Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/business/self-driving-autonomous-cars.html

by seibelj • 7 years ago

217 433 7 years ago

casefields• 7 years ago

Nothing makes a huge group of us cringe more, than people saying it's just around the corner. The worst part is it also comes from people who should know better.

Waymo’s CEO, John Krafcik, has admitted that a self-driving car that can drive in any condition, on any road, without ever needing a human to take control—usually called a “level five” autonomous vehicle—will basically never exist. At the Wall Street Journal’s D.Live conference, Krafcik said that “autonomy will always have constraints.” It will take decades for self-driving cars to become common on roads. Even then, they will not be able to drive at certain times of the year or in all weather conditions. In short, sensors on autonomous vehicles don’t work well in snow or rain—and that may never change.

https://www.cnet.com/news/alphabet-google-waymo-ceo-john-kra...

https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/07/the-dream-of-driverless-...

acollins13313• 7 years ago

You'd be surprised how well the lidar systems on these actually do see in the rain. Snow and ice is another story, and hydroplaning as well, but again it's not the sensors hampering it here. It's the logic. It's much more complicated than it first appeared, and right now the AI for detection and recognition is light years beyond where the self driving car logic is. You can watch a few YouTube videos of people training networks to drive cars (and also look at how well every company is currently doing) to see how difficult it is to get an AI solution for driving behavior.

sandworm1013• 7 years ago

They work well when they are working. Things a different when something blocks the lens, when a mirror bounces the laser back on itself, or when the laser's view is obstructed by something (ussually the road) that isnt up to code. Then the concept of lidar as reliable or even useful comes into question. Forget the math of driving, it is beyond today's lidar to tell whether there is frost on its own lens, a very basic safety proceedure.

oblio• 7 years ago

It's the logic. It's much more complicated than it first appeared

Forget the snark: you don't say? :o

Some of that logic is literally milllenium old unsolved logical dilemmas ("I have 2 choices and both involve killing people...").

suprfnk• 7 years ago

If a human can do it, I see no reason why an autonomous system can't, eventually, do it. It might take a very long time, but "never" seems short-sighted.

bryanlarsen8• 7 years ago

Humans can't do it. When your stopping distance (including reaction time) exceeds your visibility there's no way to drive safely, but humans do it anyways.

mhermher11• 7 years ago

Will a computer ever write War and Peace or compose the 9th Symphony too? How about solve an unsolved math proof? No reason it can't be automated, right?

freediver• 7 years ago

It will, when it has all capabilities of a human which may be never.

michaelt• 7 years ago

Imagine you're driving down a street when a kid playing on the sidewalk runs behind a truck and disappears from your view.

If the kid appears in the road from behind the truck, the computer can handle slamming on the brakes very easily - probably faster than a human can - without understanding the kid any better than a group of LIDAR points or a rectangle of pixels labelled 'obstacle' by a neural network.

But if you want to brake before the kid appears from behind the truck? For that, a fully attentive human driver will be making a bunch of estimates about what the kid is doing, whether they seemed to have noticed the car, how old they were, and so on. In other words, applying a theory of mind.

Needless to say, if the latter is a must-have feature, that's a pretty hairy problem.

Of course, it's possible the decrease in deaths from being fast on the brakes in simple situations will outweigh the increase in deaths from lacking a theory of mind in complex situations. If that's the case, the self-driving car programmer's job would be a good deal simpler!

60654• 7 years ago

Well said. Autonomous navigation is still a huge open research problem, in the sense that we don't even know how it _could_ work, there is no AI work capable of integrating all of the necessary pieces. Heck, we don't even know how simple bird or lizard intelligence works, much less be able to replicate human cognition that goes into operating heavy machinery in a busy multi-agent social context.

So promising that it will be not just solved, but productized into a polished consumer gadget, in 5 or so years, was an astonishing, unbelievably foolish promise.

And worst of all, yes, it came from people who should have known better.

And as a quick aside: there's much talk about "ethical AI", but here's a more common AI ethics failure: taking money from funders, shareholders, and customers, with promises of imminent deliverables, while knowing full well that the AI advances required for that haven't happened yet, and there's no evidence for when they will, if at all.

im_down_w_otp• 7 years ago

Indeed, it's unclear if anyone has yet to develop a path planner that can overcome "the freezing robot problem". Even with perfect perception performance, which doesn't exist, the path planning to deal with congested environments is an unsolved problem, and the path planning to deal with ambiguous multi-modal intent might be an unsolvable problem.

To add insult to injury, the manner in-use today of modeling humans as essentially just another kind of dynamic object breaks down extremely quickly once humans are normalized to the presence of autonomous robots. The humans change their own behavior model to achieve their own objective function. They're not dynamic objects, they're learning objects, and now your AV models (which will include human interaction and reaction behaviors on purpose if you're it right and on accident if you're not) breakdown along an entirely new longitudinal axis.

I think the AV market fundamentally broke when GM acquired Cruise for $1B seemingly out if nowhere.

1) Because the reality is that the DARPA Urban Challenge result was not assuredly generalizable, and it may be the case that there's still basic science to be done before the domain is just better, cheaper sensors & high-performance compute away from being productionizable.

2) It's not at all clear that deep learning is really iterating toward a solution to this problem either, but the improvements to methods and hardware have produced the ability to make very compelling demos, that even the purveyors of themselves might believe in, and show iterative improvements on the previous result, thus fueling more investment into something that isn't even known to be possible.

3) But, none of that would matter if GM hadn't decided to make a power move in throwing $1B at an acquisition and in one fell swoop turned an early stage unproven scientific research market into a super, super frothy capital market where it looked like anybody at any moment could be a unicorn without any clear reason or any fundamentals.

Investors went insane and the expectations and promises followed them.

pedrocr10• 7 years ago

much less be able to replicate human cognition that goes into operating heavy machinery in a busy multi-agent social context

This holds if you expect self-driving cars to be able to work like humans in picking up "body-language" cues around other drivers. But we can also approach the problem the other way around and set better fixed rules for how driving needs to be done and adjust the road and car infrastructure to make the problem simpler. Human drivers get away with breaking so many rules that the problem becomes much harder than it needs to be.

sixplusone• 7 years ago

Agreed. Navigating the world is basically an AI-complete problem; we don't let 12-year-old kids drive and these current enhanced cruise control systems are nowhere near the AGI of that.

MegaButts• 7 years ago

I think the reason we don't let 12-year-old kids drive has nothing to do with cognitive ability, but emotional maturity.

That said, I don't think the most advanced AI is even close to a 2-year-old.

gradys• 7 years ago

Here's Krafcik reacting to how what he said there was quoted and interpreted:

"Yeah some context missing here, but it did make for a fun headline.( said the same thing about my own driving.) The point is that autonomous driving, like human driving, will always have constraints."

https://twitter.com/johnkrafcik/status/1063281250088042496

jcfrei• 7 years ago

In other words, most people are not aware how dangerous certain conditions are under which they are occasionally driving (snow, fog, etc.). And that most of the time the only reason they didn't have a crash is luck. It might even be socially unacceptable to refuse driving to work because of fog.

darepublic2• 7 years ago

Agree that it's far off but saying never seems a bit pessimistic. Maybe more like never using the approach waymo is taking...

bjornsing• 7 years ago

Waymo’s CEO, John Krafcik, has admitted that a self-driving car that can drive in any condition, on any road, without ever needing a human to take control—usually called a “level five” autonomous vehicle—will basically never exist.

“Never” is kind of a strong word in this context... My personal belief is that we could very well have level five autonomy within the decade, using only two video cameras and two microphones behind a windscreen. But this would of course require major progress in A.I., of the sort that may also not happen in a hundred years.

roymurdock• 7 years ago

This probably isn't going to happen.

Getting to level 5 will require "V2X" technology - vehicles communicating with other vehicles and the road/traffic infrastructure itself.

We will need a forward-thinking government to start building sensors and communication tech into roads, stop lights, parking spots, and a secure/interoperable internet for all these sensors to communicate autonomously.

Currently the cost of implementing such a system is way higher than the return to drivers who can...what, work on more powerpoints or facetime while they're in the car instead of driving? Not to mention the huge security and safety and liability risks this would open up.

That's why we solved this problem with public transportation in the past - hire one person to be the "V2X sensor" AKA bus driver.

radicalbyte• 7 years ago

There are plenty of road conditions where humans also fail to drive. For example ice/snow in a country where that is not super common.

geegoo• 7 years ago

Nothing makes me cringe harder than absolute statements regarding technology from people in leadership roles in the technology sector.

rubicon33• 7 years ago

It is shocking to me how, we (people) CONSISTENTLY fail to understand where the bar is for accepting autonomous vehicles.

They do NOT need to be perfect. They need to be BETTER than humans. That means less accidents, and by extension, less deaths and injuries as a result of automobile errors.

acchow2• 7 years ago

Is level 5 autonomous more or less likely to be achievable than cold fusion?

gremlinsinc2• 7 years ago

Cold fusion has a 100% chance of realization. It's a sound technology. There's no doubt that it will be realized and is achievable. The only doubts are the timescale -- those who work in the field often say it's always '30 years away', but some recent research seems promising to make it much closer than that. I'd say level 5 and cold fusion are both equally achievable, though level 5 automobiles may be airborne -- as then they'd have less obstacles just birds, trees, and other airborne vehicles, but pedestrians, cats, dogs, bicycles would be off the table.

Super AI's I think are achievable and will be developed. I just don't know which will come first level 5 or cold fusion that's a toss up. If everything though has sensors including bikes, pedestrians, cross-walks, roads, etc that can detect what is on the road, send out a warning signal to cars travelling towards that intersection then that also takes out some of the problems - but that requires a very smart grid.

On a long enough timeline though there's probably not much humankind can create. Though it could be 10 years could be 50.

acchow2• 7 years ago

Wasn't it just a couple decades ago that we thought computers would never beat humans at Go?

Florin_Andrei• 7 years ago

Waymo’s CEO, John Krafcik, has admitted that a self-driving car that can drive in any condition, on any road, without ever needing a human to take control—usually called a “level five” autonomous vehicle—will basically never exist.

That's equivalent to saying AGI is impossible.

It's a pretty big statement.

AnimalMuppet5• 7 years ago

I'm not sure it's any bigger a statement than saying that it is possible, though...

ghevshoo• 7 years ago

They don’t need to drive perfectly. They only need to drive better than your average human.

chiefalchemist• 7 years ago

Perhaps. But how often are such conditions an issue? Heck, humans, if they venture out, don't do well in snow. Accidents also increase in rain.

To move the needle - towards a true tipping point? - autonomous vehicles don't have to be everything to all people all the time. Certainly for a significant number of driver miles it's moderate distances at moderate speeds.

Finally. Something as simple as a vehicle being able to deliver itself (from some central hub) to your door and you drive it (non-autonomously) from there would be significant. That changes the ownership model. It changes parking requirements, etc.

