7 ms·

>I thought fully autonomous driving was meant to be done by now? Musk was bullshitting when he made that prediction. Maybe he did it because he had bought his

>I thought fully autonomous driving was meant to be done by now? Musk was bullshitting when he made that prediction. Maybe he did it because he had bought his own bullshit. Personally I think what's more likely is that he was cynically conning people. In reality, I think no-one is anywhere close to fully self driving cars. I would be surprised if we saw fully self driving cars any time in the next 50 years. The whole field of fully self driving cars has been astonishingly full of empty hype, for some reason often believed by otherwise quite smart people.

spookthesunset 7y ago
> for some reason often believed by otherwise quite smart people I don't understand why so many smart "tech people" fall for the hype. Maybe it is because "machine learning" is just abstract enough that even the most jaded developer thinks they can treat it like a black box where if you pour enough videos, photos and LIDAR readings for training into the top it will somehow spit out a fully autonomous self driving car at the bottom. I do find it funny though. On the one hand Alexa only manages to turn on the lights successfully 50% of the time yet somehow we will magically have self driving cars capable of safely navigating the roads any day now. I mean for fsck sake, we don't even have a thing that can wash and fold clothes automatically but somehow self driving cars will be on the market any day. Like, if we cannot even get voice recognition to work right, how on earth will you tell this magical car which street parking spot to take in a busy city? How will you tell it to pull over to pick up a friend? Hell, how will you tell it to go through a drive-through at McDonalds? A touchscreen?
- jodrellblank 7y ago
  The way you suggest the future of automotive transport rests on a fast food chain drive through suggests a kind of astroturfing social media advert. If burgers were that important, the burger company would partner with the self driving car company and find a way. None of those things are physically complex - the car will be able to see or lidar if a space is big enough for it to park in, pulling over to pick up a friend is no different to pulling over to let you out at your destination, and a drive-through is moving forwards slowly and steering a bit like all low speed driving is. None of them require the dexterity of folding soft wet fabric, and the market for $30,000+ vehicles is much larger than the market for $30,000+ washing machines. One simple answer is: you don't. Self-driving car owned by <car company. takes you from A to B and you get out. You don't choose the parking spot anymore than you chose the lane or the highway exit, you don't pick up a friend they take their own separate ride, and you don't use the drive through, you use <car company>'s food delivery service.
  - spookthesunset 7y ago
    > None of those things are physically complex I don't care about how physically complex something is. You didn't tell me how I'd tell the self driving car which spot to park in or which person on the corner is my friend. If you think this detail is minor, trivial or doesn't matter.... you are sadly mistaken. > If burgers were that important, the burger company would partner with the self driving car company and find a way. So you are telling me your $70,000 self driving car can't take me through one of the hundreds of thousands of drive thru's out there? That sounds pretty shitty. > You don't choose the parking spot anymore than you chose the lane or the highway exit You are telling me that this self-driving taxi will just stop at whatever place it feels like? How will I tell it precisely where to let me out? Remember it is pouring down rain / I am physically disabled and cannot walk very far / I am not entirely sure where I need to be dropped off until I get there. So seriously, how will I command this self-driving car? Nobody seems to be able to answer this or even thought about it in any amount of detail at all. Probably because we are so far away from an actual self driving car that a realistic answer doesn't really matter at all. And that is the problem with self-driving hype. Every time you ask about a specific detail it gets hand waved away as not important or some kind of edge case that doesn't matter. Guess what... edge cases matter. Your edge case is my important case. You add up all these edge cases that "don't matter" and you've excluded almost your entire market.
