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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

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
  > It's the logic. It's much more complicated than it first appeared Forget the snark: you don't say? :o Some of that logic is literally milllenium old unsolved logical dilemmas ("I have 2 choices and both involve killing people...").
deleted 7y ago
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suprfnk 7y ago
If a human can do it, I see no reason why an autonomous system can't, eventually, do it. It might take a very long time, but "never" seems short-sighted.
- bryanlarsen 7y ago
  Humans can't do it. When your stopping distance (including reaction time) exceeds your visibility there's no way to drive safely, but humans do it anyways.
  - leetcrew 7y ago
    > When your stopping distance (including reaction time) exceeds your visibility there's no way to drive safely, but humans do it anyways. this is bad, but not quite as bad as it sounds. most of the time, you only need to stop as fast as the car in front of you. it's pretty uncommon to encounter a stationary object in the middle of the travel lane. in fact, outside of driving on surface streets in the city, I can't remember the last time I had to avoid a stationary object in my lane. I'm much more worried by how closely people follow the car in front of them, regardless of visibility. many leave barely enough room to react at all.
    - bryanlarsen 7y ago
      Accident rates in the US on the highway are on the order of one per million miles. And in a million miles of driving you will encounter quite a few stationary or otherwise unexpected objects in the middle of the travel lane.
      - Retric 7y ago
        Object sure, but generally it’s not really an issue. Simply avoiding or driving over broken tire bits etc is generally a non issue. A object would need to be substantial enough to cause an accident and then roll into or fall onto a highway. That’s far from a 1 per million miles of driving situation. Remember, something falling off a truck would also take a while to slow down.
60654 7y ago
Well said. Autonomous navigation is still a huge open research problem, in the sense that we don't even know how it _could_ work, there is no AI work capable of integrating all of the necessary pieces. Heck, we don't even know how simple bird or lizard intelligence works, much less be able to replicate human cognition that goes into operating heavy machinery in a busy multi-agent social context. So promising that it will be not just solved, but productized into a polished consumer gadget, in 5 or so years, was an astonishing, unbelievably foolish promise. And worst of all, yes, it came from people who should have known better. And as a quick aside: there's much talk about "ethical AI", but here's a more common AI ethics failure: taking money from funders, shareholders, and customers, with promises of imminent deliverables, while knowing full well that the AI advances required for that haven't happened yet, and there's no evidence for when they will, if at all.
- im_down_w_otp 7y ago
  Indeed, it's unclear if anyone has yet to develop a path planner that can overcome "the freezing robot problem". Even with perfect perception performance, which doesn't exist, the path planning to deal with congested environments is an unsolved problem, and the path planning to deal with ambiguous multi-modal intent might be an unsolvable problem. To add insult to injury, the manner in-use today of modeling humans as essentially just another kind of dynamic object breaks down extremely quickly once humans are normalized to the presence of autonomous robots. The humans change their own behavior model to achieve their own objective function. They're not dynamic objects, they're learning objects, and now your AV models (which will include human interaction and reaction behaviors on purpose if you're it right and on accident if you're not) breakdown along an entirely new longitudinal axis. I think the AV market fundamentally broke when GM acquired Cruise for $1B seemingly out if nowhere. 1) Because the reality is that the DARPA Urban Challenge result was not assuredly generalizable, and it may be the case that there's still basic science to be done before the domain is just better, cheaper sensors & high-performance compute away from being productionizable. 2) It's not at all clear that deep learning is really iterating toward a solution to this problem either, but the improvements to methods and hardware have produced the ability to make very compelling demos, that even the purveyors of themselves might believe in, and show iterative improvements on the previous result, thus fueling more investment into something that isn't even known to be possible. 3) But, none of that would matter if GM hadn't decided to make a power move in throwing $1B at an acquisition and in one fell swoop turned an early stage unproven scientific research market into a super, super frothy capital market where it looked like anybody at any moment could be a unicorn without any clear reason or any fundamentals. Investors went insane and the expectations and promises followed them.
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sixplusone 7y ago
Agreed. Navigating the world is basically an AI-complete problem; we don't let 12-year-old kids drive and these current enhanced cruise control systems are nowhere near the AGI of that.
- MegaButts 7y ago
  I think the reason we don't let 12-year-old kids drive has nothing to do with cognitive ability, but emotional maturity. That said, I don't think the most advanced AI is even close to a 2-year-old.
gradys 7y ago
Here's Krafcik reacting to how what he said there was quoted and interpreted: "Yeah some context missing here, but it did make for a fun headline.( said the same thing about my own driving.) The point is that autonomous driving, like human driving, will always have constraints." https://twitter.com/johnkrafcik/status/1063281250088042496 https://twitter.com/johnkrafcik/status/1063281250088042496
- jcfrei 7y ago