Yeah, the holy grail might be a ways off. But there's plenty of (pardon me) disruption between now and level five.

leoh• 7 years ago

Nothing makes a huge group of us cringe more, than people saying it's just around the corner.

I thought you referencing the media here. Build it up, tear it down. They quoted and amplified so many people who suggested it was possible only to print articles later that point out the it just ain't possible.

ChuckNorris89• 7 years ago

Self-driving tech muggle here.

Could someone explain to me why any average Joe with minimal intellect can drive a car using only a pair of eyes but it's difficult to build a fully self-driving car even with 8+ cameras, GPS, LIDAR and other sensors us humans don't have?

huntertwo• 7 years ago

We got brains, a learning system better than anything we could ever hope to create using current AI/ML technologies.

api2• 7 years ago

We're using a lot of sensory data to compensate for the fact that the "AI" driving the car is really dumb. It lacks any meta-level understanding of the problem domain and is essentially a stimulus-response system similar to a very simple insect or even a single celled organism.

We can drive a car with much more limited sensory input because we have a very high level cognitive model of what we are doing. Better model equals better decision making on far less information.

Slight tangent:

Having kids was an interesting chance to observe how far we are from "real AI." You can show a 3 year old one example of an object and after a few seconds they can subsequently identify that object in any lighting condition or from any angle. They can identify it with one eye closed. They can identify variations of it, pictures of it, and line drawings of it. One example, seconds. The human brain absolutely destroys any AI/ML we have.

mirceal5• 7 years ago

not quite true. when you show a kid something new you are literally exposing the kid to the thing thousands/millions of times. different angles, rotation, heck even if you’re just looking without touching from a fixed position your eyes will sample it a lot (saccades of your eye). you also connect/map the object to your prior knowledge. with an AI/ML model you’re starting from scratch. what makes learning “easy” for humans is the incremental nature of it + millions of years of evolution

also: humans can drive a car better than a machine because the roads are designed for humans and the other drivers are humans. the machines would destroy us at driving if the roads were optimized for machines.

gwbas1c2• 7 years ago

Because we really don't know how to emulate "thinking." Some overconfident people think they can, but it's a much harder problem than making an ACID-compliant relational database.

Also, because we tend to forget that technological innovation that takes a few decades, or a century, is extremely fast in a historical context.

Our ancestors aren't going to care if we have self-driving cars in 2020, 2080, or 2120.

maxfurman• 7 years ago

Humans actually aren't that great at driving - tens of thousands die on the road every year. Autonomous cars do great in ideal conditions (the suburbs of Phoenix AZ for example) but in conditions where the model lacks training data (i.e. bad weather) they have the same struggles as human drivers.

anextomp• 7 years ago

A) We can't put a brain-equivalent computer in the car, and can't program it to be as good as a brain at driving

B) We have higher standards for autonomous cars. The people saying it can never happen are saying it will never be perfect in all conditions, not that it will never be better than humans.

mojuba2• 7 years ago

Because it's not just the sensors, there's a lot of purely human interaction going on on the road. Looking at the other driver at the intersection and trying to understand what to expect from them; same for someone crossing the road in front of you - is the guy drunk? Eye contact - nope, he looks fine, he will give way. Etc. etc

Come try to drive in Paris or Rome at peak hours. No way on Earth AI can handle this kind of traffic.

I always say autonomous cars will require infrastructural change, similar to the one happened when we transitioned from horses to cars. How exactly - I don't know yet, but with the current infrastructure Level 5 seems impossible.

neillyons• 7 years ago

Haha. Very true. I was in Scilly last year and I said to my sister there is no way AI can drive on these roads.

CPLX• 7 years ago

Because driving a car is essentially analogous to full artificial intelligence.

We don't know how to do that. Like at all.

mirceal5• 7 years ago

hmm. i have to disagree. driving a car is a walk in the park compared to AGI. they’re not even in the same ballpark. for driving we at least have an idea how to make it happen and we need better tech, more training data and maybe alter the infrastructure to solve some edge cases. AGI? we’re guessing at this point (at least what’s public)

jacamera• 7 years ago

Because any average Joe with minimal intellect nevertheless has an intellect. It's impossible for a computer to actually understand or comprehend anything. Pattern matching, what computers are good at, has its limits.

snarf21• 7 years ago

A lot of those sensors and cameras are less accurate during the night or in weather or with sun glare.

I think one of the biggest issues is that people will not accept self-driving cars that are as safe as human drivers. They want perfect driving. If someone hits a pedestrian that jumps out from between two cars unexpectedly, it might get written off as an accident and the insurance company may not even have to pay if it was clearly the pedestrians fault. If it was a "robot" car that hits someone, there is going to be a suit for $500M because "Google killed my son!!!!!!". This also leads to people trying to get non-lethally hit by robot cars just to get money. The "robot" car has a big trolley problem that isn't easily solvable.

leetcrew5• 7 years ago

The "robot" car has a big trolley problem that isn't easily solvable.

I really think this is overblown. it's not hard to think of a solution to these issues because we already have it in traffic laws for humans. there are rules for accessing the right of way. if you follow the rules and make a good faith effort to account for people who don't, it is pretty hard to be found at fault for an accident, or even "cause" one to begin with. rear ending someone starts with too close of a following distance (or too high a speed) for the conditions. tbones and head on collisions can only happen when one or more people are moving without the right of way. pedestrian strikes on the street can only happen when the pedestrian or the driver is not observing the other's legal right of way.

sideswipes are kinda ambiguous. it's possible for two vehicles to check that there is space in the middle lane simultaneously, then merge into each other. I don't think it's legally required, but I never merge into the middle lane when there is a car to the far left/right.

smileysteve4• 7 years ago

there is going to be a suit for $500M because "Google killed my son!!!!!!"

I'm pretty sure that Google, Apple, Uber, Ford, Gm, Chrysler, and all of their supply chains could get lobby for the tort reform they need, especially witb much of our current "representation"

smileysteve4• 7 years ago

A lot of those sensors and cameras are less accurate during the night or in weather or with sun glare.

But for relatively minimal cost, those sensors can easily 10x better than humans. Whether it's visible light or infrared, whether it's microphones outside the car, or networked effects to other vehicles or highway camera.

notfromhere• 7 years ago

Pointing a camera at something isn't vision. Making something recognize what they're looking at, and making it create a reasoned response to it, is wickedly hard.

yitosda• 7 years ago

In a word, context.

Human brains are just context gathering pattern matching machines. We can't even count without all kinds of context being automatically bubbled up into our consciousness.

When we see other drivers, we can take all kinds of subtle hints about their behavior. We can easily tell if they have an unsecured load (not just if it's currently shaking). We can see the way someone is looking at the road to know if they are going to go, if they're hesitating, if they're high. We can know where the road is even though it's snowed out because of the approximate distance from the ditch you remember being 15 feet out alongside it.

There are zillions of cases like this in the long tail. Self driving cars leapt forward by being able to answer the vastly important contextual question of "what is this in my sensor?" -- but to do the rest, it's hard to overstate how much a computer would have to "be human". To be able to apply past experience, psychology and complicated inferences about "why is this in my sensor? what can I do about it?"

In the end, self driving cars will thrive, just in an environment that poses these kinds of questions as little as possible.

Or we'll actually get a breakthrough and be able to create NNs that allow machines to learn and apply a vast breadth of learned context to sensory input. Teach them vast amounts of unrelated things just as every human learns in the 16 years before they drive (and then some), and then effectively put extra-sensory humans on the road.

staunch• 7 years ago

The average Joe is the descendant of millions/billions of years of evolution. He is designed specifically to navigate this planet.

The fact that humans will be teaching computers to do the same kinds of navigation, with just a few decades of work, speaks to how impressive the above-average Joe is.

api2• 7 years ago

"Never" is kind of equally absurd. It's just a brutally hard problem.

mhermher11• 7 years ago

You will never define a complete and consistent algebra. You will never exactly measure the momentum and position of a particle. They're not brutally hard problems, they're not possible. We know that there are a set of things that are impossible. Why is recreating human intelligence in silicon beyond that consideration?

chillacy4• 7 years ago

Things are impossible till they aren’t. It’s not like we solved Go the board game, but we did build some killer AI which has now surpassed all human players. And that was within a matter of years: first it was a fluid game of human intelligence impossible for a machine, then it was obvious machines could be better.. but look at this other thing humans are still better at.

thorwasdfasdf• 7 years ago

The reason why, is because people believe the human brain is just an incredibly complex state machine. If it is, then it should be reproducible.

mojuba2• 7 years ago

... "autonomous vehicles" will be a reality for "ordinary people" in less than five years, Google co-founder Sergey Brin said Tuesday.

That's from 2012 [1]

[1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2491635/self-driving-c...

bryanlarsen8• 7 years ago

Waymo had autonomous vehicles in Arizona giving selected members of the public rides without safety drivers in November 2017. They since stopped.

So if you really stretch you can call that an accurate prediction.

serioussecurity• 7 years ago

Despite high hopes, incompetent new comers discover they can't compete in new industry...

rwmj• 7 years ago

We don't need self-driving cars that can go anywhere (ie. level 5) for them to be widely useful. A car that only worked in bright sunshine on a preprogrammed set of roads would be immediately useful to me.

tyingq2• 7 years ago

Semi trucks, solely on well done roads (Interstates in the US) seem more likely to happen sooner. There's an obvious strategy for "ports", dealing with exceptions, etc.

qznc3• 7 years ago

Robo taxis in retirement communities also seem likely to me. https://voyage.auto/

wbrinkley2• 7 years ago

Tesla frequently talks about platooning when touting their Semi. "Self-driving" by almost blindly following a human-driven lead vehicle doesn't seem that far off. But I'm not looking forward to the day when I see a "train" of semi trucks speeding down the interstate only a foot or two apart from each other!

marcosdumay• 7 years ago

ie. level 5

No, we need level 4. The problem is that the other 3 levels are worse than useless, so there's no point on deploying something that isn't mature.

mc_blue2• 7 years ago

I agree with you on level 3, but why do you consider levels 1 and 2 to be worse than useless?

untog3• 7 years ago

But it's a far cry from the initial promise. For instance, Uber can't replace their drivers with self-driving cars if they need to bring all their drivers back when it rains.

ghaff5• 7 years ago

At that point, autonomous driving is a convenience/safety features for autos/trucks that are more or less as we know them today. You can't build transportation systems and ownership models around vehicles that only work in some places in some conditions. (With some exceptions, but they're relatively narrow.)

wbrinkley2• 7 years ago

This. An unoccupied car should be able to find a parking spot at the mall or in a parking garage, or go from the airport terminal to the "economy" or "cell phone" lot by itself. And come back and pick me up. If it gets stuck, the app on my phone should alert me to come to the rescue.

lanrh1836• 7 years ago

Curious how a self driving car would’ve responded in the NYC blackout, and to Good Samaritans directing traffic at various intersections

georgecmu• 7 years ago

But the billions of dollars in investment are here and now.

gwbas1c2• 7 years ago

The following will happen before self-driving cars:

- Robotic trash cans that perfectly sort recyclables and compostables without any contamination

- Drones that fly around and kill invasive plants

- Landscapers that show up with robotic lawnmowers

- A dishwasher that can load and unload itself automatically

- My Tesla can keep in its lane when it passes an on ramp

(ect)

The problem, IMO, with self-driving cars is that there are other AI problems that are easier to solve. Until we start seeing more "consumer AI" in lower-risk products, self-driving cars will always be something coming in the future.

