5 ms·

Only as long as people still drive. If we had to dial every number we want to call manually, physical buttons on phones would outperform touchscreens too. But

Only as long as people still drive. If we had to dial every number we want to call manually, physical buttons on phones would outperform touchscreens too. But nobody does that anymore. And it is nicer to select the name of a friend on a touchscreen than to type it with physical keys. Same goes for cars. Humans spending their time keeping the car in lane, stopping at red lights, starting when the light turns green, doing turns etc will phase out more and more over the next 10, 20 years. The interaction we still want to have with a car is probably nicer on a touchscreen. Especially when you are not dabbling with a steering wheel anymore. Stuff like seeing the route on a map, selecting waypoints etc. We would not want physical keys for that when we are at home at our computer, right? I think dedicated keys are just legacy from the "I'm busy with the steering wheel and need to do other stuff blindly" area. Much of it will probably also move to voice control.

brk 4y ago
While I think your estimates for self-driving cars are aggressive, we have also had these touchscreens in cars for about a decade already. IF we get to more autonomous driving, sure add in the touchscreens, but until then I think we may have started that trend about a generation too soon.
- JonathanBeuys 4y ago
  Any quantifiable arguments that 10-20 years is aggressive? Google started development 13 years ago and now already has fully autonomous taxis on the road in a 4 cities. If they double the number of cities every year, in 10 years they will be in over 4000 cities. Tesla started around the same time. Looking at videos of tesla in self driving mode, my feeling is that without human interaction, it would crash maybe once every 50 hours of driving. Double that every year and in 10 years it will crash once every 50000 hours. A human driver, driving 1 hour a day, would need 136 years of crash free driving to achieve that. But the average driver has 4 accidents in their lifetime. So we are already in superhuman territory by then.
  - brk 4y ago
    I guess my argument against the aggressive timeline is that I have been working in MV/AI for the last decade or so, and am pretty deeply connected into NVIDIA, AMBA, a few SS lidar companies and so forth (though I do not deal with autonomous driving, I am in physical security/surveillance). While there has been a lot of progress made to date, much of it (IMO) has been around the low-hanging fruit kind of stuff. Sure, we've mapped a lot of roads and covered many of the basics. But none of the systems are really able to do human-level context awareness, like you see a bunch of kids running around near, but not on, the road a few hundred feet up, might want to slow down or at least be extra aware, or people clearly driving in "tourist mode", etc. My personal assessment is that we are still 20+ years away from the point where the human driver is mostly along for the ride (and thus to the point of this thread, can fiddle with a poorly implemented touchscreen UI without risk). I am led to believe the ultimate solution is going to involve altering/enhancing the road infrastructure, along with the general improvements for the in-vehicle stuff (which itself has at least a decade of development still to go). Combine those things together, and we're still quite a ways off from the vision that was sold 10 years ago.
    - JonathanBeuys 4y ago
      So the "argument" you give is your gut feeling when you look at how things are now. I expected something like this. That's why I said "quantifiable". We humans are animals of habit and have a hard time imagining a changing world. But every time a few decades pass, we look back and see - damn! - a lot has changed. A way to get away from feeling and towards a rational prediction is to look at rate of change. In my experience, doubling the performance of a new technology (self-driving is only 13 years old) is usually doable. And that means 1000x improvement in 10 years. And from where we are now, that gives us Waymo in every major city and Tesla with super human capabilities.
      - brk 4y ago
        So your response is essentially your gut feelings then? I do not think your rate of change assessment is accurate. With many newer technologies, like the DNN/CNN frameworks, we see a more or less immediate order of magnitude improvement, and then declining rate of improvements as the easier bits are done and we are forced to do deeper development or refinement. Saying that Tesla has super human capabilities sounds to me like you are not assessing it rationally. Super human would mean, to me, that it manages to do better than humans in extreme conditions. Instead, we have seen a number of very preventable causalities in the current generation systems.
adhesive_wombat 4y ago
> And it is nicer to select the name of a friend on a touchscreen than to type it with physical keys. It really isn't for me, it's much easier with the T9-style 3 letters per key on a physical keypad and then up/down on the steering wheel. Some cars have a click wheel that lets you set letters one at a time, which also works well. What doesn't work well at all is typing with one hand on a centre console touchscreen.
- vel0city 4y ago
  I never thought I'd see some argue for the MacBook Wheel. https://youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA https://youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA
  - adhesive_wombat 4y ago
    The click wheel is a very good interface, especially when you are very often setting a scalar value (volume, temperature, fan speed, etc) or navigating a linear list (songs, contact names, call history, etc) and using one hand without looking at that hand. So it's a good fit for both MP3 players and cars. Not so good for typing, but can be quite good when there's a good UI that narrows down options for you at each entered letter.
WickyNilliams 4y ago
Voice control is not an improvement imo. An anecdote... I wanted to make a call to my partner recently, whilst driving. I have an old car, with all physical controls. But my phone was in front of me with maps running. I said "OK Google.." and waited for it chime that it registered. "Call [my partner's name]", I commanded it. It responded that the name was unrecognised - even though it repeated the name back to me, so it wasn't a case of mishearing. I repeated this at least 5 times, getting increasingly frustrated. Then eventually it started calling. Joy! But I notice it doesn't say my partners name on the screen, just a phone number. "OK", I think to myself, "perhaps this is some quirk of voice dialing, it doesn't show the name" (I don't know my partners number by heart so I could not recognise it). It rang through to voicemail, and whilst the name given by the voicemail recording was correct it was definitely not my partner's voice. It turns out my phone had just dialled a random mobile number from the Internet that matched that name. It may have been a business, or a personal number, I'm not sure. Either way, I would never want this behavior! I guess the point is that voice commands have terrible error handling and recovery modes. Give me physical controls any day. Even if they're slower, at least they are accurate, discoverable, and do not make guesses about intention
jcranmer 4y ago
Perhaps when driving is no longer the main focus of the driver in the car, a touchscreen interface might make sense. Except that is not the case for any car on sale right now in any state of being (save for being parked and motionless). Yet there is still much eagerness to move everything to touchscreens right now...

brk 4y ago

While I think your estimates for self-driving cars are aggressive, we have also had these touchscreens in cars for about a decade already. IF we get to more autonomous driving, sure add in the touchscreens, but until then I think we may have started that trend about a generation too soon.

