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Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected
- bravoetch 7y agoThis meme of shock and surprise that self-driving cars haven't appeared overnight is just media BS. Yes, all technology development is a gradual process and we may not know how long it takes. Companies working on it have pitch decks and investors so they give their best or most optimistic estimates.
- ghaff 7y agoGo back a couple of years and look on just about any thread about self-driving on a forum such as this one and you'll find no shortage of people arguing that they're just around the corner. Because, after all, that's what the SV hypesters were saying and they'd never lie.
- seanmcdirmid 7y ago> you'll find no shortage of people arguing that they're just around the corner Ya, but around the corner no one thought that would be 2020. The strawman is always to place around the corner as tomorrow, but many people just mean in a decade or two.
- kaesar14 7y agoThe article posted quite literally posts examples to the contrary of what you're saying. The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/13/self-driving-cars-bmw-google-2020-driving https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/13/self-driv... Business Insider: https://www.businessinsider.com/report-10-million-self-driving-cars-will-be-on-the-road-by-2020-2015-5-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/report-10-million-self-drivi... GM/Cruise: https://www.wired.com/story/gms-cruise-rolls-back-target-self-driving-cars/ https://www.wired.com/story/gms-cruise-rolls-back-target-sel... Waymo: https://www.wired.com/story/gms-cruise-rolls-back-target-self-driving-cars/ https://www.wired.com/story/gms-cruise-rolls-back-target-sel... Toyota: https://www.wsj.com/articles/toyota-aims-to-make-self-driving-cars-by-2020-1444136396 https://www.wsj.com/articles/toyota-aims-to-make-self-drivin... Honda: https://www.autotrader.com/car-shopping/self-driving-cars-honda-sets-2020-as-target-for-highly-automated-freeway-driving-266836 https://www.autotrader.com/car-shopping/self-driving-cars-ho... Tesla: https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/22/18510828/tesla-elon-musk-autonomy-day-investor-comments-self-driving-cars-predictions https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/22/18510828/tesla-elon-musk-...
- Piskvorrr 7y agoYeah. It's been juuust beyond reach, but within five years to mass adoption, for a century now.
- seanmcdirmid 7y agoI don’t think anyone was hyping self driving cars in the 1920s. If they were, they already had horses that could do that anyways.
- Piskvorrr 7y agoNope. Horses obsolete, slow, hungry, disobedient. Future was in machines. https://io9.gizmodo.com/when-people-in-the-1920s-and-1930s-imagined-the-future-1695028672 https://io9.gizmodo.com/when-people-in-the-1920s-and-1930s-i...
- heynk 7y agoWhen I was starting my engineering career, it was right around when the first DARPA challenges had started. The hype was beginning, and my optimism towards technology was strong. I thought the predictions and timelines would be correct, and I still feel strongly that self-driving will be safer than humans in the long term. Recently, I bought a newer Subaru, with EyeSight. It has adaptive cruise and lane keep assist. The LKA is fine - it'll beep if you sway outside of a lane, and automatically adjusts the steering, but it won't keep you centered. It's more of a safety thing, and it works well from that perspective. The adaptive cruise is really good. It's camera based, and I have had zero problems with it. It works well at night and in pouring rain. It'll even stay pretty close to the car ahead of you if you turn the "tolerance" all the way down. I'm always impressed. Since I've had this car, I've thought a lot more about the practical implementation details of actual self-driving. I more often notice situations when driving that are seriously complex. The more I think about it while I'm driving, the more I realize how fucking hard self-driving would be.
- OnlineGladiator 7y ago> The adaptive cruise is really good. It's camera based, and I have had zero problems with it. It works well at night and in pouring rain. It'll even stay pretty close to the car ahead of you if you turn the "tolerance" all the way down. I'm always impressed. I checked, assuming it's actually using a radar - and you're right. They seem to use a stereo camera system. Neat. https://www.subaru.com/engineering/eyesight.html https://www.subaru.com/engineering/eyesight.html I'm surprised it works well in bad weather, but I've never tried it.
- scotje 7y agoIt's not impervious to bad weather, but pretty resilient. I'd say in the 2 years we've had ours the system has shut off maybe 3-4 times due to one of: a) very low and direct sun angle, b) very heavy rain, c) dense fog. Which, to be fair, are all difficult conditions for a human to drive in as well. But I agree with the parent, the suite of driver assistance features is very good, but a long way from "self driving".
- Shivetya 7y ago
- Mattasher 7y agoYou have to wonder, when you see these stories, whether the engineers in charge of these programs spent much time driving around, trying to see the road like an AI might. In my experience, driving in the city, it's rare that I can go more than a few miles before some exception comes up that requires human judgment. Here's a few of the things I saw just last week: * Car double parked. Do I cross the center line to go around them? * Stop sign that's been bent and it's no longer obvious which street it refers to. * Semi with its hazards on in a left turn lane. Do I make a left turn around it? * Cop directing traffic by hand at an intersection. Most city driving is a series of continual exceptions to the rules, or situations that are one-off. Who thought this would be easy?