  In other words, most people are not aware how dangerous certain conditions are under which they are occasionally driving (snow, fog, etc.). And that most of the time the only reason they didn't have a crash is luck. It might even be socially unacceptable to refuse driving to work because of fog.
darepublic 7y ago
Agree that it's far off but saying never seems a bit pessimistic. Maybe more like never using the approach waymo is taking...
bjornsing 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. “Never” is kind of a strong word in this context... My personal belief is that we could very well have level five autonomy within the decade, using only two video cameras and two microphones behind a windscreen. But this would of course require major progress in A.I., of the sort that may also not happen in a hundred years.
- roymurdock 7y ago
  This probably isn't going to happen. Getting to level 5 will require "V2X" technology - vehicles communicating with other vehicles and the road/traffic infrastructure itself. We will need a forward-thinking government to start building sensors and communication tech into roads, stop lights, parking spots, and a secure/interoperable internet for all these sensors to communicate autonomously. Currently the cost of implementing such a system is way higher than the return to drivers who can...what, work on more powerpoints or facetime while they're in the car instead of driving? Not to mention the huge security and safety and liability risks this would open up. That's why we solved this problem with public transportation in the past - hire one person to be the "V2X sensor" AKA bus driver.
  - gremlinsinc 7y ago
    Not really more expensive. If we have x deaths per year..let's say 10k for easy math. Over a decade that's 100k people dead. If self-driving cars can bring that to 0..that's 100k more people in a decade able to pay taxes because they didn't die. It's 100k families that maybe didn't lose their primary bread-winner and don't need to live off government assistance... So there's economic value in less people dying. It's also less in medical costs. Imagine what the bill for medicare for all would be if there were 0 traffic accidents across the entire U.S.A? Not to mention it could ease up congestion and make changes to the way they do construction or how often by maximizing speed and travel to make roads last longer somehow... Also less need for police to monitor traffic, I'm sure we get that sort of grid we'd also have a lot more big brother surveillance baked in too to make police jobs easier. Which I guess is good/bad depending on which side of the privacy ethics you are on surveillance and how 'honorable' our government is at the time (hopefully more honorable and less like china and it currently is)....
radicalbyte 7y ago
There are plenty of road conditions where humans also fail to drive. For example ice/snow in a country where that is not super common.
geegoo 7y ago
Nothing makes me cringe harder than absolute statements regarding technology from people in leadership roles in the technology sector.
rubicon33 7y ago
It is shocking to me how, we (people) CONSISTENTLY fail to understand where the bar is for accepting autonomous vehicles. They do NOT need to be perfect. They need to be BETTER than humans. That means less accidents, and by extension, less deaths and injuries as a result of automobile errors.
acchow 7y ago
Is level 5 autonomous more or less likely to be achievable than cold fusion?
- gremlinsinc 7y ago
  Cold fusion has a 100% chance of realization. It's a sound technology. There's no doubt that it will be realized and is achievable. The only doubts are the timescale -- those who work in the field often say it's always '30 years away', but some recent research seems promising to make it much closer than that. I'd say level 5 and cold fusion are both equally achievable, though level 5 automobiles may be airborne -- as then they'd have less obstacles just birds, trees, and other airborne vehicles, but pedestrians, cats, dogs, bicycles would be off the table. Super AI's I think are achievable and will be developed. I just don't know which will come first level 5 or cold fusion that's a toss up. If everything though has sensors including bikes, pedestrians, cross-walks, roads, etc that can detect what is on the road, send out a warning signal to cars travelling towards that intersection then that also takes out some of the problems - but that requires a very smart grid. On a long enough timeline though there's probably not much humankind can create. Though it could be 10 years could be 50.
acchow 7y ago
Wasn't it just a couple decades ago that we thought computers would never beat humans at Go?
Florin_Andrei 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. That's equivalent to saying AGI is impossible. It's a pretty big statement.
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  I'm not sure it's any bigger a statement than saying that it is possible, though...
ghevshoo 7y ago
They don’t need to drive perfectly. They only need to drive better than your average human.
chiefalchemist 7y ago
Perhaps. But how often are such conditions an issue? Heck, humans, if they venture out, don't do well in snow. Accidents also increase in rain. To move the needle - towards a true tipping point? - autonomous vehicles don't have to be everything to all people all the time. Certainly for a significant number of driver miles it's moderate distances at moderate speeds. Finally. Something as simple as a vehicle being able to deliver itself (from some central hub) to your door and you drive it (non-autonomously) from there would be significant. That changes the ownership model. It changes parking requirements, etc. Yeah, the holy grail might be a ways off. But there's plenty of (pardon me) disruption between now and level five.
leoh 7y ago
>Nothing makes a huge group of us cringe more, than people saying it's just around the corner. I thought you referencing the media here. Build it up, tear it down. They quoted and amplified so many people who suggested it was possible only to print articles later that point out the it just ain't possible.

