5 ms·

I'm not convinced either. I don't think I'll see a 100% FSD vehicle in my lifetime, at least the ones depicted in futuristic renderings without steering wheels.

I'm not convinced either. I don't think I'll see a 100% FSD vehicle in my lifetime, at least the ones depicted in futuristic renderings without steering wheels. Case in point, how does a FSD vehicle deal with extremely heavy snowfall on a unplowed road? I spent 15 minutes rocking the car back and forth, so I could slowly back my way out of a one-way road onto a main street. After that I had to drive on countless roads with no visible markings due to the snow. I don't think the way we're approaching self driving cars today will ever work for these edge cases.

ghaff 6y ago
But it never snows in Texas or Portland, OR so they'll be fine there :-/
naebother 6y ago
Trains don't have a steering wheel :)
treis 6y ago
I'm the opposite. I don't think I'll buy another car (current is 3 years old) and I'm even surer that my son (aged 2) is not going to learn how to drive. Driving is a pretty well defined space. Stay in your lane, get to the destination, and don't hit anyone. Pretty much every similar problem that significant effort has been solved. Chess, Go, Starcraft, DOTA all were called unsolvable at one point and all were eventually solved. Your edge cases are just that. Edge cases. Nobody is going to care if they can't drive in extremely heavy snow. To begin with, they probably shouldn't do that anyways. More importantly the vast benefits of self driving cars outweighs the inconvenience of not being able to drive a dozen times a year. We all still have cell phones even though you can't make calls in elevators. Even then, if you can do it why can't a computer? Rocking the car back and forth seems doable. Following an unpaved road is much harder, but then again are humans actually good at it either? You might be right that they will still have steering wheels for no other reason than there's little downside to including them.
- hntrader 6y ago
  Starcraft was solved in the sense that the winrate against top players was high, but the production model often found itself in pathological absorbing states that it couldn't escape from, which no human would ever get itself into. That's important, since if we are using it as an analogy for driving, it's not just the win rate we're interested in, it's the ability to consistently avoid pathological states when presented with edge cases (e.g. not braking when there's a strange looking object in front). Some would call this "common sense". Also, games like SC2 are distinct from the driving problem as far as RL goes, since you have unlimited training data which allows you to explore all edge cases given enough compute. In self-driving, the data is scarce and you can't explore all edge cases by just throwing compute at the problem.
  - treis 6y ago
    >avoid pathological states These just need to be relatively rare and not dangerous when they happen. If my car slams on its brakes every 100,000 miles for no good reason that's not really a big deal. At least it's not big enough to stop them from being used. >unlimited training data Unlimited is not possible, but we can get tens of millions of miles pretty easily. Then many many more as they roll out into production.
- macintux 6y ago
  Edge cases can crop up while you're en route. My go-to example: you're driving at night, two-lane road, and there's a minor accident in your lane ahead. You crawl forward to the point where you can pass the accident, and then what? Someone involved in the accident is directing traffic. In the dark, with no safety gear. On the other side the traffic is backed up, so you see headlights facing you in the lane you have to use to pass the accident. To me, that seems like an insanely difficult problem for a computer to deal with. A human driver, that's easy, but a computer? (Having said that, I'm historically terrible at predicting just how fast technology is going to advance, so it's safest to assume I'm wrong and this will turn out to be easy.)
  - dane-pgp 6y ago
jdminhbg 6y ago
> Case in point, how does a FSD vehicle deal with extremely heavy snowfall on a unplowed road? 90% of the cars on my street didn’t try to deal with that this weekend, and most of them would have failed if they tried. None of them are FSD.
iujjkfjdkkdkf 6y ago
Two thoughts from your comment: 1. Agree on the edge cases, to do real driving we'll need AGI or some whole new way of looking at it, its not possible algorithmically. But, I would pessimisticly draw on other examples of how tech handles this problem: if the tech can't do it, it's not something people get to do. Try getting help from a chatbot, or getting help from uber or Amazon on a situation that doesnt fit the FAQ. So I expect self driving cars will be great for a range of things that young tech-savvy people want to do (and that google et al want you doing) but won't drive you to the hospital in a snowstorm and will balk when they realize they have to turn into a rutted backroad at night, because why would anyone live there? 2. More frightening, there are people (see one of the siblings) that think nobody should be doing "dangerous" things like driving in a severe storm, that are beyond the range of a self driving car, and want to force their value judgement on others. So expect there to be calls for outlawing certain activities, for our safety.
mertd 6y ago
Do they have to operate in extreme weather? If they work for 99% of days and they are 100x more convenient than owning cars, I'm sure we would deal with transit during extreme weather some other way.

