Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

So anyone who has been around for even a few years has witnessed probably more than AI hype cycle. This has been going on since probably the 1960s. While there have been (I'm sure) advances over the years, some no doubt substantial, what's clear is that the big thing that was and is needed is a truly massive amount of computing power.

Now I believe that self-driving cars will ultimately be transformative for society in a way not seen since the automobile itself or possibly even mass electricity generation.

But I just think this is still way further off than the more bullish pundits are predicting.

To be clear, there are two milestones here:

1. Assisted driving

2. Autonomous driving.

It's the second that'll be truly transformative. This is when cars won't be designed to have human drivers at all.

There is a lot of low hanging fruit here like highway driving where basically you need to not hit the vehicle in front of you and you need to stay in a lane at a fairly constant speed.

Assisted driving is the incremental approach needed to prove these technologies and bring self-driving to market (IMHO). This will be gradual and slowly replace some aspects of manual driving. It will probably soon reach the point where the car will intervene to prevent an accident. I expect even this to be cautiously adopted as there is a massive product liability issue here.

A drunk driver drives on the wrong side of the road and has a head on collision and society just tends to write that off as unfortunate, the cost of doing business basically. But as swoon as the car makes a decision that injures or kills someone (and it will) the lawsuits will be swift and massive. That's a problem. In fact, it may be the biggest problem. Nevermind the inherent risk to drivers, passengers and bystanders when you put a meat sack behind the wheel.

But the long tail of this problem is huge, to the point where I'm not sure you can really solve it without having an almost or actual general AI. So much of this is anticipating what humans will do. I mean things like placing a bucket or a plastic bag on the road and seeing what an autonomous car does.

Thing is, people seem to think this is totally going to happen real soon now when we have a long history with this in the form of aviation. People have been trying to automate humans out of flying planes forever. Unfortunately there seems to be an uncanny valley type situation where too much automation can actually make things more unsafe. I'm talking here about incidents where automated systems did or nearly did cause incidents that the humans had problems overriding.

And planes have to deal with probably substantially less situations than cars do.

I honestly don't know why Apple thinks it can compete in this space. It doesn't play to any of their core strengths.

If I had to pick anyone in the box seat here it would be Tesla.

Tesla already produces cars and has a go-to-market strategy. After Tesla, I'd add Google simply because you can never totally discount Google.

I take Apple scaling back as a positive sign here... for the company. I take it to mean that they realize just how far away this is and how difficult a go-to-market strategy is and also that this just doesn't play to their strengths.

This is a weirdly titled report which implies it just happened. The "Apple scales back" part was already reported first by Bloomberg last year (which seems to be behind a paywall now) [1]. Bob Mansfield was brought on to refocus Project Titan on the fundamentals (being self-driving) rather that producing a car [2]. But both of these reports have the exact same hedging:

>Apple Inc. has drastically scaled back its automotive ambitions, leading to hundreds of job cuts and a new direction that, for now, no longer includes building its own car, according to people familiar with the project.

>Five people familiar with Apple’s car project, code-named “Titan,” discussed with The New York Times the missteps that led the tech giant to move — at least for now — from creating a self-driving Apple car to creating technology for a car that someone else builds.

And that's because the idea that Apple is going to be an auto parts supplier like Delphi that sells middleware to car companies is completely laughable.

There isn't actually much news in this report. The tidbits that the reporter got clearly motivated writing this article but it doesn't actually live up to its premise. In fact, PAIL seems like an expansion of Apple's efforts from what was previously reported.

[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2016/07/28/apple-car-autonomous-dr...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-17/how-apple...

Public transit in the US generally fails at the last mile for me especially in the suburbs. Self driving cars would be awesome for getting me to the train station. Currently I'd have to take a bus for that. However the bus stops at literally every block which is insane. Extremely frequent stops are a general problem I've had in both the bay area and the Portland area as well as the few times I've used public transit in LA. I'm more than happy to walk 5-10 minutes but I'm not happy to sit in a bus or train that is stopping all the time and never gets up to speed.

You could as well have said: That's right, Google's cloud platform is a counterargument.

"Trains and buses are much more efficient at moving people than individual cars, even if they're self-driving."

I've said this on here before, but I'll say it again: efficiency is not everything.

Individual houses (or even apartments) are less efficient than having everybody living in barracks, hot-bunking the beds in three shifts, and eating some sort of nutrient-balanced kibble in cafeterias.

Human beings have goals other than efficiency. One ignores this fact at one's own peril.