8 ms·

Steve Wozniak says he does not expect fully autonomous cars 'in my lifetime'

39 points by AndrewBissell 7y ago

mindcrime 7y ago
I'm a little younger than Woz, and I am skeptical we'll have truly autonomous self-driving cars in my lifetime. Three thoughts: 1. Any of us who work in software development know that "getting to 90% done is easy... it's the second 90% that gets you". And I believe that to the extent that we may seem to be 90% of the way to self-driving cars, it's definitely the "first 90%" not the second. The devil truly is in the details. 2. From what I've seen / heard, it seems that most of the testing done to date has been done in day-time, on limited access, smooth, flat, straight roads, OR urban surface streets where traffic speeds are relatively slow. I believe the leap from either of those environments to "any arbitrary twisty, curvy, back-country road, at night, when it's foggy and snowing", is quite substantial. And I don't consider a car truly autonomous unless it can handle those conditions at least as well as a human (to be fair, humans don't always handle those conditions well, so maybe this bar isn't as high as it seems). 3. I've developed software for 20 years... knowing how the sausage is made, seeing the compromises that are made in order to "hit the ship date", the bugs that are swept under the rug, the boundary conditions that are assumed away as "impossible", etc., I won't be trusting any self-driving car anytime soon.
- steelframe 7y ago
  > knowing how the sausage is made, seeing the compromises that are made in order to "hit the ship date", the bugs that are swept under the rug, the boundary conditions that are assumed away as "impossible", etc., I won't be trusting any self-driving car anytime soon. As a general member of the public who is present on the roads, you have no choice but to trust any Alpha- or Beta-level self-driving technology that certain companies thrust out on the roads today.
- pkulak 7y ago
  I think we're at least one CS breakthrough away, and how do you put a timeline on that? Kinda like how speech recognition was just almost there for decades until modern ML made it actually as good as a human being.
  - ozten 7y ago
    > ML made it actually as good as a human being How ML made it usable in some cases, would be more accurate. I still can't ask Alexa to play specific albums or tracks most of the time. I don't want that level of accuracy driving cars on the road.
    - shsjxjbsbs 7y ago
      Google seems to have no trouble playing music from Spotify for me. It can even manage it while I yell my song requests from the shower.
      - rsj_hn 7y ago
        The only thing I have ever wanted from phone assistants is to tell me whether a coffee shop was open or not, or what the closing time is. I still can't get this info, nor is this question understood. I still have to stop, launch a browser, navigate to the site, and dig around their website for opening hours, or in the worst case find a phone number and call to ask them.
        adriftincode 7y ago
        What phone assistants are you using? I’ve never had this problem.
        rsj_hn 7y ago
        Siri
        adriftincode 7y ago
        Same here, Siri solves this problem. Me: “Hey Siri, how late is x open?” Siri: One possibility is on x street, does that sound good? Me: Yes Siri: “X is open from y-z.”
- yumraj 7y ago
  I agree. In my various conversations on this topic around the bay area, people are generally overly optimistic, who believe it'll happen in next couple or so years, and people who are overly pessimistic. Possibly a gross generalization but generally the people who are overly pessimistic are the ones who are or have till recently been engineers, while the people who are overly optimistic are the ones further away from engineering - with the farther they are the more optimistic they are. Moreover, in addition to what you wrote there are a lot of other open questions, not necessarily in any order and definitely not a complete list: 1) Auto Insurance (cars below refers to fully autonomous cars): 1.1) What happens to auto insurance? Do I still need to buy it if I'm not driving it, or does it come bundled in the car price? 1.2) Does everyone pay the same auto insurance for the same car model/year. 1.3) Do cars with different autonomous models have different auto insurance? 1.4) What happens in the case of car accident between self-driving and non-self driving car? 1.5) What happens in the case of two self-driving cars' accident 1.6) What happens if a person is killed due to the Car's fault. Who is liable? The insurance company? The Car manufacturer? The self-driving module manufacturer? 2) Some Edge cases 2.1) What happens if on a 4-way stop 4 self-driving cars come to stop at the same time? Do they know how to handle that, as in which car is moving forward and which one is allowing other cars? 2.2) What happens in an emergency? Can I force my car to drive rash to the hospital or will it follow the speed limit to the T. 2.3) What happens if the Car runs into a situation which it is not trained for? 3) How are the cars tested? 3.1) As a consumer do we know that the cars are fully tested to handle ALL edge conditions? 3.1.1) What is the definition/definitive list of ALL edge conditions? 3.2) When will we know that the threshold has been passed, and the car is truly autonomous? 4) Security 4.1) Assuming the cars will need to be connected, how will the security be? 4.2) Can the cars be Pwned? I'm sure they can be.... so this is the rhetorical question 4.2.2) If the cars can be pwned, will the fully autonomous cars become the next WMD (Weapon of Mass Destruction) -- if you don't agree, close your eyes and imagine a fleet of hundreds of thousands or millions of fully autonomous cars under the control of a rogue entity hell bent on causing damage/killing people. 4.2.3) How do we protect against that?
