21 ms·

Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

• jongjong 4y ago
  It goes to show how much office politics has been strangling innovation. I'm sure this problem could have been solved for $100 million.
• lionkor 4y ago
  > In fact, no one has come close to making an AV Correct me if im wrong, but Honda has done this? https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a35729591/honda-legend-level-3-autonomy-leases-japan/ https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a35729591/honda-legend-lev... https://global.honda/newsroom/news/2021/4210304eng-legend.html https://global.honda/newsroom/news/2021/4210304eng-legend.ht... Toyota: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-08-02/toyota-seizes-olympic-glory-by-shuttling-athletes-autonomously https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-08-02/toyota... And Cruise: https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1132494_cruise-opens-up-driverless-taxi-service-to-public-in-san-francisco https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1132494_cruise-opens-up-... I don't really see how this all qualifies as "not close to AV", when really, it looks quite viable (with some already driving autonomously...?)
  • smt88 4y ago
    This is literally what the entire article is about.
  • Reventlov 4y ago
    AV is basically level 4 or 5 in the SAE classification ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-driving_car https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-driving_car ). And those vehicles are either not existing yet (i.e. just marketing ploys), or far from it (requiring remote drivers, for example), or just research prototypes that have not been really tried at scale.
    • MontyCarloHall 4y ago
      >or just research prototypes that have not been really tried at scale. Furthermore, all of those research prototypes are geofenced, since they rely on extremely detailed mapping and lots of training data from humans driving the same routes. There is not a single AV in the world close to capable of driving on any road, at any time, in any condition, that a skilled human could drive on without ever having seen it before. In my mind, that means we are indeed nowhere close to a true AV.
      • XorNot 4y ago
        I'm not sure I agree with this success metric: for one thing, there's plenty of roads any given human can't or won't drive on due to perceived difficulty. But when I think "autonomous vehicle" I definitely don't think "arbitrarily capable of driving on roads" - I think something capable of navigating well-understood national roads. I don't see any inconsistency with the idea that there'd be "no automation" zones or roads, or that pre-approved travelways for AVs is a failure scenario.
        • MontyCarloHall 4y ago
          What is the value add of AVs if they are only restricted to well-understood, national roads? Wouldn’t their purpose be better served by high speed trains along those roads instead? My (and Doctorow’s) definition of AV is so stringent because AVs need to deliver the same value add of regular cars relative to other forms of transportation: i) relatively fast, ii) unscheduled, and most importantly, iii) point-to-point transportation between any two points connected by roads. Trains are bad at iii), decent at ii) if run often enough, and far superior at i). If iii) is off the table, then the relative value add of cars is greatly diminished.
    • threeseed 4y ago
      Cruise has robo-taxis operating in San Francisco [1]. Obviously we don't know to what extent they have remote drivers but you wouldn't be able to run such a service if every ride required them. [1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP1rvCYiruh4SDHyPqcxlJw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP1rvCYiruh4SDHyPqcxlJw
  • deleted 4y ago
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  • gala8y 4y ago
    > I don't really see how this all qualifies as "not close to AV", when really, it looks quite viable (with some already driving autonomously...?) Also Tesla. You can see real advancements in these videos of Tesla FSD Beta [0]. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/c/AIDRIVR/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/AIDRIVR/videos
    • ahahahahah 4y ago
      Tesla has nothing close to an AV. They're at about Waymo 2014 level at best.
• leksak 4y ago
  Did not expect Doctorow to be posting on Medium. I wonder what my biases are.
  • Reventlov 4y ago
    He is posting it everywhere: twitter, medium, […], but, as usual, he posts it on his blog too ! https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/ https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/
    • smt88 4y ago
      This is the better and canonical link then, in my opinion. Medium is not pleasant to use as a reader.
  • Kiro 4y ago
    What are you referring to? Was the link changed and if so, why?
    • leksak 4y ago
      It was, why it was I do not know
  • dang 4y ago
    We've changed the URL from https://medium.com/@doctorow/100-billion-later-autonomous-vehicles-are-still-a-car-wreck-16fec61c3f2c https://medium.com/@doctorow/100-billion-later-autonomous-ve... to the original source.
    • Kiro 4y ago
      Why? The Medium article was much better and contained a lot of other interesting angles that had nothing to do with the Bloomberg article, which was just one source of many.
