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Ten years doesn't sound sarcastic to me. With fully driverless operation starting in SF (and with several years in Phoenix), having it widely rolled out within
by jefftk 5y ago
Ten years doesn't sound sarcastic to me. With fully driverless operation starting in SF (and with several years in Phoenix), having it widely rolled out within ten years seems very plausible.
- hwers 5y agoThey told us we were supposed to have driverless cars in 5 years 10 years ago.
- golergka 5y agoThey also told us we were supposed to have mass produced electric cards in 5 years 30 years ago.
- signatoremo 5y agoFirst time I heard of this. Who promised this 30 years ago?
- reportingsjr 5y agoThat would have been right around the time of the gm ev1. A lot of people were expecting electric cars to kick off right after that, so OP's claim is not unreasonable.
- signatoremo 5y agoWe’re talking about promise, not expectation. I don’t recall GM promised electric car mass production within 5 years of EV1.
- jliptzin 5y agoBut with that you also had other fossil fuel companies working hard to make sure that didn't happen
- nradov 5y agoPlease explain how fossil fuel companies can keep auto manufacturers from selling electric cars? The reality is that the biggest obstacle continues to be the high cost of battery raw materials.
- jefftk 5y agoThat was wrong, clearly. But it was a prediction made with far less evidence than we have today. Considering progress so far (which we had far less of in 2012) I don't think ten years is wrong today.
- danielmarkbruce 5y agoAnd even if it is wrong, it's obviously not stupid to think we'll have driverless cars in 10 years. Waymo are literally down to solving edge cases. There are more than people might have expected, but there isn't anything fundamental to solve.
- jacquesm 5y ago> Waymo are literally down to solving edge cases. But: there are very large numbers of these edge cases and they are of the kind where new ones keep popping up all the time. This is a very easy problem for the first 99% or so and then the last 1% is super hard.
- danielmarkbruce 5y agoSure - but they've been working on the last 1% for years now. Nuclear Power plants are almost always over budget and over time, big misses. And they've built lots of them. Every piece of software ever built suffers from this issue to some degree. Elon Musk misses every deadline he ever sets. Something taking longer than initially thought shouldn't instantly set off alarm bells suggesting it won't ever get done.
- jacquesm 5y ago> Sure - but they've been working on the last 1% for years now. Indeed, and we aren't any closer compared to say 5 years ago. That is more or less my point: you can solve for some of this and then you are still left with a mountain more. And then at some point there is an even harder problem to deal with: how to ensure that fixing one problem won't regress one or more others.
- adoxyz 5y agoAnd we have various versions and levels of drivereless cars today...
- gambiting 5y agoDo we? Where? The best version currently in existance could be (generously) described as an automated bus that only drives on a pre-mapped grid and still needs human supervision because you can't quite trust it yet. The most well known commercialy available "autopilot" (from Tesla) is so hilariously bad that I honestly don't understand how it's even legal to use, much less to sell for real money.
- warcher 5y agoEven wide distribution of long-haul trucking exclusively on the interstate, or an automated bus-like commuter service (but actually good, unlike the regular bus), would be a pretty meaningful innovation, wouldn't it?
- gambiting 5y agoOf course, and it would be awesome, and I believe that sort of thing is actually possible within a relatively short timescale. General self driving like 90% of people do every day? Nope, don't see that.
- AlotOfReading 5y agoNeither waymo nor cruise currently require human supervision. That's the whole point of this announcement: waymo is expanding their driverless program to SF. Whether the grid is pre-mapped or not isn't particularly relevant. It's just how the technology works. The vehicles aren't driving on rails, they just have more semantic information about the world around them.
- treesprite82 5y agoWaymo arguably reached level 4 with commercial taxis with no human at the wheel a while back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__EoOvVkEMo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__EoOvVkEMo
- danielmarkbruce 5y agoWho is "they" ?
- barbecue_sauce 5y agoGoogle, the tech journalist/blogger consensus, etc.
- danielmarkbruce 5y agoSergey might have said it, I don't think the people actually working on it ever thought that or said it?
- treis 5y agoNo they didn't. Cruise didn't even exist 10 years ago.
- barbecue_sauce 5y agoWhy are you bringing up Cruise specifically?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dekhn 5y agoI saw my first self-driving car parked at Google in roughly 2008 or 2009, and watched them toodling around campus shortly afterward. Many people (like Larry) thought it was a 5 year project.
- gambiting 5y agoThere is this famous story about research into image recognition back in 1960s - everyone involved thought it was literally a matter of few months, maybe a year at most, to have a system that has 100% accurate recognition capabilities. Yet we're in 2022 and the best of the best image recognition systems spew out absolute nonsense no matter how much money is poured into them. It's just the same sort of issue. It can work amazingly well 90% of the time, but the remaining 10% is basically impossible without some kind of actual general AI that can understand the context of what it's looking at. I honestly believe that current approaches to this tech will not get us to general self driving tech that is safe enough for use on our roads.
