4 ms·

boggles my mind that people who know the first thing about software can actually think that self driving cars are viable technology

seanmcdirmid 7y ago
Software technology isn’t static, most of us are only arguing about when, not if.
- anyfoo 7y ago
  And I'd argue that "when" is very, very far away. Unless you remove human drivers, and significantly change the infrastructure for self-driving cars, but at some point you are not so far from (existing) self-conducted trains, then.
  - ianai 7y ago
    And you offer no argument against “self conducted trains”. Look, people are horrible to one another. They bring their brutalist egos into their cars and drive at the whim of it. Very few people drive the safe distance away from cars, drive safe distances, let alone reacting to perceived slights by other drivers in defensive ways. No, instead they hug bumpers, cut one another off, drive so close a simple pat on the breaks would cause an accident, and so on.
    - anyfoo 7y ago
      No, I don't, and it was not my intent to lessen the value of "self conducting trains" at all. Having been raised in Germany, I'm a big fan of public transport. I just wanted to point out that "self driving cars", in isolation without any change to the infrastructure they operate in, are, by my intuition, a pipe dream. I think we are aligned here.
  - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
    We already have self driving cars running around Mountain View with little problems. Extending that progress to more extreme conditions doesn’t seem far fetched, especially when we continue to have technology advances in sensors (LIDAR) and AI control. 5 or 10 years might sound aggressive to many people, but 20 years doesn’t sound far off at all.
    - quicklyfrozen 7y ago
      Driving in Mountain View just isn't that representative of a lot of the US, much less of the world. You'll never have training data that covers every scenario as we're constantly creating new ones -- from spray painted temporary signage to unclear directions from police officers to random obstacles that force breaking rules to navigate around. 20 years sounds pretty optimistic to me.
      - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
        Why does some people assume the technology will start standing still when it has advanced so far in just the last 5 years? None of those problems are insurmountable, when the tech stops getting better, maybe you’ll have a point. 20 years is incredibly pessimistic to me. Heck, we might even have GAI by then.
        anyfoo 7y ago
        Why do you assume that those "little" problems that stand in the way are surmountable with any realistic rate of advancement in technology? Because some ill-defined "amount" x of advancement has happened in the last 5 years, so in 10 years it will be 2 times x? Some problems are really hard, some are essentially impossible. For example, the halting problem is impossible to solve. All its corollaries are, too: You cannot for arbitrary cases tell whether a C program adds two simple numbers together, period. Voice Assistants are an example for "problems so hard, they are essentially impossible": A human housemate has no problem understanding what I mean when I say "it went yellow, can you order this time?", a voice assistant likely never will. If it can understand that one, it cannot understand another way to phrase it that I can come up immediately. It might get good enough to unambiguously understand "order the water filters for the fridge" every time, but I can convey the same thing to a human in infinitely many more ways. In driving, unfortunately, you don't get to choose which way a situation is presented, the way you can with crafting a sentence to a Voice Assistant. The next time you drive through a city, look out for any even remotely non-standard situation. Now imagine how a computer should be supposed to react without the arsenal of context clues that your lifetime of human experience provides to you, and that tells you to "just swerve left after slowing down for a few feet" with barely a conscious thought.

seanmcdirmid 7y ago

Software technology isn’t static, most of us are only arguing about when, not if.

anyfoo 7y ago
And I'd argue that "when" is very, very far away. Unless you remove human drivers, and significantly change the infrastructure for self-driving cars, but at some point you are not so far from (existing) self-conducted trains, then.
- ianai 7y ago
  And you offer no argument against “self conducted trains”. Look, people are horrible to one another. They bring their brutalist egos into their cars and drive at the whim of it. Very few people drive the safe distance away from cars, drive safe distances, let alone reacting to perceived slights by other drivers in defensive ways. No, instead they hug bumpers, cut one another off, drive so close a simple pat on the breaks would cause an accident, and so on.
  - anyfoo 7y ago
    No, I don't, and it was not my intent to lessen the value of "self conducting trains" at all. Having been raised in Germany, I'm a big fan of public transport. I just wanted to point out that "self driving cars", in isolation without any change to the infrastructure they operate in, are, by my intuition, a pipe dream. I think we are aligned here.
- seanmcdirmid 7y ago
  We already have self driving cars running around Mountain View with little problems. Extending that progress to more extreme conditions doesn’t seem far fetched, especially when we continue to have technology advances in sensors (LIDAR) and AI control. 5 or 10 years might sound aggressive to many people, but 20 years doesn’t sound far off at all.
  - quicklyfrozen 7y ago
    Driving in Mountain View just isn't that representative of a lot of the US, much less of the world. You'll never have training data that covers every scenario as we're constantly creating new ones -- from spray painted temporary signage to unclear directions from police officers to random obstacles that force breaking rules to navigate around. 20 years sounds pretty optimistic to me.
    - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
      Why does some people assume the technology will start standing still when it has advanced so far in just the last 5 years? None of those problems are insurmountable, when the tech stops getting better, maybe you’ll have a point. 20 years is incredibly pessimistic to me. Heck, we might even have GAI by then.
      - anyfoo 7y ago
        Why do you assume that those "little" problems that stand in the way are surmountable with any realistic rate of advancement in technology? Because some ill-defined "amount" x of advancement has happened in the last 5 years, so in 10 years it will be 2 times x? Some problems are really hard, some are essentially impossible. For example, the halting problem is impossible to solve. All its corollaries are, too: You cannot for arbitrary cases tell whether a C program adds two simple numbers together, period. Voice Assistants are an example for "problems so hard, they are essentially impossible": A human housemate has no problem understanding what I mean when I say "it went yellow, can you order this time?", a voice assistant likely never will. If it can understand that one, it cannot understand another way to phrase it that I can come up immediately. It might get good enough to unambiguously understand "order the water filters for the fridge" every time, but I can convey the same thing to a human in infinitely many more ways. In driving, unfortunately, you don't get to choose which way a situation is presented, the way you can with crafting a sentence to a Voice Assistant. The next time you drive through a city, look out for any even remotely non-standard situation. Now imagine how a computer should be supposed to react without the arsenal of context clues that your lifetime of human experience provides to you, and that tells you to "just swerve left after slowing down for a few feet" with barely a conscious thought.