7 ms·

Kind of interesting to consider how this adjusts priors on these outcomes: - Self driving is not possible - Self driving is not possible anytime soon - Self

by gfodor 5y ago

Kind of interesting to consider how this adjusts priors on these outcomes: - Self driving is not possible - Self driving is not possible anytime soon - Self driving is possible, but requires LIDAR - Self driving is possible, and can be done with normal cameras I've engaged with a lot of people who presume self-driving reduces onto AGI, therefore it will not be achieved anytime soon if ever. I wonder which of their assumptions is wrong, if this ends up being successful.

beaconstudios 5y ago
The big concern is that driving as a human skill is reactive and adaptive, whereas ML (and software in general) models are pre-baked. If something happens outside the car's model, it will react unpredictably, and strange circumstances can arise while driving. AGI, as based on human cognition, would have the capability to adapt to as-yet-unseen circumstances.
- XorNot 5y ago
  I would suggest visiting r/idiotsincars sometime. Humans are terrible at reacting to situation outside of their experience, and essentially do random things all the time. If an AI system's default response is "come to a stop safely" then it's going to be way ahead of a lot of human "unexpected situation" handling in cars.
  - beaconstudios 5y ago
    There are many situations where "come to a stop safely" is the worst possible thing you could do. Yes, people are bad at driving, because they don't pay attention, panic, make mistakes etc. But ML models tend to freak out at slight variations on mundane circumstances; a cyclist crossing the road at just the right angle and the wrong colour of bike, that sort of thing. The thing self driving cars need to avoid is killing people in broad daylight for no discernable reason, and that seems like the kind of thing that you'd need a mind for. It's the same issue as with adversarial image manipulation to fool image recognition; if changing 3 pixels can turn a frog into a toaster, you aren't really "seeing" the frog at all in a symbolic way, and not seeing a road symbolically seems like a recipe for disaster.
    - ketzo 5y ago
      > The thing self driving cars need to avoid is killing people in broad daylight for no discernable reason This, I think, is the thing that people miss when they say "self-driving cars don't need to be perfect, they just need to be better than human-drivers, who aren't actually all that great". From a public confidence perspective, it doesn't matter if a self-driving car crashes one tenth, one one-hundredth as often as human drivers; as soon as you see a self-driving car kill someone in a situation that a human driver obviously would have avoided (like in the adversarial image kind of scenario), you've totally destroyed any and all confidence in this car's driving ability, because "I would never, ever have crashed there."
      - s17n 5y ago
        I think the main thing they miss is that human drivers are actually amazingly good.
akiselev 5y ago
You forgot a fifth one: Self driving is possible but follows the 80/20 rule that states that the last 20% of work requires 80% of the effort. We probably haven't even started on that 20%
- gfodor 5y ago
  That's the "not possible anytime soon" answer, which is probably the most common choice.
judge2020 5y ago
Self driving was never impossible, just infeasible with tech at the time. Surely it'll be standard in a few decades, despite that being quite far into the future.
MattGaiser 5y ago
I assume that they just don't solve the really wacky edge cases which might require AGI. Many people assume that a self driving car must be 100% successful. To me it is sufficient to beat the top 20%/bottom 80% of drivers. So the car will crash if a seagull flies in front of the camera and there is a deer just beyond it. The human would probably crash too.
- boplicity 5y ago
  > To me it is sufficient to beat the top 20% of drivers. Computerized safety systems can, should, and are raising the bar, in terms of safety for the top 20% of drivers. "Self-Driving Cars" aren't competing in a static environment, similar tools are raising the safety bar that they have to compete against. This means it will get increasingly difficult to beat non-self-driving vehicles.
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    Shouldn't this rapidly lead to a convergence between self driving cars and human cars though? I assume a lot of the technology is similar.
  - threatofrain 5y ago
    > similar tools are raising the safety bar And what is the story on driving becoming safer?
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    Don't let silly little empirics around traffic fatalities in recent decades get in the way of a good narrative like this one!
- _rpd 5y ago
  > To me it is sufficient to beat the top 20% of drivers. It's interesting that you set the threshold there (I presume you meant 'beat the bottom 80% of drivers'). Rationally, we should be happy if their driving performance is above average. I fear that the public (and the courts and the insurers, etc) will require airline levels of per-mile safety and still be wary.
