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Does anyone have (or has anyone read) any smart summary/analysis about the phase we find ourselves in with the autonomous driving industry? Is it like CVML was

Does anyone have (or has anyone read) any smart summary/analysis about the phase we find ourselves in with the autonomous driving industry? Is it like CVML was in a desert for some decade(s) where there were no big advances, but lots of hope and unrealized claims of some impending breakthrough, only for lots of money to be dumped into it, and companies to be led astray? Are we waiting for some major improvement in algorithms, or hardware, like GPU progress, and things will suddenly take off? Or are there fundamental difficulties that are startups (and their researchers) keep banging their heads against thinking that they're the ones to be able to solve it? Or just that they need to go through the same mistakes over and over but make little progress? It seems to have been a decade and what, $20B poured into this, but we are really not much closer to the goal? (and I'm not even sure whether we mean solving the AV problem, much less achieving a viable business model) Sure Waymo is driving in San Francisco, but that seems like a very handheld single example.

lnsru 4y ago
It’s closer to 3 decades today starting with European project: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_Prometheus_Project https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_Prometheus_Project Looks like, that some problems can’t be solved just throwing money at them. Modern hardware is light years away from the one in Prometheus Project. Radars, lidars and cameras are superior now. Heck one can design and build dedicated ASIC for cheap nowadays. Maybe taking Nvidia Drive and tweaking it is just not enough to get there.
dvh 4y ago
Autonomous driving is in "principally works but lawsuits haven't started yet" phase.
thrashh 4y ago
The way I think about is that when we drive as humans and an obstacle appears, we have over 15 years of knowledge that we have to determine our next step. And we coalesce a lifetime of knowledge in a matter of seconds. These modern algorithms do not try to implement general AI. They do not work with 15 years of knowledge. They just recognize some patterns with no understanding of what they’re are looking at. It’s a different and easier approach but I think it has some severe limits that will never be overcome. To me it’s like a software programmer that copies Stack Overflow snippets but doesn’t really understand programming. They get only so far
- kugelblitz 4y ago
  I would feel much safer having a more advanced AI (not the current ones) driving cars. It's not like humans get better at driving with each year of driving. Some become more reckless, people become old, some might think they can have some drinks before sitting behind the wheel and it takes 15 years to get 15 years of experience. What about that over-confident 19 year old who wants to show off their "skills"? And 15 years of one driver's perception of safe driving is nothing compared to swarm intelligence of AI for driving. If you have 10,000 autonomous vehicles driving for a single day and combine that data at the end of that day to improve driving, that's collectively over 25 years (assuming the human equivalent drives each day of the year) of "knowledge" in one single day. Every day. Being a father with 2 small kids who drives their kids by bike to kindergarten / school - with a large section of that road is shared by SUVs, vans and bikes (while each side is blocked by parked cars or narrow garage exits built into the building), I can't wait for safe, autonomous vehicles to become the norm.
  - ars 4y ago
    > I would feel much safer having a more advanced AI (not the current ones) driving cars. You shouldn't, there is no AI capable of doing better than a human, and there does not appear to be any currently known method of creating one. > I can't wait for safe, autonomous vehicles to become the norm. I wish I could tell you different, but the reality is you could wait the rest of your life and it would not happen.
    - xapata 4y ago
      I remember people saying no computer could ever beat the best humans at chess.
      - nmfisher 4y ago
