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I used to believe in the self driving hype. Then I learned ML and started working in related areas. Now I know full self driving is not happening, not with the

• weego 5y ago
  You're not. At least for a good few decades more. Anyone committed to self driving cars needs to be a road building company and own the road network that will manage these mostly-automated efficiency lanes, with car provision (more likely tech/compatability licensing) as a secondary income stream.
  • Retric 5y ago
    Waymo is currently successfully handling extreme edge cases on city streets via a call center. Which is a viable option as their cars average 30,000 miles completely autonomously. Worst case come to a complete stop and then ask a human to take over is perfectly reasonable option. Google running this as a pure Taxi substitute is seemingly a completely viable option today. They don’t need to be 100% autonomous as long as one person can handle a dozen or more cars that’s easily good enough to out compete traditional taxis or ride sharing services. Granted this is limited to a 50 square mile area, but collecting more data isn’t the difficult part.
    • lumost 5y ago
      Including all the expense of r&d, call center training, liability insurance etc. Is this a viable business in a 50 square mile area? Is it scalable nationwide? Is it price competitive with traditional taxi and ride share? The overnight use case is compelling as it opens entirely new transit options. Cars could be made competitive with air travel for the overnight use case. And traffic wouldn’t be nearly as large of a concern for most if they weren’t driving.
      • Retric 5y ago
        > Is it scaleable nationwide? Is it price competitive with traditional taxi and ride share? Yes to both, critically you can use a hybrid approach for outlying areas and cities lacking regulatory approval. By comparison DC is only 61 square miles and San Francisco is 47 square miles so this is plenty of area for local service and a reasonable benchmark for expansion. What’s not mentioned is the cars do need someone to clean them and fill up the tank etc, but that’s hardly an additional expense.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
• sidibe 5y ago
  How is what Waymo offering anything like a souped up cruise control? Sure it's EXTREMELY limited but that doesn't seem like an accurate description since they trust it enough to be liable for it to drive by itself or stop safely when it can't. Given the number of their cars going around SF lately I think they'll expand some soon too.
  • perryizgr8 5y ago
    > How is what Waymo offering anything like a souped up cruise control? It is actually less than that, since there is no Waymo car you can go out and buy. Driverless Uber rides are absolutely useless. When I order an Uber, how does it matter to me if it is driven by a human or a computer?
• tootie 5y ago
  I think it will be way easier to rebuild our infrastructure around self driving than to teach computers how to react to human drivers.
  • justicezyx 5y ago
    I agree. Modern cars depend on modern road infrastructure. Like traffic lights, lane markers, traffic engineering, etc, enabled the efficiency and convenience we enjoy today. And this infrastructure was built for human driver. And they do not work well for software driver.
    • thereisnospork 5y ago
      >And this infrastructure was built for human driver. And they do not work well for software driver. How much would it cost though for parallel infrastructure that is suitable for a software driver? (better signage, rfid tags in the roads, 'smart' traffic cones, etc.) For say the Bay Area. 10 billion to a few hundred billion? Speaking for myself, I'd be happy to pay say an additional 1% sales tax if it meant facilitating an area wide 24/7 autonomous 'public transit' taxi service, presumably with at-cost per mile fares.
      • justicezyx 5y ago
        I don't know. There has not been any serious effort in theoretizing the changes needed for software driver. The so-called vechle and road codesign has been mostly gimmick as far as I know.
  • silisili 5y ago
    I've considered this before, but never ironed out details. What would it entail? Magnets/IR/Beacons of some type marking roads and lanes? And each car would need them too I guess. It doesn't sound insurmountable, especially if the auto manufacturers worked together on speccing it out.
    • mojuba 5y ago
• muttantt 5y ago
  I think the real innovation would be having my car be equipped with a bunch of sensors and cameras, and then have a well paid dedicated remote driver in a third world country doing the driving for me. I'm only half joking.
  • mixmastamyk 5y ago
    BUFFERING… BUFFERING…
  • Arrath 5y ago
    "Tunnel approaching. You have 5 seconds to take control until connection can be reestablished."
    • ahahahahah 5y ago
      It's pretty crazy how tunnels can sometimes just pop out of nowhere such that an automated system with extensive mapping can't predict them more than 5 seconds early.
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
  Is the future driver assistance perfected to the point where the car lets you drive but prevents you from doing something bad? Try to jerk the wheel into the woods and it won't obey.
  • qeternity 5y ago
    The moment driver assistance is good enough to overrule human input, it ceases to be merely driver assistance. It’s unlikely this will ever be the case.
    • 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
      Navigating is more difficult than just not crashing.