- dstroot 7y ago> Cop directing traffic by hand at an intersection. That’s going to be really challenging. Good one!
- bentcorner 7y agoGoogle (Waymo?) has been thinking through these exceptions: (around the 9:45 mark) https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_urmson_how_a_driverless_car_sees_the_road https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_urmson_how_a_driverless_car_...
- mark-r 7y agoI ran into this on my commute just last night. Cop car in the left shoulder, lights flashing. Cop on the right side of the road, waving a flashlight. Oncoming traffic crossing over into my lane and blocking my way. Finally I figured out that the cop was directing traffic and I had to wait until something changed. Eventually the oncoming traffic dwindled, and the cop turned around so I had a harder time seeing the flashlight - I assumed that meant it was my turn to go. I approached very slowly. I never figured out what the problem was, this was in the middle of the road and not at an intersection. I was more concerned with doing the right thing than trying to determine the root cause.
- pasttense01 7y agoThe cop can carry a transmitting device which will communicate with cars telling them what to do.
- sjburt 7y agoThan who expected? The criminally credulous tech media?
- scottlocklin 7y agoYou mean the output of VC firm and Silly Con Valley marketing centipedes isn't strictly true? Perish the thought! Next thing you know, you'll be telling me the advocates of strong-AI, 3-d printing, Virtual Reality and Drones as revolutionary technology might not be exactly accurate.
- chungus_khan 7y agoTurns out you can't make ridiculously complicated autonomous tech that interacts with the real world in an incredibly nuanced and varied way out of pure VC hype.
- ghaff 7y agoI do wonder how much of the self-driving narrative at the peak of inflated expectations was the result of 1. Wild optimism fueled by how rapid the progress of ML had been in certain domains over the course of a few years combined with a lot of hype and general SV techno-optimism. (And the fact that a certain demographic so desperately wanted a robo-chaffeur to drive them around.) vs. 2. Hypesters and scammers who knew it was mostly smoke and mirrors but it didn't matter so long as they got their payday.
- scottlocklin 7y agoIn the case of 1. I'm certain a whole bunch of it is people getting high on their own supply; aka pay a marketer to hype your thing, your competitor does same, then you become afraid of all the progress your competitor has made (which is imaginary marketing hype). I've actually seen this dynamic at work in "AI" land; it's gotten me work. I've even seen it happen within the same company: marketing dude talks to engineer, gets it all wrong and exaggerates capabilities; then CEO demands to know why the capabilities in his sales literature don't exist in the product. I call it "human informational centipede." Hypesters and scammers always around; excepting in Theranos type cases, they mostly don't really push the needle. Pretty sure Irene Aldridge didn't change perceptions of HFT much, for example.
- ghaff 7y ago
- spiderfarmer 7y agoI have a feeling the adoption of AI will be like the early years of the internet. Massive hype, then a massive crash and then slowly it finds its into everything, fulfilling most of what was promised.
- flyGuyOnTheSly 7y agoSo do a lot of ventures but that's no reason to throw in the towel.
- csours 7y agoDisclaimer up front: I work for GM, I don't work on SDC. As I see it, self-driving is a cursed[0][1] problem. If you could choose a different problem space, or to ignore some complications, self-driving would merely be very hard. But the requirement to handle ANY external behavior with ANY external conditions and navigate to ANY destination, while also maintaining safety is impossible* satisfy. One cursed corner of the problem space is ML itself: ML is amazing in that it enables emergent behavior [3], but ML is terrible in that it gives rise to emergent behavior. The traditional engineering mindset wants a map of inputs to outputs, but you don't get to choose your inputs in the SDC world, and you can't specify all of your outputs. Another cursed corner is the Always/Never[2] problem. You want safety features like Automated Emergency Braking to Always kick in when there is a problem, and you Never want them to kick in when there isn't a problem. I really don't know how any of this gets fixed. I do think that sensor fusion and advances in AI can reduce the size of some of the cursed area of the problem, but the problem is also meta-cursed in the definition of Self-Driving: the solution to normal cursed problems is to reduce or change the solution scope, but if you reduce or change the Self-Driving solution scope, then "it's not real self driving". 0. https://twvideo01.ubm-us.net/o1/vault/gdc2019/presentations/Jaffe_Alex_Cursed_Problems_In.pdf https://twvideo01.ubm-us.net/o1/vault/gdc2019/presentations/... 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_dimensionality#Machine_learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_dimensionality#Machin... 2. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/always-never https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/always-never --- 3. edit: [pdf] https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/81580604.pdf https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/81580604.pdf Especially see section 4.3
- jacquesm 7y agoThis is spot on. The Always/Never is well articulated, it is exactly why I got rid of a vehicle with auto braking. It did it twice when it wasn't supposed to and that was more dangerous than if it had never triggered at all. And yet, in an actual imminent crash it would have probably responded a lot quicker than I ever could. Still, I'm not going to be scared twice in a month by my car doing stuff 'on its own' to my possible detriment.
