5 ms·

This is really my bear case against AI. I am not against it. I actually think it is really neat! But we have been working on driverless cars for how long and

This is really my bear case against AI. I am not against it. I actually think it is really neat! But we have been working on driverless cars for how long and spent how much? And still things like a flooded roadway completely throw them. Tesla failed to deliver driverless cars but now is pivoting to the much more complex fully autonomous robots. And we can’t get AI to stop hallucinating facts, but any day we are going to be at AGI in a few years? I get people want these things to happen, but I just don’t see it happening any time soon. The whole tech industry feels built on what maybe, someday, possibly, could happen but most likely won’t, but we are all going to act like is a sure thing and is just around the corner. Are there no responsible adults left at these tech companies?

tptacek 5mo ago
I was (I think the search bar will prove this out) a pretty committed skeptic of driverless cars, but I've come around on them in some use cases. I'm not optimistic about them on highways. But they solve some important problems in regional/local transit. We're contemplating standing up an EV shuttle service in Oak Park. It will fail. As I understand it, we've piloted non-EV versions of a shuttle service; they failed. The problem is that in small local areas, the staffing for a useful transit service is too expensive; that's because "useful" imposes constraints about responsiveness, coverage, and most of all hours of service, which mean the service won't pencil out with the ridership it'll get. An autonomous vehicle transit service in our muni would probably work fine; it's a strict grid system with very low speed limits (AVs will, in our area, be strictly better drivers than the median human drivers --- this isn't a statement about human fallibility so much as an observation about scofflawry in our area). And if the product existed, we could afford it, because we wouldn't be paying fully loaded headcount costs for 2+ shifts of drivers at epsilon levels of utilization. For whatever it's worth, I don't really have "autonomous vehicles" and "LLMs" in the same bucket in my head. I'm bullish on both, but for very different reasons. It usually doesn't occur to me to think of Waymos as "AI", though, obviously, they are.
- zamadatix 5mo ago
  I'm bullish on AI as a replacement for Uber from airports well behaved climates I frequent but bearish on how long it'll take to actually make a damn for me needing my car in Ohio until the mid-late 2030s at this rate. It's just so close and so far away at the same time.
RationPhantoms 5mo ago
I will posit something that guides my own thinking about this; robotaxis will never drink and drive. I'll take whatever flavor of mistake they conjure over that. I can deal with stupidity, I cannot (and don't want to) deal with malice.
- ACCount37 5mo ago
  "No DUI" is a big part of why even the current, flawed and markedly subhuman, self-driving cars casually beat human drivers on road safety. A self-driving car AI pays less attention than a human driver at his best. It isn't as aware as a human driver at his best. It doesn't have the spatial reasoning, the intuitive understanding of physics and road dynamics that matches that of a human driver at his best. Human drivers still fall behind statistically, because human drivers are rarely at their best. And the worst of human drivers? It's really, really bad. AI is flawed, but a car autopilot doesn't get behind the wheel after 3 beers and a pill of benadryl. It doesn't get tired, doesn't get impaired, doesn't lose sleep or succumb to road rage. It always performs the same. Until it gets a software update, that is. The road performance of an average car AI only ever goes up. I don't think that's true for human drivers, frankly.
  - fragmede 5mo ago
    Tesla's self driving will pull over if it detects the human driver has fallen asleep.
  - svieira 5mo ago
    > Until it gets a software update, that is. The road performance of an average car AI only ever goes up. Aren't there stories about certain car companies where their self-driving-at-some-level cars got worse after an OTA update?
  - RationPhantoms 5mo ago
    Yep, on the money. It's not too dissimilar from the Figure demo that was done on X/Twitter recently. Everyone was pointing out what a lackluster demo that was and here I was thinking the total opposite, it worked for 8 hours with no sexual harassment training, KPIs, management oversight, breaks or co-worker chatting. That's the worst job it'll likely ever do. We just witnessed the floor of it's capabilities. My hope/vision with robotic cars is we make cities more human-friendly/accessible. I want revitalized/bustling downtowns of bikes/bodies and not, what some cities are, which are glorified parking lots. I want to be less alone as an american. I would a physical sense of community injected back into my veins.
ACCount37 5mo ago
The "responsible adults" know that chasing perfection gets you nowhere fast. A part of growing up is learning to put up with "good enough". A car that only fails in a road conditions edge case is good enough for the vast majority of cases. You accept that, and issue a manual override for when that edge case pops up. Then you add that edge case to your training sets. Then the issue never comes up again. If you think that "flooded roadway" is a case that's handled gracefully by every human driver, and it's the AI that's uniquely prone to failure, I have news for you. Multiple cities with uncommonly flooded roadways get surges of "water flood engine damage" cars at the repair shops in the wake of extreme weather events. Human drivers underestimate just how flooded a roadway is, try to push through it, and have their car choke, die, and float there, waiting for some good samarithan with a snorkel and a long rope to pull it out. Then someone gets to play the fun game of "is this ICE toast or will it run once you get the water out".
- autoexec 5mo ago
  > The "responsible adults" know that chasing perfection gets you nowhere fast. I wouldn't call being prepared for very common life threatening events experienced by drivers "chasing perfection". The people with stalled cars are the lucky ones. Most of the drowning deaths in floods come from people who drove right into them. I'll give them credit for over-correcting before deciding to pull out until they figure out how to handle floods even though it left people stranded on the road because of a small harmless puddle. Better to do that than take the risk and drive into a dangerous situation. Even still, this is something they should have fully tested before the cars ever hit a public street.
