4 ms·

We have "self driving" cars that "work" in a very narrow set of circumstances and road conditions, but to say "it's already been done" feels....silly at best. I

We have "self driving" cars that "work" in a very narrow set of circumstances and road conditions, but to say "it's already been done" feels....silly at best. It hasn't been done, it isn't even remotely close. "but can it be done is no longer in question." You are right - it doesn't seem like it can be done at all, not in the way that most people imagine "self driving" - where you hop in your car no matter the weather, tell it where to go and it just takes you there while you sleep, and it works in every country in the world on every road like any human can drive.That doesn't seem possible this century, if ever.

jqpabc123 4y ago
All we really need is a sentient automobile --- seems easy enough /s.
- Retric 4y ago
  If you assume we need a sentient automobile to drive then we must already have them because cars are driving without drivers.
  - gambiting 4y ago
    They aren't though. I'm not aware of any example from any company anywhere. There are some really impressive examples of cruise control that works pretty well most of the time, but I wouldn't say any car "drives without drivers".
    - Retric 4y ago
      There are several examples on public streets without human drivers, random video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5eaOo-2eJM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5eaOo-2eJM Waymo, Cruise, and a few other companies are sending out empty cars to pick people up. They have off site people to remotely take over if the cars get confused, but such handoffs are in no way fast enough to deal with a safety issue and can easily scale to have thousands of cars per backup driver based on disengagement statistics. This is the same way automation has always occurred. You get the machine to deal with 90%, 99%, then 99.9% etc of cases until people move from doing job X, to being backup, to troubleshooting problems.
      - gambiting 4y ago
        Waymo and Cruise are nice demos that work in a limited set of circumstances. They are "self driving" in the same way my oven is "self cleaning". >>This is the same way automation has always occurred. You get the machine to deal with 90%, 99%, then 99.9% etc of cases until people move from doing job X, to being backup, to troubleshooting problems. Of course. We are now at maybe 20-30% coverage though. Once we are at 90%, maybe in 30-40 years, then we can start saying things like "we have self driving cars".
        Retric 4y ago
        By what metric are you suggesting 20-30% coverage? The point of these trials is to demonstrate safety not simply test limits. Waymo cars work fine in conditions and areas outside of their current tests.
        gambiting 4y ago
        >>Waymo cars work fine in conditions and areas outside of their current tests. So if you took an existing Waymo car and dropped it in a middle of a previously unmapped city, it would be "fine"?
        Retric 4y ago
        Any US city. Waymo depends on GPS style maps not high resolution LiDAR maps, so they already have maps of every city on the planet. The software however isn’t setup for non US road signs and laws for every country on the planet. PS: I am ignoring sanity checks that would need to be removed. They are setup to be geofenced so it’s going to reject any destination outside of those until someone updates a confit file. That’s just good engineering not some abstract limitation.
  - jqpabc123 4y ago
    You have pilot test cars moving along carefully mapped paths in some specific urban locations. You also have test trucks moving along some specific interstates (which I would expect to be a somewhat easier task) but with backup human drivers on board. Neither of these is capable of being placed into a random environment and actually "driving" from environmental feedback with minimal directions (turn left, go right, stop) --- which most any human driver can easily do.
    - Retric 4y ago
      The difference between pre mapped and random environment disappears once you map all roads in a finite roadway network. It only takes ~70 drivers to cross every public road in the US once a year, that’s hardly a major investment compared to the utility of self driving cars. Really it’s little different than many modern drivers being dependent on the GPS for long trips.