LeanderK• 7 years ago

- Robotic trash cans that perfectly sort recyclables and compostables without any contamination

Sorting trash is (at least to me) a surprisingly complicated problem. The frauenhofer here in karlsruhe is working on bulk sorting using computer vision with various sensors (sorting black plastic: https://www.fraunhofer.de/en/press/research-news/2016/June/s... and sorting bulk goods: https://www.iosb.fraunhofer.de/servlet/is/15954/)

If automated, it probably makes sense to not sort the stuff in your home, but instead by your trash-collector companies.

Ididntdothis• 7 years ago

I wish there was much more research in that area. It’s a very hard problem and the benefit would be enormous. All the brain power that goes into ever better surveillance and selling ads would be much better used there.

nabla9• 7 years ago

Good points. Sorting waste and other stuff in a controlled environment is a problem domain that will provide huge increase in productivity and material efficiency when it becomes common. There are companies working on it.

https://zenrobotics.com/

AtlasBarfed6• 7 years ago

You need to have an economic payoff to justify the AI development/training. Sorting trash perfectly in trash cans? That's a consumer $50 appliance with robotic arms, sensors, and software? No way

Drones flying around killing invasive plants? Capitalistic economics doesn't give a shit about the environment, because bank accounts are rarely affected by environmental problems, and certainly not in the next fiscal quarter. There's no funding for that.

- Landscaper robots need to beat immigrant labor in the US. That's tough.

- Dishwasher unloading to cabinets with robotic arms? The gain here is maybe 20 minutes a day. Payoff isn't as good as with driving which can be hours on a commute, or much more on long trips, and there isn't the safety improvement since dishwashers don't kill you in their use.

ghostbrainalpha2• 7 years ago

You definitely wouldn't use robotic arms for the dishwasher unloading.

You would make it the base of the cabinet. After the dishes were cleaned a dummy waiter system could correctly route dishes, cups, and silver ware to their correct apartments directly above the dishwasher.

But you would need to buy dishes that were designed specifically to be a part of your dishwasher package.

And I'm not sure how a robot could help you load a dishwasher. Unless you are talking about some sort of advanced roomba following you around picking up after you. That would actually be great for my fat pig of a roommate. I hate that son of a bitch.

acollins13313• 7 years ago

On highway is where it's at. City corner cases are going to be Impossible for a long time, but caravans of self driving trucks could easily happen in the next couple years. It already happens with a person in the front vehicle that is followed closesly in a train by robotic vehicles.

nradov2• 7 years ago

GM is already selling "Super Cruise" vehicles with level 4 autonomous capability on a limited set of controlled access highways.

https://www.cadillac.com/world-of-cadillac/innovation/super-...

mc_blue2• 7 years ago

Super Cruise is considered level 2, not level 4.

rimliu3• 7 years ago

And moose runs out on the road, what's then? No matter how fast the data will be passed down the line, following closer than the braking distance will not be safe. And there are black ice, puddles, etc.

acollins13313• 7 years ago

If the vehicles apply their brakes at the same time they could be bumper to bumper. That's how things work.

hateful• 7 years ago

I think it would happen this way: firstly you would automate things that go on a track - like trains - which I think we already have. Then secondly you could have certain lanes or roads that are designed for specific self-driving vehicles. This could help buses and trucks (in certain areas) get around. Then you would keep adding more of those, until many roads have those and very few manual lanes. It wouldn't immediately work in a big established city, but some existing highways or interstates can be fitted easily. Anywhere that has an HOV/Carpool/EV lane can be refitted to be an automated driving lane. Think of it like the Cash Only vs. Easy Pass toll lanes. At first there was 1-2 Easy Pass lanes, then the cash lane was just 1-2 - now we automate them reading license plates.

So to sum up, I think that the self driving will start in very specific areas, and then those specific areas would be expanded until they are the only areas. Especially if those roads contain automated taxi (Uber, Lyft, etc) which you can call with your mobile device. The main reason a lot of people drive is because public transportation in their area is junk and you have to go by it's schedule and route. But having a point-point self-driving option is way more convenient. It's like the subway, but it doesn't need tracks.

brk2• 7 years ago

This has been my line of thought as well, autonomous vehicle will slowly emerge over time. We are not waiting on 1 or 2 big tech breakthroughs alone, but also on a lot of infrastructure and regulatory changes, which take a lot of time to enact.

I would wager we are at least a decade away from self-driving cars being a common part of daily life, in the sense that the average driver would see them on the road somewhat regularly. And probably 2 decades away from self-driving cars being an "everymans" vehicle and/or delivering on the concept of not having to own a vehicle and instead summoning one when needed, or putting your autonomous vehicle to work for you while you are not using it.

mikestew2• 7 years ago

I think your prediction will turn out to be as closer or closer than any other. Certainly more on the money than the breathless “won’t be a problem in a few years when self-driving...”

But as I read your probably-on-the-money prediction, I was thinking “here we go again, dumping money for the two-ton wheelchairs while alternative transportation goes begging again.” Where’s my fucking barrier-protected bike lane? Or any bike lane at all?

Frankly, if that’s how it goes, I wonder if it happens at all. “Separate lanes for wealthy tech workers” is how that’s going to go. You know why we can’t even get bike lanes? Because people bitch and moan because they don’t personally use it. Expand that to an empty lane of moving traffic while the plebs sit in traffic.

TheBeardKing• 7 years ago

We're already doing that in my neck of the woods with toll express lanes on the insterstates. The moneyed skip the traffic at the expense of widened roads which would help all. These express lanes will logically be the first to allow automation, but at least in that case the affluent will be paying to prove the technology which will eventually benefit everyone.

rayiner2• 7 years ago

Frankly, if that’s how it goes, I wonder if it happens at all. “Separate lanes for wealthy tech workers” is how that’s going to go. You know why we can’t even get bike lanes? Because people bitch and moan because they don’t personally use it. Expand that to an empty lane of moving traffic while the plebs sit in traffic.

It’s bad policy to spend scarce resources (in this case road space) on something few people use. Just 0.6% of people bike to work at leas once a week. Bike lanes are a phenomenon completely out of proportion to how many people use them.[1]

Self driving cars will be that way at first, of course. But the big difference is that self driving technology has the possibility of becoming mainstream. Biking, by contrast, will never become mainstream. The average American commutes 16 miles one way. That’s an hour of biking each way (in weather that, in most of the country, is too hot or too cold most of the year).

[1] It doesn’t help that bike lane resources tend to be focused in areas where they disproportionately benefit educated white men: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2013/06/biggest-obsta...

rtkwe• 7 years ago

The issue with the intermediate 'specific lanes' step is three-fold 1) those buses and trucks will still require a human driver for most of their journey for dealing with the non marked sections so there's not too much gained because you're still paying someone the whole time. 2) the infrastructure is useless without the vehicles and the added capability in the vehicles is useless without the infrastructure so there's a chicken and egg problem with getting either started. 3) On top of those unless the lanes are completely segregated the only real thing adding hardware to lanes adds is making lane keeping easier. If not you still need all the accident avoidance cameras/lidar on the car the same as you need on a more 'free range' auto.

jmull• 7 years ago

A problem with this is that I don't think there are very many places with available, extra lanes.

That prevents a smooth, gradual transition. Essentially you're proposing a massive public transport project that will progressively take over and replace existing transportation infrastructure.

I guess that's possible, but we could have done that without autonomous automobiles and it hasn't happened yet (well, not on a pervasive scale). Actually, if we could do that, I'm not sure we'd actually choose autonomous vehicles, as generally envisioned, as the mode of transportation.

Put another way: I think the whole lure of autonomous vehicles is the idea that they can adapt to existing infrastructure rather than the other way around. That's exactly what seems to make makes it possible for them to catch on in a big, general way, and eventually replace human driven cars.

7j• 7 years ago

I would expect full self-driving to come through remote operation capability - at first a single person can remotely operate one vehicle. After some improvements it would be possible for a single operator to control 2 vehicles and so on.

anodyne33• 7 years ago

Then secondly you could have certain lanes or roads that are designed for specific self-driving vehicles

I have a friend in mapping at Uber ATG. Uber Eats is only available in areas she has mapped which makes me think that they aren't waiting for dedicated infrastructure and relying on their mapping database for now, at least for early development. Granted, Uber Eats isn't using AVs, but that makes me think the GIS crew is doing some heavy lifting there. Pure speculation on my part though.

pessimizer• 7 years ago

I don't deny that this is a thing that is possible to do, but what's the value add of the cars being self driving - why wouldn't we invest public money more rationally than that? The only political way this could happen is if people in powerful political positions were being paid by the manufacturers or patent-holders of this technology.

onemoresoop• 7 years ago

How about automating traffic lights? This could ease traffic in urban areas and I don't hear anyone talking about it.

mkl3• 7 years ago

Traffic lights are automated. They detect how many cars are waiting to know when to change, they adjust their cycle length depending on time of day, etc., they synchronise along long roads so people generally get a string of green lights.

What do you mean?

AtlasBarfed6• 7 years ago

Seriously, please automate highway driving first. You get all the benefits for shipping and efficiency and logistics, so the money is there. The problem is so much more simple, and there can be convergent infrastructure (embedded sensors, mesh network updates, higher standards of road quality).

On long trips on highways it just kills me that I have to stare at the same image for hours basically, and that a program couldn't do that more safely than me.

And if this happens, the airlines and all their fees and cramping and security and bad customer service can be brutally competed against for any trip under 800 miles, and probably longer.

Even a one hour 500 mile trip in a plane is really 3-4 hours, and you don't get a car at your destination, while driving there is about 5-6 hours. If I could surf that whole time or nap, then I'll drive.

If I can sleep overnight, then 8-10 hour drives become far preferable to flying.

If I have friends along the way to visit, or interesting places to vacation in, two or three day trips are more preferable than 1500-2000 mile flights, especially if you have a family and it is way way way cheaper.

Airlines have been reorienting themselves to shorter hops over the last couple decades. Self driving on highways will decimate that business, and only long haul/overseas will remain.

runarberg8• 7 years ago

It seems there is a solution for your problem already: Busses.

