7 ms·

Alphabet exec says self-driving cars 'have gone through a lot of hype'

30 points by apsec112 7y ago

moretai 7y ago
Don't be a slave to the money then.
wil421 7y ago
Self driving is way over hyped and lots of smart people bought into it. A few years ago I kept commenting about it not being around the corner. A few people compared my comments to “Less space than nomad.” We’ve done the same to AI, what someone called AI a decade ago has been reinvented as AGI. We are doing the same to self-driving cars. “What we really meant by self-driving is self-driving in perfect conditions and normal intersections. You’re thinking of autonomous self-driving or Level X self driving.” All I’ve seen is driver assist tech improve.
- mikestew 7y ago
  A few people compared my comments to “Less space than nomad.” That's because some people should think harder about their comparisons before they verbalize them. The quoted comment poo-pooed an existing product that you could buy with a mere trip to one's local Apple retailer. Poo-pooing the hype of something that hasn't even been invented yet? To take take the opposite side of that argument with any fervor strikes me as arguing for the sake of it. I mean, until I can ride in one, we could go on all day about when they're likely to appear, couldn't we?
  - catalogia 7y ago
    > That's because some people should think harder about their comparisons before they verbalize them. The quoted comment poo-pooed an existing product that you could buy with a mere trip to one's local Apple retailer. cmdrtaco was also criticizing the product as it existed at the time, not the product it would evolve into which, in retrospect, made his criticism seem ridiculous. He was criticizing the first revision which had poor connectivity (firewire only) and little storage (5GB on launch, 10GB later.) The fourth revision, the one that actually became a run-away success, had 20-60GB of storage and was the first to have full USB support. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod#/media/File:Ipod_sales_per_quarter.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod#/media/File:Ipod_sales_pe...
- tashoecraft 7y ago
  I got into a small argument with someone who claimed his 10year old daughter (5 years ago at this point) wouldn't have to learn how to drive because self driving cars were so close. That they were follow an exponential growth pattern and that a project with exponential growth over 10 years could be halfway finished at year 9 and still finish on time by year 10. Suffice to say, I am almost certain that his daughter will be learning to drive very soon, and required to drive for years to come.
pwinnski 7y ago
...by Waymo, among others!
- aantix 7y ago
  I think Tesla ultimately wins this battle. They have the real-time driving conditions and reactions being reported for likely every tricky intersection in the U.S. That’s a big competitive advantage compared to Waymo’s simulations and paid drivers.
  - bsaul 7y ago
    IMHO tesla is probably the company that’s the most likely to get a class action lawsuit at the first disappointment on their product. People got over musk overhyping unlikely features and making promises he couldn’t hold, because ultimately they were happy with their car, but he went so far he can’t make any kind of mistake.
  - toast0 7y ago
    Tesla certainly has a lot of real world data on conditions and human behavior. It remains to be seen if the sensors deployed on their customers' vehicles are sufficient to the task of self-driving, however. And if they're not, that data gathering may not turn out to be very useful. Given that they don't have a system that can avoid stationary firetrucks or gore points, I think it's fair to say Tesla haven't figured out the requirements yet. There's a meta question about the privacy aspects of the data gathering and if customers have provided meaningful consent. At least Waymo usually gets rearended by other cars as a result of being timid (except for the time they ran into a bus by being courageous and assuming the bus would move).
    - jerf 7y ago
      TIL: https://2qibqm39xjt6q46gf1rwo2g1-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/web1_160808_EDH_GoreStreetG_S.jpg https://2qibqm39xjt6q46gf1rwo2g1-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-... (A graphic defining what a "gore point" is.) This graphic is from https://www.heraldnet.com/news/dont-cross-the-gore-point-when-merging-onto-the-interstate/ https://www.heraldnet.com/news/dont-cross-the-gore-point-whe... , although at least in my browser was shrunk and hard to read. I actually thought for a moment that 'gore point' was a dark joke about places that Teslas tend to hit with their autopilots.
scarmig 7y ago
This is one of those unintentionally hilarious headlines.
- mbreese 7y ago
  It used to be funnier... it changed between the time I saw the headline and clicked on the link. For the curious, it used to read: "Waymo says self-driving cars have been overhyped."
tnecniv 7y ago
I do a lot of this stuff, and have friends who did their PhD theses on different engineering challenges in self-driving cars. Everybody agrees we'll figure out autonomous cars sooner rather than later, but nobody thought a 2020 timetable was going to happen. It's undeniable that we've made huge advances since the first DARPA challenge, but there's a long way to go before we get them to be sufficiently robust.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- ProAm 7y ago
  30 years
  - tnecniv 7y ago
    That'd be my guess too. I'm not sure if we'd be able to do 100% of off highway driving, but I imagine we'll be able to go cross country by then.
    - kmonsen 7y ago
      The joke is that it has always been, and will always be, 30 years until it's here. Also true for other things such robot assistants etc.
      - pintxo 7y ago
        Timescales: https://xkcd.com/678/ https://xkcd.com/678/
schmichael 7y ago
What I wonder is how much of self-driving cars failure to deliver on earlier timelines and roadmaps is attributable to AI. If it is will we see similar blowback in other AI-related endeavors and yet another cooling of AI as has befallen all past surges in AI progress? My understanding is its not the sensor or control technology to blame for the pace of progress which makes me think AI isn't as capable of learning the extremely complicated task of driving as expected.