      • dang 4y ago
• case0x00 4y ago
  This article is kind of a wrapper for the linked bloomberg article, which is more interesting IMO. Driving of cars is a massive cooperative game with high stakes, and autonomous cars essentially need AGI in order to play to a degree that is safer than a human with other humans. Fully autonomous cars would be sick, but IMO you'd need massive infrastructure changes (realistically restricted to cities/urbanized areas) if you want autonomous cars to work with anything less than AGI. Until companies start pursuing that, they are actually unknowingly using all that money to push for AGI and obviously coming up short because they don't even understand what they are trying to do.
  • oplaadpunt 4y ago
    I always imagined the future of self driving cars wouldn't lie in cities (except maybe some main ringroads or arterial roalds) but in highways. Just tell the computer to go to highway X exit Y, and from there the driver can drive the last few miles. Basically geofencing known 'sane' locations, which cuts down on the boring bits of driving significantly.
    • cinntaile 4y ago
      That's just trying to solve a simpler problem. It wasn't what we were promised!
      • deleted 4y ago
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      • oplaadpunt 4y ago
        I know, I think the promises are unrealistic :) This has always been my own imagined future
        • jamiek88 4y ago
          I’d be very happy with that. Especially in an RV. Enter the interstate, sleep for 8 hours, wake up 600 miles down the road. That’s the dream!
• mg 4y ago
  $100B is not that much when you compare it to the value self-driving cars will create. There are over 1 billion cars on the road which need humans to drive them. How much are they used? I don't know. Let's say one ride per day. When cars turn into a service business, the "driver" will be software. What will be paid to the driver? Let's say $1 per ride. That is 1B * $1 * 365 = $365B per year. Give that a p/e ratio of 10 and the value is $3650B. So we could spent 30 times more and still break even.
  • deleted 4y ago
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  • roenxi 4y ago
    I would like to nit-pick and say you're estimating some novel metric. The value add would be somewhat higher than that because the alternative is a human driver, so the value-add of the software is approximately ($/h value of driver x hours) that it frees up to do something else. Plus all the evidence I see suggests that whatever the current state, sooner rather than later computers are going to be superhuman at driving (like they are at most other discrete tasks) and save a lot of lives. Plus reduced wear & tear on vehicles. $365B in value is probably a serious undercall. The only reason to complain here is if only $100B has been put in to the venture so far.
    • gambiting 4y ago
      >>Plus all the evidence I see suggests that whatever the current state, sooner rather than later computers are going to be superhuman at driving (like they are at most other discrete tasks) and save a lot of lives. What is that evidence, exactly? I agree that we might eventually get there, but the scale seems to be 50-100 years at this point. We are as arrogant as the researchers in the 60s who famously announced that absolutely perfect image recognition is only 1-2 years away - except the problem is several orders of magnitude harder.
      • roenxi 4y ago
        Typically from what I've seen computers go a long period being hopeless at a task, then slightly subhuman-par-superhuman very quickly. It seems to me that as far as algorithm-and-Hz cares human intelligence lives in a very narrow window and once computers get close to it they tend to jump over it. I'd judge self driving to be slightly subhuman right now - there are definitely worse drivers on the road (typically impaired - drunk, near-blind or high). I'd expect superhuman performance this decade just based on that and the rate of improvement in anything AI related right now.
• sgtfrankieboy 4y ago
  So? Okay, we're not there yet with autonomous vehicles, and have spend tons of money on it. But the tech we have now didn't exist a decade ago. Give it another decade.
  • rvz 4y ago
    Another decade for prototype self-driving cars to cover another state part of the US? $100BN in funding these gadgets and contraptions that don't work. Not even Tesla FSD can drive itself reliably at night without supervision, because it is not Level 5. Until LiDAR becomes more cheaper and these cars CAN drive themselves safely at night without supervision in any state at scale and as advertised like a robotaxi, then you're looking into multiple decades of these research prototypes being 'useful'. So far, that $100BN is a VC scam until proven otherwise.
    • viscanti 4y ago
      > So far, that $100BN is a VC scam until proven otherwise. A lot of the self driving tech has already made its way into safety systems in cars. Things like automatic breaking seem generally useful. There's a question about if it's worth $100B for research into partially autonomous safety solutions, but I don't think it's useful to attribute zero value to self driving research until we get full self driving (certainly some value is being realized already).