Although not strictly automated, they are externalized. That is you are not the one doing the driving, and therefor you are free to sleep, read, work, etc, while you wait to get to your destination.

The beauty about busses is that they exists. There is no unsolved technology problems with busses. And they can be (and most likely already are) implemented without any or minimal additional infrastructure in your area.

If busses are overcrowded your local government can simply buy more, so they scale really well. If they become congested, we also have a solution called trains. Trains also solves your problems with driving and as a bonus get you to your destination far quicker then driving.

rossdavidh2• 7 years ago

I think the highway freight problem is also a good place for humans to act as a backup, since you more or less know when that will be needed (the beginning and the end). Also, a human driver on their 7th hour of driving is often not as alert as they normally would be, so the level of comparison is easier for AI to meet.

Unfortunately, what the people paying for this want to achieve is the ability to not have to pay for a human driver, and if you need a human for the beginning and the end of the drive, you have to pay them for the whole time. So, while this would be an excellent application, I fear the business incentives are not aligned for it to happen first like it ought to.

asdffdsa• 7 years ago

As someone that rides a motorcycle, I'm deathly scared of self-driving cars and the tech companies that will try to automate highway driving, especially with their agile 'move fast break things' 'ask forgiveness not permission' mentality

orasis• 7 years ago

Autopilot on my Tesla Model 3 has already solved highway driving for me.

WhompingWindows• 7 years ago

Your vision is idealistic, but I doubt it's going to work like that in advanced capitalism America. We don't even really have automated trains in the USA, though admittedly the business-case for those is much lower given the high worker:rider ratio. It stands to reason, in our very greedy and polarized nation, anything that requires infrastructure and policy changes is going to be VERY slowly rolled out. The most likely scenario is tech companies bust out advancing features in regulation-light states/municipalities in the USA.

Look at Uber, Lyft, Bird, AirBnB, and many other companies who just implement whatever they feel like and dare cities to challenge them. The path of corporate-profit-seeking SDC's seems far more likely than your vision of limitation and safety.

In fact, if we actually look what's happening on the ground, Waymo is advanced in Arizona, a regulation-light state. Tesla is pushing advancing features, hardware, and software across markets, though there are some exceptions made. Still, these companies are going to push for autonomy-everywhere faster than most would deem comfortable.

sizzle• 7 years ago

They should demo it on all the fastpass Lanes in Socal that are already pretty insulated from main lanes by a barrier or larger gap in most areas.

satyavh• 7 years ago

Even if it will be technically possible, and I'm pretty sure some day that will be solved. That's the easiest part.

The biggest hurdle for self-driving cars will be ethics, such as 'the car brakes for a child suddenly crossing the street but then kills the old woman' or perhaps even make decisions based upon social status. Lots of options here.

Those ethics have to be agreed upon, and they will likely differ per culture, state, country, etc. It's a political and sociological challenge. It will be interesting crossing borders.

And then those ethics need to be implemented in software. I would refrain from saying it's never going to happen, but I doubt very much this will happen in our lifetime.

bryanlarsen8• 7 years ago

I believe that this scenario is very over-blown. If you're in a situation where you have to choose between swerving into another car or hitting a child that darts out onto the street then the question really is: why were you in that situation in the first place? At 20mph pedestrian collisions are almost invariably non-fatal and emergency stops are almost instantaneous. So if you're on a street where a child can appear instantly, why are you going faster than 20mph in the first place?

leetcrew5• 7 years ago

a child can appear instantly on any street. they can even run into the highway if their parent pulls onto the shoulder for a bathroom break or something.

of course, it's much more likely to happen in a neighborhood than on the highway, so we drive slower in the neighborhood. but anything that can happen eventually will, so there ought to be some policy.

that said, I think there is a certain segment of the population that gets overly excited about mapping the trolley problem onto autonomous driving. I expect that little will change other than the liable party (the car driver vs the company) and it will mostly work out.

spunker540• 7 years ago

We don’t currently have those ethics codified now and it doesn’t seem like too big a problem. I think very few situations actually arise where someone has the time to decide between killing two different individuals.

taneq• 7 years ago

No, the Trolley Problem will not be the biggest (or even a significant) hurdle until AI is so good that it's a moot point anyway. Self driving cars will do what humans do - they'll brake as hard as possible while trying to steer away from anything they're going to hit. If we're lucky they may distinguish between moving and non-moving objects and prefer to hit the latter on the assumption that the former are more important.

    if (going_to_crash()) stop();

Robotbeat• 7 years ago

I strongly disagree. The philosophical issues are exaggerated. It’s the practical ones that matter and where the real hard work lays

gre• 7 years ago

How about a gunman stopping the car. Will the car just let the passengers be robbed or executed mafia-style? (I'm rewatching The Sopranos)

kevinofe• 7 years ago

I've always wondered why more attention isn't paid to this. A driver's ability to make a decision to run over a possible assailant is a huge deterrent that is not fully appreciated. To an autonomous vehicle all people will look the same and they will have to stop.

I'm most curious about the self-driving trucks. If they are driving across the country through sparsely populated areas, what is to stop a group of robbers from making a chain on the road that forces the autonomous truck to stop and then offloading the cargo? Legally, this would not be considered "robbery" since there is no person involved. As anybody who has driven is USA knows, time and distance would be on your side in the crime as there are tons of backroads and different routes to make a clean getaway...

imtringued• 7 years ago

The only ethical decision a self driving car has to make is to not actively kill people. What you are proposing sounds to me to be merely a way to stealthily kill people you don't like with self driving vehicles and then use the "ethical decision engine" to gain plausible deniability. To make decisions about "social status" you need a database of people and their "social status". So where are you going to find a database of people with low "social status"? Well every prison and police station has one and oh and for good measure we can also add some skin color detection because that type of analysis can be done in real time.

Or we could just build better self driving cars and accept that some people will be killed but in exchange they maintain the agency to improve their chances of survival instead of being randomly killed on the sidewalk because some stupid idiot wanted to shave off 3 seconds by jaywalking. Just do stupid shit, the car will kill someone else anyway.

The idea that we should encourage a moral hazard like this strikes me as incredibly disgusting.

tarwater11• 7 years ago

It seems like the easy answer is to kick human drivers off the road, right? That will eliminate a great deal of the unpredictability. Start with a small section of a city, and if the results are good, people will want to expand it.

exhilaration• 7 years ago

Also bicyclists, and also human pedestrians -- they decide to cross roads at the craziest times. A city without humans is what we need.

mirceal5• 7 years ago

this sounds exactly what machines silently taking over would say

_jal• 7 years ago

Yeah, no. I will become one of those people who beats up robots. I live in San Francisco, and the reason I put up with the cost and garbage and stupidity in large part is because I don't need a car.

Cars already own non-urban everything, and can stay there. We need to be moving in the other direction. How's that ban on cars on Market St. going?

accnumnplus1• 7 years ago

So, the singularity isn't imminent?

mirceal5• 7 years ago

if and when are 2 separate questions. i’m giving the singularity anywhere between 500-2000 years to happen if we manage to stay alive as a species

rorykoehler• 7 years ago

No one will ever need more than 64kb ram - Bill Gates

tyingq2• 7 years ago

He didn't say that, and it was 640k at the time.

spoppy• 7 years ago

It’s usually ‘640kb ought to be enough for anybody’

Which probably wasn’t actually from Bill Gates

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2534312/the--640k--quo...

sodafountan• 7 years ago

I think that's a misinterpretation of the quote, Gates didn't say "More than 64kb of Ram may never be possible" he simply argued against its practicality at the time.

malvosenior• 7 years ago

It’s much more difficult to prepare self-driving cars for unusual circumstances — pedestrians crossing the road when cars have the green light, cars making illegal turns. Researchers call these “corner cases,” although in city traffic they occur often.

These are difficult to deal with as human drivers too. This article is pretty light on details and basically pins the lack of progress on a couple of Tesla crashes. The thing is, regular people crash cars every day. I'd much rather share the road with self-driving cars than cars driven by humans. Especially with the advent of smart phones, not a day goes by that I don't see multiple people heads down messing with Instagram while driving.

This technology is a lot closer to reality than the article makes it seems I think.

jsnider3• 7 years ago

Given that people feel confident falling asleep in their Teslas while it drives, I think the writer should just lower their standards.

skywhopper• 7 years ago

This has been obvious all along to anyone who has ever driven or used a computer before and thought about the reality for more than a couple of minutes. But the press and VCs bought into the hype from the likes of Uber who needed to keep generating huge new investment to stay afloat and Tesla which is run by a delusional snake oil salesman who had a single hit with the Model S.

The shocking examples of crazy unexpected behavior in the article like street sweepers that do exactly what they are supposed to be doing and cyclists who don’t follow traffic rules blow my mind. Next we’ll learn that some streets have poorly painted lines or that road construction exists or that most human drivers exceed posted speed limits or that there is weather other than sunny and clear.

saiya-jin• 7 years ago

Tesla which is run by a delusional snake oil salesman

Dude, you may not like Musk personally (which is glaringly obvious), but at least stick to the facts - he triggered much needed car industry transformation more than anybody else in recent times. industry itself wouldn't change itself so rapidly even if planet would be burning, that's obvious. And mankind gravely needs it now. Plus small detail about revolutionizing whole commercial space industry in extremely effective way.

Mankind now gravely needs more of these 'snake oil salesmen', even with their missteps

mhermher11• 7 years ago

What did he trigger exactly that wasn't triggered by regulation? He just exploited some regulations to keep his structurally bankrupt company afloat long enough. Tried the same with Solar City and failed BTW.

gamblor9565• 7 years ago

Ah yes, because it's not like the Prius demonstrated that there was a market for green car, or the CA or federal green car credits and HOV access provided incentives to people to buy said green cars, or federal regulations regarding fleet emissions standards created the market for trading emissions credits that has singlehandedly kept Tesla afloat everytime it's come closer to running out of money.

No, apparently Tesla did all that on it's own.

nutjob2• 7 years ago

You get the feeling that they're solving the wrong problem though.

No-one can can predict what other people are going to do, and what other drivers do is also affected by what you do. Most drivers aren't even paying that much attention. Realistically you can't model that to any useful level of precision.

I think maybe vendors are trying to build a more deterministic system that can justify its actions, but to make autonomous driving actually work, I suspect you have to make it drive like human: taking actions "confidently" (i.e. slightly recklessly) assuming the world will roughly follow a rational model, while also driving "defensively" to cope with the general unpredictability of reality.

The price to pay for this strategy is familiar to human drivers: the occasional fender bender.

8bitsrule• 7 years ago

The 'wrong problem' might include trying to achieve everything with smart-as-an-ant cars on dumb roads. It may be possible to make any important road smarter inexpensively, so that the car's sensors could 'read' the road. Then the car has external, deterministic 'input'.