  - aeternum 7y ago
    1) Car insurance can work exactly like it currently does. The car owner's insurance is liable by default, however if the car itself is in some way at fault (performing out-of-spec), then the insurance company goes after the car company. This can already happen if something like brakes fail or accelerator gets stuck. 2 & 3) Yes there are some edge cases that you can't train for, but same with humans. What do humans do in an edge case like a torrential downpour? Simply pull over. Even if there are edge cases, consider that humans are pretty bad drivers on average, over 1.25 million deaths per year, and 50 million injuries in the US alone. Suppose that in a couple years, self driving cars are not perfect due to the edge cases, and still cause 250k deaths / year. Would you allow them at that point? Even with those stats we should consider only allowing self-driving cars and begin to outlaw human drivers.
todaysAI 7y ago
I agree, not because of technical issues but because we will never be able to get past the 'Trolley Problem'.
- nradov 7y ago
  I don't expect level 4+ autonomous vehicles any time soon, but the "trolley problem" is an irrelevant distraction. It's not something that comes up in real world collisions. There's never an even choice between hitting one of two targets. Other factors are always present and dictate the safest course of action.
  - todaysAI 7y ago
    I don't agree. The problem of least 'harm' will come up continually. Moralistic decisions must be made by the car. And even if those incidents do not occur, the software will have to be programmed for these types of decisions.
- claudiawerner 7y ago
  Moral and ethical dilemmas, unfortunately (in my view as someone very sympathetic to philosophical investigation) seem only rarely to deter the inventors of technology and even more rarely deter the companies who employ these inventors and engineers.
- mac01021 7y ago
  The trolley problem is not relevant because an autonomous vehicle should never put itself in a position where it might drive into anything.
  - todaysAI 7y ago
    Tires burst, kids run out in traffic, human drivers make mistakes, bad weather happens...
    - mac01021 7y ago
aedanman 7y ago
Is this because he doesn't expect to live much longer? He is an overweight 69 year old.
- m463 7y ago
  Woz aside, I don't think people realize the increased mortality of being on the upper end of the (literal) scale. Here's a journal article: https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1001673 https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo... but to summarize BMI vs years lost: BMI 40-45 45-50 50-55 55-60 men -6.5 -10.8 -10.6 -17.0 women -6.9 -9.1 -10.3 -13.1
  - kwhitefoot 7y ago
    For my height 1.7 m I would have 10 weigh 115 kg to have a BMI of 40. Bloody hell, I count myself as overweight at the 74 kg I weigh now, BMI 26. Just can't imagine carrying an extra 41 kg! Doesn't surprise me at all that it would shorten my life. Never mind that but the life one has must be worse as well.
    - rwmurrayVT 7y ago
      I just did that same calculation. My god. Would I even want to go 10 more years weighing 300 lbs? I know BMI isn't 'perfect'. I think once you reach a certain weight class it becomes more and more relevant. There's no way more than a few fringe cases of people are 6'+ and 350+lbs of primarily muscle. Even NFL linemen are on average 6'4" and around 300lbs. Edit: That linked article is incredible. It shows the primary driver of the increased mortality is from heart disease and diabetes. 5x more deaths from diabetes, 3x from heart disease, and 2x from digestive neoplasms, 16x lower respiratory, 5x liver disease. I'm going to continue my good exercise and dieting...
      - officeplant 7y ago
        >My god. Would I even want to go 10 more years weighing 300 lbs? As someone who's dropped from 430 to 330 (6'3" 31). This is always a difficult question. The struggle is real, but even trying to hit the "healthy" weight for my height according to BMI is another 140lb away.
rdlecler1 7y ago
This is why I’m perplexed by the concerns around AI. what is more likely to happen is that we’ll start evolving the infrastructure to support driverless cars in the same way paved roads enabled the automobile.
abduekejfidj 7y ago
Full self-driving requires artificial general intelligence and I don't think that will be around for at least another 100 years, if ever. It is truly amazing how much hype FSD has generated, even among smart technically-savvy people.
jmpman 7y ago
DARPA Grand Challenge was started in 2004, so it’s been 15 years of constant research to get this far. We have at least another 15 to go.
kd3 7y ago
Woz is expecting to die within 5 years.
ksaj 7y ago
I think he literally means nothing more than "Apple isn't making a car OS." Their focus is your pocket and other carry-alls, and not at all interested in your car outside of how those pocket and carry-all devices can connect to it. Hell, their focus is only barely on the desktop anymore. For the same reason. Tracking is way more interesting when not anchored to a desktop, and other companies already got the car thing going.
kwhitefoot 7y ago
Clarke's first law comes to mind. Not an exact fit but pertinent nonetheless: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

