7 ms·

The slow progress is not an indictment of self driving. This is one of the toughest engineering challenges ever mounted by humanity.

by ttul 7y ago

Judgmentality 7y ago
I think it parallels nuclear fusion in a lot of ways. The impact is unquestionable, but the feasibility is an ongoing debate.
dumbfoundded 7y ago
Yeah, that's a bit of an overstatement. We created nukes, landed on the moon, took sludge out of the ground and used it to power the world. We connected this world with wires and glass fibers to build a real-time global communication system that also gathered all of the world's information in a singular and immediately accessible place. Building a self driving car is hard but really not as tough. How quickly do think we'd get self driving cars if the USA spent 4% of the federal budget on it like NASA received in the 60s. (That's about $40B a year for a decade).
- paxys 7y ago
  All great achievements, but none of these is in the same ballpark of difficulty as creating a general artificial intelligence (which is pretty much what self driving cars need to achieve true level 5 autonomy).
  - dumbfoundded 7y ago
    Level 5 driving doesn't require AGI at all. It's an extremely narrow set of problems that have to be solved incredibly well. It mostly just comes down to creating an accurate 3d representation of the world from a bunch of sensors. You also have to correctly segment and label each object in that 3d representation. If you did those two things extremely well, the actual driving logic can be hardcoded. The problem is that each of these systems has problems so they all have to improve and compensate for each other.
    - Judgmentality 7y ago
      This is incorrect. The hardest part of developing a self-driving car is predicting the world around you in the immediate future. Knowing whether or not that object is a person is a lot easier than guessing whether or not that person is going to jump out in front of the car 1 second into the future. You have to know who is going to run stop signs, when cyclists are about to cut you off, when someone is about to back up into a parking spot. I don't know whether or not AGI needs to be developed to make a useful self-driving car, but as time goes on I'm beginning to believe that's the case.
      - outworlder 7y ago
        You can probabilistically predict those events with machines much better than humans can. You don't really know someone will decide to run a stop sign, but you do know when the vehicle is past the point it was supposed to start slowing down. That's relatively "easy", we have been predicting physical object motions with analog computers, even. As the parent says, accurate data from sensors is a much bigger problem. But once you have the data, you can model these objects with dumb algorithms. Computers can also have a much faster reaction time, so a human may need to predict one second ahead, but computers may be able to get away with less.
        dymk 7y ago
        > You can probabilistically predict those events with machines much better than humans can. This is an assumption and has not been shown to be correct or even probable
      - whatshisface 7y ago
        I question the claim that you need to predict the immediate future. Human reaction times are pretty slow, to the point where when our feet hit a pedal in response to light that hit our eyes two seconds ago, something that is prediction for us could be reaction for a machine. A human has to live two seconds in the future because our appendages and lower faculties are lagging behind in the past.
- gowld 7y ago
  Waymo has a far better safety records than NASA, and it self driving cars. NASA is allowed to kill people. Waymo isn't. The Internet is allowed to be full of malware. Waymo isn't.
- obernaru 7y ago
  Depends what you mean by "self driving car". IMO, building a fully self driving car requires artificial general intelligence, which is so hard I'm not sure humanity will ever achieve it. If we ever manage to create the kind of AI that fully self driving cars require, self driving cars will be one of the most boring and trivial things that is done with that AI.
- foobiekr 7y ago
  We won’t know how tough it is until it gets done once. I don’t think we’ve demonstrated anything autonomous beyond the most trivial kinds of autonomy (e.g. the V2) in all of our technology history.
- erfgh 7y ago
  It's way tougher.
- alkonaut 7y ago
  My guess is that it (full 100% self driving) has around the same technological difficulty as putting a man on Mars. It also depends on what constitutes "100%" of course. > How quickly do think we'd get self driving cars if the USA spent 4% of the federal budget on it like NASA received in the 60s. (That's about $40B a year for a decade). At that cost we could adapt all infrastructure to suit self driving cars, instead of developing self driving cars to adapt to human infrastructure. But I think that kind of cost is always going to be beyond what's acceptable. I think the discussion is mostly pointless because of diminishing returns: if you can have "99.9% full self driving" for a tiny fraction of the cost, who would want to pay to go from 99.9% to 100%? Initially human remote drivers will take care of the rest. And then there is a very slow commercial race towards using fewer humans that drives the very slow march to 99.9% and 99.99% self driving and so on. Driving the last second of the last edge case route is basically something that requires AGI (as long as we don't adapt infrastructure).
  - Miraste 7y ago
    I agree with most of this, but remote drivers are completely unfeasible with current or planned network infrastructure. You could drive with acceptable levels of sensor bandwidth and latency right next to an unobstructed low-utilization 5G tower, and that's about it. That's unlikely to correspond with the locations one would need remote drivers.
    - alkonaut 7y ago
      Luckily the hardest situations at least occur in cities and not on highways, and cities have good broadband. But yes, it's still "100%, but only here" a.k.a. not 100% I think remote drivers will probably have to "rescue" cars without piloting them, usually just assessing a situation and overriding something (driving through an obstacle etc). A passenger (if there is one) could do the same. But sometimes actual remote driving would be required of course.
ocdtrekkie 7y ago
My peeve is not the slow progress: My peeve with self-driving companies, Waymo and Tesla alike, is their constant misrepresentation of their capabilities and their timelines for the benefit of stock value and public opinion. The technology doesn't really work, and Google's marketing for the past five years has claimed regulations were the only thing holding them back.
- whatshisface 7y ago
  Is the market really being fooled? Tesla's stock price falls pretty often, and in a universe where the hype was real it would be a lot higher.
- DannyBee 7y ago
  citation? This feels like you swapped google for tesla (Elon literally said that, i can't find anything that says Google has said it)
  - ocdtrekkie 7y ago
    I mean, off-hand, this paywalled article from 2016: https://www.barrons.com/articles/googles-self-driving-cars-face-regulatory-roadblocks-1457157568 https://www.barrons.com/articles/googles-self-driving-cars-f... The search result for it had the text "Google is so confident about its technology that the Internet search giant has already agreed to accept liability if its self-driving cars cause an accident." Here's someone following right along with the suggestion that regulations, not lack of technology is to blame: https://www.wired.com/story/outdated-auto-safety-regulations-threaten-the-self-driving-revolution/?verso=true https://www.wired.com/story/outdated-auto-safety-regulations... The author, part of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, works for Google: https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/trade_association_and_third_party_groups.pdf https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/trade_association_... That was page one of my search results, but suffice to say Google's been insinuating this for a while, both from the Chris Urmson era and the John Krafcik one. I specifically referred to Tesla in my post as well. I saw the suggestion that Elon's claims about release dates for Autopilot features were effectively timed to manipulate the market. I'd give credit to that theory, or that Elon just has no clue how far he actually is from success. One of the two. Both companies horribly misrepresent the fact that self-driving isn't around the corner.