morpheos137 5y ago
Most important one you missed: Given sufficient qualitative and quantitative investment self driving may be technologically feasible at some point in the future but not price competitive with human driving. Self driving proponents seem to assume the tech is free. Just keeping sub meter scale 3d street maps up to date has a massive cost.
- BugsJustFindMe 5y ago
  There are enough people in the developed world who are physically unable to drive or use public transportation in their area and who also don't want to be homebound that the economics could still work out even if they were the only market, which they aren't. > Just keeping sub meter scale 3d street maps up to date has a massive cost. True, but probably not actually necessary.
  - morpheos137 5y ago
    You seem to assume there is unmet demand that you can meet cheaper with automation than with human drivers. I agree there may be unmet demand but I don't see you get automation to be cheaper than a $10 an hour cab driver. I mean if automation was cheap and easy then our factories would all be automated before something quixotic like a car. It is frankly absurd.
    - jpindar 5y ago
      >if automation was cheap and easy then our factories would all be automated Please describe the last factory you were in.
      - morpheos137 5y ago
        I have probably been in far more American factories than you. Obviously I am not going to answer your question directly because I have an interest in protecting my career or privacy but in my extensive experience in mamufacturing many things that you might think could be automated are not because it is still cheaper or more effective to pay a worker $15-25 an hour than to spend $15,000 on automation that doesn't work right half the time. Here is the reality that self driving will confront: cost effective, reliable, competitive automation is hard, even for seemingly closed mundane taskes like palatising products.
notshift 5y ago
Waymo already "self-drives" today, it just is extremely slow at making turns when the road is busy, and if there is any kind of unusual obstacle on the road (such as construction cones that require you to drive partially in another lane) it just stops completely and has the rider wait for twenty minutes for a manual operator to come and take over. Those two obstacles won't be overcome until AGI. At best their frequency will be brought down a bit but not by nearly enough orders of magnitude.
- valine 5y ago
  Why would faster turns require AGI? Assuming the position/velocity of the all nearby cars is known it's not a hard problem. Also even Tesla handles the obstacle in the road situation well. Their FSD beta will happily enter the left lane to go around obstacles.
- zone411 5y ago
  Completely disagree. This doesn't require AGI.
TillE 5y ago
Yeah it's been really odd to see the take that self-driving must require strong AI. It needs to be done carefully, but it's clearly a manageable engineering problem if you have good sensors.
- Mangalor 5y ago
  If there's a person at an intersection directing traffic, it will be very hard to have the car itself communicate with them as easily as a human can. Edge cases like that is where AGI would be needed it seems.
  - valine 5y ago
    So in this hypothetical is the person directing traffic completely oblivious to the existence of self driving cars? Pretty sure we can assume traffic cops in the future will be trained to deal with self driving cars and use only use gestures from a predefined list.
  - im3w1l 5y ago
    People directing traffic use only a handful of signals.
    - rurp 5y ago
      I would believe that people directing traffic usually use only a handful of signals, but it's certainly not a universal truth. This is one more case of the 80/20 problem that self driving tech keeps running into. Sure it's probably feasible for cars to handle hand signals in the happy path, but anything outside of that will be disastrous. How will the car understand and communicate with a person who doesn't use the standard signals, aside from having some level of intelligence?
    - jjav 5y ago
      > People directing traffic use only a handful of signals. Sometimes. Other times they confusingly gesticulate or just shout out things, or even give conflicting signals. Humans can interpret these without much effort but it's a hard AI problem.
bob33212 5y ago
self-driving is more of a language problem than a technology problem. In 2005 grad students had cars driving themselves on a course. Tesla and Waymo both have cars that very drive well on many roads. self-driving is here, now all that is left is for people to argue about what "L5" means as the systems improve. They will improve as there is a clear path to improvement. I don't expect that we will ever see the day where everyone is OK with self-driving cars on the roads regardless of the safety statistics, because there will always be edge cases of crashes and personal preferences around driving styles.
aaroninsf 5y ago
