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'It's a scam': self-driving cars are going nowhere
- superchroma 4y agogosh, if only there was some kind of public system that could transport many people at once for a low cost that all those billions could have gone to. Once again, people leaping at opportunities to apply tech to things because technology is a hammer and everything is a nail. Meanwhile all the horrible and unsexy things in life persist because bay area tech bros aren't forced to deal with them everyday.
- SyzygistSix 4y agoIf people in the US wanted to bicycle and support/use public transport, they would. They don't. I wish they did. But they don't. You are welcome to try to convince them otherwise. But I'm glad people are also working on the problems we do have as they are rather than waiting to convince people of solutions they do not seem interested in.
- superchroma 4y agoYeah, well, people want housing to be an investment and we've all seen where that got us. People want hour long showers and 1L big gulps of soda and NFTs. The will of the people doesn't count for squat, people are idiots.
- dqpb 4y agoIt's not a scam. A scam is a deliberate deception. Engineers working on this are genuinely trying to solve the problem.
- iancmceachern 4y agoI agree with your comment, there are lots of folks making real progress in this space and there are secondary industries that benefit from things like lidar which has gotten way better in large part to this work. Playing devils advocate though - Theranos had 800 employees at its peak, it's hard to think that at least a few of those people working there genuinely thought they were trying to solve the problem.
- TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y agoLidar still tries to kill me on a daily basis; It doesn't like sunrise and sunset.
- lizen_one 4y agoVery interesting. What LiDAR are you using? Does it happen if the sun shines directly into the LiDAR from the front?
- TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y agoStandard commercial unit, no clue. It happens as you say, with sun shining directly in front, especially when passing under bridges or when another vehicle passes the sun (but not in your lane). The stark difference of direct sunlight and long shadows triggers it the most.
- eesmith 4y ago“Jerry, just remember. It’s not a lie… If you believe it.” When a company asserts they will have self-driving cars in a year, and they aren't doing any on-road tests, is that assertion a deliberate deception? Or a willing self-deception? In any case, people can work be part of a scam without knowing it's a scam. Do you think everyone at Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities knew it was a big Ponzi scheme?
- TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y agoUranus makes a complete orbit around the Sun (a year in Uranian time) in about 84 Earth years (30,687 Earth days). So you see, it's true. From a certain point of view.
- Spooky23 4y agoTesla has been collecting money for a non-existent upcoming capability for how long now? Or did they just redefine the meaning of “full self driving” to mean something other than the car fully driving itself? Then there is Uber. You could read HN archival posts where significant numbers of folks here drank the kool-aid and waved away the obvious holes in the Uber business model with “of course this is just temporary… robot cars will be doing everything in two years”. Listen to a Ben Thompson podcast when he devotes dozens of hours fawning over Uber. Full self driving is tantalizing for unethical business people because it demos so well. High minded talk about the trolley car problem and liddites shut down meaningful criticism. The engineers may be collecting big paychecks working on it, but they are hardly innocent; they are no different than employees of any other unethical corporation.
- AtlasBarfed 4y agoWhat unethical corporation do you work for? They're all unethical.
- ido 4y agoYour comment reminds me of this Dril quote: https://twitter.com/dril/status/473265809079693312 https://twitter.com/dril/status/473265809079693312 the wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: "theres actually zero difference between good & bad things. you imbecile. you fucking moron"
- batmanturkey 4y agoI sense deflection and an attempt to change the point being made above your response. It’s particularly unethical to promise a badly thought out goal that cannot be meaningfully achieved in the interests of drawing out financial support for a longer period of time. I am reminded of the person who called their intimate partner “tomorrow” because they never came.
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- kasabali 4y agoI'm sure scientists and engineers at Theranos were genuinely trying to solve the problem, too. That didn't make it a non-scam.
- randomdata 4y agoThere is nothing inherently scammy about automated blood testing, even if we currently lack the technology.
- paulryanrogers 4y agoContinuing to brand something with deceptive wording does cross over into fraud.
- randomdata 4y agoThere is room for fraud within a scope of offering undiscovered technologies, but the undiscovered technologies themselves are not fraud. Theranos isn’t comparable to self-driving cars.
- paulryanrogers 4y agoSo imagine I sell a future-looking feature which is incompete and unreliable, even causing an order of magnitude more fatalities per usage (e.g. mile) than the alternative. And continue to sell and offer it under a confusing name for years. What would have to happen for it to cross over from naive aspiration to fraud. I.e. for Tesla FSD to become like Theranos? For me that line was crossed when Tesla offered FSD on public roads, to the general public, and continuing to include 'full' and "self driving" in the name. Every day it continues more non-Tesla owners are put at risk while the government is asleep at the wheel.
- TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y agoYou mean like selling realestate on the moon?
- TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y agohttps://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CPm5LTwHrvBJCa9h5/planning-fallacy https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CPm5LTwHrvBJCa9h5/planning-f... Not a scam, juat humans being human.