    • sgtfrankieboy 4y ago
      >Another decade of researching a cancer cure to cover another different type of cancer? $1400BN in funding these cancer treatments that don't work. Not even radiotherapy can fully cure cancer... Thats how I read it, sorry. We made tremendous leaps in the past decade with improving automated driving, is it fully automatic? No. Does it mean we should somehow stop funding it? No.
    • nrclark 4y ago
      Out of curiosity, why is lidar necessary? When a human drives a car, their only sensors are eyes, ears, and maybe vibration. Somehow we manage to muddle through it. Why do L4/L5 cars need anything extra sensors-wise?
• newaccount2021 4y ago
  welcome to the future maybe its just the case that we have already picked the low hanging fruit in computing...from this point forward, the remaining loftier goals will take decades and billions to achieve don't fall into the trap of thinking something can't be done if it can't be done easily. quickly and cheaply
• k5hp 4y ago
  https://archive.ph/sMhUt https://archive.ph/sMhUt
• origin_path 4y ago
  The main lesson here seems to be about the value of incrementalism. This project was always pitched as self driving cars in one leap, which set huge expectations and more or less ruled out just shipping incrementally better driver assistance year after year. Probably because the space became dominated by Google and Page-ist futurism, so they weren't able to sell anything that would be expected to come with an actual car because "automotive supply chain" didn't fit with Google's self image. And then everyone got scared that they'd succeed and tried to copy their approach. The mining site thing is probably where things should have begun, or highway driving only, but the question is, could a company have motivated ML and programming experts with such a humble starting point? Or was the hole-in-one approach required to build a team that could get anywhere at all?
  • lll-o-lll 4y ago
    It’s because self driving doesn’t provide much value until you can remove the human. If you can remove the human, last mile package delivery is suddenly super cheap; taxis are cheap; trucking is much cheaper; share car services are transformed as a business model. With the human still required you get nothing, so why invest at all?
    • onethought 4y ago
      You get safer drivers, less crashes and less death.
    • origin_path 4y ago
      I think a lot of people would be happy to put their feet up once they'd navigated onto a highway, or have their car go find a parking spot by itself, or come back from one. The sort of stuff Tesla is trying to do is in many ways far more practical except they keep diverting resources to FSD and end up not nailing thee more prosaic conveniences.
      • lll-o-lll 4y ago
        The cost benefit analysis just doesn’t add up though. I can see this adding a small amount to the purchasing decision of a prospective buyer, but without “remove the human” as the end goal these technologies do not provide the return on investment. No one has a crystal ball though, and a few years ago “autonomous vehicles” looked promising. It’s just that we are now looking at the sunken cost fallacy when it hasn’t worked out.
• feketegy 4y ago
  I've said it before, if you truly want to experience what a real life raod looks like in most of the World, just go to Eastern Europe and create the test models there.
  • techwiz137 4y ago
    Absolutely agreed. No road markings, speed bumps also not marked. Lack of road signs, potholes, what about non-clearly defined sidewalks, because nature has taken most of the sidewalks' blocks or even overgrown with grass.
  • saimiam 4y ago
    And then there is India. Please come here if you want zero infra AND zero adherence to basic rules of driving AND the language and script changes every few hundred kilometers AND all roads have human and non-human users at all hours of the day.
    • thrwyoilarticle 4y ago
      It's odd that it's treated as a matter of pride that, while other cities have AVs today, your own city or nation will take much longer simply because it's full of dangerous drivers breaking the law and infrastructure full of literal roadblocks. It's like claiming that cars are infeasible globally because the roads around you are full of potholes and manure. Congratulations? Rather than assume this is a death knell for self-driving cars, a more pragmatic view would be other nations will be able to benefit from them while you are left behind. Self-driving cars don't need global saturation to be worthwhile.
      • kumarvvr 4y ago
        It looks like what he meant was if an AI system works well in India, then it has very high probability of working in the rest of the world.
  • thrwyoilarticle 4y ago
    It doesn't matter what your 'real' roads look like, the money is a hemisphere and a continent away.
• edwnj 4y ago
  Productivity & efficiency unlocks in trucking, ride hailing, public transportation, vehicles, insurance, human capital, medicine etc.. We are talking tens of trillions in value unlocked around the world.
