, but how does the conjecture that self driving cars are far off jive with the fact that my understanding is they are already deployed in production in Phoenix, AZ? And are being used regularly in the bay area in testing? Obviously it's incremental. I fully expect in the next 24 months I will be able to call an autonomous car via an app on my phone in the bay area under certain known conditions, like good weather and common, low-risk routes. Or, specifically, that I'll be able to direct my model 3 to drive me to the San Jose airport (a 10 minute drive) without the need for me to actually take any manual interventions along the way. (Though I will still be asked, by Tesla, to be ready to take control.) If true, that's progress, and I expect the progress to continue until eventually this technology is widespread and covers the vast majority of routes and conditions.
• gurkancaner 7y ago
  I think there is no reel need for driverless cars. Having technological difficulties aside we should question whether there is really a need for self-driving cars. Life is not that bad without autonomous cars. I don't hear anybody complain about in real life not having driverless cars. Basically a driverless car is same thing having a private chauffeur and I know quite a few people who don't want to use their private chauffeurs lots of time.
  • empath75 7y ago
    There's no real need for anything in life other than food and shelter. If driverless cars work and don't cost much, some people will use them and enjoy them and that's enough.
    • gurkancaner 7y ago
      There are levels above food and shelter. Having a car is a real need and it solves a problem for lots of people. However having a self-driving car may solves some people's problem but that don't seem to big part of human population. I think that makes the development of self-driving cars slower.
  • sametmax 7y ago
    Same for a washing machine 100 years ago. But once it got popular, it allowed for an entire different hoursehold to form.
    • gurkancaner 7y ago
      Yes but when we think about the difficulty of developing self driving cars we need way more powerful incentives.
  • bluGill 7y ago
    I complain about it. I've lost good friends to bad drivers. I can't figure out how to improve humans so I'll take self driving cars when they get better than humans.
• darepublic 7y ago
  Instead of individual cars we need a highly dense network of rail cars that can merge and split and allow u to travel from any one block in the city to another. Should be able to ship moving trucks via this system where it would deliver them to the near address from where an operator autonomous or otherwise takes over
  • opportune 7y ago
    I fully agree. If everyone knows that self-driving cars are the future, why would we not just retrofit our roads to use some fixed transportation scheme like trams or street cars? Self-driving cars seem extremely wasteful, like some bad idea of public transit
• learc83 7y ago
  There's a professor at Oklahoma State with a popular Youtube channel who has a proposal to create an Autonomous Truck Corridor as a way to fix a lot of our infrastructure problems. His proposal works with the autonomous driving technology available today--not level 5 autonomous driving that may be available sometime in the future. http://www.acpa.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/OKStateUniv-ATC-Concept.pdf http://www.acpa.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/OKStateUniv-A... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ev6hIQYKYY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ev6hIQYKYY
• 0x262d 7y ago
  can someone please advertise public transit to these deep-pocketed VC dumbasses as somehow being an artificially intelligent city network something something we have a real bridge to sell you
• jacquesm 7y ago
  I believe that self driving cars are here whenever they can take a standard driving test in whatever conditions we feel are normal for the legislative area they are employed in. Until then any kind of self driving should be given the same penalties that we would impose on a party operating a vehicle without the appropriate license. This is such an obvious thing to me I really wonder why it has not been implemented. After all, if 'AI' is allowed to drive why aren't kids aged 12 allowed to drive, they are obviously more intelligent. It's because they have not passed a driving test and won't be eligible until they are of the right age.
• winona 7y ago
  I'm going to be the contrarian here and say that they quoted people and events from some of the laggards or less advanced companies (like Uber's crash, which was totally preventable). I see much more optimism from the leaders in the space, although it's not like they are planning 100% self-driving taxis next year. Also, keep in mind that the fair comparison is whether the cars outperform the average rate of human drivers. It doesn't have to be perfect.
• standyro 7y ago
  the only thing I see in this thread are hundreds and hundreds of people who have never had the opportunity to drive a car with Tesla Autopilot or Comma.ai EON (this article included) Those two products are literally the best purchase I've made in years, and have enabled hours of mental energy in my life freed up from the confines of soul crushing traffic in major American cities. remember that slashdot comment about iPods being lame? people will look at articles like this, and threads like this in the same way in 5 years...
  • skizm 7y ago
    Can Tesla's autopilot really navigate "major American city" areas with no human interaction? I thought it was just a slightly smarter cruise control for highways only and the driver still needs to be somewhat alert?
• kerng 7y ago
  Level 5 AV will never exist, because there isn't even a Level 5 human. How about we just see if an AV can pass a license test to operate in a jurisdiction? They probably can already- but we do have higher expectations on AV then we have with humans I think. Which is good.
• getalyft 7y ago
  How about just programming human driven cars to obey speed limits (downrated in bad weather or visibility conditions). Many accidents are caused by people driving at an unsafe speed (who has not gone into a turn a little bit too fast). No AI needed, just a speed limit overlay onto existing GPS maps, plus a bit of logic to reduce speeds in certain conditions (night, low visibility, etc).