- murph-almighty 7y ago
  > If it is will we see similar blowback in other AI-related endeavors and yet another cooling of AI as has befallen all past surges in AI progress? Anecdotal: I've noticed a lot of talk about ML/AI at my place of work is very hand wavey and talked about by business analysts who don't know what they're talking about. My friends at other places of work see this too. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a large-scale loss of faith in AI simply because too many people tried to half-assedly leverage "using AI" for a promotion.
  - puranjay 7y ago
    For a lot of non tech people I meet, AI is just a fancier term for "Excel magic".
  - 2muchcoffeeman 7y ago
    I did the Andrew Ng course because even technical people were talking about it in a really hand wavy way. I feel that even the names ‘Artificial Intelligence’ and ‘Machine Learning’ were chosen as a marketing ploy.
- ghaff 7y ago
  People saw rapid progress in techniques applicable to fairly specific problem domains (e.g. vision) and assumed that this would just carryover to the broader problem of self-driving. My personal guess is that we can probably get to hands-off self-driving on limited access highways, possibly under a subset of conditions, sooner-ish rather than later. Which would actually be a huge win for those who do long highway drives or daily commutes on highways. But it's sort of a bucket of cold water over the head for those urbanites who bought the promise of never having to learn to drive, buy a car, etc. I'm somewhat confident that there are still enough wins around ML that the whole thing won't peter out. But it may end up being less of a generalized revolution than some thought (or at least claimed they thought).
kp98 7y ago
In 2013 Google said it would have autonomous cars by 2018 In 2017 Google said the cars would be available in months according to the article. Last year Elon Musk said there would be 1mm robo taxis by the end of 2020. These corporations leverage the public's lack of understanding to spin a tale to investors and the market. Then, this tale got co-opted by politicians like Andrew Yang who say 4 million truckers will be out of work in 5-10 years, so we need to vote for him + UBI to protect us from the threat of AI in the future. The view I take is that planes have pilots for a variety of reasons, many of which are not related directly to controlling a plane's path. We have 30 years of data on flight and flights have fewer inputs to analyze, yet we still keep pilots around because of the added sense of security and the utility pilots serve on edge cases. I think self driving cars will be very similar and the future where no one drives probably will not exist for a long time. Another thing I find interesting, the retort most bring to driverless cars is that they will prevent needless deaths, but say for example America has 40,000 deaths due to car crashes per year, and 20,000 are preventable, but autonomous vehicles malfunctioning causes 10,000 deaths. So a net result of 30,000 deaths with autonomous cars. In terms of death the result is positive, but now you are relinquishing control over your experience. Someone with excellent driving skills, who never drinks and drives, and who follows the speed limit, faces a way lower risk of death driving. However, self driving cars introduce new risks to that individual, and for that reason I do not I believe the optimal combination for drivers will be the same as for pilots: machinery + individual control.
- ehsankia 7y ago
  To be fair, Google did have autonomous cars by 2018, including fully driveless ones, and available to select public users. So in that sense, they didn't lie, but the scale of the roll out has been much smaller and slower than what most people expected. I don't think Google specifically made comments about the scale. Elon on the otherhand did mention big numbers, which is a different story.
  - kp98 7y ago
    Thats a good point, you're right Google does have at least some version of autonomous
puranjay 7y ago
I often wonder if all these projections about self driving, VR, and before that, 3D printing, are essentially wish fulfillment for and from a biased audience. I'd want to say that self driving cars are just around the corner, because that's the future I want to live in. In that case, I wonder what it says about our present reality. The need to make such gloriously optimistic projections about self driving cars essentially indicates that driving isn't fun to a lot of people (ergo, car makers are making boring cars), or that commuting is too unpleasant (ergo, city planners have been slacking)
- TrainedMonkey 7y ago
  Amara's law is almost a cognitive bias: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Amara#Amara's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Amara#Amara's_law
- mettamage 7y ago
  I don't see VR and 3D printing as wish fulfillment. While they're both relatively niche (from my consumerist perspective), they do fulfill roles. VR is good for therapeutic immersive reasons, for example [1]. And 3D printing, well, shooting rockets into the stratosphere, for example [2]. IMO VR and 3D printing are real, albeit niche. Self-driving cars aren't fully there yet. [1] https://www.geekwire.com/2018/snowworld-melts-away-pain-burn-patients-using-virtual-reality-snowballs/ https://www.geekwire.com/2018/snowworld-melts-away-pain-burn... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSAB2KNgVso https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSAB2KNgVso
  - mumblemumble 7y ago