  - srdjanr 5mo ago
    I wouldn't call floods "very common"
    - kibwen 5mo ago
      Any given person might only experience a single flooded roadway or two in their lifetime. But that doesn't mean that there aren't tens of thousands of people exposed to flooded roadways every year. Something can be individually uncommon and yet frequent in absolute terms.
bsimpson 5mo ago
Motorcycling used to be one of my biggest hobbies. I live in NYC now. Drivers here are some combination of utterly selfish and mindlessly distracted. You can't even trust them to stop at red lights. It gives me a huge amount of pause riding here. "Cars are dangerous, necessary in many places, but often driven by irresponsible people" is a huge problem that needs solving. Waymo seems to have been doing a pretty fantastic job at it. And even if they couldn't figure out how to route around floods, floods are rare. They're still a net benefit to society.
- yurishimo 5mo ago
  Tbf, I think you’re just experiencing a downside of living in NYC. I’ve only ever been there as a tourist, but I wouldn’t ever dream of renting a motorcycle in the city for the reasons you mention. For context, I live in a highly dense European country and I wouldn’t ride my motorcycle in our most densely populated city centers either. For me, a motorcycle is luxury transportation for when the weather is cooperative or I want to enjoy the journey to my destination. If I want an efficient commute, I’m gonna take the train into the city and enjoy the relaxed state of mind knowing I don’t have to navigate. Drivers have waaaay too many distractions nowadays and I don’t trust most people to be paying attention as much as I want them to. At least out on the open highway, I stand a chance of getting away from them and putting distance between us. In a city, my options to create space often don’t make much of a difference due to congestion in general. I hope you can find the opportunity to ride more in the future. :)
aerhardt 5mo ago
I’ve just been to Austin where self-driving cars are everywhere but found to my disappointment that they can’t do trips to the airport. To your point, knowledge work, as a whole is a much larger and complex domain than self-driving.
- fragmede 5mo ago
  The reason they can't do trips to the airport is regulatory and not technical.
  - aerhardt 5mo ago
    What they told me and I can read online is that they don’t because they can’t operate on the Austin highways. Have you read anything that’s more detailed?
    - fragmede 5mo ago
      As far as the technology goes, they're able to operate on California highways. That's what I'm going off of.
liveoneggs 5mo ago
I actually took a waymo down North Ave (where one got stuck) a few weeks ago and it was very pleasant. I'm pretty conservative about this stuff but the waymo is genuinely nice to ride in.
northerdome 5mo ago
This is very much expected while the kinks are worked out. The reason Waymo is rolling out their vehicles in Atlanta in partnership with Uber is precisely for scenarios like this. Standard Uber service provides a backstop for when times when Waymos can't fulfill rides.
keybored 5mo ago
AI as commonly discussed is just pretty-general intelligence that is very economically valuable. Not AGI outside of the true believers. And can we discuss AI drivers and AI LLMs in the same paragraph? One is a special application of trying to emulate a very particular human embodiment, with all the sensory challenges. The other is a brain in a vat. Both can fail and flourish independent of each other, or at least I see little overlap.
- red75prime 5mo ago
  VLAs (vision-language-action models), which are offspring of LLMs, and their versions that are more suitable to edge devices are being used in self-driving to add common sense to path planners ("don't drive through a police standoff", things like that).
wtp1saac 5mo ago
I'm not aware of any self-driving widely available ten years ago. I just took my Model Y over Highway 1 in California without requiring human intervention (other than when I chose to pull the car over). Obviously when these things can become fully autonomous isn't absolutely clear, and there may always be some discomfort with a probability of failure without a human chain of responsibility. But, given ten years ago this didn't exist at all for consumers, and it now more reliably does? It doesn't seem insane to think ten years from now, it might address more edge cases, and be safer and more effective. Why would you look at the general trend and assert jettisoning the effort? EDIT: It seems some of the tech started rolling out 2016; my mind mentally was thinking 2015. So maybe this started about a decade ago. Though still, the trajectory is a decade of these systems going from limited assists toward greater autonomy with demonstrable progress.
WarmWash 5mo ago
One of the biggest challenges with self driving cars is that the cars must be substantially safer than human driven cars. Human driven cars kill tons of people. Everyday in the US 115 people wake up who will be dead from a car accident by midnight. But if a self driving car kills one human? Your company and mission is cooked. Besides the immense engineering challenge, the bar is also way way way higher.
cryptoegorophy 5mo ago
Robots vs cars? Robots are much much safer. One is a killing machine going 100km/h, other one is a slow moving thing. You don’t need fast reaction for a robot. Tesla should’ve started with robots first and then self driving.
saghm 5mo ago
> And still things like a flooded roadway completely throw them. I guess that's what you get when you test your cars far 20 years in a state that's almost perpetually in a state of drought. On the other hand, as someone who grew up in New England, laughing about news stories of highways in warmer states getting backed up because of an inch or two or snow wasn't an uncommon occurrence, so maybe having trouble driving during unfamiliar weather is just a sign that they're learning to drive like humans too well
contubernio 5mo ago
Flooded roadways completely throw human drivers too.
tsycho 5mo ago
Is your argument: - Only ship products when they are perfect against every possible edge condition? or - If Waymo fails in a few scenarios today after 20 years of effort, they can never succeed?