- GeorgeTirebiter 7y ago
- takk309 7y agoI am a traffic engineer and one of the things that I do regularly is write 10 year traffic plans for small to medium sized cities, think 60,000 people max. When a lot of the self driving hype was really kicking off, I was told to make sure to incorporate them into the plans. This mostly consisted of a few sentences about self driving and that was it. When modeling future traffic growth, the client would always say, "these numbers a pretty high, do you thing self driving cars will lower them?" To which I would respond that it is doubtful. I am in the rural west where cars are a large part of life. Ride sharing and public transportation are rarely a thing outside of the core of towns. The idea of a self driving car that one doesn't own would be very odd to a lot of people in this area. On top of the social side of things, the roads are not in great shape in northern climates and many of the visual cues that we use to drive can be missing or very hard to see for many miles. Striping delineating the edge of the road often gets worn away over the course of a few years and doesn't get re-painted for a few more. Some major roads connecting two towns may not even have a paved shoulder, just 24 feet of asphalt with a stripe down the middle. (For reference, 12 foot lanes with 4 foot shoulders are the general norm for this part of the US.) All of this and I have still yet to touch on weather. I look forward to self driving cars. However, I don't think that they are going to solve many of our traffic issues outside of urban cores. For me, the incremental steps to reach self driving will result in fewer injuries and fatalities on our roadways, and that is a win.
- chrisco255 7y agoYeah just collision detection and lane guidance are already helpful in modern cars. After driving in snow in Colorado I have to wonder how self driving cars perform under such conditions. I couldn't make out where the lines are and no one really does. A four lane road can easily become a two lane road under such conditions, as people cut a worn path through the snow. I really think self driving could improve public transportation in urban cores by tracking preset paths. I could also imagine buses that are mostly autonomous, but where a remote driver could override the controls for exceptions.
- throwawayhhakdl 7y agoA lot of people are incredibad at driving in snow. I would not be surprised at all if self driving cars vastly reduce the accidents attributable to snow on the road. Some of that might be due to the car deciding something is too dangerous to attempt, and frankly that seems fine to me. If your problem is “the car can’t handle x condition”, there’s really no issue so long as that’s because the car refuses to try, rather than trying and failing with non trivial probability
- skywhopper 7y agoBillions of dollars of VC funding go a long way to convincing people of what is possible, whatever the reality is.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- jacquesm 7y agoExpected by who?
- tjpaudio 7y agoTo anyone with a detailed understanding of the current limits of machine learning, this should be no surprise; unsupervised learning is far from solved and ML in its current state will always be plagued by the cat and mouse game of edge cases. The reality is the industry has decided to go this way anyways because it has a good profit outlook if you can get it to work, which is the only thing funding the endeavor. Consider two ways of going about automated transportation: 1) AI. The car independently makes decisions and drives itself. 2) Networks. The car communicates with a grid to make decisions. Why did we go for #1? Well, thats easy, capitalism. Consider: AI: - Company gets to own the intellectual property to form a temporary monopoly. - Easier to sidestep governments involvement. - No need to build large infrastructure Networks: - Shared, less opportunity for monopoly formation. - Will need the government to cooperate. Governments are slows. If I had to guess, we will eventually go the network route. The research used for AI will drive safety features and failsafes, but not the meet of it. Anyways, why accelerate a line of stopped cars one at a time with autonomous vehicles when you could accelerate the entire line of cars simultaneously with a networked setup?
- wilg 7y agoI think #1 is easier for lots of reasons.
- streetcat1 7y agoSo I do not think that this is an unsupervised problem. As a matter of fact, this should be one problem where labeled data is not an issue. I.e. just let humans ride the self-driving car, and record the human actions as well as all the sensors (at time t-1). Combined that with all the humans on road X, and you have the a model for road X. The problem here is that each road needs its own model as well as model per time of day. Another problem is that each company will not share its supervised data.
- pasttense01 7y agoAnd what happens if the network breaks down? Everything gridlocked. Conversely if one vehicle breaks down the rest of the cars just go on by.
- krm01 7y agoIt’s really just a matter of time. Those that started out optimistic (when it was hyped) but are now saying that they don’t see self driving cars can do the complex situations we humans supposedly can should have some patience. As the tech improves, and more data is used to train models, it’ll surely surpass humans in driving ability.
- jacquesm 7y agoIf only it were that simple.
