5 ms·

The mix of unconstrained input (the real world, not a lab, not a simu, not a factory) and safety-critical output make this kind of problem particularly hard to

The mix of unconstrained input (the real world, not a lab, not a simu, not a factory) and safety-critical output make this kind of problem particularly hard to tackle. I don’t understand why anyone could think that it would be easy or fast. Guys like Elon or Geohot have been simply delusional. I think that being naïvely over optimistic is a good trait for innovation engineering, but we should also manage expectations… Nothing is done until it’s done, proof is in the pudding.

rektide 3y ago
It's just crazy because you can get to driving great 99.99999% of the time very very quickly. The unceasing attention & ability to keep track of known unknowns is a huge superpower versus humans. But all the other cases, that wild element of reality, is so endlessly widely puzzling.
- monero-xmr 3y ago
  The amount of engineering, testing, rigor, and so on for a rover on Mars is stunning. And they are working with much more constrained environments without human actors. Society won’t accept robots that kill people. You can bring out statistics until you are blue in the face, but a major reason car accidents are tolerated is that a person can be convicted if they break the law. A faceless AI that hides behind insurance won’t cut it. Enthusiasts of self-driving cars can be hyper-logical about statistics, safety analyses, etc. while simultaneously ignoring all the other areas of political life that are based on emotion rather than rational logic. If we can’t convince huge fractions of society about basic truths - pick whatever truths you are passionate about that half the country disbelieves - why do you think society will accept robot cars that cause accidents (even 1)? It’s not going to happen.
  - hamilyon2 3y ago
    Exactly this, or something very close to this already happened in history. There was a time it was legal for pedestrians to just walk on the road. Now it is illegal and nobody blames "killer bolt" or it's operator if this person is hurt. Society adapted around technology, not the other way around. The other example is of course railroads and trains. People literally made laws and diminish freedoms of people to allow giant polluting noisy hazardous carriages do their thing and punish anyone who impeded them harshly. No reason to think it can't happen third time. We just adapt roads, laws and customs to tell people e.g. "if a purple vehicle on purple road kills you, it is 100% your fault because this law says so". And other nations will have to accept it too because nobody wants to be outcompeted.
  - d0mine 3y ago
    "Despite claims to the contrary, self-driving cars currently have a _higher_ rate of accidents than human-driven cars, but the injuries are less severe. On average, there are 9.1 self-driving car accidents per million miles driven, while the same rate is 4.1 crashes per million miles for regular vehicles." https://www.natlawreview.com/article/dangers-driverless-cars#:~:text=Despite%20claims%20to%20the%20contrary,million%20miles%20for%20regular%20vehicles https://www.natlawreview.com/article/dangers-driverless-cars.... I didn't know that statistics for self-driving car is that good (just 2x worse than humans). Last time I've checked, it was an order of magnitude worse. Perhaps, the statistics is for ideal conditions.
bodge5000 3y ago
> I don’t understand why anyone could think that it would be easy or fast. Because progress went so quickly from "cars are entirely human operated" to "cars can nearly drive themselves", so it's assumed that progress will continue at that pace. We've made this mistake time and time again before self driving cars and evidently continue to make that mistake now
- chii 3y ago
  as a percentage of accidents, i would imagine autodriving cars are less than human driven cars. It's still flawed atm, but surely it will continue to improve. Not to mention that the average human is already terrible a driver, and replacing them with autodriving surely nets more benefits than the flaws of autodriving - if not at this moment, then very soon in the future.
  - resolutebat 3y ago
    The problem is that whenever a human driven car reverses over a toddler or wraps around a telephone pole or veers across lanes into oncoming traffic or blows through a red light and T-bones someone, nobody cares because it happens all the time, but when a self-driving car does, murderbot outrage makes frontpage news all over the world. So even though we rationally should immediately go all in on automation as soon as self-driving cars are on average safer than human ones, realistically this is politically completely unpalatable until they reach a much, much higher, possibly unachievable, standard. It's not "fair" that this is the case, but unfortunately humans are really bad at accurately assessing the risks of low probability incidents (eg. dying from terrorism), especially if they get a lot of media airtime.
    - shash 3y ago
      The liability problem is important here - when someone reverses over a toddler, someone gets sued. Or they lose their license. Or $CONSEQUENCE. What's the consequence in an autonomous vehicle? Does only _that_ vehicle lose its license? Does every vehicle with that particular revision of the ML model? The whole fleet? The next problem is, you're assuming that the autonomous vehicle is going to be _better_ than the human; it may have more information, may be faster in its response time, but maybe in a chaotic environment, that doesn't translate into drastically improved safety. Unless of course, _everything_ on the road is self-driving (meaning, zero pedestrians, zero other vehicles, no animals,...) which is going to run into chicken-egg...
piyh 3y ago
Geohot might be delusional, but his company has a value proposition that's viable.
grecy 3y ago
> * I don’t understand why anyone could think that it would be easy or fast * Like electric cars, or landing rockets, or even getting to the moon. I don't think anyone honestly thought self driving cars would be easy or fast, but they're getting better every single month, and sooner or later they're going to be better than human drivers.
- jackmott42 3y ago
  are they getting better every month? a company like Waymo may have good data on this. Tesla updates seem to be doing more like a random walk.
Fricken 3y ago
Geohot never made any delusional or outrageous claims. His company set out to build and ship an advanced driver assist system and they did.
- IshKebab 3y ago
  Oh really? https://www.forbes.com/sites/aarontilley/2016/09/13/george-hotz-promises-self-driving-car-kit-for-1000-before-end-of-year/amp/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/aarontilley/2016/09/13/george-h...
  - Fricken 3y ago
    Yeah, what's the issue?
runarberg 3y ago
What baffles me is that it is relatively easy to make most transportation needs very predictable under a very controlled setting. And we have been doing it for a while, we have even been operating self driving vehicles on these corridors that transport millions of people every day. Fully automatic train systems are a proof that it can be done, but lack of imagination among policy makers makes them think the only way forward is with privately owned consumer market cars.