• batmanturkey 4y ago
  WHY is a fully autonomous vehicle even interesting to pursue, given that wheeled vehicles and their infrastructural requirements are such a large expense and social and environmental problem relative to the benefits provided? I mean, out of all the moonshots, why die on this particular hill? I consider an actual hyperloop to be a much more compelling vision for the future: those pneumatic tubes the banks use in suburban US locales coupled with maglev capsules being routed around electronically by magnetic field switching, etc… Or flying jetson mobiles etc… Why is the current obsession a robotic driver of a boring old car ?
  • FL33TW00D 4y ago
    Those infrastructure requirements are already satisfied - and ~3000 people died on US roads last year.
    • darkerside 4y ago
      This sounded off to me, and according to Google it is. You are too low by an order of magnitude.
    • vanilla_nut 4y ago
      Cars and trucks continuously degrade the roads beneath them. The infrastructure requirement is never satisfied -- it requires constant, very expensive upkeep.
      • deleted 4y ago
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      • gremlinsinc 4y ago
        What if cars were mini maglev trains (or pods), hovering above buried tracks on the road and can 'convert' into a car for last-mile delivery, and parking. Then you'd still have the asphalt etc, but hovering over it - you degrade it less than actually driving on it. In this situation you could order up any size vehicle you need from 2 seater to 20 seater.
    • 4y ago
• bwilli123 4y ago
  We already have self driving cars. We call it public transport.
  • techwiz137 4y ago
    The idea is to have private transportation, some of us like the peace and quiet.
    • Foreignborn 4y ago
      Cars aren’t quiet
    • flohofwoe 4y ago
      That "peace and quiet" is only for car owners though, not so much for pedestrians.
    • paulcole 4y ago
      If you like private transport, then you should be doing whatever you can to get as many people as possible to use public transport so there’s less traffic on the road for you.
  • concordDance 4y ago
    Doesn't allow point to point. I lose about 5 hours a week due to cycling and using public transport.
    • lozenge 4y ago
      Yet remove all the cycling and public transport and everybody's journey would be slower due to the road filling up with traffic.
    • presentation 4y ago
      Then public transit should be built to wherever you live. given the amount of investment to self driving cars and maintenance of roads that are way bigger than they should be, we could be using that capital for transit.
• prmoustache 4y ago
  I'd rather see we remove all non professionnal motorized vehicles from the road and invest those billions in high frequency and coverage public transport. That would mean more accessible transport to everyone, including disabled people, less people dying on the road, safer transport for pedestriants, cyclists, bicycles, scooters, rollerskates, better emergency services who don't have to deal with ugly traffic. Our world do not need one car for everyone.
  • Gordonjcp 4y ago
    "Our world do not need one car for everyone." Where you live. Where I live, it's not unreasonable for everyone to need a couple of vehicles each depending on what they're doing.
    • prmoustache 4y ago
      "Where I live, it's not unreasonable for everyone to need a couple of vehicles each depending on what they're doing. " Because you guys and your parents chose to make you dependent on that. The solution is not to build more killing machines and spend more time behind the wheel. All that has been done in the second half of the century can be made differently.
• EugeneOZ 4y ago
  It's quite sad. Even not-so-bright representatives of our civilization can drive a car successfully, and we still can not achieve this level in software. It means that we are extremely far from implementing something more interesting and sophisticated. All of these “AI” are too much “neural networks” and don’t have enough “intelligence”.
• hasmanean 4y ago
  Self driving trains would be far more achievable and practical…more tiny engines and smaller cars means latency and switching delays would go down. I don’t think it even needs much technology.
  • micwag 4y ago
    There are already many self driving trains operating around the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_train_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_train_system...
  • MrDresden 4y ago
    > "more tiny engines and smaller cars means latency and switching delays would go down." Thorougly disagree. The whole reason why trains are so efficient is due to their ability to haul so much weight in one go without practically any other traffic being in the way. Train track infrastructure could not handle multiple mini trains without more track which, as we know from the excessive road construction for car traffice, does not solve the congestion issue.