- dekhn 5y agothe mark i perceptron did image recognition with a single layer neural network and was surprisingly good at it. Some days I think Rosenblatt was on to something, but about 40 years ahead of the time.
- seanmcdirmid 5y agoLikewise, a lot of computer scientists didn't take Engelbart's 1969 "mother of all demos" seriously because they thought general artificial intelligence was right around the corner. Why bother with a mouse and bitmapped display when you can just tell the computer what you want?
- xipho 5y agoAnother story in a similar vein. There are many, many stories about how the advent of DNA sequencing would finally solve the issues of creating the tree of life for all species on Earth, and solve the problem of defining species boundaries, this was some 20 years ago or more. We're still nowhere close thanks largely to the unimaginable quantity of biodiversity out there. We have the low-hanging fruit genomes (specimens readily available, known to be commercially important, etc), but that's about it. Even with those "genomes" (most are not curated to any real level of completion) we still haven't solved compute at scale, even small analyses (10k terminals, 2k genes) take months if not years to comprehensively run (i.e. explore parameter spaces), albeit thanks in part to limits on resources available to scientists. The Earth is big and complex, I can't see the singularity on the horizon yet, but my vision is aging.
- eptcyka 5y agoPast performance does not indicate future returns. However, I too don't believe that self-driving cars will be here in 5 years either.
- mbesto 5y ago> With fully driverless operation starting in SF (and with several years in Phoenix) As I understand it, they will only operate within a "grid". In other words, its use case will be limited to essentially a customized route city bus. > widely rolled out within ten years seems very plausible. Define "widely". We are decades away from a driverless car driving in snow.
- jefftk 5y ago> Define "widely". We are decades away from a driverless car driving in snow. I agree snow is a lot harder (I don't think it's decades, though). But the cases moritonal brought up mostly don't require that.
- jslaby 5y agoOr black ice.. hitting the brakes and seeing how far you slide is the only test to determine safety, from my experience.
- aranchelk 5y agoWith copious sensor data and individual wheel control, I bet one could devise a more elegant solution.
- Dylan16807 5y agoIs that hard for a computer to do? The mere fact that it won't panic on black ice is already a huge advantage. And it will have very detailed feedback to and from the traction control systems.
- moritonal 5y agoOddly enough from what I've seen when it snows I'd imagine a computer's ability to simulate a multi-car situation in snow _vastly_ outmatches your normal humans.
- mantas 5y ago
- modeless 5y agoThey just announced 500k driverless miles in Phoenix. Over several years that sounds laughably small to me. For comparison, motor vehicle fatalities in the US are around 1.5 per 100 million miles. We're several orders of magnitude away from even being able to convincingly demonstrate that these reduce (or at least do not increase) fatalities in the real world. I'm glad that Cruise beat Waymo to driverless in SF because they are providing the swift kick in the butt that Waymo seems to require to actually make progress in a reasonable amount of time.
- bufferoverflow 5y agoTesla's FSD traveled billions of miles (2 years ago they had over 3 billion miles). Their crash rate is 1 in 4.4 billion miles. That's crash, not a fatality. And it's getting better. https://cleantechnica.com/2021/12/07/tesla-1-crash-per-4-41-million-miles-traveled-on-autopilot/ https://cleantechnica.com/2021/12/07/tesla-1-crash-per-4-41-...
- donkarma 5y agoyeah because every time it's about to crash it slags it off onto the driver
- pranavjoneja 5y agoYour link says Autopilot, not FSD. Autopilot is highway autonomy, which is vastly easier and you can rack up many more miles very quickly. This is not at all a relevant comparison.
- green-eclipse 5y agoAny Google search on this shows your stats are wildly incorrect.
- amelius 5y ago> They just announced 500k driverless miles in Phoenix. Not with one version of the software. They are cheating: they should reset the mileage whenever they update the software.
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- wongarsu 5y agoDepending on what you mean by widely rolled out, I agree. Driverless trucks driving on the highway and in well-marked industrial areas seems extremely plausible within 10 years. Driverless taxis at slow speeds as a shuttle service on campuses and fair grounds are more or less already a thing and will only grow. Driverless cars in a European city center, during snow, ice and rain seems unlikely within 10 years. But we don't need that to see transformational change.
- foobarian 5y ago> Driverless cars in a European city center, during snow, ice and rain seems unlikely within 10 years. The fun thing about European cities is that many of them are extremely willing to make (to Americans) unthinkable changes to traffic patterns under their jurisdiction. I would not be the least bit surprised to see those downtown centers closed to all but driverless traffic (if they are not closed already).
- bluGill 5y agoMaybe, but I don't see driverless cars ready for bad weather. BTW, humans are not ready for bad weather either, even though we drive in it all the time. However with driverless cars we will collect statistics proving it isn't ready and never noticing that it is better than humans.
- b112 5y agoThe last few percent of any project, takes the longest.
- brandonmenc 5y ago> with several years in Phoenix I lived in Phoenix for nearly a decade. I moved there from the snow belt. Teaching a car to drive itself in Phoenix is barely a step up from teaching it to drive in an empty parking lot.