39 points by AndrewBissell 7y ago

I'm a little younger than Woz, and I am skeptical we'll have truly autonomous self-driving cars in my lifetime. Three thoughts: 1. Any of us who work in software development know that "getting to 90% done is easy... it's the second 90% that gets you". And I believe that to the extent that we may seem to be 90% of the way to self-driving cars, it's definitely the "first 90%" not the second. The devil truly is in the details. 2. From what I've seen / heard, it seems that most of the testing done to date has been done in day-time, on limited access, smooth, flat, straight roads, OR urban surface streets where traffic speeds are relatively slow. I believe the leap from either of those environments to "any arbitrary twisty, curvy, back-country road, at night, when it's foggy and snowing", is quite substantial. And I don't consider a car truly autonomous unless it can handle those conditions at least as well as a human (to be fair, humans don't always handle those conditions well, so maybe this bar isn't as high as it seems). 3. I've developed software for 20 years... knowing how the sausage is made, seeing the compromises that are made in order to "hit the ship date", the bugs that are swept under the rug, the boundary conditions that are assumed away as "impossible", etc., I won't be trusting any self-driving car anytime soon.

steelframe 7y ago
> knowing how the sausage is made, seeing the compromises that are made in order to "hit the ship date", the bugs that are swept under the rug, the boundary conditions that are assumed away as "impossible", etc., I won't be trusting any self-driving car anytime soon. As a general member of the public who is present on the roads, you have no choice but to trust any Alpha- or Beta-level self-driving technology that certain companies thrust out on the roads today.
pkulak 7y ago
I think we're at least one CS breakthrough away, and how do you put a timeline on that? Kinda like how speech recognition was just almost there for decades until modern ML made it actually as good as a human being.
- ozten 7y ago
  > ML made it actually as good as a human being How ML made it usable in some cases, would be more accurate. I still can't ask Alexa to play specific albums or tracks most of the time. I don't want that level of accuracy driving cars on the road.
  - shsjxjbsbs 7y ago
    Google seems to have no trouble playing music from Spotify for me. It can even manage it while I yell my song requests from the shower.
    - rsj_hn 7y ago
      The only thing I have ever wanted from phone assistants is to tell me whether a coffee shop was open or not, or what the closing time is. I still can't get this info, nor is this question understood. I still have to stop, launch a browser, navigate to the site, and dig around their website for opening hours, or in the worst case find a phone number and call to ask them.
      - adriftincode 7y ago
        What phone assistants are you using? I’ve never had this problem.
        rsj_hn 7y ago
        Siri
        adriftincode 7y ago
        Same here, Siri solves this problem. Me: “Hey Siri, how late is x open?” Siri: One possibility is on x street, does that sound good? Me: Yes Siri: “X is open from y-z.”
yumraj 7y ago
I agree. In my various conversations on this topic around the bay area, people are generally overly optimistic, who believe it'll happen in next couple or so years, and people who are overly pessimistic. Possibly a gross generalization but generally the people who are overly pessimistic are the ones who are or have till recently been engineers, while the people who are overly optimistic are the ones further away from engineering - with the farther they are the more optimistic they are. Moreover, in addition to what you wrote there are a lot of other open questions, not necessarily in any order and definitely not a complete list: 1) Auto Insurance (cars below refers to fully autonomous cars): 1.1) What happens to auto insurance? Do I still need to buy it if I'm not driving it, or does it come bundled in the car price? 1.2) Does everyone pay the same auto insurance for the same car model/year. 1.3) Do cars with different autonomous models have different auto insurance? 1.4) What happens in the case of car accident between self-driving and non-self driving car? 1.5) What happens in the case of two self-driving cars' accident 1.6) What happens if a person is killed due to the Car's fault. Who is liable? The insurance company? The Car manufacturer? The self-driving module manufacturer? 2) Some Edge cases 2.1) What happens if on a 4-way stop 4 self-driving cars come to stop at the same time? Do they know how to handle that, as in which car is moving forward and which one is allowing other cars? 2.2) What happens in an emergency? Can I force my car to drive rash to the hospital or will it follow the speed limit to the T. 2.3) What happens if the Car runs into a situation which it is not trained for? 3) How are the cars tested? 3.1) As a consumer do we know that the cars are fully tested to handle ALL edge conditions? 3.1.1) What is the definition/definitive list of ALL edge conditions? 3.2) When will we know that the threshold has been passed, and the car is truly autonomous? 4) Security 4.1) Assuming the cars will need to be connected, how will the security be? 4.2) Can the cars be Pwned? I'm sure they can be.... so this is the rhetorical question 4.2.2) If the cars can be pwned, will the fully autonomous cars become the next WMD (Weapon of Mass Destruction) -- if you don't agree, close your eyes and imagine a fleet of hundreds of thousands or millions of fully autonomous cars under the control of a rogue entity hell bent on causing damage/killing people. 4.2.3) How do we protect against that?
- aeternum 7y ago
  1) Car insurance can work exactly like it currently does. The car owner's insurance is liable by default, however if the car itself is in some way at fault (performing out-of-spec), then the insurance company goes after the car company. This can already happen if something like brakes fail or accelerator gets stuck. 2 & 3) Yes there are some edge cases that you can't train for, but same with humans. What do humans do in an edge case like a torrential downpour? Simply pull over. Even if there are edge cases, consider that humans are pretty bad drivers on average, over 1.25 million deaths per year, and 50 million injuries in the US alone. Suppose that in a couple years, self driving cars are not perfect due to the edge cases, and still cause 250k deaths / year. Would you allow them at that point? Even with those stats we should consider only allowing self-driving cars and begin to outlaw human drivers.

