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> This whole self driving, fully autonomous thing has become some sort of strange faux-religion. What really bugs me, as someone working in consulting as a han

> This whole self driving, fully autonomous thing has become some sort of strange faux-religion. What really bugs me, as someone working in consulting as a hands-on backend developer with a previous background in technical consulting at an accounting Big4 (student job), is the insane amount of PR, politics and marketing talk by people who have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA what they are talking about. I witnessed politicians and C-level industry people talking out of their asses to ... idk ... drive stocks? Look smart in the face of Tesla? PR? No clue. Self-proclaimed experts in magazines and talk shows raving about how AI is going to change everything. I had colleagues telling customers about the magnificent rise of AI and none of them could even spell "gradient descent". Backed by a law or accounting degree they KNOW that self-driving is just around the corner and they are very vocal about it while easily impressed by tightly controlled demos at some international tech fair. Everyone just seems to fall into the hype trap without a single brain-byte spent on researching the actual issues and what's most sad is actual engineers/technical people not doing their due diligence and informing themselves BUT THEN GOING OUT TO TELL THEIR NON-TECHNICAL FRIENDS ABOUT THE AUTONOMOUS FUTURE. Ugh. I held a minor internal talk at work about self-driving cars for people generally with other backgrounds but light superficial interest due to "Tesla" and "the hype". They were surprised to see that we are likely decades away from actual Level 4 (not the marketing garbage that some companies put out) because even a slight change in weather can really fuck with all systems on the roads right now.

