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Funny in hindsight from 2016: "Lyft's president says 'majority' of rides will be in self-driving cars by 2021" https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/18/12944506/lyft

Funny in hindsight from 2016: "Lyft's president says 'majority' of rides will be in self-driving cars by 2021" https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/18/12944506/lyft-self-driving-car-prediction-2021-john-zimmer https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/18/12944506/lyft-self-drivin... https://medium.com/@johnzimmer/the-third-transportation-revolution-27860f05fa91 https://medium.com/@johnzimmer/the-third-transportation-revo...

perlgeek 6y ago
My kids are now 7 and 10 years old, respectively. I wonder if they'll have to learn to drive, and make a driver's license? It could be that by the time they come of age, there are self-driving cars, but they're much more expensive than making their license (which in Germany costs around 2k Euro, including lessons). Or maybe there'll be no viable self-driving, fully autonomous cars by then? Who knows?
adamnemecek 6y ago
I wonder if it’s possible that this is true in some restricted area where companies are heavily testing their self-driving cars, and COVID reduced the amount of driving people do.
- SECProto 6y ago
  From very brief observation a year ago, it seemed like Lombard Street [1] was 90% self-driving-car training. Definitely a very special case that just disproves the quote from Lyft's president. [1] https://goo.gl/maps/oXrvVYhDXWVxaoQC8 https://goo.gl/maps/oXrvVYhDXWVxaoQC8
andyxor 6y ago
nothing new here, AI has been "5 years away" since the 1950s
- bhk 6y ago
  It was 20 years away for a while. And may be again.
- profunctor 6y ago
  AI currently does lots of useful things in all sorts of industries. It just can't do everything that humans can do.
- paxys 6y ago
  The world is already largely running on AI, just not the version of it that is in people's heads by watching sci-fi movies.
  - thrwyoilarticle 6y ago
    The sci-fi version being as the term was defined by Alan Turing and the marketing version being as s/ML/AI
  - romwell 6y ago
    The world is running on good old software. I don't know of anything important that's running on anything that can be reasonably called AI. I think we can get by without Siri. Of course, if you include the entirety of machine learning under the AI label, then whatever. But in my opinion, a principal component analysis does not an AI make. Statistical inference has been around since before computers were invented.
    - tsimionescu 6y ago
      I think there is some argument to be made that the Web is "running on" AI, since AI-driven ads businesses are the source of all money in the Web (essentially); and I do think that it's fair to call NNs "AI". I for one am highly skeptical that the kind of automatic personalized targeting that AI enables is actually worth the price, but the industry overwhelmingly believes it is. So, removing AI from the picture would be considered to greatly diminish the value of advertising on the web per industry pricing, and with the ad money, much of the web would dry off.
    - OkayPhysicist 6y ago
      That's the rub, isn't it? Your definition of AI is basically "things we can't do by computer yet", which will always be unobtainable, by definition. Meanwhile, you've got marketers that are also trying to use that definition, in order to sell you on some software solution, despite it being oxymoronic. Two better definitions of AI that I'm a fan of are "Algorithms that model intelligence" (where "intelligence" is the ability to use knowedge in inference), or the broader definition of "Second-order algorithms" or algorithms that, rather than encoding a process that finds a solution, encode a process for finding a process that presents a solution.
- qwertywert_ 6y ago
  weak AI is here, AGI is a ways away..
ravenstine 6y ago
Back in late 2015, I was working at a media firm and one of our top directors called together a meeting with our engineering team to talk to us about the impact of our products/content. He was convinced that by 2018 most people would be using self-driving cars regularly and that this was going to hurt our core product. I don't think I ever tried harder in my life not to LOL.
- mandeepj 6y ago
  Ha! I hope he did not pivot the company or shutdown the core product
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  Same feeling for passenger-carrying drones/quadcopters/etc. Not gonna happen for decades in any commercially-viable way.
thathndude 6y ago
Hard not to feel like we’re seeing a swoon in self driving like we saw in crypto back in 2017 and 2018. They hype got ahead of the tech.
- nradov 6y ago
  This is just the typical Gartner hype cycle. It applies to most new technologies, although the time scales differ. https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/3887767 https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/3887767
plank_time 6y ago