- mark-r 7y agoI have this argument constantly. Humans make mistakes too, so we will eventually have tech that makes fewer mistakes than humans. The problem is that humans have a unique ability to make sense of situations they've never specifically encountered before. No amount of training data will be able to make up for that, because there will always be situations so rare that they never made it into the data.
- pasttense01 7y agoBut what really matters is the overall statistics: The self-driving doesn't know how to handle this one in a 10,000 situation. But in the other 9,999 of 10,000 situations the self-driving vehicle is equal or better. Thus the self-driving vehicle averages out to be a lot safer.
- mark-r 7y agoEverybody says this, but they simply take it as a matter of faith. I don't see any statistics to back it up. The article itself points out that there simply aren't enough self-driving miles at this point to make a valid comparison.
- wutbrodo 7y agoThis is what makes hype cycles so dangerous. Most people are too simple-minded to understand nuance, uncertainty, or cautious optimism. So you end up with either "this is terrible and worthless and impossible" or "this is incredible and game-changing and imminent". I've seen it happen for everything from SDC to politicians that my social milieu pin their wildest dreams on that end up disappointing them by being decent, competent and non-messianic. It's probably worth ignoring what most people think about topics like this, except to the extent that their insane thrashing affects the situation (votes, funding, etc).
- anewguy9000 7y agono they didn't lol unless you were a layman, but then, what are your expectations based on?
- axguscbklp 7y agoYes, harder than hype and deluded optimism expected. Plenty of people have seen through the hype and delusion for years now. Level 5 requires AGI. AGI is probably nowhere close to being realized - humans may well be centuries away from reaching the necessary technological level. Humanity might never get there at all. In any case, if humanity ever developed AGI, it would revolutionize the world. Self-driving cars would be one of the most boring and mundane applications.
- viburnum 7y agoYou’re right, but this is a religious conviction for nerds, like their belief in space colonies. They flip out if you don’t play along.
- cletus 7y agoAlternate headline: Some people overstated how simple this problem was because they didn't know what they were talking about, could promote themselves as experts, could get funding for a self-driving startup or some combination of the above. I guess that isn't as pithy but it's closer to the truth. When it became clear that Uber's strategy (under Kalanick anyway) was premised on replacing drivers with AIs before the cash ran out I couldn't see general self-driving vehicles coming within 20 years. I still say that's true. AI assistance? Sure. But there's an uncanny valley there too where the AI will be good enough in most circumstances that drivers lose attention and people will die. You already see this with Tesla autopilot. Here's a simple counterexample to the idea that self-driving cars are "just around the corner": in NYC, quite a few buildings have doormen. This is great for residents. Part of this is dealing with deliveries and so forth but there's also an issue of general security. People can sneak in (and I'm sure do) but just the fact that a human is there acts a strong (but not complete) deterrent. Just like having a dog is one of the most effective burglary deterrents. What prevents a lot of bad actions on the roads is actually fear. Fear of what other drivers might do. Fear of road rage by other drivers. That sort of thing. This is just how humans work. Once a driver knows the car next to them isn't driven by a person it changes their behaviour. They will do things they wouldn't do if it were a human behind the wheel, particularly because they know an AI won't ram them, cut them off, yell at them and whatever. There's no fear there. Even if there's a passenger in the car, it's still (psychologically) different. How do you program around humans changing their behaviour to take advantage of there being no driver in your car?
- mullingitover 7y ago> Once a driver knows the car next to them isn't driven by a person it changes their behaviour. If the car next to me isn't driven by a person, but is bristling with high resolution cameras that will immediately upload footage of my face to the authorities if I collide with it, I would indeed change my behavior.
- falcolas 7y agoBeing excessively cautious makes you an unpredictable driver as well. Unpredictability is the antithesis of safe driving.
- aphextron 7y agoIt amazes me how Tesla can continue to just outright lie in their sales material about this. Right now you can purchase a brand new Model S with a "full self driving" package, even though no such thing exists, nor is there any timeline at all to when it will (if ever). Autopilot as it stands is nothing more than an advanced driver assist system with blindspot monitoring and automatic lane changing. Not even close to a level 3 system, let alone full autonomous.
- psychometry 7y agoAny software dev worth their salt knew this was going to be a 90-90 problem.
- mark-r 7y agoEven in a software dev environment where you'd think this would be common sense, I get a lot of over optimism.
- AnimalMuppet 7y agoOh, far worse. 90% of the effort will get you 90% of the way there. Another 90% of the effort might get you another 9% of the way there. But that last 1% of "getting there" is going to take many more 90%s of effort.
- noonespecial 7y agoIt still feels kind of like we're in the "Apple Newton" phase of self driving with the iphone in the indeterminate future. One day we'll look back and say "aww, they tried so hard with the limited tech they had and got so close but what they needed to make it good just didn't exist yet".