    - Slartie 7y ago
      > I don't understand why so many smart "tech people" fall for the hype. Maybe it's just that some of these "tech people" are not that smart at all? > And that is the problem with self-driving hype. Every time you ask about a specific detail it gets hand waved away as not important or some kind of edge case that doesn't matter. I think you are you spot-on with that analysis. Way too much hand-waving going on. But that is a constant problem in tech, the entire area is susceptible to hypes and fads, with hands waving and waving at record speed. Like I said, maybe it's just not all geniuses and such...
      - RaceWon 7y ago
        > > I don't understand why so many smart "tech people" fall for the hype. Maybe it's just that some of these "tech people" are not that smart at all? The crux of the problem is you have people who although may well be cabable of driving to work--they are by no means cabable of understanding driving at its essence. They will never, not ever; be able to create a car that can also interact with human drivers because they don't understand driving. Period... end of story.
- tim333 7y ago
  As to "tech people" falling for the hype, it all depends which particular hype but: "surprised if we saw fully self driving cars any time in the next 50 years." a couple of years after there have been self driving cars driving around Arizona https://youtu.be/aaOB-ErYq6Y?t=93 https://youtu.be/aaOB-ErYq6Y?t=93 reminds me of quotes like "The aeroplane will never fly." — Lord Haldane, 1907 a while after the Wright brothers had done many flights. You could argue both the Wright brothers planes and the Arizona Waymos were a bit rubbish but these things tend to improve rapidly.
  - toast0 7y ago
    Rather expensive self-driving cars, with safety drivers have been driving around a very small part of Arizona, right? That's not really that close to an affordable self-driving car that I can take overnight door to door from the bay area to the Los Angeles area while I sleep. That may not be 50 years away, but it sure doesn't seem any nearer than 20 years. Progress towards something usable has been pretty slow, and the edge cases are going to be tricky.
    - tigershark 7y ago
      A percentage of the trips have been without security driver for several months. As for affordable they are comparable to Uber and lyft and you can actually get a Waymo trip using the lyft app, so that seems pretty affordable to me.
    - tim333 7y ago
      If you click the video link it's one driving without a safety driver.
- mr_toad 7y ago
  > How will you tell it to pull over to pick up a friend? You can’t imagine a way to do this, therefore it’s impossible?
kickopotomus 7y ago
I think 50 years is being overly pessimistic. Self-driving in temperate climates is probably pretty close (<10 years). Waymo has pilot programs currently underway in California and Arizona[1][2]. [1]: https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/16/waymos-robotaxi-pilot-surpassed-6200-riders-in-its-first-month-in-california/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/16/waymos-robotaxi-pilot-surp... [2]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/10/20907901/waymo-driverless-cars-email-customers-arizona https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/10/20907901/waymo-driverles...
- axguscbklp 7y ago
  The thing is, I see no way to have full self driving without AGI. And I don't think humanity is anywhere close to developing AGI. Without AGI you can have level 4++ self driving, maybe, but not level 5.
  - xkjkls 7y ago
    How much difference does 4++ vs 5 make for the predicted consequences of self-driving cars though? That's the important thing.
    - axguscbklp 7y ago
      I would say that I would feel comfortable falling asleep in a 5 while it is driving nontrivial distance and/or road conditions, but I would not feel comfortable doing so in a 4++.
      - Dylan16807 7y ago
        Why? Plain old 4 is supposed to be the "safe to sleep" level.
      - xkjkls 7y ago
        How often do you have drives when you need to fall asleep though?