I saw Levandowski do a presentation of self-driving at an Uber all-hands and it was then and there that I knew that self-driving is 20+ years away. The example video showed so many small things that we take for granted as a human driver that would need to be built in or hand coded that AI or neural nets would never be able to get. There just isn’t a way that you can train every single little thing that could cause an accident. For some things you just need experience and fear which I imagine can’t be modeled via any current AI.
- aparsons 6y ago
  I chuckled! I spoke to Anthony at the Udacity office in Mountain View around 2018 (he’d already left Uber to found his trucking company). He seemed like he’d given up on city streets being autonomously drivable any time soon, but highways were still on the table in the next five years. One idea he floated was to employ drivers only from the exit ramp for the last mile journey. For trucking, this made sense.
  - plank_time 6y ago
    Do you mean after he left Google? He left Google to form Otto which Uber bought. Frankly it’s the biggest mistake of TK’s career and caused the downfall in my opinion. He went against the advice of Emil and Salle, which was a huge mistake, and there were totally right.
- dmix 6y ago
  I think at a minimum all the cars need to be taking to each other over a protocol.
  - notsureaboutpg 6y ago
    So everyone gets in an accident when that protocol has a bug or some server assisting the communication has unplanned downtime?
  - johannes1234321 6y ago
    However that has to be secure that a hacker can't simply stop all traffic or cause speeding
wpietri 6y ago
One of the curses of software projects is "premature convergence", where people to a ton of extra work for an overoptimistic launch date. I have to wonder how much wasted effort went in to trying to be seen as a leader in what turned out to be a hype bubble. Steve McConnell also talks about a common estimation pattern: managers keep asking if something can be sooner, and are only stopped when some engineer proves that a date is 100% impossible. Normally that means that the launch date starts out with a 1% chance of success. Clearly it was lower than that here, but I wonder if that's because a) it's very hard to prove what's impossible here, or b) the Uber/Tesla hype bubble was so intense that it didn't matter what the nerds said.
- disgruntledphd2 6y ago
  I dunno, I remember that many of the commenters here were equally optimistic in 2015-16. It took a lot of arguments and discussion before people realised that it was much harder than it seemed.
  - wpietri 6y ago
    Then that raises another interesting possibility: that absolutely nobody at the deranged-optimism companies knew what they were doing. Because there were definitely experts who knew those dates were impossible. Less 18 months after that Lyft prediction, roboticist and AI expert Rodney Brooks said that free-roaming auto-taxis wouldn't be running before 2035: https://rodneybrooks.com/my-dated-predictions/ https://rodneybrooks.com/my-dated-predictions/
    - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
      It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his stock price depends on not understanding it.
      - wpietri 6y ago
        Wisdom for the ages.
filmgirlcw 6y ago
Self-driving cars are perennially five years away. Putting aside the question of whether the tech is there or not (and I would argue it isn’t there for commercial consumer use), the infrastructure and the laws will take years to catch up. This isn’t an overnight problem and many of the barriers are things that tech can’t just design around.
- weego 6y ago
  Self-driving cars will always be x years away until purpose built and dedicated self-driving car roads are built to take out the variables that put safety at risk.
- lettergram 6y ago
  Not to mention there’s a huge voting block that’ll be against automation. I think the best first bet is just localized (robots in factories). I’m personally of the opinion we are 10 years away or more technically. Main issue is weather and the risk threshold people can tolerate. All the tests thus far are in environments are high sun, no rain environments. If we are already localizing to southern cities, we may as well just add fiducial markers and guide wires. In terms of risk threshold, look at COVID, risk of death under 45 is something like 0.5%. Or the black unarmed homicide count (<30). People have no way of measuring risk, just a few fatalities would have the public in a panic.
  - kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
    In the snow belt the reflective top layer of the lane markings gets scraped off by plows. When it rains the markings will completely disappear at night. Machine learning optimized for the ideal case is never going to work in many parts of the country.
  - nradov 6y ago
    The CDC's best estimate of COVID-19 infection fatality rate for people under 45 is more like 0.05%. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html#five-scenarios https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