I am in the AGI camp, but have wondered and still wonder, Why are efforts not focused primarily on interstate/highway travel, specifically, collaboration with DoT for mesh/distributed/coordinated long-term travel? I don't need a self-driving taxi. I would pay 20K for a car which participated in a federally-regulated framework which let me let go of the wheel when I get on a highway and let teh emergent cloud determine how best to move my car and all the others on dedicated/reserved lanes in coordinated "trains" for hours. The wins here seem like no-brainers. Sidestep all jurisdictional nonsense; optimize commerce and personal travel; automatically handle emergency vehicles and other unusual conditions; etc ad infinitum. All my car needs to be able to do other than existing lower-tier self-driving/driver assist basics, is join the borg. Coordination for traffic flow management seems like an unbelievable win. But no, all we seem to be getting is cyclist-terminating taxis which cost $250K each and are, IMO, doomed in target-rich environments like SF to not forseeably adequately the last 8% of anomalous novel cases. Just don't get it.
- martinald 5y ago
  I agree. I think the problem has been the ride hailing companies shifting all the attention to being self driving taxis. For 95% of people I think the value is in letting them do other stuff while driving long distances/times instead of stuck behind the wheel. This seems many orders of magnitude easier than trying to tackle inner city driving.
- peddling-brink 5y ago
  Highways and big cities first. I predict non-self driving cars will be made illegal in areas like Manhattan, NYC.
- ggreer 5y ago
  If you just want a car that drives itself on freeways, get a Tesla. Probably 80% of my car's 15,000 miles have been on autopilot. It automatically changes lanes to pass and automatically gets out of the passing lane afterwards. It takes offramps and interchanges. It automatically brakes for obstacles. It aborts lane changes if someone else gets in the way. It even works in rain and light snow. Other car companies are a few years behind, but even something as simple as adaptive cruise control + lane centering is a huge help on freeways.
laichzeit0 5y ago
> - Self driving is not possible anytime soon Define “soon”. For me it means 50 years. That’s an infinitesimally small amount of time. If we can have level 5 autonomy in 50 years I will say that progress was rapid and we really excelled.
- gfodor 5y ago
  I'd put 50 years in the "not anytime soon" camp. 50 years is an eternity nowadays with regards to tech.
  - laichzeit0 5y ago
    To put it in perspective, 50 years is still less time than from now until when the transistor was invented.
    - williadc 5y ago
      The transistor was invented in 1947/48, over 70 years ago. Source: https://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/transist.htm https://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/transist.htm
    - eigen 5y ago
      Here in 2021 it has been well over 50 years since the first transistor was built. > The first working device to be built was a point-contact transistor invented in 1947 by American physicists John Bardeen and Walter Brattain while working under William Shockley at Bell Labs. The three shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for their achievement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor
    - JohnWhigham 5y ago
      Yup. This whole era from WW2 onwards (the 3rd/4th Industrial Revolution?) will be looked at as covering 1950 to probably the mid 21st century hundreds of years from now.
goldbattle 5y ago
I think from the original DARPA challenges most researchers knew that while self driving is possible or more correctly "a promising direction", but its application to the realworld and its robustness was a far larger barrier back then. We have the advantage of retrospect when looking at these claims which now may seem more possible then before due to our better understanding of the difficulties and technologies to address them. I think many people confuse their excitement for the promise of having self driving cars and the actual technical and political barriers that still need to be addressed to bring this to reality (ranging from robustness, infinite number of edge cases, perception, insurance, or public policies).
- rurp 5y ago
  > I think many people confuse their excitement for the promise of having self driving cars and the actual technical and political barriers that still need to be addressed to bring this to reality I think most of the confusion is due to deceptive marketing. Sales people like Elon Musk have been saying that the big dream of true self driving is just around the corner for years now, even though they were nowhere close.
paxys 5y ago
Self driving for taxis is a very different problem than for personal vehicles. For the latter you can always rely on the human driver to handle the last 1% or 0.1% edge cases and still provide a ton of value. Taxis don't have that option, so it really is perfect level 5 automation or bust. "Good enough" doesn't cut it.
- cyrux004 5y ago
  Taxis do have the option. Cruise remote operators "guide" taxis once every 5-10 miles during peak hours and thy expect to do so after public launch https://youtu.be/sliYTyRpRB8?t=212 https://youtu.be/sliYTyRpRB8?t=212