JonathanBeuys 4y ago
Any quantifiable arguments that 10-20 years is aggressive? Google started development 13 years ago and now already has fully autonomous taxis on the road in a 4 cities. If they double the number of cities every year, in 10 years they will be in over 4000 cities. Tesla started around the same time. Looking at videos of tesla in self driving mode, my feeling is that without human interaction, it would crash maybe once every 50 hours of driving. Double that every year and in 10 years it will crash once every 50000 hours. A human driver, driving 1 hour a day, would need 136 years of crash free driving to achieve that. But the average driver has 4 accidents in their lifetime. So we are already in superhuman territory by then.
- brk 4y ago
  I guess my argument against the aggressive timeline is that I have been working in MV/AI for the last decade or so, and am pretty deeply connected into NVIDIA, AMBA, a few SS lidar companies and so forth (though I do not deal with autonomous driving, I am in physical security/surveillance). While there has been a lot of progress made to date, much of it (IMO) has been around the low-hanging fruit kind of stuff. Sure, we've mapped a lot of roads and covered many of the basics. But none of the systems are really able to do human-level context awareness, like you see a bunch of kids running around near, but not on, the road a few hundred feet up, might want to slow down or at least be extra aware, or people clearly driving in "tourist mode", etc. My personal assessment is that we are still 20+ years away from the point where the human driver is mostly along for the ride (and thus to the point of this thread, can fiddle with a poorly implemented touchscreen UI without risk). I am led to believe the ultimate solution is going to involve altering/enhancing the road infrastructure, along with the general improvements for the in-vehicle stuff (which itself has at least a decade of development still to go). Combine those things together, and we're still quite a ways off from the vision that was sold 10 years ago.
  - JonathanBeuys 4y ago
    So the "argument" you give is your gut feeling when you look at how things are now. I expected something like this. That's why I said "quantifiable". We humans are animals of habit and have a hard time imagining a changing world. But every time a few decades pass, we look back and see - damn! - a lot has changed. A way to get away from feeling and towards a rational prediction is to look at rate of change. In my experience, doubling the performance of a new technology (self-driving is only 13 years old) is usually doable. And that means 1000x improvement in 10 years. And from where we are now, that gives us Waymo in every major city and Tesla with super human capabilities.
    - brk 4y ago
      So your response is essentially your gut feelings then? I do not think your rate of change assessment is accurate. With many newer technologies, like the DNN/CNN frameworks, we see a more or less immediate order of magnitude improvement, and then declining rate of improvements as the easier bits are done and we are forced to do deeper development or refinement. Saying that Tesla has super human capabilities sounds to me like you are not assessing it rationally. Super human would mean, to me, that it manages to do better than humans in extreme conditions. Instead, we have seen a number of very preventable causalities in the current generation systems.

adhesive_wombat 4y ago

> And it is nicer to select the name of a friend on a touchscreen than to type it with physical keys. It really isn't for me, it's much easier with the T9-style 3 letters per key on a physical keypad and then up/down on the steering wheel. Some cars have a click wheel that lets you set letters one at a time, which also works well. What doesn't work well at all is typing with one hand on a centre console touchscreen.

vel0city 4y ago
I never thought I'd see some argue for the MacBook Wheel. https://youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA https://youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA
- adhesive_wombat 4y ago
  The click wheel is a very good interface, especially when you are very often setting a scalar value (volume, temperature, fan speed, etc) or navigating a linear list (songs, contact names, call history, etc) and using one hand without looking at that hand. So it's a good fit for both MP3 players and cars. Not so good for typing, but can be quite good when there's a good UI that narrows down options for you at each entered letter.

WickyNilliams 4y ago

Voice control is not an improvement imo. An anecdote... I wanted to make a call to my partner recently, whilst driving. I have an old car, with all physical controls. But my phone was in front of me with maps running. I said "OK Google.." and waited for it chime that it registered. "Call [my partner's name]", I commanded it. It responded that the name was unrecognised - even though it repeated the name back to me, so it wasn't a case of mishearing. I repeated this at least 5 times, getting increasingly frustrated. Then eventually it started calling. Joy! But I notice it doesn't say my partners name on the screen, just a phone number. "OK", I think to myself, "perhaps this is some quirk of voice dialing, it doesn't show the name" (I don't know my partners number by heart so I could not recognise it). It rang through to voicemail, and whilst the name given by the voicemail recording was correct it was definitely not my partner's voice. It turns out my phone had just dialled a random mobile number from the Internet that matched that name. It may have been a business, or a personal number, I'm not sure. Either way, I would never want this behavior! I guess the point is that voice commands have terrible error handling and recovery modes. Give me physical controls any day. Even if they're slower, at least they are accurate, discoverable, and do not make guesses about intention

jcranmer 4y ago

Perhaps when driving is no longer the main focus of the driver in the car, a touchscreen interface might make sense. Except that is not the case for any car on sale right now in any state of being (save for being parked and motionless). Yet there is still much eagerness to move everything to touchscreens right now...