It was common lore in CS grad school that there were self driving cars, funded by DARPA, driving around the CMU campus back in the 90s. It was not as easy to look things up. I am glad this story is being told, but I'd love to know about the history and the early days.
There was one at CMU back in the 1980s, the NavLab. Autonomous vehicle with a crew of five. Three racks of workstations. Really, really slow.[1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntIczNQKfjQ
Compared to the cars in the background it is doing just fine speed wise!
The DARPA grand challenges were an important step for autonomy, by demonstrating basic capabilities and bringing attention and industry funding to the field, but overhyping the expertise gained there may have held the field back over the years. The hardest part of building a self-driving car has proven to be robust perception (processing sensor data to create a very accurate representation of the dynamic environment), which is an aspect that was not heavily emphasized in the challenges: for instance, the winning entry in 2005 had $500K worth of Lidar on it, and the cars were given a GPS map, which allows very accurate localization with yet another expensive sensor (differential GPS). By all accounts I'm aware of, the perception software involved in the challenges was rudimentary, and a lot of the effort was spent on mechanical engineering and path planning. Most importantly, robustness cannot be demonstrated in a one-off competition. Building robust perception is a hard AI problem, and the expertise required to tackle this aspect is orthogonal to the robotics aspects demonstrated in the challenges (which are also obviously very important).
It was 13 years from the Wright Flyer to the first commercial fixed-wing aircraft. And that was still very dangerous. Jet engines (which really introduced the safety we are used to in airlines) took 50 years.
Jet travel brings improved speed and comfort, not really improved safety. Prop planes, as a technology, are very safe. It is a lot easier to land a prop with a failed engine or another part -- due to is low speed one can land small props with a high chance of no injuries on unprepared surfaces such as grass fields. For jets, if you have a failed engine and no landing strip you are likely toast (although there are som…
What you describe has nothing to do with jet versus prop, it's just big versus small. Small planes can land in small, unprepared fields, which are common in many parts of the world, whereas large planes can't. You could make a small jet-powered Cessna that would be just as capable of landing in such small places, while offering more safety due to better reliability of the engine. And an airliner-sized prop plane would be no more capable of landing in a hayfield than a 737 would be.
(I'd also like to mention my appreciation for Bloomberg for not only publishing such articles as this, but also for actually linking to other interesting content not published by them)
Pre-Jet flight wasn't exactly a suicide run. A turboprop plane with dual engines was as safe as a jet, fixed for a number of factors. The larger benefit with jets is being able to fly much higher and faster and being able to hit the 30,000-35,000 sweet spot where the air is thinner, the plane is above storms, and jet fuel efficiency for typical planes is pretty good. The larger 'innovation' on the success of jets is…
Turboprops were developed after jets. But yeah there were other reasons planes got much safer after around the 1950s.
Hasn’t this been validated for hundreds of years? The Story of Longitude is a great read. Harrison spent decades working on the problem. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude_(book) The Spirit of St. Louis crossing the Atlantic was for a prize, and I believe an inspiration for the current X-Prize. I don’t think we need “grand challenges” but simply challenges, to help get us to successive breakthroughs. I’ve thro…
Capitalism is a huge motivator by itself. Come out ahead of the competition and reap the benefits, it's a permanent contest. It's not without its downsides (externalization) but it definitely seems to move the needle.
yes, but that doesn’t mean it’s the best solution for all problems. Investors/founders want to have their exit strategy. We get a lot of “uber of”, etc, for example.
The goal might not be a marketable solution but a step in the desired direction. I don’t know the limits of this type of prize but it’s worth pursuing:
Keeping up with Darpa's challenges is a good way to see into the future a couple of their current projects: 1) A machine-learning competition to overcome scarcity in the radio frequency which is INSANELY fascinating and, if they pull it off, hugely impactful -> https://spectrumcollaborationchallenge.com 2) A program to build technology to drive “swarm sprint” exercises to inform tactics and technologies for large gro…
The technologies that will be developed in #2 will be absolutely, unquestionably used by governments to repress their own people.
Keeping up with Darpa's challenges is a good way to see into the future a couple of their current projects: 1) A machine-learning competition to overcome scarcity in the radio frequency which is INSANELY fascinating and, if they pull it off, hugely impactful -> https://spectrumcollaborationchallenge.com 2) A program to build technology to drive “swarm sprint” exercises to inform tactics and technologies for large gro…
The technologies that will be developed in #2 will be absolutely, unquestionably used by governments to repress their own people.
> The technologies that will be developed in #2 will be absolutely, unquestionably used by governments to repress their own people
One can go to the dawn of self-driving cars, the Internet, really any potentially game-changing technology, and throw this out. It's an inconsequential assertion that provokes no follow-on thought. Just emotion.
Graduating this seed from FUD to a chain of critical thought involves asking how the technology in question might evolve detrimentally and what we can do, today and specifically, preferably in a technical capacity, to mitigate that risk.
The technologies that will be developed in #2 will be absolutely, unquestionably used by governments to repress their own people.
> The technologies that will be developed in #2 will be absolutely, unquestionably used by governments to repress their own people One can go to the dawn of self-driving cars, the Internet, really any potentially game-changing technology, and throw this out. It's an inconsequential assertion that provokes no follow-on thought. Just emotion. Graduating this seed from FUD to a chain of critical thought involves asking…
Every technology has a spectrum of usefulness, between applications that make people's lives better, and worse.
It's not FUD to point out that a particular technology will be primarily used for the latter.
We generally don't hold people responsible for direct effects of their work. Working on drones that will kill people for the military is a direct effect.
'Game-changing potential', whatever that means for this kind of work, is not a first order effect.
Hasn’t this been validated for hundreds of years? The Story of Longitude is a great read. Harrison spent decades working on the problem. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude_(book) The Spirit of St. Louis crossing the Atlantic was for a prize, and I believe an inspiration for the current X-Prize. I don’t think we need “grand challenges” but simply challenges, to help get us to successive breakthroughs. I’ve thro…
Capitalism is a huge motivator by itself. Come out ahead of the competition and reap the benefits, it's a permanent contest. It's not without its downsides (externalization) but it definitely seems to move the needle.
I think some (e.g., Koch Bros) would argue that we don't really have capitalism. That (too often?) Uncle Sam steps in and unbalances the market, often in favor of current winners.
A contest, equally open to all, certainly feels like an appropriate proxy.