      • qeternity 5y ago
        That’s my point. The moment that a car says the safest thing to do isn’t to veer off the road (maybe to avoid a large compressed gas carrier in front) even when the human says it is, then we’ve achieved L5
• clon 5y ago
  Perhaps we should just bring back horses. BI as in biologic intelligence. Where I'm from it was common merely 100 years ago to exit the tavern, plonk yourself into the wagon, let the horse free and fall asleep in pleasant stupor. Usually the horse had no issues finding its way home. Usually. Sometimes it supercharged itself on a nearby pasture. Crashes were uncommon. If you think this is sarcasm, it is not. That horse was clearly more reliable, adaptable and performant, not to mention safer, than anything Tesla or Wayomo is offering today.
  • pm90 5y ago
    Except that they poop and piss everywhere and need to be fed and watered.
    • KozmoNau7 5y ago
      Is that really worse than car/truck exhausts? Horse manure is mostly dry and inoffensive, plus solutions to that problem have existed for hundreds of years in the form of bags hung from the harness, to collect the manure, which makes for excellent fertilizer.
    • kzrdude 5y ago
      That's biofuel!
  • balsam 5y ago
    I see what you are saying. We don’t need to build something as smart as a human. It just needs to be as smart as a horse. ABI. We can even train ABIs using horses. Where are you from? East europe or central asia? South america? I imagine itd be easier to train ABIs in certain countries. Heck even in western europe they can start with the beer deliveries. In america, the ABIs wont be so smart, they are limited to safe tourist areas.
• mike_d 5y ago
  This viewpoint seems to be a strange version of Schneier's law. Just because you learned ML and can't think of a way to make a car drive itself doesn't mean it is impossible. I believe within the next few years we will see driverless long haul freight operations. Freeways are orders of magnitude easier than dynamic city streets, longer routes can be taken at little cost to avoid adverse conditions (a human rider isn't going to be ok with adding 10 hours to avoid a snow storm, a truck load of coffee beans doesn't care), and the cost of humans in this case is stupid high. Once it is demonstrated in the real world that corporations stand to profit from eliminating drivers, you'll start to see pressure on the public sector to annotate the world. Stop signs will by law include an RF beacon, lanes will no longer be defined by paint but by transmitters in the pavement, federal law will mandate that personal vehicles transmit their location and dimensions to other nearby cars, etc. Eventually once we have the infrastructure built, every new car will piggyback on it. Remember the Interstate Highway System was started in 1955 and completed in 1992 - progress just takes time.
  • ikerdanzel 5y ago
    He learnt the field and know what can be done and what cannot be done. Go lookup the history of Ai with lisp and then deep blue vs Karpersky. Back then people believe humanoid like Star Trek Data is possible within our lifetime. If you have studied the AI of its day you would know it is near impossible. The OP above you is right, based on current ML knowledge self-driving car is impossible. Assisted self-driving car is more likely. The problem of self-driving car isn't like chess or go. There isnt simplified rules. Humans and humans needs are messy. What you're thinking of is some new technology say super LIDAR++ and new method say doubly deep organic learning might solve the problem. But as of now, they are not yet invented or extremely infant stage. But one thing for sure those aren't the current knowledge ML. Perhaps Waymo will get there...perhaps no. Many decades ago, there are tesla-like cars but it was successful because of battery tech and cheap oil price. They basically went out of business. So Waymo maybe be like them, full of possibility but the isn't ripe yet. Just like Friendster and MySpace before FB.
  • javagram 5y ago
    Annotating every object on the road with RFID beacons seems like it actually would be an impossible project. Yes, you can attach beacons to stoplights and signs (although they already have “beacons” that display in the visible light spectrum). But you can’t attach them to people like the homeless pedestrian killed by Uber’s test self driving car, animals, trash thrown on the roadway or falling off a truck, or a boulder falling from the side of a mountain. And looking at the decades-long process it took to install PTC on train lines, it would take decades to install radio beacons on everything we can and by then technology should have advanced to the point where we don’t need them.
• morpheos137 5y ago
  Remember Taylor Series or polynomial expansion from calc I. You can fit something until it doesn't. With a really large number of terms you can fit a lot.
• hakfoo 5y ago
  I feel like the problem involves a liability shift. If you stand or park on a railway track and get creamed, the pedestrian is going to be the target of blame. We've come to the conclusion that the track belongs to the trains; at best the engineer can perform a limited, good-faith effort to stop and everyone knows that's not going to happen when you've got a kilometre-long, 10,000-tonne wad of physics rushing down slick metal rails at 60kph. But if you walk into the middle of I-5 at rush hour, we still throw the legal and financial liability at drivers. Everyone is supposed to expect a rando suddenly stepping into the road and brake/steer around them. That's hard for humans and potentially harder for machines. I could imagine a network of "autonomous only" roads which were much regulatorily much more like the rail infrastructure-- designed for minimum surprise (limited on/off ramps, limited turning points, predictable advance signing and marking, perhaps a block-control system to mitigate traffic flow) and limited recourse for pedestrians or human operators who enter the territory.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • amanaplanacanal 5y ago
    I don't think I-5 is the problem. City streets are the problem. Cars, bicycles, and pedestrians will always mix there, and there is no reasonable street design where that won't happen.