The slow progress is not an indictment of self driving. This is one of the toughest engineering challenges ever mounted by humanity.

by ttul 7y ago

The slow progress is not an indictment of self driving. This is one of the toughest engineering challenges ever mounted by humanity.

Judgmentality 7y ago

I think it parallels nuclear fusion in a lot of ways. The impact is unquestionable, but the feasibility is an ongoing debate.

dumbfoundded 7y ago

Yeah, that's a bit of an overstatement. We created nukes, landed on the moon, took sludge out of the ground and used it to power the world. We connected this world with wires and glass fibers to build a real-time global communication system that also gathered all of the world's information in a singular and immediately accessible place. Building a self driving car is hard but really not as tough. How quickly do think we'd get self driving cars if the USA spent 4% of the federal budget on it like NASA received in the 60s. (That's about $40B a year for a decade).

paxys 7y ago
All great achievements, but none of these is in the same ballpark of difficulty as creating a general artificial intelligence (which is pretty much what self driving cars need to achieve true level 5 autonomy).
- dumbfoundded 7y ago
  Level 5 driving doesn't require AGI at all. It's an extremely narrow set of problems that have to be solved incredibly well. It mostly just comes down to creating an accurate 3d representation of the world from a bunch of sensors. You also have to correctly segment and label each object in that 3d representation. If you did those two things extremely well, the actual driving logic can be hardcoded. The problem is that each of these systems has problems so they all have to improve and compensate for each other.
  - Judgmentality 7y ago
    This is incorrect. The hardest part of developing a self-driving car is predicting the world around you in the immediate future. Knowing whether or not that object is a person is a lot easier than guessing whether or not that person is going to jump out in front of the car 1 second into the future. You have to know who is going to run stop signs, when cyclists are about to cut you off, when someone is about to back up into a parking spot. I don't know whether or not AGI needs to be developed to make a useful self-driving car, but as time goes on I'm beginning to believe that's the case.
    - outworlder 7y ago
      You can probabilistically predict those events with machines much better than humans can. You don't really know someone will decide to run a stop sign, but you do know when the vehicle is past the point it was supposed to start slowing down. That's relatively "easy", we have been predicting physical object motions with analog computers, even. As the parent says, accurate data from sensors is a much bigger problem. But once you have the data, you can model these objects with dumb algorithms. Computers can also have a much faster reaction time, so a human may need to predict one second ahead, but computers may be able to get away with less.
      - dymk 7y ago
        > You can probabilistically predict those events with machines much better than humans can. This is an assumption and has not been shown to be correct or even probable
    - whatshisface 7y ago
      I question the claim that you need to predict the immediate future. Human reaction times are pretty slow, to the point where when our feet hit a pedal in response to light that hit our eyes two seconds ago, something that is prediction for us could be reaction for a machine. A human has to live two seconds in the future because our appendages and lower faculties are lagging behind in the past.
gowld 7y ago
Waymo has a far better safety records than NASA, and it self driving cars. NASA is allowed to kill people. Waymo isn't. The Internet is allowed to be full of malware. Waymo isn't.
obernaru 7y ago
Depends what you mean by "self driving car". IMO, building a fully self driving car requires artificial general intelligence, which is so hard I'm not sure humanity will ever achieve it. If we ever manage to create the kind of AI that fully self driving cars require, self driving cars will be one of the most boring and trivial things that is done with that AI.
foobiekr 7y ago