  - rifung 7y ago
tenpies 7y ago
This has been my take too. The whole hackathon and hiring effort screams to me of "we have finally concluded that a LIDAR-less implementation is impossible within our lifetimes. We hope one of you has at least a Hail Mary that we can burn money on so we can at least pretend that it may still be done. Anything to keep us from having to refund millions, dealing with a huge class action, seeing the stock halve, and Elon having to admit that he's something of a charlatan." And that's just on the decision to not use LIDAR because "it's dumb", not the whole concept of self-driving as it has been marketed being decades away.
- gowld 7y ago
  Tesla lawyers are good as their engineers. They know how to make you think they are selling self driving cars without actually saying it.
  - brokenmachine 7y ago
    Another commenter here said that Tesla has been selling "fully self driving" as an option since years ago.
xkemp 7y ago
I don't understand why "otherwise smart people" feel the need to diminish the potential and successes of ML. When chess was basically solved, it was dismissed brute force, with a sarcastic challenge to do Go, and we now the fate of that challenge. There used to be, on slashdot and I believe in the early days of HN, this running complaint of the new-at-the-time CSI-style shows, specifically the "enhance" trope: "you can't reconstruct a license plate from a bad frame in a video. That information is just lost. It's not there anymore", they would say, usually with all the aura of letting you in on a secret only a very smart mind could gleam, although there were five others in the same thread making this point. Today we have superresolution algorithms that can reconstruct license plates from low-res images. Turns out the information wasn't really lost, at least not in the sense applicable to the situation (i. e. you are allowed to train on other data). Many tech people dismiss such progress as "just statistics", but I haven't seen much of an attempt to find a definition of intelligence that is meaningful different from "just statistics". In fact I doubt it's possible within the realm of science, i. e. without resorting to mind-body dualism. As to driverless cars: they exist, right now. Google does thousands of miles without any need of human intervention. Yes, maybe it doesn't yet work well enough in a hailstorm. But predicting that these problems will endure for 50 years plus, against a combination of restricting these cars to certain situations, improving the models, and/or improving maps, seems at least as overconfident in your ability to make predictions as those made by self-driving optimists.
- spookthesunset 7y ago
  They exist now as what amounts to fancy amusement park rides. Wake me up when I can get sloppy drunk and catch one home. Only I was drunk and didn’t provide the exactly correct drop off address and need to somehow communicate to the robo-Uber where exactly it should drop me off... (how will I do that, by the way? talk to it? What if it doesn’t understand my accent?) Also, I’m at a wedding and the pickup is in a grass field in front of the venue. Can’t pick me up on pavement... it’s a two lane road 50mph road with no shoulder to pull over in. Also the entrance to the venue is a poorly marked dirt road. Also, the “pin” I told the robo-Uber to pick me up at has it at the street ‘cause that is the address. I’ll wait for the robo-Uber to call me on how the hell it should pull into the lot. I did mention cell sucks here, so hope you’ve got that all offline, right? And I fully expect my use case to be waved away as “edge case” and “doesn’t matter”. Except it does. Every trip that isn’t a pre-planned, set route amusement park ride is an edge case. Until you can meet my use case, a common one for an Uber driver, self driving cars are empty hype.
hermitdev 7y ago
Publicly bullshitting (without explicitly stating as such) about your companies capabilities while CEO of a publicly traded company is a potentially huge issue with the SEC.
mlindner 7y ago
No Elon constantly buys his own bullshit. This has been true for years and years and years long before he became famous from Tesla. His bullshit does eventually become true though, unless it's canceled entirely. It just never happens when he says it will happen.