ghaff 6y ago

But it never snows in Texas or Portland, OR so they'll be fine there :-/

naebother 6y ago

Trains don't have a steering wheel :)

treis 6y ago

I'm the opposite. I don't think I'll buy another car (current is 3 years old) and I'm even surer that my son (aged 2) is not going to learn how to drive. Driving is a pretty well defined space. Stay in your lane, get to the destination, and don't hit anyone. Pretty much every similar problem that significant effort has been solved. Chess, Go, Starcraft, DOTA all were called unsolvable at one point and all were eventually solved. Your edge cases are just that. Edge cases. Nobody is going to care if they can't drive in extremely heavy snow. To begin with, they probably shouldn't do that anyways. More importantly the vast benefits of self driving cars outweighs the inconvenience of not being able to drive a dozen times a year. We all still have cell phones even though you can't make calls in elevators. Even then, if you can do it why can't a computer? Rocking the car back and forth seems doable. Following an unpaved road is much harder, but then again are humans actually good at it either? You might be right that they will still have steering wheels for no other reason than there's little downside to including them.

hntrader 6y ago
Starcraft was solved in the sense that the winrate against top players was high, but the production model often found itself in pathological absorbing states that it couldn't escape from, which no human would ever get itself into. That's important, since if we are using it as an analogy for driving, it's not just the win rate we're interested in, it's the ability to consistently avoid pathological states when presented with edge cases (e.g. not braking when there's a strange looking object in front). Some would call this "common sense". Also, games like SC2 are distinct from the driving problem as far as RL goes, since you have unlimited training data which allows you to explore all edge cases given enough compute. In self-driving, the data is scarce and you can't explore all edge cases by just throwing compute at the problem.
- treis 6y ago
  >avoid pathological states These just need to be relatively rare and not dangerous when they happen. If my car slams on its brakes every 100,000 miles for no good reason that's not really a big deal. At least it's not big enough to stop them from being used. >unlimited training data Unlimited is not possible, but we can get tens of millions of miles pretty easily. Then many many more as they roll out into production.
macintux 6y ago
Edge cases can crop up while you're en route. My go-to example: you're driving at night, two-lane road, and there's a minor accident in your lane ahead. You crawl forward to the point where you can pass the accident, and then what? Someone involved in the accident is directing traffic. In the dark, with no safety gear. On the other side the traffic is backed up, so you see headlights facing you in the lane you have to use to pass the accident. To me, that seems like an insanely difficult problem for a computer to deal with. A human driver, that's easy, but a computer? (Having said that, I'm historically terrible at predicting just how fast technology is going to advance, so it's safest to assume I'm wrong and this will turn out to be easy.)
- dane-pgp 6y ago

jdminhbg 6y ago

> Case in point, how does a FSD vehicle deal with extremely heavy snowfall on a unplowed road? 90% of the cars on my street didn’t try to deal with that this weekend, and most of them would have failed if they tried. None of them are FSD.

iujjkfjdkkdkf 6y ago

Two thoughts from your comment: 1. Agree on the edge cases, to do real driving we'll need AGI or some whole new way of looking at it, its not possible algorithmically. But, I would pessimisticly draw on other examples of how tech handles this problem: if the tech can't do it, it's not something people get to do. Try getting help from a chatbot, or getting help from uber or Amazon on a situation that doesnt fit the FAQ. So I expect self driving cars will be great for a range of things that young tech-savvy people want to do (and that google et al want you doing) but won't drive you to the hospital in a snowstorm and will balk when they realize they have to turn into a rutted backroad at night, because why would anyone live there? 2. More frightening, there are people (see one of the siblings) that think nobody should be doing "dangerous" things like driving in a severe storm, that are beyond the range of a self driving car, and want to force their value judgement on others. So expect there to be calls for outlawing certain activities, for our safety.

mertd 6y ago

Do they have to operate in extreme weather? If they work for 99% of days and they are 100x more convenient than owning cars, I'm sure we would deal with transit during extreme weather some other way.