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There’s a parallel with self driving cars. We could make them go around a track autonomously in 2007, and so a lot of people were thinking “how much harder coul

There’s a parallel with self driving cars. We could make them go around a track autonomously in 2007, and so a lot of people were thinking “how much harder could it be to get this driving anywhere? We will have these everywhere in 5 years!” 15 years later and we are perpetually “5 years out”. Yes you can take a taxi ride in a closed circuit, but that’s much closer to where we were in 2007 than where we thought we’d be today, and it took 15 years to get here.

martythemaniak 4y ago
Unless you consider Phoenix or San Francisco to be "closed tracks", that's 100% factually wrong.
- cmontella 4y ago
  Yes, I do. The point is we didn’t solve the general case, we just learned how to scale the specific case that was demoed in 2007. This is like building a ladder to the moon; it’ll get you closer, but it’ll never get you to the moon.
  - bufferoverflow 4y ago
    You are factually wrong. The general case is being solved. Self-driving systems are objectively better every year, and will eventually reach human level safety. You can literally watch cars self-driving in all kinds of places and conditions. Yes, they make mistakes. So do humans.
    - cmontella 4y ago
      See my comment about the moon ladder. Progress is nice, and I’m not saying there hasn’t been progress. But there is no indication that the methods of today that work to make taxi cabs in SF drivable will lead to a general-case self driving machine as promised for so many years. The fact that the two cases that work best have a similar climate to the 2007 DUC really highlights the reality that these methods haven’t been proven to scale generally. The industry is still chasing that 2007 success, and it’s not surprising that over 15 years they’ve improved that. But do I need to link to all the promises from CEOs about where they thought we’d be today? Those predictions were based on the idea that the DUC prototypes would be more generally applicable. The successes since then have shown we can make the experience better, but don’t show we can solve autonomous driving in the general case.
      - verdverm 4y ago
        Google/Waymo demo'd the AI driving in a snow storm and the method they used to see through the flakes and maintain object detection. Having trouble finding the video I'm thinking of. Here are some videos related to self-driving in snow and progress on weird edge cases. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kx7fHEhnIZk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kx7fHEhnIZk (snow, like the google demo) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSX3qdy0dFg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSX3qdy0dFg | https://youtu.be/LSX3qdy0dFg?t=2229 https://youtu.be/LSX3qdy0dFg?t=2229 (snow, but not the one I was thinking of)
    - goatlover 4y ago
      So when will these self-driving cars be ready for mass consumption? Because they're starting to sound like flying cars at this point. Yes, technically doable and there are always some working prototypes, but no real market, and not seen as practical.
      - bufferoverflow 4y ago
        We have flying cars.
        goatlover 4y ago
        Where can I purchase one to use on the road when I'm not flying (helicopters don't count as cars).
      - dsr_ 4y ago
        Helicopters -- hold on -- and light general aviation are our best extant examples of flying cars. Here's what we should learn from them: - at current traffic levels, accidents are rare - but fatality rates are high (20% of helicopter accidents) - the commercial carriers have much better accident statistics than general aviation - commuter and on-demand flights are much worse than commercial scheduled flights - rather more than half of all accidents have a root incident near an airport - taxi-ing, departure, initial climb, approach, landing. My conclusion is that mass adoption of flying cars (as in, millions of people piloting small aircraft with varying levels of maintenance, safety inspections, training, and traffic control) would be a terrifyingly foreseeable disaster. On the other hand, I hold out real hope for fully autonomous vehicles being potentially safer than a distracted teenager on the road.
      - fragmede 4y ago
        Soon? As a member of the general public I got opted into the Cruise beta. Took a ride from point A to point B. It had to be within a small service zone, and I have no idea how much mapping was needed to accomplish this, and thus have no idea how long it'll take for them to expand the service area, but it works! It cost $12 and I hailed it via the Cruise app. I dunno, I suppose GM could just fire the whole team and lose the code on a USB stick and just give up, but that hardly seems likely.
    - lm28469 4y ago
      > will eventually reach human level safety That's a very strong statement with not much to back it up. They drive fine in straight, wide, sunny, south US roads (and even there not always), they struggle even in US cities, put them in any European country and it's game over. Mountain roads in swizerland during a snow storm ? Foggy twisty roads in the woods ? These won't be solved easily, even Waymo's ceo acknowledged that fully autonomous cars won't be able to drive everywhere.
danbruc 4y ago
We could make them go around a track autonomously in 2007 [...] This we could actually do 20 years earlier. [1] A first culmination point was achieved in 1994, when their twin robot vehicles VaMP and VITA-2 drove more than 1,000 kilometres (620 mi) on a Paris multi-lane highway in standard heavy traffic at speeds up to 130 kilometres per hour (81 mph). They demonstrated autonomous driving in free lanes, convoy driving, automatic tracking of other vehicles, and lane changes left and right with autonomous passing of other cars. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_Prometheus_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_Prometheus_Project
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

martythemaniak 4y ago

Unless you consider Phoenix or San Francisco to be "closed tracks", that's 100% factually wrong.