rektide 3y ago

It's just crazy because you can get to driving great 99.99999% of the time very very quickly. The unceasing attention & ability to keep track of known unknowns is a huge superpower versus humans. But all the other cases, that wild element of reality, is so endlessly widely puzzling.

monero-xmr 3y ago
The amount of engineering, testing, rigor, and so on for a rover on Mars is stunning. And they are working with much more constrained environments without human actors. Society won’t accept robots that kill people. You can bring out statistics until you are blue in the face, but a major reason car accidents are tolerated is that a person can be convicted if they break the law. A faceless AI that hides behind insurance won’t cut it. Enthusiasts of self-driving cars can be hyper-logical about statistics, safety analyses, etc. while simultaneously ignoring all the other areas of political life that are based on emotion rather than rational logic. If we can’t convince huge fractions of society about basic truths - pick whatever truths you are passionate about that half the country disbelieves - why do you think society will accept robot cars that cause accidents (even 1)? It’s not going to happen.
- hamilyon2 3y ago
  Exactly this, or something very close to this already happened in history. There was a time it was legal for pedestrians to just walk on the road. Now it is illegal and nobody blames "killer bolt" or it's operator if this person is hurt. Society adapted around technology, not the other way around. The other example is of course railroads and trains. People literally made laws and diminish freedoms of people to allow giant polluting noisy hazardous carriages do their thing and punish anyone who impeded them harshly. No reason to think it can't happen third time. We just adapt roads, laws and customs to tell people e.g. "if a purple vehicle on purple road kills you, it is 100% your fault because this law says so". And other nations will have to accept it too because nobody wants to be outcompeted.
- d0mine 3y ago
  "Despite claims to the contrary, self-driving cars currently have a _higher_ rate of accidents than human-driven cars, but the injuries are less severe. On average, there are 9.1 self-driving car accidents per million miles driven, while the same rate is 4.1 crashes per million miles for regular vehicles." https://www.natlawreview.com/article/dangers-driverless-cars#:~:text=Despite%20claims%20to%20the%20contrary,million%20miles%20for%20regular%20vehicles https://www.natlawreview.com/article/dangers-driverless-cars.... I didn't know that statistics for self-driving car is that good (just 2x worse than humans). Last time I've checked, it was an order of magnitude worse. Perhaps, the statistics is for ideal conditions.

bodge5000 3y ago

> I don’t understand why anyone could think that it would be easy or fast. Because progress went so quickly from "cars are entirely human operated" to "cars can nearly drive themselves", so it's assumed that progress will continue at that pace. We've made this mistake time and time again before self driving cars and evidently continue to make that mistake now

chii 3y ago
as a percentage of accidents, i would imagine autodriving cars are less than human driven cars. It's still flawed atm, but surely it will continue to improve. Not to mention that the average human is already terrible a driver, and replacing them with autodriving surely nets more benefits than the flaws of autodriving - if not at this moment, then very soon in the future.
- resolutebat 3y ago
  The problem is that whenever a human driven car reverses over a toddler or wraps around a telephone pole or veers across lanes into oncoming traffic or blows through a red light and T-bones someone, nobody cares because it happens all the time, but when a self-driving car does, murderbot outrage makes frontpage news all over the world. So even though we rationally should immediately go all in on automation as soon as self-driving cars are on average safer than human ones, realistically this is politically completely unpalatable until they reach a much, much higher, possibly unachievable, standard. It's not "fair" that this is the case, but unfortunately humans are really bad at accurately assessing the risks of low probability incidents (eg. dying from terrorism), especially if they get a lot of media airtime.
  - shash 3y ago
    The liability problem is important here - when someone reverses over a toddler, someone gets sued. Or they lose their license. Or $CONSEQUENCE. What's the consequence in an autonomous vehicle? Does only _that_ vehicle lose its license? Does every vehicle with that particular revision of the ML model? The whole fleet? The next problem is, you're assuming that the autonomous vehicle is going to be _better_ than the human; it may have more information, may be faster in its response time, but maybe in a chaotic environment, that doesn't translate into drastically improved safety. Unless of course, _everything_ on the road is self-driving (meaning, zero pedestrians, zero other vehicles, no animals,...) which is going to run into chicken-egg...

piyh 3y ago

Geohot might be delusional, but his company has a value proposition that's viable.

grecy 3y ago

> * I don’t understand why anyone could think that it would be easy or fast * Like electric cars, or landing rockets, or even getting to the moon. I don't think anyone honestly thought self driving cars would be easy or fast, but they're getting better every single month, and sooner or later they're going to be better than human drivers.

jackmott42 3y ago
are they getting better every month? a company like Waymo may have good data on this. Tesla updates seem to be doing more like a random walk.

Fricken 3y ago

Geohot never made any delusional or outrageous claims. His company set out to build and ship an advanced driver assist system and they did.

IshKebab 3y ago
Oh really? https://www.forbes.com/sites/aarontilley/2016/09/13/george-hotz-promises-self-driving-car-kit-for-1000-before-end-of-year/amp/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/aarontilley/2016/09/13/george-h...
- Fricken 3y ago
  Yeah, what's the issue?

runarberg 3y ago

What baffles me is that it is relatively easy to make most transportation needs very predictable under a very controlled setting. And we have been doing it for a while, we have even been operating self driving vehicles on these corridors that transport millions of people every day. Fully automatic train systems are a proof that it can be done, but lack of imagination among policy makers makes them think the only way forward is with privately owned consumer market cars.