perlgeek 6y ago

My kids are now 7 and 10 years old, respectively. I wonder if they'll have to learn to drive, and make a driver's license? It could be that by the time they come of age, there are self-driving cars, but they're much more expensive than making their license (which in Germany costs around 2k Euro, including lessons). Or maybe there'll be no viable self-driving, fully autonomous cars by then? Who knows?

adamnemecek 6y ago

I wonder if it’s possible that this is true in some restricted area where companies are heavily testing their self-driving cars, and COVID reduced the amount of driving people do.

SECProto 6y ago
From very brief observation a year ago, it seemed like Lombard Street [1] was 90% self-driving-car training. Definitely a very special case that just disproves the quote from Lyft's president. [1] https://goo.gl/maps/oXrvVYhDXWVxaoQC8 https://goo.gl/maps/oXrvVYhDXWVxaoQC8

andyxor 6y ago

nothing new here, AI has been "5 years away" since the 1950s

bhk 6y ago
It was 20 years away for a while. And may be again.
profunctor 6y ago
AI currently does lots of useful things in all sorts of industries. It just can't do everything that humans can do.
paxys 6y ago
The world is already largely running on AI, just not the version of it that is in people's heads by watching sci-fi movies.
- thrwyoilarticle 6y ago
  The sci-fi version being as the term was defined by Alan Turing and the marketing version being as s/ML/AI
- romwell 6y ago
  The world is running on good old software. I don't know of anything important that's running on anything that can be reasonably called AI. I think we can get by without Siri. Of course, if you include the entirety of machine learning under the AI label, then whatever. But in my opinion, a principal component analysis does not an AI make. Statistical inference has been around since before computers were invented.
  - tsimionescu 6y ago
    I think there is some argument to be made that the Web is "running on" AI, since AI-driven ads businesses are the source of all money in the Web (essentially); and I do think that it's fair to call NNs "AI". I for one am highly skeptical that the kind of automatic personalized targeting that AI enables is actually worth the price, but the industry overwhelmingly believes it is. So, removing AI from the picture would be considered to greatly diminish the value of advertising on the web per industry pricing, and with the ad money, much of the web would dry off.
  - OkayPhysicist 6y ago
    That's the rub, isn't it? Your definition of AI is basically "things we can't do by computer yet", which will always be unobtainable, by definition. Meanwhile, you've got marketers that are also trying to use that definition, in order to sell you on some software solution, despite it being oxymoronic. Two better definitions of AI that I'm a fan of are "Algorithms that model intelligence" (where "intelligence" is the ability to use knowedge in inference), or the broader definition of "Second-order algorithms" or algorithms that, rather than encoding a process that finds a solution, encode a process for finding a process that presents a solution.
qwertywert_ 6y ago
weak AI is here, AGI is a ways away..

ravenstine 6y ago

Back in late 2015, I was working at a media firm and one of our top directors called together a meeting with our engineering team to talk to us about the impact of our products/content. He was convinced that by 2018 most people would be using self-driving cars regularly and that this was going to hurt our core product. I don't think I ever tried harder in my life not to LOL.

mandeepj 6y ago
Ha! I hope he did not pivot the company or shutdown the core product
redis_mlc 6y ago
Same feeling for passenger-carrying drones/quadcopters/etc. Not gonna happen for decades in any commercially-viable way.

thathndude 6y ago

Hard not to feel like we’re seeing a swoon in self driving like we saw in crypto back in 2017 and 2018. They hype got ahead of the tech.