    • hasmanean 4y ago
      Yeah, efficiency for a train means cargo divided by the cost of the driver and the costs of the locomotive. Take the driver out of the equation, and suddenly making the train longer doesn’t provide any savings. You might as well switch to smaller and cheaper engines and divide one train into 10. There are a lot of variables that affect efficiency but new technology alters the landscape. Self driving public transit is one such thing. Would you rather be on a bus with one driver or a self driving taxi that costs the same?
• neximo64 4y ago
  They wont go anywhere until theres a legal way for the company making the tech to shift liability to drivers for the odd chance it'll crash. That's the issue, that needs to be solved more.
  • jakeogh 4y ago
    Driver liability should never be lost. Trusting a marketing campaign to not kill someone is a (bad) choice, that that user must be liable for. They are still driving the car; recklessly. It's their job to be in control of these megajoules. Conventionally, drivers are liable on the physics level... because they have skin in the game. When I pass another car on a 2 lane road at 100mph+ relative velocity, we both (conventionally) have a strong incentive to not mess up. That's a feature. Same goes (unfortunately) for people who make life or death decisions based on marketing campaigns. All that said while skipping over the elephant, which is that they do not work; for fundamental reasons: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33221575 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33221575
• seshagiric 4y ago
  Is it a data problem? If you have data modeling every nook and corner of the world and every possible combination of human, objects, roads and traffic/ weather conditions, then the AI can learn. If not, it keeps getting confused, will enter private driveways or get bamboozled by traffic cones. Till then it will be an iterative process where the AV companies will keep learning from incidents like those described in the article. On the other hand, I do think the biggest impact of AV will be in controlled environments like the mine dump trucks in the article or the relatively easier long-distance highway only trucks (AV trucks haul till city outskirts, human drivers supply into cities).
• deleted 4y ago
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• helsinkiandrew 4y ago
  Discussed a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33106739 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33106739
• Lutger 4y ago
  Huge waste of money that could have been poured into public transport to actually solve our problems and improve our lives. What a tragedy.
  • benj111 4y ago
    But you could say that about a lot of things. Instead of going to Starbucks you could have fed a starving African for a week. Instead of wasting research money on computer networking, you could spend it on stamps and envelopes. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. But you don't know what's going to come out of that research before hand.
  • iinnPP 4y ago
    According to the UN, it's enough to save over 40million lives (for almost two years) We have our priorities all twisted.
    • kybernetyk 4y ago
      And what after those 2 years?
      • TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
        Same question applies to self-driving research.
        • melling 4y ago
          The knowledge gained is forever. Once we learn something in science and engineering…
          • rrss 4y ago
            … it vanishes when the companies fold?
            • 4y ago
• jhoechtl 4y ago
  Because we are nowhere close to Artificial Intelligence in layman's sense of understanding. Not even close, as long our computing principles are still based on zero and one.
  • jakeogh 4y ago
    Agreed. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23432601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23432601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22087410 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22087410
• yohann305 4y ago
  Have you noticed that lately there has been a symphony of media news to bash everything related to green energy, including EVs, self driving cars, batteries and so on? It feels like we are getting brainstormed to induce us to remove investments in this sector so that others can get in at a much lower entry point. Is it just in my head?
  • flohofwoe 4y ago
    What does self-driving have to do with any of the other things though? Whether there's a human behind the wheel of an EV or an algorithm doesn't make any difference for climate change. If anything, the money wasted on self-driving could have gone into more pragmatic goals.
    • kitsunesoba 4y ago
      Fewer people owning cars and instead hailing from a shared pool of autonomous EVs as needed sounds like a solid improvement over the current situation.
      • flohofwoe 4y ago
        Car sharing is already a thing without self-driving, yet people still seem to prefer their own car. That all sounds to me a bit too much like the 50's flying car utopia.
        • kitsunesoba 4y ago
          I think the big difference is convenience. Car sharing as it exists requires prior planning/coordination, you can’t just grab one on a whim. That’s enough friction that a lot of people would prefer to own a car instead, especially when you consider that a huge part of the appeal of a car is agency and freedom — no need to operate on anybody else’s time tables or predefined stops, just step out and go wherever you please. The closest we have to autonomous hailing is Uber/Lyft, but that becomes prohibitively expensive, not to mention there’s places Uber drivers won’t want to pick you up from or take you to. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of public transportation )lived in Japan for a while and loved the trains) and think it should be greatly expanded, but driving in the US isn’t going away any time soon and so alongside efforts to improve public transportation, efforts should also go into autonomous driving to try to take even more cars off the road. Ideally the bulk of commuters and errandrunners would be using rail, with the second largest group using autonomous car sharing, and the last and by far smallest group still owning their cars.