    I'd still say VR and 3D printing are (historically) overhyped. Within their respective niches, they're very effective technologies. But there's also this idea they're going to change the consumer landscape, because everyone's going to have one in their home, and use it all the time. e.g., my experience with consumer-grade 3D printing is that it still kind of sucks. It makes home fabrication marginally more convenient than it was without 3D printing, and a lot more aggravating. Even with the rise of gig economy 3D printing services, which have made me a lot happier by removing the hassle of actually operating a 3D printer and giving me access to much better equipment than I'd ever buy for myself, I find that the best executed prints that I order still require significant manual finishing time. It's still just an extremely far cry from the "You'll never need stuff shipped to you because you can just print it at home" hype that surrounded the technology 5 or 10 years back.
jariel 7y ago
The last 10% of the problem takes 90% of the time? We already have autonomous cars that can handle themselves in 'controlled conditions' ... perhaps the solution is to build out in such conditions? Walmart wants to build a massive highway from their HQ down to Mexico - why not start with that? Make 3/4 of the lanes 'fully autonomous' - no humans, on/off ramps designed for clarity, Wifi the whole way and maybe have some 'central control' etc. to dictate speeds etc.. If the vehicles 'worked together' to inform each other of speeds, location, imagine how efficient it could be? In Ottawa there's large chunks of roadway dedicated to just busses (no cars), so maybe put autonomous buses on those routes: very controlled conditions, no pesky humans to worry about. The same for a lot of railway that's not used - either flip them to 'controlled roads' or maybe even some kind of 'AI train'? There are large chunks of opportunity to be had right now while we wait 20 years for AI to get to the right levels of safety etc..
duhi88 7y ago
"Five years out"
- dang 7y ago
  I can't find that text in the article. Who are you quoting?
  - virmundi 7y ago
    It’s a reference to the general claim about self driving cars, super batteries that make solar competitive, etc. these things are always just 5 years away forever.
    - dang 7y ago
      It's best not to use quotation marks to make it look like you're quoting someone when you're not. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20quotation%20marks%20quoting&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
lalos 7y ago
What I don't understand about self-driving cars is that once all cars are 'self-driving' enabled then there won't be a need for the complicated AI and computer vision work since if all cars have the tech might as well just have a standard where they are constantly communicating their position with each other (add signs and traffic lights to the mix). The challenge then would be to how to efficiently route all cars simultaneously. I have the opinion that all this investment in the long run will be discarded and will only be useful in the transition period where roads are shared by humans and algorithms. Thoughts? Is this future vision shared by people involved in the self-driving world?
- Mvhsz 7y ago
  What about pedestrians?
  - lalos 7y ago
    Crosswalks with buttons to signal a red light for traffic (this is quite common in big cities in the USA) and/or pedestrian bridges in highly transited areas (not as common).
    - scott_s 7y ago
      Assuming there will be no people walking in the roads is not realistic.
    - ghaff 7y ago
      It differs by locale--in my experience on the West Coast pedestrians tend to follow the signals more--but people don't reliably follow walk/don't walk signs.
- kemiller 7y ago
  As long as there are bicycles, pedestrians, pets, weird one-off accidents, there will always be a need for situational awareness.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
riantogo 7y ago
FWIW Here is my anecdotal experience. I have be driving a Tesla Model 3 for 1 year now. I don't have their Full Self Driving package but had added on Autopilot (adaptive cruise control plus lane keeping). 75% of my commute (and lot more on trips) is the car driving itself. I'm of course ready to take over any moment but with all the help from the sensors it is definitely much safer than depending on my senses alone. Over the months the self driving has become more natural, reliable and safer. Over the next several years it will only keep getting better. It has a huge positive impact on reducing driver fatigue. I know that the topic at hand is about L5 fully autonomous, but wanted to share that though robotaxis are still some ways out, big benefits to personal driving is already here. From here things will rapidly evolve towards the ideal state.
- scott_s 7y ago
  What do you still do manually? An important concept pointed out in these conversations before is that human-in-the-loop driving is a moving target. That is, it's possible we may never get to the point of fully automated driving because we may discover that the safest method is humans doing some small fraction, and automated systems doing the rest. Since we have partial automation now, and will continue to in the future, we're not asking "When will automated systems replace human drivers?" but "When will fully automated systems replace humans using partially automated systems?" Because we're constantly improving the partially automated systems, we're constantly raising the bar that a fully automated system needs to meet.
  - vl 7y ago
    > What do you still do manually? If there is no car in front of you, stop and start at lights and intersections. Turn (while with FSD package it takes highway ramps automatically, it’s not reliable on any complex highway intersection). In heavy traffic, you have to change lanes manually, automatic system is not aggressive enough.
  - gremlinsinc 7y ago
    Maybe we could convert cars to maglev, that go super fast floating above roads and pedestrians but cars follow 'tracks' and convert to normal street when nearing destinations. Truckers could have 'ports' that maglevs hook up to so trucking and commercial vehicles wouldn't need drivers to 'take over' in local environs.
carapace 7y ago
(Apologies to anyone who's heard this before.) The self-driving car (or "auto-auto") is a kind of sci-fi fetish. What I want, and what could be built today I think, is a self-driving golf cart, covered in nerf and airbags, that doesn't go any faster than five or ten mph. It can do things like take seniors to and from the pharmacy or doctor appointments safely.