nradov 6y ago
This is just the typical Gartner hype cycle. It applies to most new technologies, although the time scales differ. https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/3887767 https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/3887767

plank_time 6y ago

I saw Levandowski do a presentation of self-driving at an Uber all-hands and it was then and there that I knew that self-driving is 20+ years away. The example video showed so many small things that we take for granted as a human driver that would need to be built in or hand coded that AI or neural nets would never be able to get. There just isn’t a way that you can train every single little thing that could cause an accident. For some things you just need experience and fear which I imagine can’t be modeled via any current AI.

aparsons 6y ago
I chuckled! I spoke to Anthony at the Udacity office in Mountain View around 2018 (he’d already left Uber to found his trucking company). He seemed like he’d given up on city streets being autonomously drivable any time soon, but highways were still on the table in the next five years. One idea he floated was to employ drivers only from the exit ramp for the last mile journey. For trucking, this made sense.
- plank_time 6y ago
  Do you mean after he left Google? He left Google to form Otto which Uber bought. Frankly it’s the biggest mistake of TK’s career and caused the downfall in my opinion. He went against the advice of Emil and Salle, which was a huge mistake, and there were totally right.
dmix 6y ago
I think at a minimum all the cars need to be taking to each other over a protocol.
- notsureaboutpg 6y ago
  So everyone gets in an accident when that protocol has a bug or some server assisting the communication has unplanned downtime?
- johannes1234321 6y ago
  However that has to be secure that a hacker can't simply stop all traffic or cause speeding

wpietri 6y ago

One of the curses of software projects is "premature convergence", where people to a ton of extra work for an overoptimistic launch date. I have to wonder how much wasted effort went in to trying to be seen as a leader in what turned out to be a hype bubble. Steve McConnell also talks about a common estimation pattern: managers keep asking if something can be sooner, and are only stopped when some engineer proves that a date is 100% impossible. Normally that means that the launch date starts out with a 1% chance of success. Clearly it was lower than that here, but I wonder if that's because a) it's very hard to prove what's impossible here, or b) the Uber/Tesla hype bubble was so intense that it didn't matter what the nerds said.

disgruntledphd2 6y ago
I dunno, I remember that many of the commenters here were equally optimistic in 2015-16. It took a lot of arguments and discussion before people realised that it was much harder than it seemed.
- wpietri 6y ago
  Then that raises another interesting possibility: that absolutely nobody at the deranged-optimism companies knew what they were doing. Because there were definitely experts who knew those dates were impossible. Less 18 months after that Lyft prediction, roboticist and AI expert Rodney Brooks said that free-roaming auto-taxis wouldn't be running before 2035: https://rodneybrooks.com/my-dated-predictions/ https://rodneybrooks.com/my-dated-predictions/
  - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his stock price depends on not understanding it.
    - wpietri 6y ago
      Wisdom for the ages.

filmgirlcw 6y ago

Self-driving cars are perennially five years away. Putting aside the question of whether the tech is there or not (and I would argue it isn’t there for commercial consumer use), the infrastructure and the laws will take years to catch up. This isn’t an overnight problem and many of the barriers are things that tech can’t just design around.

weego 6y ago
Self-driving cars will always be x years away until purpose built and dedicated self-driving car roads are built to take out the variables that put safety at risk.
lettergram 6y ago
Not to mention there’s a huge voting block that’ll be against automation. I think the best first bet is just localized (robots in factories). I’m personally of the opinion we are 10 years away or more technically. Main issue is weather and the risk threshold people can tolerate. All the tests thus far are in environments are high sun, no rain environments. If we are already localizing to southern cities, we may as well just add fiducial markers and guide wires. In terms of risk threshold, look at COVID, risk of death under 45 is something like 0.5%. Or the black unarmed homicide count (<30). People have no way of measuring risk, just a few fatalities would have the public in a panic.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  In the snow belt the reflective top layer of the lane markings gets scraped off by plows. When it rains the markings will completely disappear at night. Machine learning optimized for the ideal case is never going to work in many parts of the country.
- nradov 6y ago
  The CDC's best estimate of COVID-19 infection fatality rate for people under 45 is more like 0.05%. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html#five-scenarios https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]