We won’t know how tough it is until it gets done once. I don’t think we’ve demonstrated anything autonomous beyond the most trivial kinds of autonomy (e.g. the V2) in all of our technology history.
erfgh 7y ago
It's way tougher.
alkonaut 7y ago
My guess is that it (full 100% self driving) has around the same technological difficulty as putting a man on Mars. It also depends on what constitutes "100%" of course. > How quickly do think we'd get self driving cars if the USA spent 4% of the federal budget on it like NASA received in the 60s. (That's about $40B a year for a decade). At that cost we could adapt all infrastructure to suit self driving cars, instead of developing self driving cars to adapt to human infrastructure. But I think that kind of cost is always going to be beyond what's acceptable. I think the discussion is mostly pointless because of diminishing returns: if you can have "99.9% full self driving" for a tiny fraction of the cost, who would want to pay to go from 99.9% to 100%? Initially human remote drivers will take care of the rest. And then there is a very slow commercial race towards using fewer humans that drives the very slow march to 99.9% and 99.99% self driving and so on. Driving the last second of the last edge case route is basically something that requires AGI (as long as we don't adapt infrastructure).
- Miraste 7y ago
  I agree with most of this, but remote drivers are completely unfeasible with current or planned network infrastructure. You could drive with acceptable levels of sensor bandwidth and latency right next to an unobstructed low-utilization 5G tower, and that's about it. That's unlikely to correspond with the locations one would need remote drivers.
  - alkonaut 7y ago
    Luckily the hardest situations at least occur in cities and not on highways, and cities have good broadband. But yes, it's still "100%, but only here" a.k.a. not 100% I think remote drivers will probably have to "rescue" cars without piloting them, usually just assessing a situation and overriding something (driving through an obstacle etc). A passenger (if there is one) could do the same. But sometimes actual remote driving would be required of course.

ocdtrekkie 7y ago

My peeve is not the slow progress: My peeve with self-driving companies, Waymo and Tesla alike, is their constant misrepresentation of their capabilities and their timelines for the benefit of stock value and public opinion. The technology doesn't really work, and Google's marketing for the past five years has claimed regulations were the only thing holding them back.

whatshisface 7y ago
Is the market really being fooled? Tesla's stock price falls pretty often, and in a universe where the hype was real it would be a lot higher.
DannyBee 7y ago
citation? This feels like you swapped google for tesla (Elon literally said that, i can't find anything that says Google has said it)
- ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  I mean, off-hand, this paywalled article from 2016: https://www.barrons.com/articles/googles-self-driving-cars-face-regulatory-roadblocks-1457157568 https://www.barrons.com/articles/googles-self-driving-cars-f... The search result for it had the text "Google is so confident about its technology that the Internet search giant has already agreed to accept liability if its self-driving cars cause an accident." Here's someone following right along with the suggestion that regulations, not lack of technology is to blame: https://www.wired.com/story/outdated-auto-safety-regulations-threaten-the-self-driving-revolution/?verso=true https://www.wired.com/story/outdated-auto-safety-regulations... The author, part of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, works for Google: https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/trade_association_and_third_party_groups.pdf https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/trade_association_... That was page one of my search results, but suffice to say Google's been insinuating this for a while, both from the Chris Urmson era and the John Krafcik one. I specifically referred to Tesla in my post as well. I saw the suggestion that Elon's claims about release dates for Autopilot features were effectively timed to manipulate the market. I'd give credit to that theory, or that Elon just has no clue how far he actually is from success. One of the two. Both companies horribly misrepresent the fact that self-driving isn't around the corner.