spookthesunset 7y ago

> for some reason often believed by otherwise quite smart people I don't understand why so many smart "tech people" fall for the hype. Maybe it is because "machine learning" is just abstract enough that even the most jaded developer thinks they can treat it like a black box where if you pour enough videos, photos and LIDAR readings for training into the top it will somehow spit out a fully autonomous self driving car at the bottom. I do find it funny though. On the one hand Alexa only manages to turn on the lights successfully 50% of the time yet somehow we will magically have self driving cars capable of safely navigating the roads any day now. I mean for fsck sake, we don't even have a thing that can wash and fold clothes automatically but somehow self driving cars will be on the market any day. Like, if we cannot even get voice recognition to work right, how on earth will you tell this magical car which street parking spot to take in a busy city? How will you tell it to pull over to pick up a friend? Hell, how will you tell it to go through a drive-through at McDonalds? A touchscreen?

jodrellblank 7y ago
The way you suggest the future of automotive transport rests on a fast food chain drive through suggests a kind of astroturfing social media advert. If burgers were that important, the burger company would partner with the self driving car company and find a way. None of those things are physically complex - the car will be able to see or lidar if a space is big enough for it to park in, pulling over to pick up a friend is no different to pulling over to let you out at your destination, and a drive-through is moving forwards slowly and steering a bit like all low speed driving is. None of them require the dexterity of folding soft wet fabric, and the market for $30,000+ vehicles is much larger than the market for $30,000+ washing machines. One simple answer is: you don't. Self-driving car owned by <car company. takes you from A to B and you get out. You don't choose the parking spot anymore than you chose the lane or the highway exit, you don't pick up a friend they take their own separate ride, and you don't use the drive through, you use <car company>'s food delivery service.
- spookthesunset 7y ago
  > None of those things are physically complex I don't care about how physically complex something is. You didn't tell me how I'd tell the self driving car which spot to park in or which person on the corner is my friend. If you think this detail is minor, trivial or doesn't matter.... you are sadly mistaken. > If burgers were that important, the burger company would partner with the self driving car company and find a way. So you are telling me your $70,000 self driving car can't take me through one of the hundreds of thousands of drive thru's out there? That sounds pretty shitty. > You don't choose the parking spot anymore than you chose the lane or the highway exit You are telling me that this self-driving taxi will just stop at whatever place it feels like? How will I tell it precisely where to let me out? Remember it is pouring down rain / I am physically disabled and cannot walk very far / I am not entirely sure where I need to be dropped off until I get there. So seriously, how will I command this self-driving car? Nobody seems to be able to answer this or even thought about it in any amount of detail at all. Probably because we are so far away from an actual self driving car that a realistic answer doesn't really matter at all. And that is the problem with self-driving hype. Every time you ask about a specific detail it gets hand waved away as not important or some kind of edge case that doesn't matter. Guess what... edge cases matter. Your edge case is my important case. You add up all these edge cases that "don't matter" and you've excluded almost your entire market.
  - Slartie 7y ago
    > I don't understand why so many smart "tech people" fall for the hype. Maybe it's just that some of these "tech people" are not that smart at all? > And that is the problem with self-driving hype. Every time you ask about a specific detail it gets hand waved away as not important or some kind of edge case that doesn't matter. I think you are you spot-on with that analysis. Way too much hand-waving going on. But that is a constant problem in tech, the entire area is susceptible to hypes and fads, with hands waving and waving at record speed. Like I said, maybe it's just not all geniuses and such...
    - RaceWon 7y ago
      > > I don't understand why so many smart "tech people" fall for the hype. Maybe it's just that some of these "tech people" are not that smart at all? The crux of the problem is you have people who although may well be cabable of driving to work--they are by no means cabable of understanding driving at its essence. They will never, not ever; be able to create a car that can also interact with human drivers because they don't understand driving. Period... end of story.
tim333 7y ago
As to "tech people" falling for the hype, it all depends which particular hype but: "surprised if we saw fully self driving cars any time in the next 50 years." a couple of years after there have been self driving cars driving around Arizona https://youtu.be/aaOB-ErYq6Y?t=93 https://youtu.be/aaOB-ErYq6Y?t=93 reminds me of quotes like "The aeroplane will never fly." — Lord Haldane, 1907 a while after the Wright brothers had done many flights. You could argue both the Wright brothers planes and the Arizona Waymos were a bit rubbish but these things tend to improve rapidly.
- toast0 7y ago
  Rather expensive self-driving cars, with safety drivers have been driving around a very small part of Arizona, right? That's not really that close to an affordable self-driving car that I can take overnight door to door from the bay area to the Los Angeles area while I sleep. That may not be 50 years away, but it sure doesn't seem any nearer than 20 years. Progress towards something usable has been pretty slow, and the edge cases are going to be tricky.
  - tigershark 7y ago
    A percentage of the trips have been without security driver for several months. As for affordable they are comparable to Uber and lyft and you can actually get a Waymo trip using the lyft app, so that seems pretty affordable to me.
  - tim333 7y ago
    If you click the video link it's one driving without a safety driver.
mr_toad 7y ago
> How will you tell it to pull over to pick up a friend? You can’t imagine a way to do this, therefore it’s impossible?

kickopotomus 7y ago

I think 50 years is being overly pessimistic. Self-driving in temperate climates is probably pretty close (<10 years). Waymo has pilot programs currently underway in California and Arizona[1][2]. [1]: https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/16/waymos-robotaxi-pilot-surpassed-6200-riders-in-its-first-month-in-california/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/16/waymos-robotaxi-pilot-surp... [2]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/10/20907901/waymo-driverless-cars-email-customers-arizona https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/10/20907901/waymo-driverles...