tptacek 5mo ago

I was (I think the search bar will prove this out) a pretty committed skeptic of driverless cars, but I've come around on them in some use cases. I'm not optimistic about them on highways. But they solve some important problems in regional/local transit. We're contemplating standing up an EV shuttle service in Oak Park. It will fail. As I understand it, we've piloted non-EV versions of a shuttle service; they failed. The problem is that in small local areas, the staffing for a useful transit service is too expensive; that's because "useful" imposes constraints about responsiveness, coverage, and most of all hours of service, which mean the service won't pencil out with the ridership it'll get. An autonomous vehicle transit service in our muni would probably work fine; it's a strict grid system with very low speed limits (AVs will, in our area, be strictly better drivers than the median human drivers --- this isn't a statement about human fallibility so much as an observation about scofflawry in our area). And if the product existed, we could afford it, because we wouldn't be paying fully loaded headcount costs for 2+ shifts of drivers at epsilon levels of utilization. For whatever it's worth, I don't really have "autonomous vehicles" and "LLMs" in the same bucket in my head. I'm bullish on both, but for very different reasons. It usually doesn't occur to me to think of Waymos as "AI", though, obviously, they are.

zamadatix 5mo ago
I'm bullish on AI as a replacement for Uber from airports well behaved climates I frequent but bearish on how long it'll take to actually make a damn for me needing my car in Ohio until the mid-late 2030s at this rate. It's just so close and so far away at the same time.

RationPhantoms 5mo ago

I will posit something that guides my own thinking about this; robotaxis will never drink and drive. I'll take whatever flavor of mistake they conjure over that. I can deal with stupidity, I cannot (and don't want to) deal with malice.