      - jqpabc123 4y ago
        The difference between pre mapped and random environment disappears once you map all roads in a finite roadway network. Once you map all the roads and account for very imaginable situation and scenario --- the unexpected and unanticipated will still occur.
        Retric 4y ago
        In unexpected situations they avoid obstacles just like people do. Mapping isn’t about unexpected situations beyond the loss of GPS.
        gambiting 4y ago
        No they don't, that's nonsense. A Tesla FSD just gives up control deciding it has no idea what to do, often with literally 3 second notice. I've driven it and it's the most dangerous system out there - because it seems so good, right up to a point where it completely relinquishes control, leaving you in the middle of a busy intersection, or in traffic behind a cyclist which it literally doesn't know what to do with. "Just like people do" is only true if you see 7 year olds driving around, I imagine they would have similar capacity to make decisions on the road as Tesla FSD does. Except I imagine even a 7 year old wouldn't just let go of the wheel completely.
  - ripe 4y ago
    I don't know about "sentient", but yes, cars "have been driving without drivers" for decades. Those are limted demos, not actual, useful self-driving cars. Big difference! Extract from [1]: The basic navigation problem has been "solved" for decades. Back in Carnegie Mellon University in 1990, I watched a NavLab van rolling down a trail in Schenley Park behind my graduate student office. Since then, every few years we've been hearing announcements about how self-driving cars were just around the corner. But between demos and actual products lies a huge chasm. Today, not only do self-driving cars still not exist after billions of dollars and decades of investment, but the experts admit that they are at least a decade away. And no, you don't get to nit-pick what "self-driving car" means. It still means that I can get in, tell it to go to a destination that I would normally drive to, and then I can go to sleep. That's what's known in the trade as "Level 5" autonomy. Anything less than that is not the life-changing promise that attracts all this investment and press. If your car can operate only on a few roads, then it's no better than one of those people-mover trains at airports. Those are driverless, too. [1] https://www.robotsinplainenglish.com/e/2021-08-29-humanoid.html https://www.robotsinplainenglish.com/e/2021-08-29-humanoid.h...
    - Retric 4y ago
      That article’s entire premise falls apart based on a single line you skipped over: If your car can operate only on a few roads, then it's no better than one of those people-mover trains at airports. Coverage area doesn’t somehow require intelligence and these systems operate on far more than a few roads. The same hardware and software could operate on every road in the US at which it would ‘suddenly be intelligent’ even though nothing changed. Look people always say whatever AI systems can do isn’t intelligent as soon as they can do it. Chess used to be considered a bastion of human supremacy over machines, then go, now the last gasps of self driving. In 20 years people will say self driving cars aren’t intelligent because they don’t work in North Korea, even as young slowly people stop learning how to drive the same way humanity largely forgot how to drive a horse and buggy.
      - ripe 4y ago
        > Coverage area doesn't somehow require intelligence Coverage area is required for practical self-driving solutions, and today's ML based efforts are not close to producing it. If you measure intelligence in this context by the ability to drive on any roads anywhere, then humans are beating the crap out of "AI".
Retric 4y ago
There is no reason to assume weather is more difficult to deal with than sunny conditions in comparison to human drivers. Car sensors have larger advantages in bad weather than human drivers and they’ve already been demonstrated to work in rain, fog, and snow. These companies are avoiding bad weather for the same reason human drivers do, they simply have zero reason to take risks.
- gambiting 4y ago
  See, this I completely agree with. But OP said that we already have this and now we're basically facing a price/marketing problem and we have self driving cars otherwise - and we definitely don't.