        Would you be willing to play a computer at chess if there was a possibility on any given move that it would squash you like a pancake?
poulpy123 4y ago
Manifestly statistics and massive data does not replace reasoning
chx 4y ago
The problem with autonomous driving is if you were to swap all cars on the road to autonomous ones and banned pedestrians and cyclists except for traffic light controlled crossings, it would go swimmingly. Barring that, it's absolutely impossible. It's not a kind of problem where more powerful hardware in five or ten years will just magically solve it. Cyclists, pedestrians but even cars in a parking -- it's not just a moving object, it's a human giving clues which we can read based on experience. You are veering into full artificial vision if you want to read this.
- sofixa 4y ago
  > The problem with autonomous driving is if you were to swap all cars on the road to autonomous ones and banned pedestrians and cyclists except for traffic light controlled crossings, it would go swimmingly Would it? Teslas, the cars with most widely deployed autonomous driving system (unlike say Waymo which is still geographically fenced), get confused by regular things such as lights (stop lights getting interpreted as a red light) and vehicles in front.
  - datpiff 4y ago
    Presumably with a full replacement we would also replace all the stop signs and lights.
urthor 4y ago
Mathematically, zero human supervision driving is close to impossible. It's simply almost impossible to guarantee, and convince society's institutions, a computer car will perform better than a human. And if a human still has to be sitting in the driver's seat paying attention? The financial justification flies out of the window.
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  More importantly, if the robo car IS ACTUALLY safer than average human drivers (which is a stupidly low bar because that includes drunk and distracted driving), but has extremely weird, unpredictable failure modes like suddenly driving off a bridge with no warning 1 out of 1,000,000 times, how safe do you feel riding in this car? People don't like working with systems that have utterly inscrutable error conditions. The devil you know is much better.
  - theluketaylor 4y ago
    I've heard it said the single best thing that could be done for airline safety is getting rid of pilots since most crashes are the result of pilot error. Then ask yourself if you would get on a plane without anyone flying it. Driving is one of the most dangerous activities people undertake on a regular basis, yet we are all numb to the risk since it's just normal. Changing a major variable in the risk profile of driving by introducing autonomous cars is a big deal since the failure modes are so foreign. I think the autonomous vehicle resources should be more focused in the short term in making "uncrashable" cars as we're a long way off from true autonomy. Systems like automatic emergency braking that live in the background and act when the driver is making a serious error to prevent or dramatically reduce the impact of an event the car is certain will occur.
    - xboxnolifes 4y ago
      > I've heard it said the single best thing that could be done for airline safety is getting rid of pilots since most crashes are the result of pilot error. Then ask yourself if you would get on a plane without anyone flying it. The first one? Probably not. But going but a lot of comments here and else where, there are plenty of other people willing to be early adopters. People already do some pretty stupid shit with Tesla Autopilot. 5 years in with statistics to show? Yes, I would. Of course, that logic of removing pilots could be completely flawed based on the chance that the only reason the pilots failed at all was because they had to step in when the automated systems could not handle the situation.
zulban 4y ago
I love how you asked people to share a smart summary and analysis, but all you got was hackernews comment pontifications. Folks: pretty sure they meant a researched article that takes longer than a poop to write. I'm interested in this too.
greendestiny_re 4y ago
The Starsky postmortem 2-parter published on Medium reveals that: 1) true autonomy is worth less than a cup of coffee a day 2) safety isn't sexy 3) nobody knows which features sell.