- NohatCoder 7y agoI think car companies try to rely way too much on machine learning. You get some promising results fast, but it is all inside a black box, both verifying the correctness and changing what is wrong are almost impossible jobs. Maybe machine learning can be used to tell the difference between a dog and a plastic bag, but you'll need some hard code to describe how to react to either.
- ghaff 7y ago>ut you'll need some hard code to describe how to react to either My understanding is that's largely how it's done. The ML part is mostly about recognizing objects. But the car doesn't "learn" how to drive. It's told how to drive depending on what's happening in its field of view. Which is why there's probably misperceptions about the importance of miles on the road. It uncovers un-programmed situations but it's not like the car runs over someone and reinforcement learning leads to it not doing that next time.
- NohatCoder 7y agoThere are some levels in between, like feeding an ML algorithm recordings of human drivers and expecting it to learn how to drive from watching those.
- SemiTom 7y agoIt's one of the biggest engineering problems in the last 10 years due to sensory input issues, dealing with the unexpected behavior of outside influences and you have to have the mechanical and software components that the first two components give the commands to, and can then faithfully execute them https://semiengineering.com/challenges-to-building-autonomous-chips/ https://semiengineering.com/challenges-to-building-autonomou... and https://semiengineering.com/more-data-more-problems-in-automotive/ https://semiengineering.com/more-data-more-problems-in-autom...
- erobbins 7y agoI've been beating this drum for years (but I'm a nobody, so it's like pissing in the wind): 1. Anything less than 100% FULL automation is MORE dangerous than manual driving, because the "driver" will almost certainly lack any situational awareness. When the need for manual intervention happen, it will be at the moments where you need maximum awareness and split second reflexes. 2. There are SO many edge cases and never-seen-before situations that happen when driving "at scale" that the automation features will fail unexpectedly and in strange ways. 3. G and Cruise might be exceptions, but most of the companies in this space are cowboys with reckless disregard for public safety and terrible "iterate quickly" coding practices. 4. At some point there will be an accident that kills a photogenic "middle America" person or people and at that point the government will crush this industry with regulation, with the financial backing of automakers, UAW, and other people who benefit from the status quo. The only way 100% fully self driving cars will ever happen is for the infrastructure itself to be built to accommodate them. Mixing regular cars, parking, trucks, bicycles, scooters, pedestrians, dog walkers, hoverboards, etc all together on the same roads ensures that the problem is unsolvable.
- ghaff 7y agoI have some confidence we'll get there on limited access highways because there are a lot fewer of the things that you describe there. That doesn't really help the people who want to be driven around everywhere. But it would actually be a really nice feature for the majority of people who own and drive cars.
- mumblemumble 7y ago> 4. At some point there will be an accident that kills a photogenic "middle America" person or people I'm ready to guess what it looks like: Car on autopilot going through a residential neighborhood, playground ball bounces out into the street from between two parked cars, car does not brake in anticipation of a 6-year-old that is not currently visible.
- pasttense01 7y agoIt's too expensive to built the infrastructure to accommodate them--current infrastructure spending isn't even enough to eliminate potholes and other bad pavement conditions.
- nunez 7y agoI have a feeling that self-driving will be one of those things that everyone will be opted into. Self-driving becomes much easier if everyone is playing by the same ground rules (with either the same set of cars or a common protocol through which cars communicate). Trying to engineer away the entire problem space of driving seems intractable (think: you have to engineer for drunk drivers doing damn well nearly anything on the road)
- amanaplanacanal 7y agoEven if everybody in every vehicle (including motorcycles?) is forced to opt in, you still have pedestrians, bicycles, scooters, animals, and who knows what else on the roads. This feels like an impossible problem.
- Andrew_nenakhov 7y agoLived in Russia and have some knowledge about programming. Unless some breakthrough happens in general purpose artificial intelligence research, I do not believe self-driving cars that can drive here are possible at all.
- Naac 7y agoWhat I think is interesting is that none of these articles talk about one specific implication of self-driving cars. What happens to car-insurance companies? Seems like with self driving cars the form of car insurance we have now wouldn't be really necessary. I expect car-insurance profits to decline. Isn't there an incentive ( read: lobbying ) for car insurance companies to discourage self-driving cars?
- jes5199 7y agoTesla offers car insurance for Teslas, probably trying to get ahead of this
- Marsymars 7y agoIn competitive jurisdictions, car insurance isn't a profitable venture per customer - insurance companies make money on the float. In other jurisdictions, auto insurance is provided by a single public auto insurer - these rarely run a notable profit.