ACCount37 5mo ago
"No DUI" is a big part of why even the current, flawed and markedly subhuman, self-driving cars casually beat human drivers on road safety. A self-driving car AI pays less attention than a human driver at his best. It isn't as aware as a human driver at his best. It doesn't have the spatial reasoning, the intuitive understanding of physics and road dynamics that matches that of a human driver at his best. Human drivers still fall behind statistically, because human drivers are rarely at their best. And the worst of human drivers? It's really, really bad. AI is flawed, but a car autopilot doesn't get behind the wheel after 3 beers and a pill of benadryl. It doesn't get tired, doesn't get impaired, doesn't lose sleep or succumb to road rage. It always performs the same. Until it gets a software update, that is. The road performance of an average car AI only ever goes up. I don't think that's true for human drivers, frankly.
- fragmede 5mo ago
  Tesla's self driving will pull over if it detects the human driver has fallen asleep.
- svieira 5mo ago
  > Until it gets a software update, that is. The road performance of an average car AI only ever goes up. Aren't there stories about certain car companies where their self-driving-at-some-level cars got worse after an OTA update?
- RationPhantoms 5mo ago
  Yep, on the money. It's not too dissimilar from the Figure demo that was done on X/Twitter recently. Everyone was pointing out what a lackluster demo that was and here I was thinking the total opposite, it worked for 8 hours with no sexual harassment training, KPIs, management oversight, breaks or co-worker chatting. That's the worst job it'll likely ever do. We just witnessed the floor of it's capabilities. My hope/vision with robotic cars is we make cities more human-friendly/accessible. I want revitalized/bustling downtowns of bikes/bodies and not, what some cities are, which are glorified parking lots. I want to be less alone as an american. I would a physical sense of community injected back into my veins.

ACCount37 5mo ago

The "responsible adults" know that chasing perfection gets you nowhere fast. A part of growing up is learning to put up with "good enough". A car that only fails in a road conditions edge case is good enough for the vast majority of cases. You accept that, and issue a manual override for when that edge case pops up. Then you add that edge case to your training sets. Then the issue never comes up again. If you think that "flooded roadway" is a case that's handled gracefully by every human driver, and it's the AI that's uniquely prone to failure, I have news for you. Multiple cities with uncommonly flooded roadways get surges of "water flood engine damage" cars at the repair shops in the wake of extreme weather events. Human drivers underestimate just how flooded a roadway is, try to push through it, and have their car choke, die, and float there, waiting for some good samarithan with a snorkel and a long rope to pull it out. Then someone gets to play the fun game of "is this ICE toast or will it run once you get the water out".

autoexec 5mo ago
> The "responsible adults" know that chasing perfection gets you nowhere fast. I wouldn't call being prepared for very common life threatening events experienced by drivers "chasing perfection". The people with stalled cars are the lucky ones. Most of the drowning deaths in floods come from people who drove right into them. I'll give them credit for over-correcting before deciding to pull out until they figure out how to handle floods even though it left people stranded on the road because of a small harmless puddle. Better to do that than take the risk and drive into a dangerous situation. Even still, this is something they should have fully tested before the cars ever hit a public street.
- srdjanr 5mo ago
  I wouldn't call floods "very common"
  - kibwen 5mo ago
    Any given person might only experience a single flooded roadway or two in their lifetime. But that doesn't mean that there aren't tens of thousands of people exposed to flooded roadways every year. Something can be individually uncommon and yet frequent in absolute terms.

bsimpson 5mo ago

Motorcycling used to be one of my biggest hobbies. I live in NYC now. Drivers here are some combination of utterly selfish and mindlessly distracted. You can't even trust them to stop at red lights. It gives me a huge amount of pause riding here. "Cars are dangerous, necessary in many places, but often driven by irresponsible people" is a huge problem that needs solving. Waymo seems to have been doing a pretty fantastic job at it. And even if they couldn't figure out how to route around floods, floods are rare. They're still a net benefit to society.