lnsru 4y ago

It’s closer to 3 decades today starting with European project: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_Prometheus_Project https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_Prometheus_Project Looks like, that some problems can’t be solved just throwing money at them. Modern hardware is light years away from the one in Prometheus Project. Radars, lidars and cameras are superior now. Heck one can design and build dedicated ASIC for cheap nowadays. Maybe taking Nvidia Drive and tweaking it is just not enough to get there.

dvh 4y ago

Autonomous driving is in "principally works but lawsuits haven't started yet" phase.

thrashh 4y ago

The way I think about is that when we drive as humans and an obstacle appears, we have over 15 years of knowledge that we have to determine our next step. And we coalesce a lifetime of knowledge in a matter of seconds. These modern algorithms do not try to implement general AI. They do not work with 15 years of knowledge. They just recognize some patterns with no understanding of what they’re are looking at. It’s a different and easier approach but I think it has some severe limits that will never be overcome. To me it’s like a software programmer that copies Stack Overflow snippets but doesn’t really understand programming. They get only so far

kugelblitz 4y ago
I would feel much safer having a more advanced AI (not the current ones) driving cars. It's not like humans get better at driving with each year of driving. Some become more reckless, people become old, some might think they can have some drinks before sitting behind the wheel and it takes 15 years to get 15 years of experience. What about that over-confident 19 year old who wants to show off their "skills"? And 15 years of one driver's perception of safe driving is nothing compared to swarm intelligence of AI for driving. If you have 10,000 autonomous vehicles driving for a single day and combine that data at the end of that day to improve driving, that's collectively over 25 years (assuming the human equivalent drives each day of the year) of "knowledge" in one single day. Every day. Being a father with 2 small kids who drives their kids by bike to kindergarten / school - with a large section of that road is shared by SUVs, vans and bikes (while each side is blocked by parked cars or narrow garage exits built into the building), I can't wait for safe, autonomous vehicles to become the norm.
- ars 4y ago
  > I would feel much safer having a more advanced AI (not the current ones) driving cars. You shouldn't, there is no AI capable of doing better than a human, and there does not appear to be any currently known method of creating one. > I can't wait for safe, autonomous vehicles to become the norm. I wish I could tell you different, but the reality is you could wait the rest of your life and it would not happen.
  - xapata 4y ago
    I remember people saying no computer could ever beat the best humans at chess.
    - nmfisher 4y ago
      Would you be willing to play a computer at chess if there was a possibility on any given move that it would squash you like a pancake?

poulpy123 4y ago

Manifestly statistics and massive data does not replace reasoning

chx 4y ago

The problem with autonomous driving is if you were to swap all cars on the road to autonomous ones and banned pedestrians and cyclists except for traffic light controlled crossings, it would go swimmingly. Barring that, it's absolutely impossible. It's not a kind of problem where more powerful hardware in five or ten years will just magically solve it. Cyclists, pedestrians but even cars in a parking -- it's not just a moving object, it's a human giving clues which we can read based on experience. You are veering into full artificial vision if you want to read this.

sofixa 4y ago
> The problem with autonomous driving is if you were to swap all cars on the road to autonomous ones and banned pedestrians and cyclists except for traffic light controlled crossings, it would go swimmingly Would it? Teslas, the cars with most widely deployed autonomous driving system (unlike say Waymo which is still geographically fenced), get confused by regular things such as lights (stop lights getting interpreted as a red light) and vehicles in front.
- datpiff 4y ago
  Presumably with a full replacement we would also replace all the stop signs and lights.

urthor 4y ago

Mathematically, zero human supervision driving is close to impossible. It's simply almost impossible to guarantee, and convince society's institutions, a computer car will perform better than a human. And if a human still has to be sitting in the driver's seat paying attention? The financial justification flies out of the window.

mrguyorama 4y ago
More importantly, if the robo car IS ACTUALLY safer than average human drivers (which is a stupidly low bar because that includes drunk and distracted driving), but has extremely weird, unpredictable failure modes like suddenly driving off a bridge with no warning 1 out of 1,000,000 times, how safe do you feel riding in this car? People don't like working with systems that have utterly inscrutable error conditions. The devil you know is much better.
- theluketaylor 4y ago
  I've heard it said the single best thing that could be done for airline safety is getting rid of pilots since most crashes are the result of pilot error. Then ask yourself if you would get on a plane without anyone flying it. Driving is one of the most dangerous activities people undertake on a regular basis, yet we are all numb to the risk since it's just normal. Changing a major variable in the risk profile of driving by introducing autonomous cars is a big deal since the failure modes are so foreign. I think the autonomous vehicle resources should be more focused in the short term in making "uncrashable" cars as we're a long way off from true autonomy. Systems like automatic emergency braking that live in the background and act when the driver is making a serious error to prevent or dramatically reduce the impact of an event the car is certain will occur.
  - xboxnolifes 4y ago
    > I've heard it said the single best thing that could be done for airline safety is getting rid of pilots since most crashes are the result of pilot error. Then ask yourself if you would get on a plane without anyone flying it. The first one? Probably not. But going but a lot of comments here and else where, there are plenty of other people willing to be early adopters. People already do some pretty stupid shit with Tesla Autopilot. 5 years in with statistics to show? Yes, I would. Of course, that logic of removing pilots could be completely flawed based on the chance that the only reason the pilots failed at all was because they had to step in when the automated systems could not handle the situation.

zulban 4y ago

I love how you asked people to share a smart summary and analysis, but all you got was hackernews comment pontifications. Folks: pretty sure they meant a researched article that takes longer than a poop to write. I'm interested in this too.

greendestiny_re 4y ago

The Starsky postmortem 2-parter published on Medium reveals that: 1) true autonomy is worth less than a cup of coffee a day 2) safety isn't sexy 3) nobody knows which features sell.