By reading the road, pinging dumb targets, the car has input to help it decide if it can drive safely. If the targets go missing, it quits safely. The dumb targets should ping thru snow. At certain intervals, the road is smarter, with powered, networked targets that can update the car about 'danger, Will Robinson' conditions in real-time.

treespace8• 7 years ago

I know this is far out there. But I believe the problem of fully autonomous anything via software is fundamentally impossible. The divide between analog and digital is just too big.

Humans are underrated.

Faark• 7 years ago

fundamentally impossible

You are basically saying AI is fundamentally impossible. Could you explain what kind of magic in humans beside our simulateable physics is fundamentally impossible to imitate? I understand we might be a long way off of understanding how our minds work and there is no guarantee we can massively simplify those processes. But even an inefficient imitation of a human mind as seen in earlier sci-fy could bring lots of benefits. Saying fundamentally impossible seems like... well, wishful thinking, to say it nicely.

chillacy4• 7 years ago

So how hard are you willing to short the entire software industry over the next 10 years? I definitely wouldn't bet against automation in the next few decades.

baggachipz• 7 years ago

Tesla which is run by a delusional snake oil salesman who had a single hit with the Model S

Being that dismissive and willfully ignorant discredits your entire argument. A snake oil salesman produces nothing and hoodwinks people. I drive my "snake oil" every day and not only is it the best car I've ever driven, it's the coolest thing I've ever owned. I routinely watch his "snake oil" launch huge payloads to orbit and land the booster(s) autonomously for cheap re-use. Hate the guy personally if you want, but slander like yours is simply holding back progress.

almost_usual3• 7 years ago

It's hard to judge Tesla at this point, most automotive companies really can't be judged until their vehicles are on the road heavily for over a decade. I've said this before but I can't imagine a Tesla on the road today being on the road in thirty years. Hopefully I'm wrong. Otherwise we're going to have a lot of 'good for the environment' vehicles in landfills like cellphones. While the gas guzzling 30+ year old Toyota will be chugging along.

hi5eyes3• 7 years ago

if you dont think elon musk is a fraudster with this robotaxi bullshit sir you might have drank the kool aid

repeatedly pretending that full self driving was anything more than a pipe dream is dangerous. everyone knows that except people that enable his scamming

gooseus4• 7 years ago

Nobody said the snake oil salesman doesn't also offer aspirin and stuff that is actually valuable... in fact they'd be a shitty caricature of a snake-oil salesperson if they didn't.

I agree it's overly strong language and I admire Teslas for what they are (fancy toys, his words) and SpaceX more than I can adequately communicate... however, his claims about Hyperloop, the Boring Company, Neuralink, and yes, even those about the future of Tesla self-driving could all be considered hyperbolic claims that fall into the "fake it till you make it" category, just adjacent to the actual frauds.

People challenging these claims and holding hyped up individuals to account are not holding back progress, it's the blind faith people put into hyped individuals and their claims that is holding back progress. Elizabeth Holmes has done far more to hinder progress than the people who were naysaying her claims and calling her a snake-oil salesperson before it was commonly known to be true.

paulcole• 7 years ago

Until the relatively recent backlash, Tesla’s Autopilot page was carefully worded to trick the average reader into thinking that Tesla was far closer to autonomous driving than it really was.

That’s snake oil salesman 101.

All Tesla vehicles produced in our factory, including Model 3, have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver.

maskedinvader2• 7 years ago

Id take this article with a large pinch of salt, considering their previous predictions about technology.

case in point below:

"Hence, if it requires, say, a thousand years to fit for easy flight a bird which started with rudimentary wings, or ten thousand for one which started with no wings at all and had to sprout them ab initio, it might be assumed that the flying machine which will really fly might be evolved by the combined and continuous efforts of mathematicians and mechanicians in from one million to ten million years--provided, of course, we can meanwhile eliminate such little drawbacks and embarrassments as the existing relation between weight and strength in inorganic materials. "[Emphasis added.] The New York Times, Oct 9, 1903, p. 6.

see -> https://11points.com/11-ridiculously-terrible-predictions-ma...

brk2• 7 years ago

Your best case example is a statement made over a century ago?

maskedinvader2• 7 years ago

well if you see the link I posted, there are 11 examples from various points in the past. I was just making the point that their track record with technology predictions isn't stellar.

ljcn• 7 years ago

That last point about materials is interesting. Commercial extraction of aluminium was only discovered in the late 1880s and Duralumin (an early alloy) wouldn't be invented until 1909. Thanks to these discoveries and the Great War the prediction was way off.

kpU8efre7r2• 7 years ago

Could be saying that to defeat competition. Don't bother trying it's decades away! And Ford is notoriously behind the rest of the pack so I'd believe even less of what they say as well. I don't listen to executives with a stake in the game regardless of which side they are playing.

The barriers to this seem mosly man made. Regulations, restrictions, taxi lobby, trucker unions, etc. A lot of it depends on where the line is drawn for safety or versatility. Does one vehicle need to operate in all climates with 0 accidents a year? Simply being safer than humans is easy- we are already there.

I'd be happy to even see more and more driver assist to the point where you can't crash even if you jerk the wheel and try to.

I think the bar has been set incredibly high, almost impossibly out of reach, by people interested in things staying the same.

peteradio• 7 years ago

Simply being safer than humans is easy- we are already there.

Seriously?

kpU8efre7r2• 7 years ago

Just Waymo was driving over 1 million miles a month in 2018. How many people have they killed? The fact that an autonomous vehicle or Tesla "autopilot" fatality makes national news is telling. It's not commonplace.

mhermher11• 7 years ago

You need to stop listening to Elon Musk. Almost everything you said is wrong.

d--b• 7 years ago

Just to play the devil's advocate: the level at which autonomous vehicles operate today was unthinkable in 2000. Literally unthinkable.

The progress in AI has been a massive step forward in a very short amount of time.

We may be years away, but the truth is we are one or two "massive breakthrough" away. These could happen tomorrow, or in 50 years, or never at all.

qznc3• 7 years ago

"Literally unthinkable" is too much. Here is a self-driving van back in 1993: https://youtu.be/JTnBiTIvGqY

Sure, it is an empty highway. I guess that is what you mean by "the level at which autonomous vehicles operate today". Still, people surely were thinking about Waymo like performance.

melling2• 7 years ago

They mean in America, right?

Because I’m sure China will simply build dedicated roads to kickstart the process.

Dedicated self-driving roads for trucks to move products would likely be profitable.

There’s no need to solve the entire problem for self-driving to be worthwhile.

magpi3• 7 years ago

How would that be different from railroads? Aren't those already dedicated to moving products and large amounts of people? And wouldn't they be much easier for machines to navigate?

melling2• 7 years ago

Your lack of imagination is disappointing.

That’s why it’s great to see China innovating where the rest of the world won’t.

https://thenextweb.com/cars/2019/04/15/how-chinas-new-highwa...

You have a bit more flexibility with roads. If you want to add a lane for cars, for example. You could have restricted periods for cars only.

Trucks could filter off main arteries to make late night deliveries within cities where roads become self-driving only during certain hours.

Drivers could also meet trucks at exits.

In the US, it would be great to drive to Florida in the winter with your car so you don’t need to rent a car once you arrive.

petschge2• 7 years ago

These are called railways and every civilized country already has them.

NateEag• 7 years ago

I believe you misspelled "small."

The US does actually have railroads, but it's so huge that it's utterly unreasonable to build enough railways to be a major contender for general transit.

At least, that's my perspective as a US citizen who commutes by train daily.

bryanlarsen8• 7 years ago

The really interesting thing (to me) is that Waymo operated self-driving cars on public streets in Arizona without safety drivers during November 2017 but stopped within a month. (google waymo "november 7 2017") Why did they stop? I'm sure it was partially because they realized there were some situations it wasn't handling properly, but my conjecture is mostly that expectations have changed.

I bet that Waymo cars are massively safer than human drivers in many situations, and that they're not as safe in a few others, and that there are a bunch of situations they don't handle well and "freeze up" or otherwise behave unpredictably. Waymo has probably realized that the bar isn't "as good as a human" but "significantly better than humans".

hamilyon2• 7 years ago

We need to regulate corner cases just like we did with trains, regular cars, medicine, e.t.c

Someone supposed dedicated lanes - that is goog thinking, dedicated intersections is the next step. No pedestrians allowed, but no lights whatsoever. Then, a section of city where regular cars cannot drive, and pedestrian areas are automaticaly driven at reasonably low speeds.

JustSomeNobody• 7 years ago

I don't understand why independent full automated self-driving is the goal. This just leads to competing "standards" so to speak. I think auto manufacturers should be working with governments to create smarter roadways and define an automated driving standard. You'd have smarter cars that would be able to link up in trains on the roadways. They'd be more efficient aerodynamically. It would be safer. You'd have "road ranger" style e-vehicles that could link up and charge you without ever stopping. And you could help fund it all using tax payer money.

sunstone• 7 years ago

The ugly part of this is that if drivers get used to self driving in reasonable weather then, in the one percent of the time (or less) when conditions get really horrible, their driving skills won't be up to the challenge.

However as self driving becomes common investment will be made to make roads easier for self driving technology and extend the technologies usefulness.

Even now in snow storms when temperatures are just below freezing human drivers have a hard time coping. If self driving just has to do better than that. It doesn't have to be perfect.

celeritascelery2• 7 years ago

I have been saying this for years. Even if self driving cars handle 99% of situations correctly, they don’t become feasible until they can do that last 1%, which is 100x more difficult then previous 99. The reality is, if the car drives itself, people will be doing other things in the car and will be unable to respond to emergencies.

bryanlarsen8• 7 years ago

If they get in a situation they cannot handle, the car can stop and pull over to the side of the road before asking the human to take over. And it can refuse to navigate to areas where it wouldn't be able to do that. (And if you're in an area where an emergency stop is unsafe, it's unsafe for human drivers too. Getting rear-ended for an emergency stop is that fault of the following car for that reason.)

umanwizard• 7 years ago

So I’ll still need to have a drivers license to use an autonomous vehicle? That pretty much defeats the whole purpose, at least for me.

iron0013• 7 years ago

Is it just me, or is the Argo CEO interviewed for every single article that's pessimistic about self-driving cars?

celeritascelery2• 7 years ago

I honestly think that even when we do get full self driving cars, you won’t be able to own one. They will be rideshare only. The reality is that autonomous vehicles are so complex that you need advanced mapping of very well known conditions to make this feasible. Companies will make these sort of maps for major cities where they run their ride service but anywhere else cars will just not be advanced enough to handle unexpected conditions. Self driving cars will only ever work under controlled circumstances such as well known cities and suburbs.

dzader2• 7 years ago

basically everything you said is wrong

rossdavidh2• 7 years ago

It is also the case that the downtown area of cities is often the place where parking your own car is the most problematic, so being able to use a self-driving rideshare would be really helpful for that reason also.

rmolin88• 7 years ago

Waymo’s CEO, John Krafcik, has admitted that a self-driving car that can drive in any condition, on any road, without ever needing a human to take control—usually called a “level five” autonomous vehicle—will basically never exist. At the Wall Street Journal’s D.Live conference, Krafcik said that “autonomy will always have constraints.” It will take decades for self-driving cars to become common on roads. Even then, they will not be able to drive at certain times of the year or in all weather conditions. In short, sensors on autonomous vehicles don’t work well in snow or rain—and that may never change.