30 points by apsec112 7y ago

Don't be a slave to the money then.

Self driving is way over hyped and lots of smart people bought into it. A few years ago I kept commenting about it not being around the corner. A few people compared my comments to “Less space than nomad.” We’ve done the same to AI, what someone called AI a decade ago has been reinvented as AGI. We are doing the same to self-driving cars. “What we really meant by self-driving is self-driving in perfect conditions and normal intersections. You’re thinking of autonomous self-driving or Level X self driving.” All I’ve seen is driver assist tech improve.

mikestew 7y ago
A few people compared my comments to “Less space than nomad.” That's because some people should think harder about their comparisons before they verbalize them. The quoted comment poo-pooed an existing product that you could buy with a mere trip to one's local Apple retailer. Poo-pooing the hype of something that hasn't even been invented yet? To take take the opposite side of that argument with any fervor strikes me as arguing for the sake of it. I mean, until I can ride in one, we could go on all day about when they're likely to appear, couldn't we?
- catalogia 7y ago
  > That's because some people should think harder about their comparisons before they verbalize them. The quoted comment poo-pooed an existing product that you could buy with a mere trip to one's local Apple retailer. cmdrtaco was also criticizing the product as it existed at the time, not the product it would evolve into which, in retrospect, made his criticism seem ridiculous. He was criticizing the first revision which had poor connectivity (firewire only) and little storage (5GB on launch, 10GB later.) The fourth revision, the one that actually became a run-away success, had 20-60GB of storage and was the first to have full USB support. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod#/media/File:Ipod_sales_per_quarter.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod#/media/File:Ipod_sales_pe...
tashoecraft 7y ago
I got into a small argument with someone who claimed his 10year old daughter (5 years ago at this point) wouldn't have to learn how to drive because self driving cars were so close. That they were follow an exponential growth pattern and that a project with exponential growth over 10 years could be halfway finished at year 9 and still finish on time by year 10. Suffice to say, I am almost certain that his daughter will be learning to drive very soon, and required to drive for years to come.