by gfodor 5y ago

beaconstudios 5y ago

The big concern is that driving as a human skill is reactive and adaptive, whereas ML (and software in general) models are pre-baked. If something happens outside the car's model, it will react unpredictably, and strange circumstances can arise while driving. AGI, as based on human cognition, would have the capability to adapt to as-yet-unseen circumstances.

XorNot 5y ago
I would suggest visiting r/idiotsincars sometime. Humans are terrible at reacting to situation outside of their experience, and essentially do random things all the time. If an AI system's default response is "come to a stop safely" then it's going to be way ahead of a lot of human "unexpected situation" handling in cars.
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  There are many situations where "come to a stop safely" is the worst possible thing you could do. Yes, people are bad at driving, because they don't pay attention, panic, make mistakes etc. But ML models tend to freak out at slight variations on mundane circumstances; a cyclist crossing the road at just the right angle and the wrong colour of bike, that sort of thing. The thing self driving cars need to avoid is killing people in broad daylight for no discernable reason, and that seems like the kind of thing that you'd need a mind for. It's the same issue as with adversarial image manipulation to fool image recognition; if changing 3 pixels can turn a frog into a toaster, you aren't really "seeing" the frog at all in a symbolic way, and not seeing a road symbolically seems like a recipe for disaster.
  - ketzo 5y ago
    > The thing self driving cars need to avoid is killing people in broad daylight for no discernable reason This, I think, is the thing that people miss when they say "self-driving cars don't need to be perfect, they just need to be better than human-drivers, who aren't actually all that great". From a public confidence perspective, it doesn't matter if a self-driving car crashes one tenth, one one-hundredth as often as human drivers; as soon as you see a self-driving car kill someone in a situation that a human driver obviously would have avoided (like in the adversarial image kind of scenario), you've totally destroyed any and all confidence in this car's driving ability, because "I would never, ever have crashed there."
    - s17n 5y ago
      I think the main thing they miss is that human drivers are actually amazingly good.

akiselev 5y ago

You forgot a fifth one: Self driving is possible but follows the 80/20 rule that states that the last 20% of work requires 80% of the effort. We probably haven't even started on that 20%

gfodor 5y ago
That's the "not possible anytime soon" answer, which is probably the most common choice.

judge2020 5y ago

Self driving was never impossible, just infeasible with tech at the time. Surely it'll be standard in a few decades, despite that being quite far into the future.

MattGaiser 5y ago

I assume that they just don't solve the really wacky edge cases which might require AGI. Many people assume that a self driving car must be 100% successful. To me it is sufficient to beat the top 20%/bottom 80% of drivers. So the car will crash if a seagull flies in front of the camera and there is a deer just beyond it. The human would probably crash too.

boplicity 5y ago
> To me it is sufficient to beat the top 20% of drivers. Computerized safety systems can, should, and are raising the bar, in terms of safety for the top 20% of drivers. "Self-Driving Cars" aren't competing in a static environment, similar tools are raising the safety bar that they have to compete against. This means it will get increasingly difficult to beat non-self-driving vehicles.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  Shouldn't this rapidly lead to a convergence between self driving cars and human cars though? I assume a lot of the technology is similar.
- threatofrain 5y ago
  > similar tools are raising the safety bar And what is the story on driving becoming safer?
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  Don't let silly little empirics around traffic fatalities in recent decades get in the way of a good narrative like this one!
_rpd 5y ago
> To me it is sufficient to beat the top 20% of drivers. It's interesting that you set the threshold there (I presume you meant 'beat the bottom 80% of drivers'). Rationally, we should be happy if their driving performance is above average. I fear that the public (and the courts and the insurers, etc) will require airline levels of per-mile safety and still be wary.

morpheos137 5y ago

Most important one you missed: Given sufficient qualitative and quantitative investment self driving may be technologically feasible at some point in the future but not price competitive with human driving. Self driving proponents seem to assume the tech is free. Just keeping sub meter scale 3d street maps up to date has a massive cost.