• Kukumber 4y ago
  They should have hired game developers, they have a headstart
  • sexy_seedbox 4y ago
    Maybe we'll get noclip mode.
• m0llusk 4y ago
  It seems like some metrics and well named domains might help with this. There are different levels of driving challenge and self driving cars can handle some of the most basic challenges already. Cars are used for all kinds of tasks in all kinds of places, but currently self driving cars are making a significant impact on taxi services in some big cities. All of that is limited and should be noted as such, but having mastered many of the basics and now offering taxi service in many areas it is clear that self driving cars have made and continue to make progress which is very different from the "going nowhere" this clickbait article claims.
• stephc_int13 4y ago
  Companies are going to die on that hill. I would not call it a waste of money. It might work in the end, and even if the current tech is not sufficient to attain the goal of fully autonomous driving, the car is a very good guinea pig for robotic research. We're collectively learning a lot in this process. I am not surprised that it turns out to be much more difficult than anticipated. I think it is 95% vaporware, but I liked the ideas behind the latest Nvidia presentation. Machine learning is all about the training quality, useful robots (such as autonomous vehicles) have to operate in the real world. We can't have robots that kills by accident. It is difficult/risky/costly to train them in the real world. Good virtual twins are needed to achieve safe training with infinite repetitions in extreme situations. Not sure if that is sufficient, but it is worth trying.
• ChildOfChaos 4y ago
  It will come eventually, but I wonder how much of my lifetime I will be able to appreciate it, i'm already almost 40 and I don't drive. I live in a small city, I can walk most places and I get the train to larger cities for social events, I save a huge amount of money and I love it. But the trains are awful, good, decent public transport and self-driving transportation would be awesome. I might never get to the point of having owned a car and i will be pretty happy with that.
  • nikanj 4y ago
    The roads clogged by cars would be replaced by the roads clogged by self-driving cars. Self-driving cars are not the solution to awful public transport
• dubeye 4y ago
  Is it binary? I get a lot of value from the level 2 systems already common. And appreciate the incremental improvements.
  • GaylordTuring 4y ago
    My thoughts exactly. And the Tesla FSD is already at a level where it allows you to relax and drive more safely (even though you have to be ready to take over).
• deng 4y ago
  I must say, the linked video in the article to the rogue Waymo car is like a hilarious Black Mirror episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdKCQKBvH-A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdKCQKBvH-A
• satisfice 4y ago
  There is no good reason for self-driving cars. This is not a problem that anyone has been clamoring to solve. Human-caused death by driving is a small problem (quoting statistics does not in any way make it into a big problem, nor do the people who quote those statistics compare them with statistics about how much safer robot drivers are, because no reliable statistics exist). If you think that deaths and injuries are intrinsically bad, then look at the stats for injuries while skateboarding (https://skateboardsafety.org/injury-statistics/ https://skateboardsafety.org/injury-statistics/). Surely you think something must be done about that, right? But we don't care, because the FACT of injury is not the important thing. The important thing is fairness; reasonableness; agency. People on skateboards and who do other dangerous things are choosing to risk themselves and we think that's okay. Human-caused accidents are considered by society (that's you and me) to be acceptable because we have agreed to the bargain. This is not so with robotic drivers. I have NOT CONSENTED to share the road with robot drivers because they are not bound by the same social bargain-- their real drivers are programmers, who risk nothing. Uber was not charged at all in the killing of that pedestrian in Arizona. Only the human safety driver was, who rashly had bought into the supposed safety of self-driving cars. I don't want to ride in a box where no one takes responsibility in case of disaster. EVEN IF, there are fewer accidents. This is the key point: AI stands for "Automated Irresponsibility" or "Agency Interrupted." Irresponsibility is the bigger problem; or loss of agency. If you truly, madly believe that mere numbers are the crux of morality, then consider. If you save 10 people from drowning in your boat, is it okay for you to pull out a gun and shoot one of them in the head before returning to shore? You will still have saved 9 people. You're a hero, right? Obviously, this is not okay-- because HOW one dies matters. Responsibiliy and agency matter.