pwinnski 7y ago

...by Waymo, among others!

aantix 7y ago
I think Tesla ultimately wins this battle. They have the real-time driving conditions and reactions being reported for likely every tricky intersection in the U.S. That’s a big competitive advantage compared to Waymo’s simulations and paid drivers.
- bsaul 7y ago
  IMHO tesla is probably the company that’s the most likely to get a class action lawsuit at the first disappointment on their product. People got over musk overhyping unlikely features and making promises he couldn’t hold, because ultimately they were happy with their car, but he went so far he can’t make any kind of mistake.
- toast0 7y ago
  Tesla certainly has a lot of real world data on conditions and human behavior. It remains to be seen if the sensors deployed on their customers' vehicles are sufficient to the task of self-driving, however. And if they're not, that data gathering may not turn out to be very useful. Given that they don't have a system that can avoid stationary firetrucks or gore points, I think it's fair to say Tesla haven't figured out the requirements yet. There's a meta question about the privacy aspects of the data gathering and if customers have provided meaningful consent. At least Waymo usually gets rearended by other cars as a result of being timid (except for the time they ran into a bus by being courageous and assuming the bus would move).
  - jerf 7y ago
    TIL: https://2qibqm39xjt6q46gf1rwo2g1-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/web1_160808_EDH_GoreStreetG_S.jpg https://2qibqm39xjt6q46gf1rwo2g1-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-... (A graphic defining what a "gore point" is.) This graphic is from https://www.heraldnet.com/news/dont-cross-the-gore-point-when-merging-onto-the-interstate/ https://www.heraldnet.com/news/dont-cross-the-gore-point-whe... , although at least in my browser was shrunk and hard to read. I actually thought for a moment that 'gore point' was a dark joke about places that Teslas tend to hit with their autopilots.

scarmig 7y ago

This is one of those unintentionally hilarious headlines.

mbreese 7y ago
It used to be funnier... it changed between the time I saw the headline and clicked on the link. For the curious, it used to read: "Waymo says self-driving cars have been overhyped."

tnecniv 7y ago

I do a lot of this stuff, and have friends who did their PhD theses on different engineering challenges in self-driving cars. Everybody agrees we'll figure out autonomous cars sooner rather than later, but nobody thought a 2020 timetable was going to happen. It's undeniable that we've made huge advances since the first DARPA challenge, but there's a long way to go before we get them to be sufficiently robust.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ProAm 7y ago
30 years
- tnecniv 7y ago
  That'd be my guess too. I'm not sure if we'd be able to do 100% of off highway driving, but I imagine we'll be able to go cross country by then.
  - kmonsen 7y ago
    The joke is that it has always been, and will always be, 30 years until it's here. Also true for other things such robot assistants etc.
    - pintxo 7y ago
      Timescales: https://xkcd.com/678/ https://xkcd.com/678/

schmichael 7y ago

What I wonder is how much of self-driving cars failure to deliver on earlier timelines and roadmaps is attributable to AI. If it is will we see similar blowback in other AI-related endeavors and yet another cooling of AI as has befallen all past surges in AI progress? My understanding is its not the sensor or control technology to blame for the pace of progress which makes me think AI isn't as capable of learning the extremely complicated task of driving as expected.

murph-almighty 7y ago
> If it is will we see similar blowback in other AI-related endeavors and yet another cooling of AI as has befallen all past surges in AI progress? Anecdotal: I've noticed a lot of talk about ML/AI at my place of work is very hand wavey and talked about by business analysts who don't know what they're talking about. My friends at other places of work see this too. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a large-scale loss of faith in AI simply because too many people tried to half-assedly leverage "using AI" for a promotion.
- puranjay 7y ago
  For a lot of non tech people I meet, AI is just a fancier term for "Excel magic".
- 2muchcoffeeman 7y ago
  I did the Andrew Ng course because even technical people were talking about it in a really hand wavy way. I feel that even the names ‘Artificial Intelligence’ and ‘Machine Learning’ were chosen as a marketing ploy.
ghaff 7y ago
People saw rapid progress in techniques applicable to fairly specific problem domains (e.g. vision) and assumed that this would just carryover to the broader problem of self-driving. My personal guess is that we can probably get to hands-off self-driving on limited access highways, possibly under a subset of conditions, sooner-ish rather than later. Which would actually be a huge win for those who do long highway drives or daily commutes on highways. But it's sort of a bucket of cold water over the head for those urbanites who bought the promise of never having to learn to drive, buy a car, etc. I'm somewhat confident that there are still enough wins around ML that the whole thing won't peter out. But it may end up being less of a generalized revolution than some thought (or at least claimed they thought).