tim333 7y ago
Yeah but speaking as someone kinda on the other side there are things like this 'actual Level 4' delivering stuff for real in Wuhan https://kr-asia.com/jd-com-uses-l4-autonomous-driving-solutions-to-deliver-goods-in-locked-down-wuhan https://kr-asia.com/jd-com-uses-l4-autonomous-driving-soluti... Fair enough it's not very good - that one just went 600m - but it's hard to argue it won't exist for decades when it exists now. And historically going form sorta works but is rubbish in info tech eg. early cellphones, internet and so on - to works well doesn't seem to take that long. Five to ten years perhaps typically.
- ipsi 7y ago
  The issue is that there are so, so many edge cases to worry about. Simple example: someone decides to troll you in your self-driving car and steps out in front of it. You don't have controls in the car, so you can't go around them - you have to wait for them to move. In reality, it seems like it would resolve quickly - you get out and yell at them, call the police if that doesn't work, etc. But it can get more sinister - criminals _already_ block the road to force drivers out of their car to rob them[1][2]. Now, if you know that might happen, you can just drive around the obstacle. Unless, of course, you're in a self-driving car where you might not even be able to get it to do a u-turn. Related issues would be areas where the practical advice is "don't stop" - not even at red lights - if you're there late at night due to the risk of car jacking[3][4] (this might be out-of-date now, to be fair). Can rules like that be encoded into a self-driving car? OK, yes, you probably could find a way to do it. But that's almost certainly just the tip of the iceberg in terms of "ways people will fuck with self-driving cars" and "things people do that are technically illegal but still safer than the alternative." Could you solve enough of those in 5-10 years, _on top of_ making self-driving cars work in sun/rain/snow/fog/night/tornados/etc safely and consistently? I think that's very unlikely. Decades seems far more likely to me. [1] https://abc7chicago.com/593111/ https://abc7chicago.com/593111/ [2] (Non-EU only) https://wgntv.com/2015/03/31/robbers-set-up-fake-road-blocks-then-attack-drivers-on-south-side/ https://wgntv.com/2015/03/31/robbers-set-up-fake-road-blocks... [3] https://eu.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/detroit-city/2018/12/11/man-carjacked-red-light-west-side/2274423002/ https://eu.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/detroit-city/201... [4] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskLEO/comments/2rzsdz/are_there_any_neighborhoods_youll_forgive_someone/cnlbtfr/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskLEO/comments/2rzsdz/are_there_an...
  - Pigo 7y ago
    Have you seen the roads in Alabama? They have this weird, red asphalt and rarely any edge lines. In Louisiana they have these elevated roads over the bayou that don't seem to have break-down lanes. In Tennessee they have roads that go through mountains with shocking curves and gradients. Pot holes, broken lights & signs, weird parking lots, new construction, and seeing a small ball roll near the road and knowing that a kid might be coming after it soon. It seems like it would take an endless list to cover every new edge case. Our technology is a amazing, but I almost think the edge case is places where autonomous driving makes sense. The thing I trust the least is the operators they want to put in these cars. They better be completely autonomous, self-maintaining, and somehow tamper-proof. It's a really tall order, which I hope we do fulfill one day. But maybe I'm a pessimist, and they have it all figured out already.
xkemp 7y ago
Predicting with All-Caps confidence that autonomous driving is "decades away" is at least as indefensible as overly optimistic predictions were.
- simias 7y ago
  I wouldn't bet on it but I also wouldn't call it indefensible. Fully autonomous driving is a very complex problem with a very long tail. Being able to drive semi-reliably on American highways doesn't mean that you're almost done, not even close. An other handicap for self-driving cars is that the problem is effectively harder at the start when the majority of the traffic will still be operated by human drivers who are a lot harder to predict reliably than an other autonomous vehicles. Beyond that, I strongly believe that software engineering is still ridiculously immature and unable to deliver safe, reliable solutions without strong hardware failovers. We have countless examples of this. We simply don't have the maturity yet, we're still figuring out what type of screwdrivers we should use and whether a hammer could do the trick.
- koheripbal 7y ago
  Having driven in Canadian winters, I honestly agree that reliable autonomous driving in inclement weather is indeed decades away. The visual recognition needed is well beyond the systems today.
  - ijpsud 7y ago
    Isn't that just "image de-obfuscation" though? Seems like narrow AI will be able to out-class humans at that in no time. You can generate as much training data for that as you want. Doesn't really require human-type intelligence. Though I guess you might mean that the obfuscation makes the edge cases even harder, which makes sense.
    - Spooky23 7y ago
      I have a car (Honda Pilot) where the company decided to make the lift gate window too high, probably to accommodate mounting the spare tire inside the cabin. This design makes you dependent on the rear camera for most reverse use cases. It probably made a lot of sense in the Southern California design center. In Upstate New York, that camera is covered in road spray and salt, and my brain cannot see anything or act effectively without cleaning it. Even after doing that, it will get dirty again after a few minutes of driving. I’d guess that a least a few dozen people will hurt by this decision. Take this problem to the self-driving car and things get even worse. You’re going to have a lot of problems with sensor effectiveness that cannot be magically fixed with software.