• tech2globeweb 4y ago
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  • SteveNuts 4y ago
• cs702 4y ago
  In the short run, technological progress is much slower than anyone hopes, but in the long run it is much faster than anyone expects. My favorite example is that in 1987, the scientific consensus was that it would take "at least 100 years" and likely much longer to sequence the entire human gnome.[a] But the vast majority of it was sequenced by 2000, only 13 years later. Moreover, just two decades later, anyone could get their genome checked for known markers for pocket change by companies like 23andMe, founded in 2006. Having some expertise and interest in AI, I regularly watch presentations by all companies working on self-driving and also look at the videos posted by beta testers online. While it's fun to watch the failures, I'm more interested in judging whether the technology is continuing to improve. My perceptions contradict this article: (1) The technology is progressing faster than is generally recognized, with vehicles getting progressively better at dealing with edge cases and handling failures gracefully. (2) Judging by the videos I've watched online, Tesla is significantly ahead of everyone else. Prediction: Before the end of the decade, this article will seem... short-sighted. -- [a] https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/sequencing-human-genome-the-contributions-of-francis-686/ https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/sequencing-human-g... -- EDIT: I edited my statement about 23andMe based on sausagefeet's comment below.
  • black_13 4y ago
  • bastawhiz 4y ago
    I'm genuinely curious why you think Tesla is ahead compared to Waymo and Cruise. Autopilot struggles in my car on some fairly boring roads, while Waymo and Cruise are both operating real taxi services in vehicles without drivers. I can understand the argument that Tesla has lots of data from real world driving. But Google also has fleets of cars mapping out every road in the world.
    • cs702 4y ago
      Please keep in mind that I'm talking about FSD Beta, not the current production software, which is dozens of versions behind. Are you on Beta 10.69.2.3? If I had to articulate my reasons: * Judging by the videos available online, my perception is that many situations that were impossible for Tesla FSD Beta a year ago have become uneventful in recent weeks. Take a look at Chuck Cook's videos for example (I like the fact that he always highlights the failures). * Judging again by the videos available online, my perception is that Tesla FSD Beta has encountered and had to deal with more crazy edge cases than any other system. A possible explanation for this is that for a long time Tesla FSD Beta hasn't been geofenced or restricted only to certain types of roads, like highways. You can test it anywhere in North America. * Tesla FSD Beta currently has 160,000 individuals testing it without road restrictions. As far as I know, no other system has been exposed to similar open-ended large-scale testing. * Occupancy networks look like a real breakthrough to me -- DNNs that predict whether each voxel in a 3D model is occupied by an object, using only video data as an input. I understood the high-level explanation of these DNNs on AI Day 2. I haven't seen anything like it from anyone else. * Tesla's DOJO also looks like a breakthrough to me. I understood the high-level explanation of it on AI Day 2. IIRC, DOJO cabinets are 6x faster at training existing neural networks than Nvidia rigs, at 6x lower cost, so call it ~36x more efficient.
• black_13 4y ago
• martythemaniak 4y ago
  It's really bizarre that people are treating autonomous EVs as somehow pitted against transit. The core of public transit is having a monopoly on local service and using profitable routes to subsidize unprofitable ones for the benefit of the public. Transit agencies don't build their own vehicles, they buy them and operate them. Having the option to buy autonomous EVs does not change the core of public transit, but it does give them the ability to save on operations, run more routes, more frequent service, use a different mix of vehicles for their fleet, etc. Replacing one 50 seat $500,000 bus with 5 $100,000 10 seat vans that cost a fraction to operate will make public transit far better than it is today.
  • rospaya 4y ago
    An EV self driving car still has the same capacity and takes up the same amount of space in rush hour like a regular gas guzzler. Without denser zoning and lifestyle changes, nothing will change.
• TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
  Self driving cars are slowly degenerating from intelligent autonomous machines to just another version of train - see sensors in a road/signs, special lanes, etc. If they can't drive on existing roads together with human drivers, then they are utterly pointless.
• zxcvbn4038 4y ago
  I’m still waiting for my ray gun. Unless the aliens are made of paper, and move really slow, and are in the same room as me, I’ve got nothing. The space princess is going to do more damage throwing her high heels at them.