kp98 7y ago

In 2013 Google said it would have autonomous cars by 2018 In 2017 Google said the cars would be available in months according to the article. Last year Elon Musk said there would be 1mm robo taxis by the end of 2020. These corporations leverage the public's lack of understanding to spin a tale to investors and the market. Then, this tale got co-opted by politicians like Andrew Yang who say 4 million truckers will be out of work in 5-10 years, so we need to vote for him + UBI to protect us from the threat of AI in the future. The view I take is that planes have pilots for a variety of reasons, many of which are not related directly to controlling a plane's path. We have 30 years of data on flight and flights have fewer inputs to analyze, yet we still keep pilots around because of the added sense of security and the utility pilots serve on edge cases. I think self driving cars will be very similar and the future where no one drives probably will not exist for a long time. Another thing I find interesting, the retort most bring to driverless cars is that they will prevent needless deaths, but say for example America has 40,000 deaths due to car crashes per year, and 20,000 are preventable, but autonomous vehicles malfunctioning causes 10,000 deaths. So a net result of 30,000 deaths with autonomous cars. In terms of death the result is positive, but now you are relinquishing control over your experience. Someone with excellent driving skills, who never drinks and drives, and who follows the speed limit, faces a way lower risk of death driving. However, self driving cars introduce new risks to that individual, and for that reason I do not I believe the optimal combination for drivers will be the same as for pilots: machinery + individual control.

ehsankia 7y ago
To be fair, Google did have autonomous cars by 2018, including fully driveless ones, and available to select public users. So in that sense, they didn't lie, but the scale of the roll out has been much smaller and slower than what most people expected. I don't think Google specifically made comments about the scale. Elon on the otherhand did mention big numbers, which is a different story.
- kp98 7y ago
  Thats a good point, you're right Google does have at least some version of autonomous

puranjay 7y ago

I often wonder if all these projections about self driving, VR, and before that, 3D printing, are essentially wish fulfillment for and from a biased audience. I'd want to say that self driving cars are just around the corner, because that's the future I want to live in. In that case, I wonder what it says about our present reality. The need to make such gloriously optimistic projections about self driving cars essentially indicates that driving isn't fun to a lot of people (ergo, car makers are making boring cars), or that commuting is too unpleasant (ergo, city planners have been slacking)

TrainedMonkey 7y ago
Amara's law is almost a cognitive bias: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Amara#Amara's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Amara#Amara's_law
mettamage 7y ago
I don't see VR and 3D printing as wish fulfillment. While they're both relatively niche (from my consumerist perspective), they do fulfill roles. VR is good for therapeutic immersive reasons, for example [1]. And 3D printing, well, shooting rockets into the stratosphere, for example [2]. IMO VR and 3D printing are real, albeit niche. Self-driving cars aren't fully there yet. [1] https://www.geekwire.com/2018/snowworld-melts-away-pain-burn-patients-using-virtual-reality-snowballs/ https://www.geekwire.com/2018/snowworld-melts-away-pain-burn... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSAB2KNgVso https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSAB2KNgVso
- mumblemumble 7y ago
  I'd still say VR and 3D printing are (historically) overhyped. Within their respective niches, they're very effective technologies. But there's also this idea they're going to change the consumer landscape, because everyone's going to have one in their home, and use it all the time. e.g., my experience with consumer-grade 3D printing is that it still kind of sucks. It makes home fabrication marginally more convenient than it was without 3D printing, and a lot more aggravating. Even with the rise of gig economy 3D printing services, which have made me a lot happier by removing the hassle of actually operating a 3D printer and giving me access to much better equipment than I'd ever buy for myself, I find that the best executed prints that I order still require significant manual finishing time. It's still just an extremely far cry from the "You'll never need stuff shipped to you because you can just print it at home" hype that surrounded the technology 5 or 10 years back.