axguscbklp 7y ago
The thing is, I see no way to have full self driving without AGI. And I don't think humanity is anywhere close to developing AGI. Without AGI you can have level 4++ self driving, maybe, but not level 5.
- xkjkls 7y ago
  How much difference does 4++ vs 5 make for the predicted consequences of self-driving cars though? That's the important thing.
  - axguscbklp 7y ago
    I would say that I would feel comfortable falling asleep in a 5 while it is driving nontrivial distance and/or road conditions, but I would not feel comfortable doing so in a 4++.
    - Dylan16807 7y ago
      Why? Plain old 4 is supposed to be the "safe to sleep" level.
    - xkjkls 7y ago
      How often do you have drives when you need to fall asleep though?
- rifung 7y ago

tenpies 7y ago

This has been my take too. The whole hackathon and hiring effort screams to me of "we have finally concluded that a LIDAR-less implementation is impossible within our lifetimes. We hope one of you has at least a Hail Mary that we can burn money on so we can at least pretend that it may still be done. Anything to keep us from having to refund millions, dealing with a huge class action, seeing the stock halve, and Elon having to admit that he's something of a charlatan." And that's just on the decision to not use LIDAR because "it's dumb", not the whole concept of self-driving as it has been marketed being decades away.

gowld 7y ago
Tesla lawyers are good as their engineers. They know how to make you think they are selling self driving cars without actually saying it.
- brokenmachine 7y ago
  Another commenter here said that Tesla has been selling "fully self driving" as an option since years ago.

xkemp 7y ago

I don't understand why "otherwise smart people" feel the need to diminish the potential and successes of ML. When chess was basically solved, it was dismissed brute force, with a sarcastic challenge to do Go, and we now the fate of that challenge. There used to be, on slashdot and I believe in the early days of HN, this running complaint of the new-at-the-time CSI-style shows, specifically the "enhance" trope: "you can't reconstruct a license plate from a bad frame in a video. That information is just lost. It's not there anymore", they would say, usually with all the aura of letting you in on a secret only a very smart mind could gleam, although there were five others in the same thread making this point. Today we have superresolution algorithms that can reconstruct license plates from low-res images. Turns out the information wasn't really lost, at least not in the sense applicable to the situation (i. e. you are allowed to train on other data). Many tech people dismiss such progress as "just statistics", but I haven't seen much of an attempt to find a definition of intelligence that is meaningful different from "just statistics". In fact I doubt it's possible within the realm of science, i. e. without resorting to mind-body dualism. As to driverless cars: they exist, right now. Google does thousands of miles without any need of human intervention. Yes, maybe it doesn't yet work well enough in a hailstorm. But predicting that these problems will endure for 50 years plus, against a combination of restricting these cars to certain situations, improving the models, and/or improving maps, seems at least as overconfident in your ability to make predictions as those made by self-driving optimists.

spookthesunset 7y ago
They exist now as what amounts to fancy amusement park rides. Wake me up when I can get sloppy drunk and catch one home. Only I was drunk and didn’t provide the exactly correct drop off address and need to somehow communicate to the robo-Uber where exactly it should drop me off... (how will I do that, by the way? talk to it? What if it doesn’t understand my accent?) Also, I’m at a wedding and the pickup is in a grass field in front of the venue. Can’t pick me up on pavement... it’s a two lane road 50mph road with no shoulder to pull over in. Also the entrance to the venue is a poorly marked dirt road. Also, the “pin” I told the robo-Uber to pick me up at has it at the street ‘cause that is the address. I’ll wait for the robo-Uber to call me on how the hell it should pull into the lot. I did mention cell sucks here, so hope you’ve got that all offline, right? And I fully expect my use case to be waved away as “edge case” and “doesn’t matter”. Except it does. Every trip that isn’t a pre-planned, set route amusement park ride is an edge case. Until you can meet my use case, a common one for an Uber driver, self driving cars are empty hype.

hermitdev 7y ago

Publicly bullshitting (without explicitly stating as such) about your companies capabilities while CEO of a publicly traded company is a potentially huge issue with the SEC.

mlindner 7y ago

No Elon constantly buys his own bullshit. This has been true for years and years and years long before he became famous from Tesla. His bullshit does eventually become true though, unless it's canceled entirely. It just never happens when he says it will happen.