- tanilama 7y agoThan expected? I am pretty sure none of the people who actually works in the related industry expect self-driving car to come out anytime soon. The hype is created by media and investors, with intention other than creating a viable product. Driving is simple but still logical. Though it doesn't seem to involve too abstract of processing like what is required for language, that doesn't mean it is just looking the road ahead and making turns. Say if an accident happens and the road condition is messy now the one-way road is changed to switch to allow once direction then another, how would AI understand this? No it can't. Current NN based model had huge problem guarantee Robustness, while human can be incredibly resilient against adverisal scenarios, because we are superfasr few shots learners.
- WhompingWindows 7y agoIt's hard to fully understand the challenges of SDCs, because most of these players are extremely secretive about their approaches. The fact that we rely on disengagement data from California as some proxy, that's just not great data when so many of the players are doing 1000's of miles in other states. It's sad, I wish we knew more about the inner-workings of these systems, and I would love to see them collaborate for the benefit of society.
- reggieband 7y agoI've been watching Lex Fridman's youtube podcast and there is a recent interview with Jim Keller [1]. Keller is a chip designer famous for his involvement in multiple chips at Intel, AMD, Apple and he was co-author of the x86-64 instruction set. He also worked for Tesla. There is a point in the conversation where Lex and Jim clearly disagree about how "easy" self-driving AI should be. Lex is clearly pessimistic and Jim is clearly optimistic. I have to admit I was more swayed by Lex's points than by Jim's, but it is hard to discount someone so clearly (extraordinarily) expert and working directly in the field. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb2tebYAaOA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb2tebYAaOA
- theresistor 7y agoJim Keller went back to Intel in 2018.
- reggieband 7y agoMy mistake - I should have checked his bio rather than assume based on the content of the discussion. I've updated my comment to change his association to Tesla to the past tense, Thank you.
- golemiprague 7y agoSelf driving cars are going to work only in an environment where all cars are safe driving cars. In China they start running trackless light trains which makes much more sense. I believe dedicated routes for self driving cars will be a cheaper and more efficient alternative to trains and it will be the way forward long before we have a full self driving environment.
- krtong 7y agoIf you could create instructions efficient enough for a computer to drive a car, it always seemed like you just created the best instructions for a human to drive a car too, and a human who had similar instructions would always be a better driver of the two. "Pay attention to this, prioritize these things, brake when this occurs, turn when this occurs, safest speed is this given these parameters." and so on. You would think silicon valley would be obsessed with learning how to drive really well given the amount of time so many engineers have spent on automating it. We should have our own F1/WRC team by now sponsored by these companies.
- msoad 7y agoThe more self driving advances in lab, the more safety features for regular cars are invented which in turn makes it harder for fully self driving systems to computer with human+safety features and justify their value...
- frosted-flakes 7y agoThat's an excellent point. Why hand over complete control to a computer when we can have both? Each has different strengths, so an almost-SDC with a human at the wheel will surely be better than a true SDC. I think that's a much more likely future.
- 0x8BADF00D 7y agoThere’s a huge bubble in the autonomous vehicle space. I foresee Waymo being able to do it, only because I know some of the crazy smart people that work there. It won’t be until the end of the decade though.
- rafaelvasco 7y agoAs the article said, we're in that awkward transition period. The problem is that it puts people's lives at risk, even though most deaths could be avoided if the drivers hadn't been so negligent, like watching their smartphones while the car AI operated the car, sleeping etc. It's a turbulent transition, but the tech is here to stay, and it'll not only keep improving, but the advancements in AI due to self driving research will surely benefit several other areas;
- ars 7y agoI've said it multiple time on HN, and I'll say it again: Self Driving cars are impossible until we have Artificial general intelligence (and not the limited AI that exists now). The only exception might be specially instrumented road tracks, with limited access (like train rails). And yes, I fully expect such a thing on interstates. It will never happen inside cities. Want to make money? Design a vehicle agnostic system, primarily aimed at long haul trucks. Install it in a ton of cars, but don't switch it on. Then instrument some highways, and convince governments to only allows these cars on those lanes. By being vendor agnostic, anyone with a car could get this. It will require deep pockets, and maybe you would need government to mandate this (some kind of open standard).
- vmchale 7y agoMy impression (not in the field) was that Uber wanted to believe in this out of wishful thinking, and then everyone scrambled because they thought they were going to be left behind.
- LoSboccacc 7y agoharder than you pundit expected. nothing in the news cycles ever warranted such optimism. been a skeptic of current tech long enough. they'll come eventually, but they haven't yet even started to define the boundaries of the domain problem, just piling heuristics and people literally died because of corner cases that weren't covered. well unless you want to tow the line of "that wasn't true autopilot" to wich I say yeah, that's the point exactly, none of them is doing it.
- ecolonsmak 7y agoas long as software is based on clumsy "if then else when for" statements and computation relies on binary switches - self driving cars will remain impossible.
- linksnapzz 7y agoExpected by whom? Where did they find people who thought this was going to be easy, and more importantly why were they given billions to screw around with after grotesquely underestimating the complexity of the task at hand?