This reminds me of the time Bill Gates allegedly said: "640K ought to be enough for anybody", taking about RAM memory.

Why would you say it will never happen? That is just silly. It may be decades out, today sensors may have a long way to go. But it's just silly to say it will NEVER happen.

Never say never!

landryraccoon• 7 years ago

In short, sensors on autonomous vehicles don’t work well in snow or rain

This is a curious line of reasoning for me. Why are humans allowed to drive in snow or rain though? Your sensors work considerably worse in snow or rain, and there is abundant evidence over the entire history of cars that humans butcher each other with motor vehicles in snow or rain constantly.

The bar is simply that an autonomous car has to be significantly less likely to cause an injury in snow or rain than a human is.

refurb• 7 years ago

The problem is that with current technology (as I understand it), it doesn't just make a self-driving car worse in the rain or snow, it makes it so it can't drive at all.

shareIdeas• 7 years ago

5G will give vehicle position better than GPS, will they use this instead of sensors for Lane detection?

pretendscholar2• 7 years ago

Strong but brittle is how you could describe most automated systems. They are superhuman in the right context but fail comically if you alter the context just slightly out of what the system can handle. I think the best way forward is to set up infrastructure on roads to help the partially autonomous systems. Its important to not let great get in the way of good.

luckydata• 7 years ago

Having seen the evolution of AI in fits and starts from the early days to now I don't understand why the skeptical stance is still default. We have made enormous progress in the last five years and I don't see why it's not possible to get to human-like performance in the next decade. I argue it would be surprising if we don't get there relatively soon.

jopsen• 7 years ago

Yes, especially with massive competing investments in the subject.

almost_usual3• 7 years ago

Serious question, do you think Self-Driving vehicles would be as heavily invested in if cellphones did not exist?

tabtab5• 7 years ago

We don't need all-or-nothing.

A good many people stay off the road anyhow during poor weather, and those who do go out usually stay on familiar routes, such as to work or their favorite grocery store.

If self-driving cars/buses stick to a subset of streets and don't go out in big storms, they can still be widely useful. Set up (require) a universal network/database of road conditions on the main streets that all self-driving vehicles can tap into. If a problem arises, it then only directly affects the first bot-vehicle that encounters it instead of all of them that use the road. It's internet-like packet switching.

Thus, bots may get "confused" easier than humans, but they can also take advantage of automation to work around confusing areas. The upsides of automation thus counter the down-sides.

The biggest cost of taxis and buses is the driver. If you remove that, then "hitching a ride" is a lot more affordable to those who can't or don't drive.

seibelj2• 7 years ago

By admitting this fact you dramatically reduce the value of self driving cars and thus the inflated valuations of companies trying to create them. It is an uncomfortable truth.

tabtab5• 7 years ago

Once their quantity reaches a threshold, it will quickly become the primary mode of transportation, and expand onto more streets.

Many youngsters don't even want to drive these days, I've noticed. They'd rather sit in a bot car/tram and surf social media. The desire for the product will grow.

pas• 7 years ago

The safe self driving is possible, but currently it is awkward, results in honking (because slow speed).

That is still valuable for the occasional take me home from the pub mode.

The rest of the time it should work with me and disengage prematurely if there's something going on.

twblalock2• 7 years ago

Should everyone own a self-driving car and also a normal car they can drive in situations the self-driving car cannot handle? Keep in mind that public transit is nonexistent in many of the places that have weather conditions self-driving cars can't handle.

For me personally, if a self-driving car cannot handle 100% of the driving and I have to own a second car, I might as well just make that second car my only car and save a bunch of money. In that sense, it is all or nothing.

I don't really think treating self-driving cars as a ridesharing service is a good way around this. People don't want to share cars with strangers who trash the interiors and vomit in them after a night at the bar. People want to keep stuff in the trunk, go to Home Depot and buy a bunch of stuff, transport their pets, etc. -- all things that are difficult to do with a ridesharing service.

tabtab5• 7 years ago

No. Use Uber if you must go out in bad weather. It's rare you have to go out in bad weather. Amazon etc. can deliver dog food if you forget.

rayiner2• 7 years ago

A good many people stay off the road anyhow during poor weather, and those who do go out usually stay on familiar routes, such as to work or their favorite grocery store.

How many people? Folks in Atlanta will happily drive 55 on 75/85 in torrential downpours where you can’t even see the lane markings.

beat9• 7 years ago

It doesn't have to work perfectly - it just has to work better than humans.

Our sensors ain't real great in snow and rain, either.

ben_w4• 7 years ago

It needs slightly more than that: when it fails, it needs to be able to demonstrate that no human would’ve succeeded in its place.

This isn’t a moral or a technical issue, just public relations. If a system reduces road deaths from ~30,000 per year to 365 per year, but one of those deaths was it mistaking a grey skirt for an open road [1], there will still be calls for its use to be outlawed — basically what’s happening now with antivaxxers, and they’re hard enough to deal with when all the evidence is against them.

[1] just to give a concrete example

AtlasBarfed6• 7 years ago

By "fail" you mean crash, or it detects that it's uncertainty gets too large and it pulls over safely, forcing you to wait or take over yourself?

Insurance companies will force the adoption once they become proven safe. The added insurance costs for luddites will price them out of the market.

glitchc• 7 years ago

It seems even that is not enough. Most people would prefer it succeeds where the human fails, and is on the whole better than the human in every way.

beat9• 7 years ago

And if there are no examples of machine-only failure? Then they will be invented, good ol' fake news.

Because our anxiety about AI driving isn't about whether or not the tech will work.

edit: Our fear of autonomous driving is akin to fear of flying. Flying is, by any measure, far safer than driving, but people are terrified of flying in a way far different than how they feel about driving.

sam_goody• 7 years ago

It is phenomenally simpler to have autonomous driving in an area where the only things on the road are autonomous and there is a standard for interacting cross manufacturer.

Many new cars, and in some countries all new cars (by law), have enough sensors to be made self driving.

Standards are already being worked on. A basic level of autonomy - good enough for an area without human drivers - is being worked on by every car manufacturer. At some point, the vast majority of cars on the road (at least in cities where leasing and turnover s highe) will have the capability to be autonomous.

At that point I expect the car manufacturers to work with the larger cities to make central city areas autonomous only. Software updates will be pushed to all those existing cars, and overnight there will be self-driving on a level which is sustainable.

Once that happens, it will push people to upgrade to newer cars, expanding the number of autonomous-capable cars, and by extension allowing for the expansion of autonomous only areas.

As autonomous becomes more standard and accepted in the public conscious, solutions that will look obvious in hindsight will deal with many areas that we consider fringe now.

I read that Fedex originally claimed there would be areas they would never service. Even if they were right, it is less of a deal than they thought it would be. Same thing will happen with autonomous cars.

gregkerzhner• 7 years ago

I can see self driving cars and trucks on long haul freeways, but to me it seems like self driving in city centers is going to be the hardest, not first problem that is solved. Even if other drivers are taken out of the equation, there are still so many variables in a city to account for. Pedestrians, bicyclists, Lime scooters (I guess these will be self driving too?), dogs, construction, etc...

The only way I see self driving cars dealing with all this in the near future is if the roads were totally fenced off from everything else so that only self driving cars were on them more like trains. However, this seems like such a big infrastructure investment (and just a big change overall) that I just don't see it happening within the next few years.

Our cities (at least in America) can't even put in bike lanes, or provide reliable trains, which is a 200 year old technology, so how are we to expect them to completely overhaul our infrastructure to help a technology that barely even exists?

milesokeefe• 7 years ago

Many new cars, and in some countries all new cars (by law), have enough sensors to be made self driving.

Does that include LIDAR? You can't make a safe self driving car without LIDAR.

Causality1• 7 years ago

After Musk's announcement that Tesla will stop selling cars to consumers after cracking Level 5 autonomy, I've stopped even looking forward to it because he's right. Why would a manufacturer sell a self-driving car for $50000 when they can make $300000 off of it as a taxi over its lifetime? Why would anyone make a non self driving car when for a couple thousand dollars in parts they can make money off of it for a decade?

Level 5 self-driving is the death of private car ownership. That may sound great to people living in a city but for those of us to whom visiting family means dirt roads it's stomach-churning.

HALtheWise• 7 years ago

When read literally, there is no way that any system ever, human or automatic, will be able to drive on "any road" with "perfect safety". Crazy freak accidents happen, and human drivers regularly aren't able to handle them. On top of that, most people just can't safely drive in thick fog, icy conditions, or pouring rain. No amount of intelligence will allow a car to drive through a sufficiently flooded street.

Just like with human cars, the important metric is just whether they can drive acceptably safely in the environments that they attempt to go. There's enough low-hanging fruit from faster reaction times and 360 sensing to make that feasible without needing to solve the AI-complete problem. Nobody's asking them to be able to drive at 70 MPH through a fog bank in Alaska with ice on the road, even if that is technically part of the requirements for Level 5 that even humans can't obtain.

ghaff5• 7 years ago

It's actually not a very useful quote because, as you say, taken literally it's an impossibly high bar. What is required to be useful is either

1.) Demonstrably better than human (whatever that means exactly) for a well-defined subset of roads and conditions such as interstate highways under some subset of weather or

2.) Demonstrably better than human for any roads and conditions that a typical adult human would typically be able to navigate door-to-door safely.

1. is a very useful driver assist system, and likely a big win for safety, but you still need a sober adult driver available to take over with reasonable notice. 2. is what you need for robo-taxis to be practical.

bobthepanda2• 7 years ago

There are open questions about whether or not intermediate levels of automation might actually be more dangerous because they lull human drivers into a false sense of security, so I don't even know that 1 is necessarily sufficient.

notahacker• 7 years ago

Faster reaction times are "low-hanging fruit" until the reaction is wrong...

Even taking Alaskan fog banks out of the equation, a machine need to be pretty near AI-complete to not be fatally wrong about how to react more often than every few hundred 100 million miles, which is the human benchmark (including inexperienced, tired, drunk and stupid drivers) if it's driving in normal road conditions without a human failsafe. Or for the road environments to be very different, or for the 360 sensing and autobraking to be primarily driver aids, which are the real low hanging fruit for all that investment in AI processes to understand roads and control vehicles.

afthonos• 7 years ago

That’s an impressively difficult number, but I wonder where you got it from? What is a “time”? A second in dangerous conditions? A trip? How do you get a hundred million iterations of anything at human driving scale?