todaysAI 7y ago

I agree, not because of technical issues but because we will never be able to get past the 'Trolley Problem'.

nradov 7y ago
I don't expect level 4+ autonomous vehicles any time soon, but the "trolley problem" is an irrelevant distraction. It's not something that comes up in real world collisions. There's never an even choice between hitting one of two targets. Other factors are always present and dictate the safest course of action.
- todaysAI 7y ago
  I don't agree. The problem of least 'harm' will come up continually. Moralistic decisions must be made by the car. And even if those incidents do not occur, the software will have to be programmed for these types of decisions.
claudiawerner 7y ago
Moral and ethical dilemmas, unfortunately (in my view as someone very sympathetic to philosophical investigation) seem only rarely to deter the inventors of technology and even more rarely deter the companies who employ these inventors and engineers.
mac01021 7y ago
The trolley problem is not relevant because an autonomous vehicle should never put itself in a position where it might drive into anything.
- todaysAI 7y ago
  Tires burst, kids run out in traffic, human drivers make mistakes, bad weather happens...
  - mac01021 7y ago

aedanman 7y ago

Is this because he doesn't expect to live much longer? He is an overweight 69 year old.

m463 7y ago
Woz aside, I don't think people realize the increased mortality of being on the upper end of the (literal) scale. Here's a journal article: https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1001673 https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo... but to summarize BMI vs years lost: BMI 40-45 45-50 50-55 55-60 men -6.5 -10.8 -10.6 -17.0 women -6.9 -9.1 -10.3 -13.1
- kwhitefoot 7y ago
  For my height 1.7 m I would have 10 weigh 115 kg to have a BMI of 40. Bloody hell, I count myself as overweight at the 74 kg I weigh now, BMI 26. Just can't imagine carrying an extra 41 kg! Doesn't surprise me at all that it would shorten my life. Never mind that but the life one has must be worse as well.
  - rwmurrayVT 7y ago
    I just did that same calculation. My god. Would I even want to go 10 more years weighing 300 lbs? I know BMI isn't 'perfect'. I think once you reach a certain weight class it becomes more and more relevant. There's no way more than a few fringe cases of people are 6'+ and 350+lbs of primarily muscle. Even NFL linemen are on average 6'4" and around 300lbs. Edit: That linked article is incredible. It shows the primary driver of the increased mortality is from heart disease and diabetes. 5x more deaths from diabetes, 3x from heart disease, and 2x from digestive neoplasms, 16x lower respiratory, 5x liver disease. I'm going to continue my good exercise and dieting...
    - officeplant 7y ago
      >My god. Would I even want to go 10 more years weighing 300 lbs? As someone who's dropped from 430 to 330 (6'3" 31). This is always a difficult question. The struggle is real, but even trying to hit the "healthy" weight for my height according to BMI is another 140lb away.

rdlecler1 7y ago

This is why I’m perplexed by the concerns around AI. what is more likely to happen is that we’ll start evolving the infrastructure to support driverless cars in the same way paved roads enabled the automobile.

abduekejfidj 7y ago

Full self-driving requires artificial general intelligence and I don't think that will be around for at least another 100 years, if ever. It is truly amazing how much hype FSD has generated, even among smart technically-savvy people.

jmpman 7y ago

DARPA Grand Challenge was started in 2004, so it’s been 15 years of constant research to get this far. We have at least another 15 to go.

kd3 7y ago

Woz is expecting to die within 5 years.

ksaj 7y ago

I think he literally means nothing more than "Apple isn't making a car OS." Their focus is your pocket and other carry-alls, and not at all interested in your car outside of how those pocket and carry-all devices can connect to it. Hell, their focus is only barely on the desktop anymore. For the same reason. Tracking is way more interesting when not anchored to a desktop, and other companies already got the car thing going.

kwhitefoot 7y ago

Clarke's first law comes to mind. Not an exact fit but pertinent nonetheless: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.