- jihoon796 7y agoOutside the vacuum of technology (can it be done?), it seems to me that the role that policy plays when it comes to the actual rollout of self-driving cars (should it be done and how?) is vastly underrated. This seems to be the real bottleneck in mass adoption - improvements in technology will have diminishing returns after a certain point. For example, things like getting companies to agree to a unified standard at a government/industry level & determining frameworks for liability all seem to be as important (and perhaps difficult) as eking out another 0.00001% increase in safety.
- betoharres 7y agojust like any other side project: "Oh, that's easy to build" fast foward 10 weeks "Shit, this is harder than I expected"
- agumonkey 7y agoIt's only the end of a wave. 50s saw some ideas, 80s a few more, this one was a massive push [0], I honestly don't think the road to SDV is long and windy. It's just a natural bubble bursting backpush for now. [0] I'm not even a fan of the idea anymore btw, just trying to assess the technical hurdles. Sensors have become numerous and cheaper, compute power is immense. Investment won't be higher to make new steps in 20-30 years.
- readhn 7y agoi think that the best solution right now is very costly: have a separate lane for "self-driving tech" equipped cars. having a mix traffic (humans&automated cars) is a recipe for a disaster.
- kumarvvr 7y agoAnd they are just getting started with in Developed countries. The real test for a self driving car would be on roads in third world countries. That would be a real test of capability. Meanwhile, I just wish I could drive my car without moving my legs or hands so often. Why can't somebody make a car such that it can be driven by, say a simple joystick like thingy.
- mango7283 7y agoI think if you actually tried to drive with a joystick you will appreciate the appropriateness of the steering wheel as a means to control a car.
- catalogia 7y agoSaab tried joystick control back in the 90s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saab_9000#Prometheus_(prototype) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saab_9000#Prometheus_(prototyp...
- c3534l 7y agoThere are problems where we know how difficult the problem is. These problems, you can just throw money at them to make them work and the skill is in figuring out how to do it cheaply. There are other problems where we don't even know what we're missing. I see people, all the time, try to extrapolate current progress on problems where we don't know what puzzle pieces we're missing. Nobody knew what it was going to take to build self-driving cars, nor do we know what it will take today, but the hype machine that sucks in funding and grants and produces nothing pretended like this was a problem we understood and just had to throw money at it. I've found that asking "do we know what we don't know yet?" has been a surprisingly good way to cut through the bullshit over the years. I'd say "I told you so" if anyone knew who I was or had any reason to listen to me.
- puranjay 7y agoI've become increasingly jaded about the tech hype cycle. We had 3D Printing, VR/AR, crypto, and self driving cars hyped to no extent in 2-4 year cycles. We were told that they were going to change our world in the next few years. Turns out that the underlying technology was far from maturity in each case and the use cases limited to a handful of enthusiasts.
- allhacks 7y agoI worked at a car marketplace company. The number of time people told us back in 2014-2016 that Americans would no longer own cars in “2-3 years” and that consequently our market would vanish over night ... btw this group of people included very respectable folks, many of whom have a lot of fans here on HN :)
- wutbrodo 7y agoThat's trivially stupid though; if a perfect SDC came out tomorrow, it would take more than 2-4 years to turn over the vast amount of capital out there, and probably another decade or two to shake people (and thus policy, in a democracy) out of their status quo bias, no matter how terrible the status quo is.
- puranjay 7y agoYou're going to take even more time to convince people to let go of the control - or at least the idea of control - that comes from driving yourself.
- oblib 7y ago>some researchers have argued we won’t have widespread self-driving cars until we’ve made major changes to our streets to make it easier to communicate information to those cars. It feels to me like those working on the concept are expecting that if they keep adding sensors and twiddling with AI they can avoid that. I get why. It's a vast and expensive undertaking that is out of their control and they want to sell their product asap. But if we started with major city streets and highways it could be a quicker and safer route to get it to market. Years ago (around the late `90s) I worked on an "Intelligent Traffic Systems" project for the city of Branson, Missouri. The 3M Corporation demonstrated a magnetic tape for street lines and a snow plow truck outfitted with sensors that could detect the lines connected to vibrators on each side of the drivers seat. When the truck got too close to the line the seat would vibrate on the side they were close to. I got to ride in the truck for a demo of the tech and worked well. We also had street cameras that detected autos and could estimate speed and traffic congestion. These sent video and data to the local 911 center. I created a "traffic congestion map" that ran on a web server using that data that worked pretty much the same as Google Maps that show congestion. We need "smart streets" to really make this work. Without adding that to mix corporations could be banging their heads against the wall and spending billions of dollars to try and never make the last mile.
- joejerryronnie 7y agoSelf-driving personal aircraft would probably be easier to implement than self-driving cars.
