Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#61

Post by colechristensen » Wed, Aug 23, 2017, 1:05 AM UTC

plicense wrote: post #48

ctdonath wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over the decades I've noticed how businesses need to recognize and focus on their core competencies - if they don't, they die. Everything must feed that core, and undue distractions are lethal. Occasionally there's a need to pivot , which is deliberately stepping from one competency to another, but that is rare and difficult. Apple's core is to build small computers; everything else they do (music, video, cloud servi…

I definitely wouldn't call AWS, Echo from Amazon occasional. I think companies come in all shapes and sizes - some focus 90% on their core, some try to spend more time and diverge out to other business segments. Its upto Apple to figure out what to do and what would make it successful.

I think it's more that most don't see Amazon's actual core competence. Amazon is a logistics business, both information and physical. They do logistics for themselves for various front-ends (amazon.com, echo, video, kindle, etc.) but you can view all of those as accessories to their AWS, warehousing, and shipping business which they provide both for their own front ends and for sale to anyone.

Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#62

Post by freehunter » Wed, Aug 23, 2017, 1:05 AM UTC

How much energy does it take to move one train 500 miles? How much energy does it take to move 10 cars 25 miles each? That's your question.

Why do people always frame public transport in the light of "everyone can just take a single train!"? It doesn't work like that. It never works like that. It's a ridiculous argument barely even worthy of a response. 500 people might take one train in LA or NYC, but how about Greenville, Wisconsin? How about in Bitely, Michigan? How about Linn Grove, Indiana?

Suddenly the argument breaks down, doesn't it? Good luck replacing 500 cars with one train when the town only has 150 people and they all work in different cities. Now suddenly cars are looking pretty damn efficient, aren't they?

Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#63

Post by didip » Wed, Aug 23, 2017, 1:05 AM UTC

jamestimmins wrote: post #20

slackoverflower wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it that you don't want self driving cars to happen or you don't THINK it will happen? I, for one, am super excited for self driving personal vehicles and will be glad to see the eradication of mass public transportation like trains and buses.

There's a strong case to be made that this isn't a desirable outcome in a lot of areas. Trains and buses are much more efficient at moving people than individual cars, even if they're self-driving. I'm also extremely excited about autonomous cars, but neither desire nor think they will replace mass transit. edit: As a few people have mentioned, my suggestion that "trains are buses are much more efficient" is dubious.…

What if trains and buses can be made autonomous?

From software perspective, there isn't much difference between form of vehicles.

Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#64

Post by moxious » Wed, Aug 23, 2017, 1:06 AM UTC

ianai wrote: post #13

Call me crazy but why not consider ways to let someone remote drive the vehicle? I'm sure there are all sorts of corner cases (bad signal for one) but it's done all the time with drones.

Drones typically don't need sub-second response times; they're not dogfighting

Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#65

Post by jamestimmins » Wed, Aug 23, 2017, 1:10 AM UTC

scarmig wrote: post #57

jamestimmins wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a strong case to be made that this isn't a desirable outcome in a lot of areas. Trains and buses are much more efficient at moving people than individual cars, even if they're self-driving. I'm also extremely excited about autonomous cars, but neither desire nor think they will replace mass transit. edit: As a few people have mentioned, my suggestion that "trains are buses are much more efficient" is dubious.…

I think you overstate how much better mass transit is than self driving cars. Transportation is fundamentally about traversing a graph, and transportation infrastructure is about maximizing the value of the flows on that graph. Mass transit only makes sense when the edges become a certain weight. The vast majority of point to point connections are far too light to support mass transit. Car transit is a bit better for…

That's an interesting approach to breaking the problem down, and a way in which I hadn't thought of it. I can see that I likely overstated my initial comment. I'll edit it to clarify what I meant.

Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#66

Post by make3 » Wed, Aug 23, 2017, 1:10 AM UTC

tambourine_man wrote: post #36

“From the beginning, the employees dedicated to Project Titan looked at a wide range of details. That included motorized doors that opened and closed silently. They also studied ways to redesign a car interior without a steering wheel or gas pedals, and they worked on adding virtual or augmented reality into interior displays. The team also worked on a new light and ranging detection sensor, also known as lidar. Lida…

Very large tech companies always have people looking into weird slightly bullshit things. Doesn't necessarily mean that they had any real intention of committing to these ideas.

Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#67

Post by rconti » Wed, Aug 23, 2017, 1:11 AM UTC

anilshanbhag wrote: post #8

This is the right way. Building a mass market car is an enormous exercise. We have seen this with Tesla, which has thrown money at the problem and will still take 4 years to become mass market (2.5 already over + another 1.5 years). After these 4 years, its unclear what the value add will be.

The Roadster started production in 2008. I don't even know how long it was in development before that. To me, that counts as part of trying to build a mass market car. Yes, it was a niche vehicle, but if you want to point to the Model S as the start point, it's either ALSO a niche vehicle, or already represents success at building a mass market vehicle.

Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#68

Post by colechristensen » Wed, Aug 23, 2017, 1:12 AM UTC

tambourine_man wrote: post #36

“From the beginning, the employees dedicated to Project Titan looked at a wide range of details. That included motorized doors that opened and closed silently. They also studied ways to redesign a car interior without a steering wheel or gas pedals, and they worked on adding virtual or augmented reality into interior displays. The team also worked on a new light and ranging detection sensor, also known as lidar. Lida…

Seems like they were biting off way more than they could chew.

If Apple partnered with an existing car company to apply their design principles on top of an existing car platform (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_Mini_platform ) they could see a lot of success if they weren't too ambitious. They wouldn't win if they tried to reinvent the wheel because there would be far too big of a chance of either taking 10 years to build nothing or for building something that ended up being overly strange (e.g. Segway)

Build a car that was familiar built out with quality materials and an iOS dash interface and you'd sell like hotcakes.

Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#69

Post by moxious » Wed, Aug 23, 2017, 1:13 AM UTC

freehunter wrote: post #50

mindcrime wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the "happy path" case, in good weather, etc., sure. But that's the first 90%. The second 90%, dealing with all weather conditions, all traffic conditions, arbitrary road hazards, crazy road conditions, etc., might take a lot longer. To the point that it's not crazy to say "it'll never happen". That said, I do think we'll get there eventually, as I think we'll get to AGI (or even ASI) eventually. But I can't prove…

There was a day when I booted my computer, I'd have to run a few commands and enter a few keys and insert a diskette. If, at that point, you told me I'd one day have a computer that boots itself and starts programs by itself upon booting to the point where a reboot would be indistinguishable from merely turning the monitor on and off, I may have laughed at you. But here we are, in an era where when my Mac reboots I c…

Throughout all of that development, computers remained remarkably dumb. We still program them manually and they do what we tell them to even if it's disastrous.

Driving on open roads with other humans is going to require elements of real intelligence that are qualitatively different than your OS example where they just did more programming, better, faster.

It's apples and dump trucks. What if computers are just the wrong approach for this problem?

Computers are always improving. Granted. Doesn't mean it's going to be in a direction that's useful for general AI and driving full-autonomous.

On the flip side of constant improvement is are the claims that we'd have full autonomous cars "real soon now" for each of the last 20 years.

In 2017, we're still far enough away no one will give a product availability date. This again points to a qualitatively different challenge than what came before, and the need to develop several new layers of tech (not just integrate what's there) to get the job done

Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#70

Post by rconti » Wed, Aug 23, 2017, 1:13 AM UTC

kartD wrote: post #3

"But people within the industrial design team including Jonathan Ive, Apple’s chief designer, believed that a fully driverless car would allow the company to reimagine the automobile experience, according to the five people." Ah Jony Ive, first he ruined iOS 7 and now this constant need to tinker with things that work fine. I love the hardware design but please leave the software and HID bit alone... of course YMMV P…

I was looking at an iOS screenshot from 6 or 7 years ago, and was amazed at how the battery and location services and bluetooth icons all really popped in color and texture. No more. Now I have to find a hidden force touch control to do.. well, god knows what.