BugsJustFindMe 5y ago
There are enough people in the developed world who are physically unable to drive or use public transportation in their area and who also don't want to be homebound that the economics could still work out even if they were the only market, which they aren't. > Just keeping sub meter scale 3d street maps up to date has a massive cost. True, but probably not actually necessary.
- morpheos137 5y ago
  You seem to assume there is unmet demand that you can meet cheaper with automation than with human drivers. I agree there may be unmet demand but I don't see you get automation to be cheaper than a $10 an hour cab driver. I mean if automation was cheap and easy then our factories would all be automated before something quixotic like a car. It is frankly absurd.
  - jpindar 5y ago
    >if automation was cheap and easy then our factories would all be automated Please describe the last factory you were in.
    - morpheos137 5y ago
      I have probably been in far more American factories than you. Obviously I am not going to answer your question directly because I have an interest in protecting my career or privacy but in my extensive experience in mamufacturing many things that you might think could be automated are not because it is still cheaper or more effective to pay a worker $15-25 an hour than to spend $15,000 on automation that doesn't work right half the time. Here is the reality that self driving will confront: cost effective, reliable, competitive automation is hard, even for seemingly closed mundane taskes like palatising products.

notshift 5y ago

Waymo already "self-drives" today, it just is extremely slow at making turns when the road is busy, and if there is any kind of unusual obstacle on the road (such as construction cones that require you to drive partially in another lane) it just stops completely and has the rider wait for twenty minutes for a manual operator to come and take over. Those two obstacles won't be overcome until AGI. At best their frequency will be brought down a bit but not by nearly enough orders of magnitude.

valine 5y ago
Why would faster turns require AGI? Assuming the position/velocity of the all nearby cars is known it's not a hard problem. Also even Tesla handles the obstacle in the road situation well. Their FSD beta will happily enter the left lane to go around obstacles.
zone411 5y ago
Completely disagree. This doesn't require AGI.

TillE 5y ago

Yeah it's been really odd to see the take that self-driving must require strong AI. It needs to be done carefully, but it's clearly a manageable engineering problem if you have good sensors.

Mangalor 5y ago
If there's a person at an intersection directing traffic, it will be very hard to have the car itself communicate with them as easily as a human can. Edge cases like that is where AGI would be needed it seems.
- valine 5y ago
  So in this hypothetical is the person directing traffic completely oblivious to the existence of self driving cars? Pretty sure we can assume traffic cops in the future will be trained to deal with self driving cars and use only use gestures from a predefined list.
- im3w1l 5y ago
  People directing traffic use only a handful of signals.
  - rurp 5y ago
    I would believe that people directing traffic usually use only a handful of signals, but it's certainly not a universal truth. This is one more case of the 80/20 problem that self driving tech keeps running into. Sure it's probably feasible for cars to handle hand signals in the happy path, but anything outside of that will be disastrous. How will the car understand and communicate with a person who doesn't use the standard signals, aside from having some level of intelligence?
  - jjav 5y ago
    > People directing traffic use only a handful of signals. Sometimes. Other times they confusingly gesticulate or just shout out things, or even give conflicting signals. Humans can interpret these without much effort but it's a hard AI problem.

bob33212 5y ago

self-driving is more of a language problem than a technology problem. In 2005 grad students had cars driving themselves on a course. Tesla and Waymo both have cars that very drive well on many roads. self-driving is here, now all that is left is for people to argue about what "L5" means as the systems improve. They will improve as there is a clear path to improvement. I don't expect that we will ever see the day where everyone is OK with self-driving cars on the roads regardless of the safety statistics, because there will always be edge cases of crashes and personal preferences around driving styles.

