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Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”

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Re: Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”

#121

Post by Eridrus »

ScottBurson wrote: post #70
Eridrus wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we had autonomous planes it wouldn't significantly reduce cost or increase usage. But there is a lot of investment in autonomous drones. Planes also have a very high safety bar to begin with, which cars do not. Same thing about trains, there's very little value in doing so, and resistance in the form of unions in some locations. Some trains are fully automated though, here's an article with some more info: https:/…

Gill Pratt is not "some dude" -- he's a robotics researcher with a PhD from MIT, and was a DARPA program manager [0]. [0] http://corporatenews.pressroom.toyota.com/article_display.cf...

To engage with the substance of his argument a bit more, his argument is that perfection is a long way away:

> “Historically human beings have shown zero tolerance for injury or death caused by flaws in a machine,” Pratt said. “As wonderful as AI is, AI systems are inevitably flawed… We’re not even close to Level 5. It’ll take many years and many more miles, in simulated and real world testing, to achieve the perfection required for level 5 autonomy.”

I can believe that, but I also disagree that we need to be there for it to be useful. Level 4 is enough for large scale deployments.

Re: Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”

#122

Post by ghaff »

tyingq wrote: post #86
Eridrus wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we had autonomous planes it wouldn't significantly reduce cost or increase usage. But there is a lot of investment in autonomous drones. Planes also have a very high safety bar to begin with, which cars do not. Same thing about trains, there's very little value in doing so, and resistance in the form of unions in some locations. Some trains are fully automated though, here's an article with some more info: https:/…

>some dude from Toyota, who don't seem to be very invested in this space, tell me he doesn't think it's going to work isn't very convincing Similarly, opinions from those heavily invested aren't convincing. Are there people with credible experience, but without bias either way, that are giving projections on when it might be viable?

John Leonard at MIT is one long-time (going back to 2007 DARPA challenge) researcher who is very skeptical.

e.g. http://searchcio.techtarget.com/blog/TotalCIO/Driverless-car...

"I think that driving exposes fundamental issues in intelligence, fundamental issues in how the brain works. And we might be a very long way away.”

Re: Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”

#123

Post by cmurf »

w0utert wrote: post #68
wnevets wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>when both planes and trains haven't been automated for various reasons. I thought both were already highly automated?

Automated: yes. Autonomous: no. There's a fundamental difference between the two. Airplane autopilots are basically scripted, and operate fully within the parameters set by the pilot. There is almost no intelligence, and very little adaptivity there. The pilot needs to reprogram the autopilot manually when the flight plan changes, for example. Flight conditions can change in many ways that require the autopilot to be…

FAA flight plan plus an IFR clearance is basically a script. Before autopilots, the pilot followed that script, without radar, with waypoint and next fix ETA reporting by radio. And it has a fallback in place for lost communications, the flight is expected to fly and land at its destination per it's clearance (or most recently amended version of it). And the fallback also includes the possibility of being unable to land at the destination, and instead having to go to the specified alternate in the flight plan. http://delta.jepptech.com/jifp/help/Images/FAAFlightPlan.gif

Re: Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”

#124

Post by leereeves »

jessriedel wrote: post #110
dperfect wrote: post #57

I've been saying this for a while. The problem is that people are mostly familiar with the rate of overcoming traditional technical challenges (e.g., making your current computer/phone more compact, improving graphics quality, making cameras and screens with more pixels, etc.). What people don't realize is that full autonomous driving will require more than just faster/smaller/cheaper technical innovation - it will r…

I use Google voice dictation to transcribe emails and text messages on my phone constantly. Not like "I tried it for a week and then went back". I have been using it daily for months. It's now vastly faster than typing it in by hand on a phone, and even the per-word error rate is actually better than mobile typing.

That's not to say that voice dictation is good enough to trust your life to (as in autonomous driving), just that mobile typing is even worse.

