3 ms·

"until it wasn’t" => After the AI winter, we had to wait for the phone revolution which enabled data collection at scale, and google et al's big ad dollars in o

by Jagat 7y ago

"until it wasn’t" => After the AI winter, we had to wait for the phone revolution which enabled data collection at scale, and google et al's big ad dollars in order to fund speech recognition. Moreover, speech recognition isn't a product you can't launch in a faulty state. You can sell a bad product, make a profit, and iterate without any consequence. It's not the same with self driving cars, which won't be profitable till you get rid of the driver entirely. And you can't launch a ok product and iterate. It has to be almost perfect when it comes to safety. Barring geofencing or legislative changes, you have to get it in a perfect state before you roll it out. When the VC money dies down, and when such big companies are no longer optimistic at having a viable self driving car, the research is going to slow down drastically, till a new wave of funding comes along from some other boom to resuscitate the research.

I_like_2lurk 7y ago
>And you can't launch a bad product and iterate. I think Tesla is doing just this. They are putting self driving features on their cars, putting the onus on the driver to supervise, and using the experiment to gather data. I don't expect their current hardware to ever be able to deliver full autonomous driving, but it will likely provide a useful stepping stone.
xoa 7y ago
>It's not the same with self driving cars, which won't be profitable till you get rid of the driver entirely. And you can't launch a ok product and iterate. It has to be almost perfect when it comes to safety. No, it merely has to be as good as humans, though it should be mildly better. The massive economic and feature advantages it will bring to the table mean that regular people will paper over problems real quick, just as with, well, current cars. In fact if anything I wonder if a higher rate of fatalities and accidents would actually be psychologically better than "almost perfect", because in the modern environment things that are super rare and low risk tend to get inordinate media attention and political response vs things that happen with a certain frequency and thus people become habituated to. I mean, again cars themselves are the big example of that. In America alone, estimates are around 40,000 died last year, which itself was actually around a 1% drop from the previous few years. Which means hundreds of fewer deaths. But that didn't register remotely like a handful of high profile super unlikely dramatic deaths would. But the bonuses are the main things vs any negatives, because humans are good at motivated reasoning to deal with risk when it's something they want. And a reliable included always available personal chauffeur that means things like car access for kids without disruption of parents' schedules, continued car access for the elderly (note, one of the most powerful and reliable voting segments of the electorate), elimination of issues due to drinking/tiredness/phone usage, just plain letting people do other productive things or flat out sleep on trips, etc etc etc., is a powerful set of incentives to quickly move past someone else's "bad luck".
matz1 7y ago
>And you can't launch a ok product and iterate Yes you can, tesla and comma.ai doing it right now.

by Jagat 7y ago

I_like_2lurk 7y ago

>And you can't launch a bad product and iterate. I think Tesla is doing just this. They are putting self driving features on their cars, putting the onus on the driver to supervise, and using the experiment to gather data. I don't expect their current hardware to ever be able to deliver full autonomous driving, but it will likely provide a useful stepping stone.

xoa 7y ago

>It's not the same with self driving cars, which won't be profitable till you get rid of the driver entirely. And you can't launch a ok product and iterate. It has to be almost perfect when it comes to safety. No, it merely has to be as good as humans, though it should be mildly better. The massive economic and feature advantages it will bring to the table mean that regular people will paper over problems real quick, just as with, well, current cars. In fact if anything I wonder if a higher rate of fatalities and accidents would actually be psychologically better than "almost perfect", because in the modern environment things that are super rare and low risk tend to get inordinate media attention and political response vs things that happen with a certain frequency and thus people become habituated to. I mean, again cars themselves are the big example of that. In America alone, estimates are around 40,000 died last year, which itself was actually around a 1% drop from the previous few years. Which means hundreds of fewer deaths. But that didn't register remotely like a handful of high profile super unlikely dramatic deaths would. But the bonuses are the main things vs any negatives, because humans are good at motivated reasoning to deal with risk when it's something they want. And a reliable included always available personal chauffeur that means things like car access for kids without disruption of parents' schedules, continued car access for the elderly (note, one of the most powerful and reliable voting segments of the electorate), elimination of issues due to drinking/tiredness/phone usage, just plain letting people do other productive things or flat out sleep on trips, etc etc etc., is a powerful set of incentives to quickly move past someone else's "bad luck".

matz1 7y ago

>And you can't launch a ok product and iterate Yes you can, tesla and comma.ai doing it right now.