AtlasBarfed6• 7 years ago

If the standard of self-driving becomes something akin to how airplanes fly, then weather will be a delay, bypass, or do not fly precondition to the execution of the flight plan.

All this stuff about "it's right around the road" vs "it'll never happen" is all unspoken assumptions around what it means to take a "safe" "trip" "in a car" "driven" "autonomously".

Safe? Compared to humans that are alert, humans with smartphones, drunk drivers? Airplanes?

Trip? Distance? Rural vs Urban? Highway? Speed?

"in a car"? Smart fortwo? Motorcycle? RV? Sedan? SUV?

"driven"? All by software all the time and no windshield? implicit backup if uncertainties are too great and can be manually overridden?

I think what needs to happen is that you need programs tailored to specific routes/roads. As you drive any distance, you download/cache the programs for the routes and execute them.

You aren't going to be carrying around a "general driving AI", except as emergency backup to specific route downloads.

Humans work this exact way. You have the idiot tourist drivers versus people that commute on a route. Commuters know how different parts of the road's concrete sound differently, how fast they can take curves if they had to, which lane to be in to anticipate merge backups.

Those commuters know how to drive those routes in winter or summer as well, deer season or not, rain or shine. So that implies conditions-specific programs as well.

TeMPOraL3• 7 years ago

I think what needs to happen is that you need programs tailored to specific routes/roads. As you drive any distance, you download/cache the programs for the routes and execute them.

Wow. That's so obvious in retrospect. I wonder why I haven't considered it before, nor why I haven't read of it before either.

I imagine having stationary "traffic controllers", semi- or completely automated, that keep real-time information about conditions on the segments of the roads they monitor, and which continuously assign "travel plans" to cars. An autonomous car wouldn't have to recognize weather conditions or static obstacles in fraction of a second, because there would be a static sensor network and processing centres responsible for this. All a car would have to do is follow assigned route at assigned speeds, and monitor its environment for dynamic obstacles.

This makes more sense than trying to pack all the intelligence into the car, and doubly more sense than having the car hooked up to the cloud. Unfortunately, I feel companies of today may find it difficult to coordinate on designing such a system.

qznc3• 7 years ago

The "safe" part is a huge one. We need a definition of "safe" on a formal level of ISO26262 which is also feasible. From what I have heard the validation would require billions if not trillions of miles driven. If you retrain the neural net, you start from 0. Currently, it is not feasible to sell a safe self-driving car.

j05h• 7 years ago

This is what GM is trying to do with Super Cruise. Seems like the right way to go on my book.

https://www.cadillac.com/world-of-cadillac/innovation/super-...

YeGoblynQueenne4• 7 years ago

> Nobody's asking them to be able to drive at 70 MPH through a fog bank in Alaska with ice on the road, even if that is technically part of the requirements for Level 5 that even humans can't obtain.

What is required is a vehicle that can decide not to drive at 70 MPH when it's going though a fog bank in Alaska. Humans can drive that fast in such low visibility, but we (often) have enough brains not to.

Majromax4• 7 years ago

Humans can drive that fast in such low visibility, but we (often) have enough brains not to.

I think your "(often)" is doing a lot of work in this sentence.

There are many unsafe conditions that don't require an icy road plus fog plus highway speeds: any bad thunderstorm is likely to combine poor visibility and the risk of puddles/hydroplaning, for example. But the highways don't clear out during summer thunderstorms; people seem (from their actions) content to take the risk.

If self-driving cars become common and maintain a high safety standard, I think we'll also need to see a culture shift. People will have to become comfortable saying (and hearing) "the roads aren't safe right now, so I'll not be there on time."

winternett• 7 years ago

We keep forgetting that in the 1920s they said -all- cars would be flying in the year 2000, and it never happened... Heck, some could say we still don't have cars that can fly realistically, we only have flawed prototypes, and they aren't safe. It's not being pessimistic, it's being realistic. Most of the hype surrounding the self driving car discussion is generated and promoted by people and companies on the profit receiving end of the discussion.

Right now it's primarily based off of cameras watching painted lines on roads. Also not a solid practice. If someone wanted to cause accidents all they'd have to do is paint the lines off the road on a section above 60 MPH.

Another problem is maintenance of these vehicles. Accidents are caused a lot by owners not properly maintaining the car's subsystems like brakes, fluids, and even keeping sensors and windshields clean. Too much performance unpredictability is introduced into the equation by things like this to make self driving cars a reality, and makers cannot reliably answer who will own up to responsibility in case of an accident.

There's also the concept of "free will", i.e. how will these cars work around human drivers, what about everyone relinquishing their personal rights to own cars, will drivers be able to go off the maps and radar routes, etc. And none of those questions can be answered. For planes, boats, large haulers and buses maybe, provided they stay in designated lanes, but for cars? I don't see it happening any time soon unless all of the questions can be answered acceptably.

amptorn• 7 years ago

The important things that self-driving cars can't do aren't freak occurrences. They're elementary things like responding correctly to hand signals from someone directing traffic, or reading and obeying street signs written in plain English.

onlyrealcuzzo• 7 years ago

IFF autonomous cars can drive in certain conditions and on certain roads substantially more safely and cheaply, I think that'll cause roads and commuting patterns to adapt to the cars.

So even if it's a long way away from being able to replace the majority of cars in the way we use them today. The roads and way we use cars in the future might be different.

I'm not saying it will be. It's just something I rarely hear discussed.

safog• 7 years ago

This is the key thing here - Uber for instance doesn't need to solve L5 self driving. They need to figure out what routes are frequent in their network and what routes can be driven by their self driving car and route a ride appropriately.

It will never be Uber flicked a switch and replaced all their human drivers. It will be a very gradual transition over to self driving that may never reach more than 25-30% of all trips.

Is that worth the billions of dollars they're pouring into self driving? https://www.uber.com/newsroom/company-info/ says they complete 14 million trips a day. That is 5.1 billion trips a year (and growing). 10% of that is a 500 million trips a year. Assuming the average trip is 13$, that would be $6.5 billion per year in revenue, I think that's more than enough to turn a significant profit even accounting for R&D, Capital expenses to maintain the fleet etc.

The reason self driving will be a reality is purely economic. Noone's developing it to change the world or reduce the number of people dying in accidents or whatever shpiel they cook up.

Edmond• 7 years ago

Detractors of self-driving cars are always eager to lap up a story like this as proof that it will never happen or it would take decades...."Years" doesn't mean decades, even 10 yrs is a relative short time, i owned my last care for about 13 yrs.

Some proponents of self driving cars might have gotten too ahead of the hype train but nevertheless, self-driving is here and soon would be common place.

It would obviously take some time to turn over the current inventory of non-self-driving cars but even that would happen faster than most people anticipate. Americans already replace their cars quite often and it is hard to think of a more compelling nudge to replace your car than the prospect of not having to actively drive it.

As for the outstanding technical challenges, I am often baffled when people point to that as a reason for skepticism...it is the whole point of the endeavor, to solve those problems.

untog3• 7 years ago

As for the outstanding technical challenges, I am often baffled when people point to that as a reason for skepticism...it is the whole point of the endeavor, to solve those problems.

Right, but that's an absolutely massive issue. I could say that I am embarking on a project to enable me to flap my arms and fly, you might say that's not possible, but I say that's the whole point of the endeavor, to solve these problems!

The article outlines many very real problems that do not have answers. We can hand-wave and say "well, we'll solve them" but until we have any idea how, and the time it'll take to do them, "years" absolutely does mean decades, if not longer.

self-driving is here

No, it isn't.

aeturnum• 7 years ago

The question of "how much and how fast" matters more than you give it credit for, I think.

Take drones - drones are "here" in some sense. You can buy one, they work. But there's a big question about how common drones will be and what they will be used for. How much we care about drone regulations, safety, tracking, etc, will depend a lot on how often we see them. Right now they're rare-ish, but if delivery-by-drone works they could be very common.

The same is true of self driving cars. Of course we will have some number of self driving cars and self-driving features will probably exist on most new cars eventually. But how many and how much they can do matters a lot! I think people point out existing problems to suggest that the magnitude and universality of the technology is still unknown and impactful.

SomeOldThrow• 7 years ago

self-driving is here and soon would be common place.

Ehh, "soon" and "common place" are both hedge words large enough to represent any future. Heck, you could say it alraedy is common place—you can see them all over the place in SF.

My instinct is that this entire self driving hype is to distract from how direly we need to invest in public transit.

listic• 7 years ago

An average American car is on the road for 13 years and this number keeps increasing. (source: lost)

growlist• 7 years ago

I'd be quite happy if they could just drive up and down the motorway themselves in reasonable conditions. Seems like we're pretty close to that already, and that hasn't even required wiring them all up to talk to each other.

pif2• 7 years ago

Every time I read about autonomous cars, I wonder if these points have ever been discussed:

- Yielding to an emergency vehicle with sirens on.

- Moving backwards to a safe and large enough spot when the route is too narrow to fit self-driving car and oncoming huge lorry (and there is no line marking the limit between road and ravine).

- Upon instructions from authority, recognizing that the highway is closed due to an accident and, no matter what the driving code says, you actually have to make a U-turn on the highway and follow the crowd. Alternatively, just take that route (yes, the one with the large no-entry sign at the beginning) or that narrow path in the wood (yes, it exists, even if Google Maps isn't aware of it). At the bare minimum, park yourself off the road and let the others move on.

- Verifying whether a queue is forming behind you. Listening to the honkers, they may be right. When you are an obstacle to the most part of traffic, moving to the side and letting others pass from time to time is sincerely appreciated.

AtlasBarfed6• 7 years ago

- a broadcast radio signal and microphones can detect sirens. That seems easy.

- that's just flow analysis and basic perceptions of the environment. At a minimum, just tell the driver to take over.

- highways will benefit from convergent infrastructure, and alerts like this will be part and parcel of highway driving automation. Flying does this already, basically.

- sensors have 360 degree vision, and mesh networking between cars would help solve this, and automatically call towing/traffic control emergency vehicles to help with disabled cars

I don't worry about any of those situations, those can be readily incorporated into certification and testing of the algorithms/systems.

pif2• 7 years ago

a broadcast radio signal...
...just tell the driver...
...alerts like this will be part and parcel of highway driving automation...
...mesh networking between cars...

You are not talking about autonomous cars.

geogra4• 7 years ago

I would be immensely happy even if it was just on interstates/major highways in clear weather. That's at least 80% of the worst and most mind-numbing driving right there. The rest I don't have a problem doing myself.

gfodor2• 7 years ago

I can't read the article, so only going off the headline, but how does the conjecture that self driving cars are far off jive with the fact that my understanding is they are already deployed in production in Phoenix, AZ? And are being used regularly in the bay area in testing?