UI_at_80x24 7y ago
>...without a single brain-byte spent on ... This is a glorious Gibson-esq turn of phrase that I hope goes down in history and is picked up in common vernacular. Back on topic: The more I know about technology the less I want it or trust it to work. I assume this is similar to Pilots not wanting somebody else to fly, or surgeons not wanting to go under the knife. We know, that we don't know enough about autonomous driving. Instead of the 'unwashed masses' saying "gee-whiz that is cool", we think "this isn't ready yet!"
- bdamm 7y ago
  We know that, but also we ought to know that pushing through the hard problems by rolling out systems operating world-wide and interacting with real people is the only way forward toward improved safety, reduced mental slavery to the menial task of driving, and the time and relationship freedom that comes with it. So yep, I let my Tesla do lots of driving. And I do it knowing that the brake pedal and the steering wheel are both manual controls that I can use to override the car at any time, no matter what. That is why I feel so comfortable. And you know what? It's wonderful. It really is. I am free to look around and see other people on the freeway. They look so bored. So tired. So used up. Meanwhile my wife and I, we turn on the careoke machine and sing our way to the destination. It is absolutely the way to go. You can take my Tesla and its AP functions out of my cold dead hands. Maybe that's how I go, and I'm alright with it.
  - jskrablin 7y ago
    I wouldn't feel comfortable in a vehicle that may, or may not react to some situation on the road ahead. Because one day it will decide to do $something_really_stupid and you won't be able to react in time/correctly because you'll be too busy singing karaoke. With some extra bad luck, you'll die/kill someone else because of that.
    - bdamm 7y ago
      Yeah, but is that a bigger risk than some dumbass in a truck blowing a red light and plowing into my door? Based on where Tesla is at I don't think it is. They're already reasonably below the median risk we all accept for driving at all. After all, my butt can feel that the car is doing something seriously unexpected way before my eyeballs can. So I'm going to keep singing, with my thumb gently on the wheel and one eye on the road.
huherto 7y ago
> is the insane amount of PR, politics and marketing talk by people who have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA I have seen this too much. People who have a deep understanding of how things work are busy learning and doing. People who can spent their energy with politics and marketing can do it because they are not busy learning and doing. I which there was a solution for this. Corporate IT departments are particularly full of this.
smallcharleston 7y ago
I wonder why the self-driving car hype folks don’t simply lobby to make more trains. (I mean the ones who have been successfully marketed to here, not the marketers).
- SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
  We had self driving vehicles for 30,000 years. I’ve thought about just getting horse brains hooked up - but people probably don’t want their cars spooked by plastic bags.
- ironmagma 7y ago
  How do you know the people bullish on self driving cars haven’t also lobbied for trains? There’s a lot more standing in the way of trains being built in the US, unfortunately. To me, self driving cars are just the second-best thing, and one that might actually happen. It’s a bit too late for trains to take over in most of the country.
cgh 7y ago
You think that's bad? Listen to sales types talk about "blockchain" sometime.
clairity 7y ago
note that "gradient descent" isn't AI either. it's more computational linear algebra: a heuristic for numerical methods used to solve (usually to a local extrema) systems of equations without direct analytical solution(s).
eastof 7y ago
Sorry for the out of the blue unrelated reply, but I am currently stuck working as a technical consultant at one of the Big4, how did you make your way out of this? I feel like I am learning about antiquated technologies, and that pivoting to a software engineering job more aligned with my interests, skills, and sanity feels harder every day. Even something like you describe you are doing now sounds much better than what I'm doing now. Also I know exactly what you are talking about with the marketing and PR talk it is insane.
- prteja11 7y ago
  Some folks I know joined code camps/ lambda school like programs and got out. Alrernatively, if you work on clients, easy way is to accept a full time job at any of your clients you enjoy/tolerate working.
- neuronic 7y ago
  Sorry, late reply. I got out by never really getting in I am afraid. I worked for 1.5 years in technical consulting as a student job while getting my informatics degree. Once I obtained my degree, I declined an offer by said Big4 firm and took another offer where I got to go hands-on with coding. I had previous coding experience which helped and then amazing colleagues who boosted my start.
a9h74j 7y ago
Five years ago or so, video from "DARPA robot challenge" type events would easily give the lie to "superb autonomy" claims. I just found this[1] more impressive, but at its 20x playback speed. I imagine that playback at 1x could still serve as a reality-check and counterexample. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6-heLIg85o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6-heLIg85o