Re: Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”

#125

Post by Bartweiss »

noobermin wrote: post #72
moxious wrote: post #12

It speaks to the trends of the day that an article which says something patently obvious to people in the tech field is considered news. This reality seems like it may pose a problem though, as some people's business models and valuations depend on this article being wrong. The thing is, we don't need full level 5 to get useful stuff out of this line of tech development. But in terms of the futurist vision of driverl…

>in terms of the futurist vision of driverless cars everywhere, fleets of cars replacing private ownership, etc -- hard to see that happening. Please tell this to city governors who are so keen at throwing money to stupid start-ups peddling this nonsense at the expensive of other things, like proven public transport, for example. Stuff like this being "patently obvious" to you should be an impetus to get the word out…

> throwing money to stupid start-ups peddling this nonsense

And this is why god invented short-selling. If startups were openly traded instead of privately funded, I think we'd see a lot of technologists setting up massive bets against "full automation" and "solve everything with AI" projects.

It's not easy to get people (especially politicians) to listen to bad news, no matter how loudly you shout it. But in a lot of markets, downward pressure comes from the ability of cynics to enter the market and get payouts from guessing (or knowing) that some promise is impossible.

In the meantime, I suppose we'll all keep yelling. But when trigger-happy investors and unaccountable state funding are shaping the market, I'm not sure how much good it'll do.

Re: Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”

#126

Post by QAPereo »

chapmindustries wrote: post #85
QAPereo wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really makes the insane gamble of the Uber VC's ultimately terminal.

I strongly disagree. Uber has markets that make money and they release new services all the time. There are ways for them to stay in the black if they scale things back and fine tune different markets. Someone is going to be the first in self driving cars. Uber has a tremendous demand for them. It would be stupid to not at least be trying to be the first one on the scene.

Someone will be first, but the Uber VCs will be an old cautionary tale by then IMO.

Re: Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”

#127

Post by vamin »

dperfect wrote: post #57

I've been saying this for a while. The problem is that people are mostly familiar with the rate of overcoming traditional technical challenges (e.g., making your current computer/phone more compact, improving graphics quality, making cameras and screens with more pixels, etc.). What people don't realize is that full autonomous driving will require more than just faster/smaller/cheaper technical innovation - it will r…

I disagree with the analogy to speech recognition. What makes speech recognition difficult is that it's highly dependent on context (sounds the same, but means something different depending on surrounding words, what the conversation is about, or even who you're speaking with). With driving, you should be able to make a good decision with just the instantaneous state, given enough information about that state (objects, velocities, etc). You can argue about what constitutes "enough information," but it seems plausible to me that given enough sensors we could meet or exceed the amount of information taken in by a pair of human eyes on a swivel.

Re: Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”

#128

Post by QAPereo »

alphonsegaston wrote: post #88
QAPereo wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really makes the insane gamble of the Uber VC's ultimately terminal.

Maybe for this particular investment, but I'm pretty sure the wider intention was to legitimize business practices where the poor live tenuous lives as an app-directed servant class. Uber made this kind of neo-feudalism so socially acceptable that we now celebrate "Uber-for-X" as "innovation."

To be fair, few outside of SV do celebrate that.

Re: Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”

#129

Post by damontal »

maxerickson wrote: post #117
damontal wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what if there are 2 obstacles that the car can't brake fast enough to avoid so it has to decide which to hit. one is a person pushing a baby in a baby carriage, the other is a person pushing someone a wheelchair

Do you think we will tolerate autonomous cars operating at speeds that create those situations?

if someone steps out in front your car going 30 MPH can you stop in time? i mean they walk right into your immediate path. do you think this kind of thing can't happen?

Re: Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”

#130

Post by throw2016 »

cryptoz wrote: post #25
limeblack wrote: post #5

One thing I would love someone to explain is how can people assume cars are going to be automated soon when both planes and trains haven't been automated for various reasons. They are different issues I have gathered but essentially shouldn't trains be dead simple but to this day at least the trains(not metras though) often have someone to stop the train in case of emergencies. Planes are more complex but have lower…

30,000 people in the USA alone are killed each year because of human driving error. Humans are not getting any better at driving. Car safety mechanisms have reduced road death rates significantly in the last 50 years, but still - 30,000 deaths/year in the USA alone due to human driver error. Cars will be automated because cars have to be automated.

Self driving advocates having trivialized human drivers have now realized the technology is not quite there and have changed tack to demonizing human drivers and scare stories and FUD.

These are self interested business people. There are real issues around self driving cars like safety, autonomy, rent seeking, corporate control, individual freedom and surveillance that self interested tunnel vision advocates simply cannot comprehend.

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