aaroninsf 5y ago

I am in the AGI camp, but have wondered and still wonder, Why are efforts not focused primarily on interstate/highway travel, specifically, collaboration with DoT for mesh/distributed/coordinated long-term travel? I don't need a self-driving taxi. I would pay 20K for a car which participated in a federally-regulated framework which let me let go of the wheel when I get on a highway and let teh emergent cloud determine how best to move my car and all the others on dedicated/reserved lanes in coordinated "trains" for hours. The wins here seem like no-brainers. Sidestep all jurisdictional nonsense; optimize commerce and personal travel; automatically handle emergency vehicles and other unusual conditions; etc ad infinitum. All my car needs to be able to do other than existing lower-tier self-driving/driver assist basics, is join the borg. Coordination for traffic flow management seems like an unbelievable win. But no, all we seem to be getting is cyclist-terminating taxis which cost $250K each and are, IMO, doomed in target-rich environments like SF to not forseeably adequately the last 8% of anomalous novel cases. Just don't get it.

martinald 5y ago
I agree. I think the problem has been the ride hailing companies shifting all the attention to being self driving taxis. For 95% of people I think the value is in letting them do other stuff while driving long distances/times instead of stuck behind the wheel. This seems many orders of magnitude easier than trying to tackle inner city driving.
peddling-brink 5y ago
Highways and big cities first. I predict non-self driving cars will be made illegal in areas like Manhattan, NYC.
ggreer 5y ago
If you just want a car that drives itself on freeways, get a Tesla. Probably 80% of my car's 15,000 miles have been on autopilot. It automatically changes lanes to pass and automatically gets out of the passing lane afterwards. It takes offramps and interchanges. It automatically brakes for obstacles. It aborts lane changes if someone else gets in the way. It even works in rain and light snow. Other car companies are a few years behind, but even something as simple as adaptive cruise control + lane centering is a huge help on freeways.

laichzeit0 5y ago

> - Self driving is not possible anytime soon Define “soon”. For me it means 50 years. That’s an infinitesimally small amount of time. If we can have level 5 autonomy in 50 years I will say that progress was rapid and we really excelled.

gfodor 5y ago
I'd put 50 years in the "not anytime soon" camp. 50 years is an eternity nowadays with regards to tech.
- laichzeit0 5y ago
  To put it in perspective, 50 years is still less time than from now until when the transistor was invented.
  - williadc 5y ago
    The transistor was invented in 1947/48, over 70 years ago. Source: https://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/transist.htm https://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/transist.htm
  - eigen 5y ago
    Here in 2021 it has been well over 50 years since the first transistor was built. > The first working device to be built was a point-contact transistor invented in 1947 by American physicists John Bardeen and Walter Brattain while working under William Shockley at Bell Labs. The three shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for their achievement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor
  - JohnWhigham 5y ago
    Yup. This whole era from WW2 onwards (the 3rd/4th Industrial Revolution?) will be looked at as covering 1950 to probably the mid 21st century hundreds of years from now.

goldbattle 5y ago

I think from the original DARPA challenges most researchers knew that while self driving is possible or more correctly "a promising direction", but its application to the realworld and its robustness was a far larger barrier back then. We have the advantage of retrospect when looking at these claims which now may seem more possible then before due to our better understanding of the difficulties and technologies to address them. I think many people confuse their excitement for the promise of having self driving cars and the actual technical and political barriers that still need to be addressed to bring this to reality (ranging from robustness, infinite number of edge cases, perception, insurance, or public policies).

rurp 5y ago
> I think many people confuse their excitement for the promise of having self driving cars and the actual technical and political barriers that still need to be addressed to bring this to reality I think most of the confusion is due to deceptive marketing. Sales people like Elon Musk have been saying that the big dream of true self driving is just around the corner for years now, even though they were nowhere close.

paxys 5y ago

Self driving for taxis is a very different problem than for personal vehicles. For the latter you can always rely on the human driver to handle the last 1% or 0.1% edge cases and still provide a ton of value. Taxis don't have that option, so it really is perfect level 5 automation or bust. "Good enough" doesn't cut it.

cyrux004 5y ago
Taxis do have the option. Cruise remote operators "guide" taxis once every 5-10 miles during peak hours and thy expect to do so after public launch https://youtu.be/sliYTyRpRB8?t=212 https://youtu.be/sliYTyRpRB8?t=212