tim333 7y ago

Yeah but speaking as someone kinda on the other side there are things like this 'actual Level 4' delivering stuff for real in Wuhan https://kr-asia.com/jd-com-uses-l4-autonomous-driving-solutions-to-deliver-goods-in-locked-down-wuhan https://kr-asia.com/jd-com-uses-l4-autonomous-driving-soluti... Fair enough it's not very good - that one just went 600m - but it's hard to argue it won't exist for decades when it exists now. And historically going form sorta works but is rubbish in info tech eg. early cellphones, internet and so on - to works well doesn't seem to take that long. Five to ten years perhaps typically.

ipsi 7y ago
The issue is that there are so, so many edge cases to worry about. Simple example: someone decides to troll you in your self-driving car and steps out in front of it. You don't have controls in the car, so you can't go around them - you have to wait for them to move. In reality, it seems like it would resolve quickly - you get out and yell at them, call the police if that doesn't work, etc. But it can get more sinister - criminals _already_ block the road to force drivers out of their car to rob them[1][2]. Now, if you know that might happen, you can just drive around the obstacle. Unless, of course, you're in a self-driving car where you might not even be able to get it to do a u-turn. Related issues would be areas where the practical advice is "don't stop" - not even at red lights - if you're there late at night due to the risk of car jacking[3][4] (this might be out-of-date now, to be fair). Can rules like that be encoded into a self-driving car? OK, yes, you probably could find a way to do it. But that's almost certainly just the tip of the iceberg in terms of "ways people will fuck with self-driving cars" and "things people do that are technically illegal but still safer than the alternative." Could you solve enough of those in 5-10 years, _on top of_ making self-driving cars work in sun/rain/snow/fog/night/tornados/etc safely and consistently? I think that's very unlikely. Decades seems far more likely to me. [1] https://abc7chicago.com/593111/ https://abc7chicago.com/593111/ [2] (Non-EU only) https://wgntv.com/2015/03/31/robbers-set-up-fake-road-blocks-then-attack-drivers-on-south-side/ https://wgntv.com/2015/03/31/robbers-set-up-fake-road-blocks... [3] https://eu.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/detroit-city/2018/12/11/man-carjacked-red-light-west-side/2274423002/ https://eu.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/detroit-city/201... [4] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskLEO/comments/2rzsdz/are_there_any_neighborhoods_youll_forgive_someone/cnlbtfr/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskLEO/comments/2rzsdz/are_there_an...
- Pigo 7y ago
  Have you seen the roads in Alabama? They have this weird, red asphalt and rarely any edge lines. In Louisiana they have these elevated roads over the bayou that don't seem to have break-down lanes. In Tennessee they have roads that go through mountains with shocking curves and gradients. Pot holes, broken lights & signs, weird parking lots, new construction, and seeing a small ball roll near the road and knowing that a kid might be coming after it soon. It seems like it would take an endless list to cover every new edge case. Our technology is a amazing, but I almost think the edge case is places where autonomous driving makes sense. The thing I trust the least is the operators they want to put in these cars. They better be completely autonomous, self-maintaining, and somehow tamper-proof. It's a really tall order, which I hope we do fulfill one day. But maybe I'm a pessimist, and they have it all figured out already.

xkemp 7y ago

Predicting with All-Caps confidence that autonomous driving is "decades away" is at least as indefensible as overly optimistic predictions were.

simias 7y ago
I wouldn't bet on it but I also wouldn't call it indefensible. Fully autonomous driving is a very complex problem with a very long tail. Being able to drive semi-reliably on American highways doesn't mean that you're almost done, not even close. An other handicap for self-driving cars is that the problem is effectively harder at the start when the majority of the traffic will still be operated by human drivers who are a lot harder to predict reliably than an other autonomous vehicles. Beyond that, I strongly believe that software engineering is still ridiculously immature and unable to deliver safe, reliable solutions without strong hardware failovers. We have countless examples of this. We simply don't have the maturity yet, we're still figuring out what type of screwdrivers we should use and whether a hammer could do the trick.
koheripbal 7y ago
Having driven in Canadian winters, I honestly agree that reliable autonomous driving in inclement weather is indeed decades away. The visual recognition needed is well beyond the systems today.
- ijpsud 7y ago
  Isn't that just "image de-obfuscation" though? Seems like narrow AI will be able to out-class humans at that in no time. You can generate as much training data for that as you want. Doesn't really require human-type intelligence. Though I guess you might mean that the obfuscation makes the edge cases even harder, which makes sense.
  - Spooky23 7y ago
    I have a car (Honda Pilot) where the company decided to make the lift gate window too high, probably to accommodate mounting the spare tire inside the cabin. This design makes you dependent on the rear camera for most reverse use cases. It probably made a lot of sense in the Southern California design center. In Upstate New York, that camera is covered in road spray and salt, and my brain cannot see anything or act effectively without cleaning it. Even after doing that, it will get dirty again after a few minutes of driving. I’d guess that a least a few dozen people will hurt by this decision. Take this problem to the self-driving car and things get even worse. You’re going to have a lot of problems with sensor effectiveness that cannot be magically fixed with software.

