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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

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).
mumblemumble 7y ago
My impression is that the current AI hype cycle is no different from the last one, and is likely to result in the same disillusionment as always happens. Self-driving cars are foundering because of the same problem that always sinks things that are sold as AI: We've still got zero idea how to program a computer to introspect and reason independently. Not even the foggiest. So we invariably fall back to an unmaintainable rat's nest of hand-coded rules when the time comes to implement the very core of the system. And then distract people by hyping up whatever fancy new technology (Stacks of NVidia GPUs let us fit hypersurfaces in lots more dimensions than we could on a single Xeon!. . . err, that's not marketable, let's call it "deep learning" instead.) is being plugged into that core. The deeper issue is that people hear the term AI and invariably think "artificial general intelligence". You can try and walk that back all you want with disclaimer upon disclaimer, but it's kind of silly to even try. If you're describing something as Artificial Intelligence, of course people are going to think that you're claiming to have built something that is (1) Artificial, and (2) Intelligent. And, let's be honest, that's probably what they were trying to imply all along. If they wanted to describe the technology as "really really amped up parameter estimation", they'd have stuck with the term we already have for that: Machine Learning.
tnecniv 7y ago
Yes and no. You are right, control is not the issue. Sensing is or isn't the issue depending on what you are talking about. On one hand, sensors are the best they've ever been and you could get a car to drive around a closed course in a robust enough manner. However, there's a lot going on in the world around a car in the wild. We can identify obstacles like other cars pretty robustly, but it is still a sticking point because small mistakes cost lives (see that early Tesla fatality that thought a truck was a billboard). I think an AI winter is pretty inevitable at this point because AI has become so overhyped. It won't be as bad as previous winters though, because modern AI techniques have had a pretty major impact on other fields. Computer vision, for example, will never really be the same again. Moreover, for something like a self-driving car, ML will certainly play a big roll. Even though getting the computer vision models to work is incredibly tricky, I can't fathom how you would go about doing it with "conventional" algorithms.

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).

mumblemumble 7y ago

My impression is that the current AI hype cycle is no different from the last one, and is likely to result in the same disillusionment as always happens. Self-driving cars are foundering because of the same problem that always sinks things that are sold as AI: We've still got zero idea how to program a computer to introspect and reason independently. Not even the foggiest. So we invariably fall back to an unmaintainable rat's nest of hand-coded rules when the time comes to implement the very core of the system. And then distract people by hyping up whatever fancy new technology (Stacks of NVidia GPUs let us fit hypersurfaces in lots more dimensions than we could on a single Xeon!. . . err, that's not marketable, let's call it "deep learning" instead.) is being plugged into that core. The deeper issue is that people hear the term AI and invariably think "artificial general intelligence". You can try and walk that back all you want with disclaimer upon disclaimer, but it's kind of silly to even try. If you're describing something as Artificial Intelligence, of course people are going to think that you're claiming to have built something that is (1) Artificial, and (2) Intelligent. And, let's be honest, that's probably what they were trying to imply all along. If they wanted to describe the technology as "really really amped up parameter estimation", they'd have stuck with the term we already have for that: Machine Learning.

tnecniv 7y ago

Yes and no. You are right, control is not the issue. Sensing is or isn't the issue depending on what you are talking about. On one hand, sensors are the best they've ever been and you could get a car to drive around a closed course in a robust enough manner. However, there's a lot going on in the world around a car in the wild. We can identify obstacles like other cars pretty robustly, but it is still a sticking point because small mistakes cost lives (see that early Tesla fatality that thought a truck was a billboard). I think an AI winter is pretty inevitable at this point because AI has become so overhyped. It won't be as bad as previous winters though, because modern AI techniques have had a pretty major impact on other fields. Computer vision, for example, will never really be the same again. Moreover, for something like a self-driving car, ML will certainly play a big roll. Even though getting the computer vision models to work is incredibly tricky, I can't fathom how you would go about doing it with "conventional" algorithms.