Obviously it's incremental. I fully expect in the next 24 months I will be able to call an autonomous car via an app on my phone in the bay area under certain known conditions, like good weather and common, low-risk routes. Or, specifically, that I'll be able to direct my model 3 to drive me to the San Jose airport (a 10 minute drive) without the need for me to actually take any manual interventions along the way. (Though I will still be asked, by Tesla, to be ready to take control.) If true, that's progress, and I expect the progress to continue until eventually this technology is widespread and covers the vast majority of routes and conditions.

gurkancaner3• 7 years ago

I think there is no reel need for driverless cars. Having technological difficulties aside we should question whether there is really a need for self-driving cars. Life is not that bad without autonomous cars. I don't hear anybody complain about in real life not having driverless cars. Basically a driverless car is same thing having a private chauffeur and I know quite a few people who don't want to use their private chauffeurs lots of time.

empath75• 7 years ago

There's no real need for anything in life other than food and shelter. If driverless cars work and don't cost much, some people will use them and enjoy them and that's enough.

gurkancaner3• 7 years ago

There are levels above food and shelter. Having a car is a real need and it solves a problem for lots of people. However having a self-driving car may solves some people's problem but that don't seem to big part of human population. I think that makes the development of self-driving cars slower.

sametmax• 7 years ago

Same for a washing machine 100 years ago. But once it got popular, it allowed for an entire different hoursehold to form.

gurkancaner3• 7 years ago

Yes but when we think about the difficulty of developing self driving cars we need way more powerful incentives.

bluGill3• 7 years ago

I complain about it. I've lost good friends to bad drivers. I can't figure out how to improve humans so I'll take self driving cars when they get better than humans.

darepublic2• 7 years ago

Instead of individual cars we need a highly dense network of rail cars that can merge and split and allow u to travel from any one block in the city to another. Should be able to ship moving trucks via this system where it would deliver them to the near address from where an operator autonomous or otherwise takes over

opportune• 7 years ago

I fully agree. If everyone knows that self-driving cars are the future, why would we not just retrofit our roads to use some fixed transportation scheme like trams or street cars? Self-driving cars seem extremely wasteful, like some bad idea of public transit

learc83• 7 years ago

There's a professor at Oklahoma State with a popular Youtube channel who has a proposal to create an Autonomous Truck Corridor as a way to fix a lot of our infrastructure problems. His proposal works with the autonomous driving technology available today--not level 5 autonomous driving that may be available sometime in the future.

http://www.acpa.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/OKStateUniv-A...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ev6hIQYKYY

0x262d• 7 years ago

can someone please advertise public transit to these deep-pocketed VC dumbasses as somehow being an artificially intelligent city network

something something we have a real bridge to sell you

jacquesm• 7 years ago

I believe that self driving cars are here whenever they can take a standard driving test in whatever conditions we feel are normal for the legislative area they are employed in.

Until then any kind of self driving should be given the same penalties that we would impose on a party operating a vehicle without the appropriate license. This is such an obvious thing to me I really wonder why it has not been implemented.

After all, if 'AI' is allowed to drive why aren't kids aged 12 allowed to drive, they are obviously more intelligent. It's because they have not passed a driving test and won't be eligible until they are of the right age.

winona• 7 years ago

I'm going to be the contrarian here and say that they quoted people and events from some of the laggards or less advanced companies (like Uber's crash, which was totally preventable). I see much more optimism from the leaders in the space, although it's not like they are planning 100% self-driving taxis next year.

Also, keep in mind that the fair comparison is whether the cars outperform the average rate of human drivers. It doesn't have to be perfect.

standyro• 7 years ago

the only thing I see in this thread are hundreds and hundreds of people who have never had the opportunity to drive a car with Tesla Autopilot or Comma.ai EON (this article included)

Those two products are literally the best purchase I've made in years, and have enabled hours of mental energy in my life freed up from the confines of soul crushing traffic in major American cities.

remember that slashdot comment about iPods being lame?

people will look at articles like this, and threads like this in the same way in 5 years...

skizm• 7 years ago

Can Tesla's autopilot really navigate "major American city" areas with no human interaction? I thought it was just a slightly smarter cruise control for highways only and the driver still needs to be somewhat alert?

kerng• 7 years ago

Level 5 AV will never exist, because there isn't even a Level 5 human.

How about we just see if an AV can pass a license test to operate in a jurisdiction? They probably can already- but we do have higher expectations on AV then we have with humans I think. Which is good.

getalyft• 7 years ago

How about just programming human driven cars to obey speed limits (downrated in bad weather or visibility conditions). Many accidents are caused by people driving at an unsafe speed (who has not gone into a turn a little bit too fast). No AI needed, just a speed limit overlay onto existing GPS maps, plus a bit of logic to reduce speeds in certain conditions (night, low visibility, etc).

asark• 7 years ago

Unexpected (by the driver) braking, possibly while making a turn, or controls failing to respond (the accelerator, say) seems more dangerous than the status quo.

Plus you'd have to roll it out everywhere at once, or my merge onto a 60mph limit highway where flow-of-traffic is closer to 75, in my software-crippled car that thinks I shouldn't exceed or maybe even match the speed limit in the on-ramp, is gonna be way more dangerous than having no such feature.

Then there's GPS often not quite knowing where you are most of the time (the route-finding apps just guess a lot—watch what happens when you make a wrong turn and it takes a few seconds to correct, because it's just assuming the diff between where you are and the road you're supposed to be on is an error, because there often are errors that large)

Animats• 7 years ago

The state of the art is discouraging for the money and years poured into it.

Recognizing solid obstacles is still unreliable. On the one side, there's Tesla running into stationary objects multiple times, and Uber running down a pedestrian. On the other side, there's a false alarm rate which causes sudden stops.

Low-speed self-driving vehicles ought to work reliably by now, but don't. Google's cute little bubble car, top speed 25MPH, was discontinued. Voyage has some cars in a retirement community. Some, as in 3. With safety drivers.[1] Local Motors has been issuing press releases for years, but not much is on the road. There are some self-driving shuttle buses, but they all have "safety drivers". EasyMile has real autonomous shuttle buses, but they had to drop the speed to about 10 MPH.

Worse, all these systems have a huge engineer to passenger ratio. Nothing is close to being financially realistic. That's not a permanent problem; in the early days of the Internet, it was said that the ratio of PhDs to packets was too high. But this is a long way from profitability.

It shouldn't be this bad.

[1] https://www.villages-news.com/2019/01/31/villager-treated-to...

YeGoblynQueenne4• 7 years ago

The Uber did recognise Elaine Herzberg as a pedestrian in the last 2 seconds before hitting her, after failing to do so for the 4 previous seconds [1]. It could have activated its breaks and she may have had a chance to survive (though probably not unscathed).

However, the car's auto-breaking decision had been disabled because it was considered too conservative. So the only agent who could have reacted in time was the woman driving the car, who, as we know, was on her phone.

Much as I find the hype around self-driving cars brain-dead, in this case, the car's AI was not at fault. Even if it could have made the decision to stop in time, the agency to act upon this decision was removed from it.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg#Cause...

bart_spoon• 7 years ago

Much as I find the hype around self-driving cars brain-dead, in this case, the car's AI was not at fault. Even if it could have made the decision to stop in time, the agency to act upon this decision was removed from it.

The agency to react was removed because its reactions are crap. If the AI is braking due to false positives all the time, and the the only way to fix it is to disable its ability to react, then I would say that indeed, it is the car’s AI at fault, albeit indirectly.

seibelj2• 7 years ago

It's been the same conversation for 10 years! Here's a comment I made 4 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10133049

It still takes a team of highly paid engineers to build and maintain an authentication page. Seriously - I guarantee you there is a 100+ person team at Google that handles login. Self driving cars are a very, very long way away. The problem space has unquantifiable and insurmountable complexity.

taurath• 7 years ago

At the same time, we're able to launch huge rockets into space with people in them. We build massive buildings that withstand 9.0 earthquakes. We build and maintain massive systems of roads, the power grid, deliver clean water to every home in the country. Its a problem of resources and infrastructure - we could rebuild every highway with a self-driving lane that'd be much safer than not.

You're right - the distance to being able to navigate just about any area whether built for it or not is a long way away, and the complexity may end up insurmountable. But we have the tech to move us incrementally towards that.

noego• 7 years ago

To be honest, 80% of what I want is a self-driving car that can drive itself on the highways during regular weather conditions. Getting it on and off the highway, I don't mind doing that manually. I would love to be able to read or work during the hour that I spend on the highway everyday. I would love to take a overnight road trip where I can go to sleep in SF and wake up the next morning in LA. I'm aware that accidents/bugs will happen, and as long as the car's safety record is better than that of humans, that's fine with me. I've never spent more than $20k on a car before, but for a car that can drive itself on the highways, I'd pay a whole lot more.

jonplackett• 7 years ago

The problem is that the mistakes even a much-better-statistically-than-human driverless car will make are going to be different types of mistakes than a human would make.

A driverless car that kills half as many people per mile as normal driver BUT the ones it does kill are in ways that people feel sure that a human driver would not have been killed then it’ll still be a problem.

DenisM• 7 years ago

I can't help but notice that the hyper-enthusiastic media talk about self driving cars died down right around the time of Uber and Lyft IPOs.

Like, if you want to sell something, you want to create a sense of urgency, right? "If you don't invest into U/L you're missing out on the self-driving revolution, and it's going to be huge! Just look at all the media going crazy!".

mhermher11• 7 years ago

And any time Tesla is about to do a cap raise.

mlguy456• 7 years ago

I wonder if this is partially because the people working on AI/ML intentionally don't put enough efforts into this. I'm one of those people and while I'm to increase accuracy of an existing ML model by 0.3% and collect a fat paycheck, I'd never release any really novel ideas if I happen to come up with some. The reason is our society isn't ready for AI: it's bent by greed and doesn't even recognize this as a problem. Bezos makes billions out of literally slave labor and is cool with that. The US ships containers with firearms to middle East and Africa for profit. The first world people are ok with slave labor in Africa and China as long as it makes the next iPhone cheaper. China and UK are proud of making fast progress in making the survelliance state happen. Australian billionaires open new coal mines and don't care about the rest of the world as long as they have clean air where they live. American healthcare mafia extorts outrageous prices for basic meds and services and would rather let millions die than cut it's profits. What can AI give to this world? Superpowers for the tiny ruling elite? Private armies that can't possibly be challenged by common people. I don't want to live in that world.

beefield• 7 years ago

Just give me platooning on highways and approximately 95% of my personal use cases for self driving cars are satisfactorily fulfilled. And the problem is vastly simpler to solve.

Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’

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