jqpabc123 4y ago

All we really need is a sentient automobile --- seems easy enough /s.

Retric 4y ago
If you assume we need a sentient automobile to drive then we must already have them because cars are driving without drivers.
- gambiting 4y ago
  They aren't though. I'm not aware of any example from any company anywhere. There are some really impressive examples of cruise control that works pretty well most of the time, but I wouldn't say any car "drives without drivers".
  - Retric 4y ago
    There are several examples on public streets without human drivers, random video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5eaOo-2eJM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5eaOo-2eJM Waymo, Cruise, and a few other companies are sending out empty cars to pick people up. They have off site people to remotely take over if the cars get confused, but such handoffs are in no way fast enough to deal with a safety issue and can easily scale to have thousands of cars per backup driver based on disengagement statistics. This is the same way automation has always occurred. You get the machine to deal with 90%, 99%, then 99.9% etc of cases until people move from doing job X, to being backup, to troubleshooting problems.
    - gambiting 4y ago
      Waymo and Cruise are nice demos that work in a limited set of circumstances. They are "self driving" in the same way my oven is "self cleaning". >>This is the same way automation has always occurred. You get the machine to deal with 90%, 99%, then 99.9% etc of cases until people move from doing job X, to being backup, to troubleshooting problems. Of course. We are now at maybe 20-30% coverage though. Once we are at 90%, maybe in 30-40 years, then we can start saying things like "we have self driving cars".
      - Retric 4y ago
        By what metric are you suggesting 20-30% coverage? The point of these trials is to demonstrate safety not simply test limits. Waymo cars work fine in conditions and areas outside of their current tests.
        gambiting 4y ago
        >>Waymo cars work fine in conditions and areas outside of their current tests. So if you took an existing Waymo car and dropped it in a middle of a previously unmapped city, it would be "fine"?
        Retric 4y ago
        Any US city. Waymo depends on GPS style maps not high resolution LiDAR maps, so they already have maps of every city on the planet. The software however isn’t setup for non US road signs and laws for every country on the planet. PS: I am ignoring sanity checks that would need to be removed. They are setup to be geofenced so it’s going to reject any destination outside of those until someone updates a confit file. That’s just good engineering not some abstract limitation.
- jqpabc123 4y ago
  You have pilot test cars moving along carefully mapped paths in some specific urban locations. You also have test trucks moving along some specific interstates (which I would expect to be a somewhat easier task) but with backup human drivers on board. Neither of these is capable of being placed into a random environment and actually "driving" from environmental feedback with minimal directions (turn left, go right, stop) --- which most any human driver can easily do.
  - Retric 4y ago
    The difference between pre mapped and random environment disappears once you map all roads in a finite roadway network. It only takes ~70 drivers to cross every public road in the US once a year, that’s hardly a major investment compared to the utility of self driving cars. Really it’s little different than many modern drivers being dependent on the GPS for long trips.
    - jqpabc123 4y ago
      The difference between pre mapped and random environment disappears once you map all roads in a finite roadway network. Once you map all the roads and account for very imaginable situation and scenario --- the unexpected and unanticipated will still occur.
      - Retric 4y ago
        In unexpected situations they avoid obstacles just like people do. Mapping isn’t about unexpected situations beyond the loss of GPS.
        gambiting 4y ago
        No they don't, that's nonsense. A Tesla FSD just gives up control deciding it has no idea what to do, often with literally 3 second notice. I've driven it and it's the most dangerous system out there - because it seems so good, right up to a point where it completely relinquishes control, leaving you in the middle of a busy intersection, or in traffic behind a cyclist which it literally doesn't know what to do with. "Just like people do" is only true if you see 7 year olds driving around, I imagine they would have similar capacity to make decisions on the road as Tesla FSD does. Except I imagine even a 7 year old wouldn't just let go of the wheel completely.
- ripe 4y ago
  I don't know about "sentient", but yes, cars "have been driving without drivers" for decades. Those are limted demos, not actual, useful self-driving cars. Big difference! Extract from [1]: The basic navigation problem has been "solved" for decades. Back in Carnegie Mellon University in 1990, I watched a NavLab van rolling down a trail in Schenley Park behind my graduate student office. Since then, every few years we've been hearing announcements about how self-driving cars were just around the corner. But between demos and actual products lies a huge chasm. Today, not only do self-driving cars still not exist after billions of dollars and decades of investment, but the experts admit that they are at least a decade away. And no, you don't get to nit-pick what "self-driving car" means. It still means that I can get in, tell it to go to a destination that I would normally drive to, and then I can go to sleep. That's what's known in the trade as "Level 5" autonomy. Anything less than that is not the life-changing promise that attracts all this investment and press. If your car can operate only on a few roads, then it's no better than one of those people-mover trains at airports. Those are driverless, too. [1] https://www.robotsinplainenglish.com/e/2021-08-29-humanoid.html https://www.robotsinplainenglish.com/e/2021-08-29-humanoid.h...
  - Retric 4y ago
    That article’s entire premise falls apart based on a single line you skipped over: If your car can operate only on a few roads, then it's no better than one of those people-mover trains at airports. Coverage area doesn’t somehow require intelligence and these systems operate on far more than a few roads. The same hardware and software could operate on every road in the US at which it would ‘suddenly be intelligent’ even though nothing changed. Look people always say whatever AI systems can do isn’t intelligent as soon as they can do it. Chess used to be considered a bastion of human supremacy over machines, then go, now the last gasps of self driving. In 20 years people will say self driving cars aren’t intelligent because they don’t work in North Korea, even as young slowly people stop learning how to drive the same way humanity largely forgot how to drive a horse and buggy.
    - ripe 4y ago
      > Coverage area doesn't somehow require intelligence Coverage area is required for practical self-driving solutions, and today's ML based efforts are not close to producing it. If you measure intelligence in this context by the ability to drive on any roads anywhere, then humans are beating the crap out of "AI".

Retric 4y ago

There is no reason to assume weather is more difficult to deal with than sunny conditions in comparison to human drivers. Car sensors have larger advantages in bad weather than human drivers and they’ve already been demonstrated to work in rain, fog, and snow. These companies are avoiding bad weather for the same reason human drivers do, they simply have zero reason to take risks.

gambiting 4y ago
See, this I completely agree with. But OP said that we already have this and now we're basically facing a price/marketing problem and we have self driving cars otherwise - and we definitely don't.