yurishimo 5mo ago
Tbf, I think you’re just experiencing a downside of living in NYC. I’ve only ever been there as a tourist, but I wouldn’t ever dream of renting a motorcycle in the city for the reasons you mention. For context, I live in a highly dense European country and I wouldn’t ride my motorcycle in our most densely populated city centers either. For me, a motorcycle is luxury transportation for when the weather is cooperative or I want to enjoy the journey to my destination. If I want an efficient commute, I’m gonna take the train into the city and enjoy the relaxed state of mind knowing I don’t have to navigate. Drivers have waaaay too many distractions nowadays and I don’t trust most people to be paying attention as much as I want them to. At least out on the open highway, I stand a chance of getting away from them and putting distance between us. In a city, my options to create space often don’t make much of a difference due to congestion in general. I hope you can find the opportunity to ride more in the future. :)

aerhardt 5mo ago

I’ve just been to Austin where self-driving cars are everywhere but found to my disappointment that they can’t do trips to the airport. To your point, knowledge work, as a whole is a much larger and complex domain than self-driving.

fragmede 5mo ago
The reason they can't do trips to the airport is regulatory and not technical.
- aerhardt 5mo ago
  What they told me and I can read online is that they don’t because they can’t operate on the Austin highways. Have you read anything that’s more detailed?
  - fragmede 5mo ago
    As far as the technology goes, they're able to operate on California highways. That's what I'm going off of.

liveoneggs 5mo ago

I actually took a waymo down North Ave (where one got stuck) a few weeks ago and it was very pleasant. I'm pretty conservative about this stuff but the waymo is genuinely nice to ride in.

northerdome 5mo ago

This is very much expected while the kinks are worked out. The reason Waymo is rolling out their vehicles in Atlanta in partnership with Uber is precisely for scenarios like this. Standard Uber service provides a backstop for when times when Waymos can't fulfill rides.

keybored 5mo ago

AI as commonly discussed is just pretty-general intelligence that is very economically valuable. Not AGI outside of the true believers. And can we discuss AI drivers and AI LLMs in the same paragraph? One is a special application of trying to emulate a very particular human embodiment, with all the sensory challenges. The other is a brain in a vat. Both can fail and flourish independent of each other, or at least I see little overlap.

red75prime 5mo ago
VLAs (vision-language-action models), which are offspring of LLMs, and their versions that are more suitable to edge devices are being used in self-driving to add common sense to path planners ("don't drive through a police standoff", things like that).

wtp1saac 5mo ago

I'm not aware of any self-driving widely available ten years ago. I just took my Model Y over Highway 1 in California without requiring human intervention (other than when I chose to pull the car over). Obviously when these things can become fully autonomous isn't absolutely clear, and there may always be some discomfort with a probability of failure without a human chain of responsibility. But, given ten years ago this didn't exist at all for consumers, and it now more reliably does? It doesn't seem insane to think ten years from now, it might address more edge cases, and be safer and more effective. Why would you look at the general trend and assert jettisoning the effort? EDIT: It seems some of the tech started rolling out 2016; my mind mentally was thinking 2015. So maybe this started about a decade ago. Though still, the trajectory is a decade of these systems going from limited assists toward greater autonomy with demonstrable progress.

WarmWash 5mo ago

One of the biggest challenges with self driving cars is that the cars must be substantially safer than human driven cars. Human driven cars kill tons of people. Everyday in the US 115 people wake up who will be dead from a car accident by midnight. But if a self driving car kills one human? Your company and mission is cooked. Besides the immense engineering challenge, the bar is also way way way higher.

cryptoegorophy 5mo ago

Robots vs cars? Robots are much much safer. One is a killing machine going 100km/h, other one is a slow moving thing. You don’t need fast reaction for a robot. Tesla should’ve started with robots first and then self driving.

saghm 5mo ago

> And still things like a flooded roadway completely throw them. I guess that's what you get when you test your cars far 20 years in a state that's almost perpetually in a state of drought. On the other hand, as someone who grew up in New England, laughing about news stories of highways in warmer states getting backed up because of an inch or two or snow wasn't an uncommon occurrence, so maybe having trouble driving during unfamiliar weather is just a sign that they're learning to drive like humans too well

contubernio 5mo ago

Flooded roadways completely throw human drivers too.

tsycho 5mo ago

Is your argument: - Only ship products when they are perfect against every possible edge condition? or - If Waymo fails in a few scenarios today after 20 years of effort, they can never succeed?