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
> It's the logic. It's much more complicated than it first appeared Forget the snark: you don't say? :o Some of that logic is literally milllenium old unsolved logical dilemmas ("I have 2 choices and both involve killing people...").

deleted 7y ago

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suprfnk 7y ago

If a human can do it, I see no reason why an autonomous system can't, eventually, do it. It might take a very long time, but "never" seems short-sighted.

bryanlarsen 7y ago
Humans can't do it. When your stopping distance (including reaction time) exceeds your visibility there's no way to drive safely, but humans do it anyways.
- leetcrew 7y ago
  > When your stopping distance (including reaction time) exceeds your visibility there's no way to drive safely, but humans do it anyways. this is bad, but not quite as bad as it sounds. most of the time, you only need to stop as fast as the car in front of you. it's pretty uncommon to encounter a stationary object in the middle of the travel lane. in fact, outside of driving on surface streets in the city, I can't remember the last time I had to avoid a stationary object in my lane. I'm much more worried by how closely people follow the car in front of them, regardless of visibility. many leave barely enough room to react at all.
  - bryanlarsen 7y ago
    Accident rates in the US on the highway are on the order of one per million miles. And in a million miles of driving you will encounter quite a few stationary or otherwise unexpected objects in the middle of the travel lane.
    - Retric 7y ago
      Object sure, but generally it’s not really an issue. Simply avoiding or driving over broken tire bits etc is generally a non issue. A object would need to be substantial enough to cause an accident and then roll into or fall onto a highway. That’s far from a 1 per million miles of driving situation. Remember, something falling off a truck would also take a while to slow down.

60654 7y ago

Well said. Autonomous navigation is still a huge open research problem, in the sense that we don't even know how it _could_ work, there is no AI work capable of integrating all of the necessary pieces. Heck, we don't even know how simple bird or lizard intelligence works, much less be able to replicate human cognition that goes into operating heavy machinery in a busy multi-agent social context. So promising that it will be not just solved, but productized into a polished consumer gadget, in 5 or so years, was an astonishing, unbelievably foolish promise. And worst of all, yes, it came from people who should have known better. And as a quick aside: there's much talk about "ethical AI", but here's a more common AI ethics failure: taking money from funders, shareholders, and customers, with promises of imminent deliverables, while knowing full well that the AI advances required for that haven't happened yet, and there's no evidence for when they will, if at all.

im_down_w_otp 7y ago
Indeed, it's unclear if anyone has yet to develop a path planner that can overcome "the freezing robot problem". Even with perfect perception performance, which doesn't exist, the path planning to deal with congested environments is an unsolved problem, and the path planning to deal with ambiguous multi-modal intent might be an unsolvable problem. To add insult to injury, the manner in-use today of modeling humans as essentially just another kind of dynamic object breaks down extremely quickly once humans are normalized to the presence of autonomous robots. The humans change their own behavior model to achieve their own objective function. They're not dynamic objects, they're learning objects, and now your AV models (which will include human interaction and reaction behaviors on purpose if you're it right and on accident if you're not) breakdown along an entirely new longitudinal axis. I think the AV market fundamentally broke when GM acquired Cruise for $1B seemingly out if nowhere. 1) Because the reality is that the DARPA Urban Challenge result was not assuredly generalizable, and it may be the case that there's still basic science to be done before the domain is just better, cheaper sensors & high-performance compute away from being productionizable. 2) It's not at all clear that deep learning is really iterating toward a solution to this problem either, but the improvements to methods and hardware have produced the ability to make very compelling demos, that even the purveyors of themselves might believe in, and show iterative improvements on the previous result, thus fueling more investment into something that isn't even known to be possible. 3) But, none of that would matter if GM hadn't decided to make a power move in throwing $1B at an acquisition and in one fell swoop turned an early stage unproven scientific research market into a super, super frothy capital market where it looked like anybody at any moment could be a unicorn without any clear reason or any fundamentals. Investors went insane and the expectations and promises followed them.

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sixplusone 7y ago

Agreed. Navigating the world is basically an AI-complete problem; we don't let 12-year-old kids drive and these current enhanced cruise control systems are nowhere near the AGI of that.