jariel 7y ago

The last 10% of the problem takes 90% of the time? We already have autonomous cars that can handle themselves in 'controlled conditions' ... perhaps the solution is to build out in such conditions? Walmart wants to build a massive highway from their HQ down to Mexico - why not start with that? Make 3/4 of the lanes 'fully autonomous' - no humans, on/off ramps designed for clarity, Wifi the whole way and maybe have some 'central control' etc. to dictate speeds etc.. If the vehicles 'worked together' to inform each other of speeds, location, imagine how efficient it could be? In Ottawa there's large chunks of roadway dedicated to just busses (no cars), so maybe put autonomous buses on those routes: very controlled conditions, no pesky humans to worry about. The same for a lot of railway that's not used - either flip them to 'controlled roads' or maybe even some kind of 'AI train'? There are large chunks of opportunity to be had right now while we wait 20 years for AI to get to the right levels of safety etc..

duhi88 7y ago

"Five years out"

dang 7y ago
I can't find that text in the article. Who are you quoting?
- virmundi 7y ago
  It’s a reference to the general claim about self driving cars, super batteries that make solar competitive, etc. these things are always just 5 years away forever.
  - dang 7y ago
    It's best not to use quotation marks to make it look like you're quoting someone when you're not. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20quotation%20marks%20quoting&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

lalos 7y ago

What I don't understand about self-driving cars is that once all cars are 'self-driving' enabled then there won't be a need for the complicated AI and computer vision work since if all cars have the tech might as well just have a standard where they are constantly communicating their position with each other (add signs and traffic lights to the mix). The challenge then would be to how to efficiently route all cars simultaneously. I have the opinion that all this investment in the long run will be discarded and will only be useful in the transition period where roads are shared by humans and algorithms. Thoughts? Is this future vision shared by people involved in the self-driving world?

Mvhsz 7y ago
What about pedestrians?
- lalos 7y ago
  Crosswalks with buttons to signal a red light for traffic (this is quite common in big cities in the USA) and/or pedestrian bridges in highly transited areas (not as common).
  - scott_s 7y ago
    Assuming there will be no people walking in the roads is not realistic.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    It differs by locale--in my experience on the West Coast pedestrians tend to follow the signals more--but people don't reliably follow walk/don't walk signs.
kemiller 7y ago
As long as there are bicycles, pedestrians, pets, weird one-off accidents, there will always be a need for situational awareness.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

riantogo 7y ago

FWIW Here is my anecdotal experience. I have be driving a Tesla Model 3 for 1 year now. I don't have their Full Self Driving package but had added on Autopilot (adaptive cruise control plus lane keeping). 75% of my commute (and lot more on trips) is the car driving itself. I'm of course ready to take over any moment but with all the help from the sensors it is definitely much safer than depending on my senses alone. Over the months the self driving has become more natural, reliable and safer. Over the next several years it will only keep getting better. It has a huge positive impact on reducing driver fatigue. I know that the topic at hand is about L5 fully autonomous, but wanted to share that though robotaxis are still some ways out, big benefits to personal driving is already here. From here things will rapidly evolve towards the ideal state.

scott_s 7y ago
What do you still do manually? An important concept pointed out in these conversations before is that human-in-the-loop driving is a moving target. That is, it's possible we may never get to the point of fully automated driving because we may discover that the safest method is humans doing some small fraction, and automated systems doing the rest. Since we have partial automation now, and will continue to in the future, we're not asking "When will automated systems replace human drivers?" but "When will fully automated systems replace humans using partially automated systems?" Because we're constantly improving the partially automated systems, we're constantly raising the bar that a fully automated system needs to meet.
- vl 7y ago
  > What do you still do manually? If there is no car in front of you, stop and start at lights and intersections. Turn (while with FSD package it takes highway ramps automatically, it’s not reliable on any complex highway intersection). In heavy traffic, you have to change lanes manually, automatic system is not aggressive enough.
- gremlinsinc 7y ago
  Maybe we could convert cars to maglev, that go super fast floating above roads and pedestrians but cars follow 'tracks' and convert to normal street when nearing destinations. Truckers could have 'ports' that maglevs hook up to so trucking and commercial vehicles wouldn't need drivers to 'take over' in local environs.

carapace 7y ago

(Apologies to anyone who's heard this before.) The self-driving car (or "auto-auto") is a kind of sci-fi fetish. What I want, and what could be built today I think, is a self-driving golf cart, covered in nerf and airbags, that doesn't go any faster than five or ten mph. It can do things like take seniors to and from the pharmacy or doctor appointments safely.