- mdonahoe 7y agoDefinitely. The air is a universal medium... the ground is a mess.
- zelly 7y agoSelf-driving stops being a (difficult) AI problem if you force all cars to be self-driving and network with each other. It converts the behavioral/theory-of-mind problem into a distributed computing problem. We could have had self-driving in the 80s with this approach. Imagine where we would be today if we had decades of 24/7 trucks and ubiquitous robotaxis. It would be a completely different world. It's a shame humans are so bad at cooperating. But still, this is not out of the question today. Obviously the only way to pull this off would be with massive government subsidies. It would be worth experimenting in a small country like Luxembourg.
- Barrin92 7y agorelying on networked cars is monstrously fragile. One critical error in the system is going to tank everyone, disconnecting from the system is going to drastically reduce the safety of both the individual and the system, as it now has to deal with rogue elements, and the potential for malicious attacks, like terrorism or simply some sort of natural freak event is huge problematic. I think the direction of the thought is reasonable though, you should just take it a few steps farther. If networked infrastructure is a good idea, then maybe cars are not a good idea. We already have driverless, well defined, organised modes of transportation, they're called trains. modern subway systems already pretty much drive themselves, they also come with the added bonus of not having everyone carry two tons of steel around.
- zelly 7y agoThose concerns are legitimate. My proposal is not a purely centralized hub-and-spoke network topology where one data center drives a million cars. Yes, you can have the central brain too, but I'm thinking more of a mesh network among nearby cars on the road. The network can be fully connected so that one nefarious car cannot take down the whole mesh. There are a lot of cryptographic safeguards to prevent bad actors too. Each car is able to drive on its own, or pull over, only relying on networking for a stream of sensor output from nearby cars. The upstream servers can go down without doing anything worse than making all its client cars pull over and stop. All the steering is done on the client side. What if terrorists spoof phantom cars or rewrite maps to send people off cliffs? Assume they stole the master signing keys, have root on the central servers, exploited 0-days on the client car software, etc. One car misbehaves somewhere, triggering sensors of nearby cars which tell every other car in an N kilometer radius to pull over en masse. If anything, it is more robust to hacking/terrorism than the independently-self-driving Tesla or Waymo approach because those do not have the benefit of the herd. One gazelle in a herd who gets tackled can yell out to save the rest of the herd. > I think the direction of the thought is reasonable though, you should just take it a few steps farther. If networked infrastructure is a good idea, then maybe cars are not a good idea. We already have driverless, well defined, organised modes of transportation, they're called trains. How do I take a train/subway from my apartment to the front door of a McDonald's? People go from building to building. It's not practical to do this without cars or buses outside of maybe 5 cities in the world like HK or NYC. Also there is an ungodly amount of cars in the world. It's a lot cheaper and efficient to retrofit cars with self-driving modules than to recycle all that metal into trains/subways.
- m3kw9 7y agoThere are lots of edge cases that human can adapt to easily but would confuse machines. The risk is that when that edge case comes up if the car go full bat sht crazy and kills someone, that will bring down the hammer.
- m3kw9 7y agoJust look at parking lots and self summoning. Tesla is still in step 2 of 10
- fnord77 7y agonear human levels of AGI will be needed to achieve Level 5 AVs- change my mind.
- mdonahoe 7y agoIt depends on your definition of vehicle. I bet we see a few Level 5 flying cars before we see Level 5 ground vehicles. Roads are more complicated than the airspace. Flying cars are unlikely to be as mainstream as cars due to energy requirements though.
- KKKKkkkk1 7y agoIn the debate over self driving, there are two schools of thought. One says that you can't solve it without machine learning because it's impossible to hand-engineer a system to cover all edge cases. The other says that you can't solve it with machine learning because any solution must have zero glitches. Both sides are correct.
- _pmf_ 7y agoExpect massive push for goal post shifting.
- vgaldikas 7y ago>One study attempting to estimate the effects of self-driving cars on car use behavior simulated a family having a self-driving car by paying for them to have a chauffeur for a week, and telling them to treat the chauffeur service the way they’d treat having a car that could drive itself. >The result? They went on a lot more car trips. That's kind of pointless 'study'. Of course I will take a lot more trips for some time after getting chaffeur/self driving car, just for the novelty of it. One family for one week does not really tell anything
- fourthark 7y agoPuff piece with critical title.
- axilmar 7y agoWe could make driving fully automatic by going the train route, i.e. filling roads with tracks and letting the cars move on those tracks only, fully automated. But that's not really sexy, is it? it just doesn't sell as well as fully automated AI driving does.
- sunstone 7y agoWho would have thought that it might be tricky to replicate the capabilities of an organism exquisitely designed by evolution over more than 10 million years to dash through the jungle canopy with break neck speed, split second coordination and decision making?