  • asark 7y ago
    Unexpected (by the driver) braking, possibly while making a turn, or controls failing to respond (the accelerator, say) seems more dangerous than the status quo. Plus you'd have to roll it out everywhere at once, or my merge onto a 60mph limit highway where flow-of-traffic is closer to 75, in my software-crippled car that thinks I shouldn't exceed or maybe even match the speed limit in the on-ramp, is gonna be way more dangerous than having no such feature. Then there's GPS often not quite knowing where you are most of the time (the route-finding apps just guess a lot—watch what happens when you make a wrong turn and it takes a few seconds to correct, because it's just assuming the diff between where you are and the road you're supposed to be on is an error, because there often are errors that large)
• Animats 7y ago
  The state of the art is discouraging for the money and years poured into it. Recognizing solid obstacles is still unreliable. On the one side, there's Tesla running into stationary objects multiple times, and Uber running down a pedestrian. On the other side, there's a false alarm rate which causes sudden stops. Low-speed self-driving vehicles ought to work reliably by now, but don't. Google's cute little bubble car, top speed 25MPH, was discontinued. Voyage has some cars in a retirement community. Some, as in 3. With safety drivers.[1] Local Motors has been issuing press releases for years, but not much is on the road. There are some self-driving shuttle buses, but they all have "safety drivers". EasyMile has real autonomous shuttle buses, but they had to drop the speed to about 10 MPH. Worse, all these systems have a huge engineer to passenger ratio. Nothing is close to being financially realistic. That's not a permanent problem; in the early days of the Internet, it was said that the ratio of PhDs to packets was too high. But this is a long way from profitability. It shouldn't be this bad. [1] https://www.villages-news.com/2019/01/31/villager-treated-to-ride-in-autonomous-vehicle/ https://www.villages-news.com/2019/01/31/villager-treated-to...
  • YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
    The Uber did recognise Elaine Herzberg as a pedestrian in the last 2 seconds before hitting her, after failing to do so for the 4 previous seconds [1]. It could have activated its breaks and she may have had a chance to survive (though probably not unscathed). However, the car's auto-breaking decision had been disabled because it was considered too conservative. So the only agent who could have reacted in time was the woman driving the car, who, as we know, was on her phone. Much as I find the hype around self-driving cars brain-dead, in this case, the car's AI was not at fault. Even if it could have made the decision to stop in time, the agency to act upon this decision was removed from it. _____________ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg#Cause_investigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg#Cause...
    • bart_spoon 7y ago
      > Much as I find the hype around self-driving cars brain-dead, in this case, the car's AI was not at fault. Even if it could have made the decision to stop in time, the agency to act upon this decision was removed from it. The agency to react was removed because its reactions are crap. If the AI is braking due to false positives all the time, and the the only way to fix it is to disable its ability to react, then I would say that indeed, it is the car’s AI at fault, albeit indirectly.
• noego 7y ago
  To be honest, 80% of what I want is a self-driving car that can drive itself on the highways during regular weather conditions. Getting it on and off the highway, I don't mind doing that manually. I would love to be able to read or work during the hour that I spend on the highway everyday. I would love to take a overnight road trip where I can go to sleep in SF and wake up the next morning in LA. I'm aware that accidents/bugs will happen, and as long as the car's safety record is better than that of humans, that's fine with me. I've never spent more than $20k on a car before, but for a car that can drive itself on the highways, I'd pay a whole lot more.
• jonplackett 7y ago
  The problem is that the mistakes even a much-better-statistically-than-human driverless car will make are going to be different types of mistakes than a human would make. A driverless car that kills half as many people per mile as normal driver BUT the ones it does kill are in ways that people feel sure that a human driver would not have been killed then it’ll still be a problem.
• DenisM 7y ago
  I can't help but notice that the hyper-enthusiastic media talk about self driving cars died down right around the time of Uber and Lyft IPOs. Like, if you want to sell something, you want to create a sense of urgency, right? "If you don't invest into U/L you're missing out on the self-driving revolution, and it's going to be huge! Just look at all the media going crazy!".
  • mhermher 7y ago
    And any time Tesla is about to do a cap raise.
• selfDrvngTrains 7y ago
  Self driving cars can be had right now, as long as we lay down self driving roads. When left on their own dedicated infrastructure, with specialized cues and signaling, they'd work great, right now, today. Unfortunately, the quick defeat to this idea is trains.
• mlguy456 7y ago
  I wonder if this is partially because the people working on AI/ML intentionally don't put enough efforts into this. I'm one of those people and while I'm to increase accuracy of an existing ML model by 0.3% and collect a fat paycheck, I'd never release any really novel ideas if I happen to come up with some. The reason is our society isn't ready for AI: it's bent by greed and doesn't even recognize this as a problem. Bezos makes billions out of literally slave labor and is cool with that. The US ships containers with firearms to middle East and Africa for profit. The first world people are ok with slave labor in Africa and China as long as it makes the next iPhone cheaper. China and UK are proud of making fast progress in making the survelliance state happen. Australian billionaires open new coal mines and don't care about the rest of the world as long as they have clean air where they live. American healthcare mafia extorts outrageous prices for basic meds and services and would rather let millions die than cut it's profits. What can AI give to this world? Superpowers for the tiny ruling elite? Private armies that can't possibly be challenged by common people. I don't want to live in that world.
• beefield 7y ago
  Just give me platooning on highways and approximately 95% of my personal use cases for self driving cars are satisfactorily fulfilled. And the problem is vastly simpler to solve.