• dang 4y ago
  Recent and related: Even After $100B, Self-Driving Cars Are Going Nowhere - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33106739 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33106739 - Oct 2022 (107 comments)
• insanitybit 4y ago
  > It all sounds great until you encounter an actual robo-taxi in the wild. Which is rare: I see them all the time. They work fine.
• coldtea 4y ago
  Self-driving cars might not be going anywhere, but $100B made several people rich.
• CyanLite4 4y ago
  These companies are swinging for the fences and instead striking out. A base hit would suffice for most people. I just want a reliable car that can steer in the highway so I can eat a burger or answer a text message. GM’s SuperCruise is nearly there but has too many safety restrictions. It doesn’t need to work in inclement weather or construction zones. Being able to answer emails or watch a YouTube clip on a long road trip gives me back precious time that is worth paying a few thousand for.
  • cycomanic 4y ago
    I believe there was some news that Mercedes was going for exactly that use case some time ago.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • Gordonjcp 4y ago
    Why don't you go by train? If you don't like driving, don't drive.
    • GaylordTuring 4y ago
      Maybe there isn’t a train available. Maybe it takes much longer time taking the train. Maybe you don’t like sitting close to other people for several hours each week. I can think of many reasons why train wouldn’t be an option.
      • Gordonjcp 4y ago
        Then it sucks to be you. Don't drive if you don't like driving. Walk, or cycle. Or get a job that doesn't require you to commute.
  • nojvek 4y ago
    I’ve honestly been impressed by comma.ai. The little $1000 device does well with Seattle rain. Once it was snowing and it followed well. It’s not perfect but I love that it makes it clear what it can and can’t do. It follows lanes on a highway and monitors you’re paying attention.
• SergeAx 4y ago
  I have a feeling that we have something like Pareto principle in effect here. We spent 20% of effort to solve 80% of the problem. Now we have to spend 80% of effort to solve remaining 20% of the problem :( I am starting to believe in hybrid system at least for self-driving taxis. Autopilot works 80% of time, but in the case of uncertainty it calls a remote human driver to solve a particular problem. With 4G/5G coverage it is already technically feasible to drive a car remotely on a slow speed. Will have to master emergency slow down and stop on autopilot and of course detection of malicious or inadequate action from remote pilot.
• joshuaheard 4y ago
  I think the mistake was trying for full pattern recognition of the environment to control the car. Even human drivers need lane markers and traffic signals. They should make a custom "Botts Dot" that the AI can use to stay in the lanes. Every intersection should have a server broadcasting instructions to the vehicles to control traffic at that intersection. I'm not an expert, however.
• Geee 4y ago
  > “It’s a scam,” says George Hotz I found this quote pretty funny. If you listen to the guy for a moment you'll realize that he calls everything a scam.
  • CogitoCogito 4y ago
    Is he wrong?
• jdmg94 4y ago
  • dang 4y ago
    Please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait to HN. We're trying for something else here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • jasonladuke0311 4y ago
    Have you ever been to Denver? Houston? Jacksonville, Florida?
• justnotworthit 4y ago
  The failure of self driving cars will be the next AI winter.
• GekkePrutser 4y ago
  I think it would go significantly better if we make roads for self-driving cars. Right now cars are trying to drive like a human. Based on the same cues and road markings, signs etc. What if we started embedding road signs with radio beacons. Cars with transponders like aircraft have. Road markings in a digital way that's easier to follow for a machine. We could start with some lanes dedicated to automated traffic. If the goal is that humans will no longer drive themselves, why should the road design still be prioritized for humans?
  • tttttt5ts 4y ago
    Why not just invest in public transport instead? To date all cars with any self driving tech are expensive and only available to the wealthy.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • GekkePrutser 4y ago
      Good point. I have not even driven a car in the last 3 years myself. I do think in some areas this will not be feasible. But these are also probably the very last areas to consider when building smart car infrastructure.
• jeffrallen 4y ago
  Why are we not talking about the lead of this story, which is that the tech not working caused a headache for uninvolved people, and the company refused to take responsibility for it until it was embarrassed in the press, and then hid behind the weasel words of "our cars were following applicable laws". Maybe the problem with driverless cars is that we do not need them and do not want them and are not willing to tolerate the hijinks of big business trying to force them on us?
• up2isomorphism 4y ago
  Because self-driving is never a well-defined term, and we all know that’s best for scams.