UI_at_80x24 7y ago

>...without a single brain-byte spent on ... This is a glorious Gibson-esq turn of phrase that I hope goes down in history and is picked up in common vernacular. Back on topic: The more I know about technology the less I want it or trust it to work. I assume this is similar to Pilots not wanting somebody else to fly, or surgeons not wanting to go under the knife. We know, that we don't know enough about autonomous driving. Instead of the 'unwashed masses' saying "gee-whiz that is cool", we think "this isn't ready yet!"

bdamm 7y ago
We know that, but also we ought to know that pushing through the hard problems by rolling out systems operating world-wide and interacting with real people is the only way forward toward improved safety, reduced mental slavery to the menial task of driving, and the time and relationship freedom that comes with it. So yep, I let my Tesla do lots of driving. And I do it knowing that the brake pedal and the steering wheel are both manual controls that I can use to override the car at any time, no matter what. That is why I feel so comfortable. And you know what? It's wonderful. It really is. I am free to look around and see other people on the freeway. They look so bored. So tired. So used up. Meanwhile my wife and I, we turn on the careoke machine and sing our way to the destination. It is absolutely the way to go. You can take my Tesla and its AP functions out of my cold dead hands. Maybe that's how I go, and I'm alright with it.
- jskrablin 7y ago
  I wouldn't feel comfortable in a vehicle that may, or may not react to some situation on the road ahead. Because one day it will decide to do $something_really_stupid and you won't be able to react in time/correctly because you'll be too busy singing karaoke. With some extra bad luck, you'll die/kill someone else because of that.
  - bdamm 7y ago
    Yeah, but is that a bigger risk than some dumbass in a truck blowing a red light and plowing into my door? Based on where Tesla is at I don't think it is. They're already reasonably below the median risk we all accept for driving at all. After all, my butt can feel that the car is doing something seriously unexpected way before my eyeballs can. So I'm going to keep singing, with my thumb gently on the wheel and one eye on the road.

huherto 7y ago

> is the insane amount of PR, politics and marketing talk by people who have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA I have seen this too much. People who have a deep understanding of how things work are busy learning and doing. People who can spent their energy with politics and marketing can do it because they are not busy learning and doing. I which there was a solution for this. Corporate IT departments are particularly full of this.

smallcharleston 7y ago

I wonder why the self-driving car hype folks don’t simply lobby to make more trains. (I mean the ones who have been successfully marketed to here, not the marketers).

SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
We had self driving vehicles for 30,000 years. I’ve thought about just getting horse brains hooked up - but people probably don’t want their cars spooked by plastic bags.
ironmagma 7y ago
How do you know the people bullish on self driving cars haven’t also lobbied for trains? There’s a lot more standing in the way of trains being built in the US, unfortunately. To me, self driving cars are just the second-best thing, and one that might actually happen. It’s a bit too late for trains to take over in most of the country.

cgh 7y ago

You think that's bad? Listen to sales types talk about "blockchain" sometime.

clairity 7y ago

note that "gradient descent" isn't AI either. it's more computational linear algebra: a heuristic for numerical methods used to solve (usually to a local extrema) systems of equations without direct analytical solution(s).

eastof 7y ago

Sorry for the out of the blue unrelated reply, but I am currently stuck working as a technical consultant at one of the Big4, how did you make your way out of this? I feel like I am learning about antiquated technologies, and that pivoting to a software engineering job more aligned with my interests, skills, and sanity feels harder every day. Even something like you describe you are doing now sounds much better than what I'm doing now. Also I know exactly what you are talking about with the marketing and PR talk it is insane.

prteja11 7y ago
Some folks I know joined code camps/ lambda school like programs and got out. Alrernatively, if you work on clients, easy way is to accept a full time job at any of your clients you enjoy/tolerate working.
neuronic 7y ago
Sorry, late reply. I got out by never really getting in I am afraid. I worked for 1.5 years in technical consulting as a student job while getting my informatics degree. Once I obtained my degree, I declined an offer by said Big4 firm and took another offer where I got to go hands-on with coding. I had previous coding experience which helped and then amazing colleagues who boosted my start.

a9h74j 7y ago

Five years ago or so, video from "DARPA robot challenge" type events would easily give the lie to "superb autonomy" claims. I just found this[1] more impressive, but at its 20x playback speed. I imagine that playback at 1x could still serve as a reality-check and counterexample. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6-heLIg85o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6-heLIg85o