- dexterlagan 4y agoThere was a time when many within the AI community thought that every problem could be solved using neural nets, tuning and lots of training. Elon truly believed them, and believed himself that if you trained a large enough network on trip recordings and/or sensor data, the network would magically come up with correct driving inputs. It seemed to work well enough on closed courses, so everybody, including Elon, thought that within a year's time we'd have figured out the kinks. That's when he made the mistake of promising FSD. Turned out, what worked in one city/country didn't work in another. And then we had inconsistent road markings, missing lane dividers, lanes going into walls, pigeons... So they had to get back to more 'conventional' machine vision combined with some neural to recognize objects. It turned out driving is a hard problem that humans happen to be very, very good at. And here we are, many years later, and the problem isn't close to being solved - and not for lack of trying. IMHO finding a solution to self-driving isn't so far from finding a way to scale intelligence enough to reach AGI. I'm sure we'll get to self-driving before we get to AGI, but solving self-driving will be a major stepping stone towards AGI. Hence Elon is now aiming square at it: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2022/01/elon-musk-must-lead-new-tesla-development-programs.html https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2022/01/elon-musk-must-lead-ne... *edit for typos.
- Ekaros 4y agoLast night I was thinking of road markings. Or sings really. Which at high level are somewhat unified across certain areas. But then you have fun list of regional variety or additional details that really do matter, but throw entirely new wrench in the works. Like simple sign of banning lorries and vans. But then having a text under it allowing vans... Not to even mention the hell that is parking and stopping prohibited signs.
- survirtual 4y agoI would just say sign perception is a trivial problem to solve. There are just so many edge cases with driving we take for granted and little standardization for local areas.
- GenerocUsername 4y agoWhile I don't own a Tesla nor have I ever even been in one, I've seen plenty of videos of Tesla's full self drive in action, and it is doing incredibly well! Driving is not a 1+1 operation. Real life is messy and their system seems to handle that mess pretty damn well for many many scenarios. I feel like people attack full self driving as if it's supposed to be better than humans on day 1, meanwhile the definition of better is impossible to agree upon.
- fragmede 4y agoPeople attack self driving because if a car hits you, you're dead or greviously injured.
- stevenhuang 4y agoThat's different from a human driver how exactly?
- badlucklottery 4y ago>That's different from a human driver how exactly? We have many decades of experience with human drivers and generally understand their shortcomings and how/when they fail. Self-driving systems tend to fail due to weird edge cases of their systems that humans can't perceive. Tesla's FSD will navigate tight, winding neighborhood roads with ease then it'll try to steer you into a construction zone on a mostly empty interstate. Weeks later they'll push an update that handles the interstate well but regresses in the neighborhood.
- cwillu 4y agoThat is to say, we have many decades of experience with human drivers running into walls and humans, and have largely given up on the problem and instead focus on making the car crumple instead of the thing it hits.
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- black_puppydog 4y agoScam or not, I've said this before and I'll say it again: self driving is a side show. Electrification? Yes, important. Getting fewer people to own and use cars altogether? Totally. But is self driving going to get us there? Think about it, all the reasons that people cite for wanting to own a car today will still be there. I don't see many people going "well now that it drives itself I won't need it in my driveway." Especially because for some fucked-up reason, the connection to "my car" is much more emotional than it should be. I'm from Germany and the attachment people have to these things is insane. There's actually some interesting psychoanalytical work about this.
- slifin 4y agoYeah it's like a parasite how much attachment there is to cars People have lots of money and passion sunk into them Children's die cast cars, children's play mats that have road networks on, city builder games that are just car centric, car TV shows, children's movies There's lots of things in our cultural fabric that make it hard to imagine anything else I suppose it's quite similar to the promotion of guns, but here in the UK we heavily restrict access to guns
- joenot443 4y agoA lot of people on this site will spend hours and thousands of dollars perfecting their desktop configuration or their mechanical keyboard setup because it’s a token of their pride and joy and a manifestation of their livelihood. I’ve met people with the same level of love and dedication for their cars, it’s just an incredibly important part of life in North America.
- black_puppydog 4y agoAnd there's a good debate to be had about the negative externalities of IT equipment, and short product release cycles! Personally I've taken to buying more second hand, and making sure my systems are upgradeable. But still, silicon and other IT stuff has insane footprints wrt water, CO2, and other pollutants... That being said, we can look at both. My point here was just that self-driving will not magically make the world better. It will, if it ever works, make cars more convenient for the people inside. But it will not address the big problems with cars, which are all about the people outside and the environment.
- SyzygistSix 4y agoJim Keller seems to think self-driving is a solvable problem. I find him more credible than Levandowski and an article that is written in a way that is not even-handed or objective at all. It starts with a premise and tries to convince rather than weighing evidence in a way intended to be objective. The article literally starts with anecdotal evidence, as if that's relevant. It's wording and construction makes its intent clear; it's an emotional appeal. I could be convinced that working on self-driving isn't worth it with a proper weighing of evidence. But this article ain't it.
- s1k3 4y agoNot a scam. A harder problem than originally thought. Also there are several companies working on this. So they’re in on the scam together? What a joke of an article. How about trying to be a little more honest about it and people might listen, or forget that this article isn’t completely biased against the tech.
- puma_ambit 4y agoPOV: The experts are busy working, the non-experts are commenting on HN threads.
- dang 4y agoEven after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33212850 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33212850 - Oct 2022 (425 comments) 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)