MegaButts 7y ago
I think the reason we don't let 12-year-old kids drive has nothing to do with cognitive ability, but emotional maturity. That said, I don't think the most advanced AI is even close to a 2-year-old.

gradys 7y ago

Here's Krafcik reacting to how what he said there was quoted and interpreted: "Yeah some context missing here, but it did make for a fun headline.( said the same thing about my own driving.) The point is that autonomous driving, like human driving, will always have constraints." https://twitter.com/johnkrafcik/status/1063281250088042496 https://twitter.com/johnkrafcik/status/1063281250088042496

jcfrei 7y ago
In other words, most people are not aware how dangerous certain conditions are under which they are occasionally driving (snow, fog, etc.). And that most of the time the only reason they didn't have a crash is luck. It might even be socially unacceptable to refuse driving to work because of fog.

darepublic 7y ago

Agree that it's far off but saying never seems a bit pessimistic. Maybe more like never using the approach waymo is taking...

bjornsing 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. “Never” is kind of a strong word in this context... My personal belief is that we could very well have level five autonomy within the decade, using only two video cameras and two microphones behind a windscreen. But this would of course require major progress in A.I., of the sort that may also not happen in a hundred years.

roymurdock 7y ago
This probably isn't going to happen. Getting to level 5 will require "V2X" technology - vehicles communicating with other vehicles and the road/traffic infrastructure itself. We will need a forward-thinking government to start building sensors and communication tech into roads, stop lights, parking spots, and a secure/interoperable internet for all these sensors to communicate autonomously. Currently the cost of implementing such a system is way higher than the return to drivers who can...what, work on more powerpoints or facetime while they're in the car instead of driving? Not to mention the huge security and safety and liability risks this would open up. That's why we solved this problem with public transportation in the past - hire one person to be the "V2X sensor" AKA bus driver.
- gremlinsinc 7y ago
  Not really more expensive. If we have x deaths per year..let's say 10k for easy math. Over a decade that's 100k people dead. If self-driving cars can bring that to 0..that's 100k more people in a decade able to pay taxes because they didn't die. It's 100k families that maybe didn't lose their primary bread-winner and don't need to live off government assistance... So there's economic value in less people dying. It's also less in medical costs. Imagine what the bill for medicare for all would be if there were 0 traffic accidents across the entire U.S.A? Not to mention it could ease up congestion and make changes to the way they do construction or how often by maximizing speed and travel to make roads last longer somehow... Also less need for police to monitor traffic, I'm sure we get that sort of grid we'd also have a lot more big brother surveillance baked in too to make police jobs easier. Which I guess is good/bad depending on which side of the privacy ethics you are on surveillance and how 'honorable' our government is at the time (hopefully more honorable and less like china and it currently is)....

radicalbyte 7y ago

There are plenty of road conditions where humans also fail to drive. For example ice/snow in a country where that is not super common.

geegoo 7y ago

Nothing makes me cringe harder than absolute statements regarding technology from people in leadership roles in the technology sector.

rubicon33 7y ago

It is shocking to me how, we (people) CONSISTENTLY fail to understand where the bar is for accepting autonomous vehicles. They do NOT need to be perfect. They need to be BETTER than humans. That means less accidents, and by extension, less deaths and injuries as a result of automobile errors.

acchow 7y ago

Is level 5 autonomous more or less likely to be achievable than cold fusion?

gremlinsinc 7y ago
Cold fusion has a 100% chance of realization. It's a sound technology. There's no doubt that it will be realized and is achievable. The only doubts are the timescale -- those who work in the field often say it's always '30 years away', but some recent research seems promising to make it much closer than that. I'd say level 5 and cold fusion are both equally achievable, though level 5 automobiles may be airborne -- as then they'd have less obstacles just birds, trees, and other airborne vehicles, but pedestrians, cats, dogs, bicycles would be off the table. Super AI's I think are achievable and will be developed. I just don't know which will come first level 5 or cold fusion that's a toss up. If everything though has sensors including bikes, pedestrians, cross-walks, roads, etc that can detect what is on the road, send out a warning signal to cars travelling towards that intersection then that also takes out some of the problems - but that requires a very smart grid. On a long enough timeline though there's probably not much humankind can create. Though it could be 10 years could be 50.

acchow 7y ago

Wasn't it just a couple decades ago that we thought computers would never beat humans at Go?

Florin_Andrei 7y ago

AnimalMuppet 7y ago
I'm not sure it's any bigger a statement than saying that it is possible, though...

ghevshoo 7y ago

They don’t need to drive perfectly. They only need to drive better than your average human.

chiefalchemist 7y ago

Perhaps. But how often are such conditions an issue? Heck, humans, if they venture out, don't do well in snow. Accidents also increase in rain. To move the needle - towards a true tipping point? - autonomous vehicles don't have to be everything to all people all the time. Certainly for a significant number of driver miles it's moderate distances at moderate speeds. Finally. Something as simple as a vehicle being able to deliver itself (from some central hub) to your door and you drive it (non-autonomously) from there would be significant. That changes the ownership model. It changes parking requirements, etc. Yeah, the holy grail might be a ways off. But there's plenty of (pardon me) disruption between now and level five.

leoh 7y ago

>Nothing makes a huge group of us cringe more, than people saying it's just around the corner. I thought you referencing the media here. Build it up, tear it down. They quoted and amplified so many people who suggested it was possible only to print articles later that point out the it just ain't possible.