cmontella 4y ago
Yes, I do. The point is we didn’t solve the general case, we just learned how to scale the specific case that was demoed in 2007. This is like building a ladder to the moon; it’ll get you closer, but it’ll never get you to the moon.
- bufferoverflow 4y ago
  You are factually wrong. The general case is being solved. Self-driving systems are objectively better every year, and will eventually reach human level safety. You can literally watch cars self-driving in all kinds of places and conditions. Yes, they make mistakes. So do humans.
  - cmontella 4y ago
    See my comment about the moon ladder. Progress is nice, and I’m not saying there hasn’t been progress. But there is no indication that the methods of today that work to make taxi cabs in SF drivable will lead to a general-case self driving machine as promised for so many years. The fact that the two cases that work best have a similar climate to the 2007 DUC really highlights the reality that these methods haven’t been proven to scale generally. The industry is still chasing that 2007 success, and it’s not surprising that over 15 years they’ve improved that. But do I need to link to all the promises from CEOs about where they thought we’d be today? Those predictions were based on the idea that the DUC prototypes would be more generally applicable. The successes since then have shown we can make the experience better, but don’t show we can solve autonomous driving in the general case.
    - verdverm 4y ago
      Google/Waymo demo'd the AI driving in a snow storm and the method they used to see through the flakes and maintain object detection. Having trouble finding the video I'm thinking of. Here are some videos related to self-driving in snow and progress on weird edge cases. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kx7fHEhnIZk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kx7fHEhnIZk (snow, like the google demo) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSX3qdy0dFg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSX3qdy0dFg | https://youtu.be/LSX3qdy0dFg?t=2229 https://youtu.be/LSX3qdy0dFg?t=2229 (snow, but not the one I was thinking of)
  - goatlover 4y ago
    So when will these self-driving cars be ready for mass consumption? Because they're starting to sound like flying cars at this point. Yes, technically doable and there are always some working prototypes, but no real market, and not seen as practical.
    - bufferoverflow 4y ago
      We have flying cars.
      - goatlover 4y ago
        Where can I purchase one to use on the road when I'm not flying (helicopters don't count as cars).
    - dsr_ 4y ago
      Helicopters -- hold on -- and light general aviation are our best extant examples of flying cars. Here's what we should learn from them: - at current traffic levels, accidents are rare - but fatality rates are high (20% of helicopter accidents) - the commercial carriers have much better accident statistics than general aviation - commuter and on-demand flights are much worse than commercial scheduled flights - rather more than half of all accidents have a root incident near an airport - taxi-ing, departure, initial climb, approach, landing. My conclusion is that mass adoption of flying cars (as in, millions of people piloting small aircraft with varying levels of maintenance, safety inspections, training, and traffic control) would be a terrifyingly foreseeable disaster. On the other hand, I hold out real hope for fully autonomous vehicles being potentially safer than a distracted teenager on the road.
    - fragmede 4y ago
      Soon? As a member of the general public I got opted into the Cruise beta. Took a ride from point A to point B. It had to be within a small service zone, and I have no idea how much mapping was needed to accomplish this, and thus have no idea how long it'll take for them to expand the service area, but it works! It cost $12 and I hailed it via the Cruise app. I dunno, I suppose GM could just fire the whole team and lose the code on a USB stick and just give up, but that hardly seems likely.
  - lm28469 4y ago
    > will eventually reach human level safety That's a very strong statement with not much to back it up. They drive fine in straight, wide, sunny, south US roads (and even there not always), they struggle even in US cities, put them in any European country and it's game over. Mountain roads in swizerland during a snow storm ? Foggy twisty roads in the woods ? These won't be solved easily, even Waymo's ceo acknowledged that fully autonomous cars won't be able to drive everywhere.

danbruc 4y ago

We could make them go around a track autonomously in 2007 [...] This we could actually do 20 years earlier. [1] A first culmination point was achieved in 1994, when their twin robot vehicles VaMP and VITA-2 drove more than 1,000 kilometres (620 mi) on a Paris multi-lane highway in standard heavy traffic at speeds up to 130 kilometres per hour (81 mph). They demonstrated autonomous driving in free lanes, convoy driving, automatic tracking of other vehicles, and lane changes left and right with autonomous passing of other cars. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_Prometheus_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_Prometheus_Project

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]