Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock
1–10 of 256 posts
Re: Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock
#2Waymo seems to be the only question mark in my mind making me doubt my bet that we're a decade or more away from usable self-driving cars.
If Waymo has truly solved the problem while everybody else is just trying to catch up and/or bluffing, I guess I wouldn't be that surprised.
Edited to add: The reason is that they've apparently ordered 10's of thousands of these cars. Can they really use that many only in good-weather places with perfect roads? It seems unlikely that they are just that stupid to spend that much money without being confident that their plan will work. One last option would be that they intend to put 10's of thousands of them on the road just to exponentially speed up the data collection that they've decided is necessary to truly get the system up to par.
Re: Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock
#3This has been hanging out there for a while it's just that it never got much mainstream press. I wonder what it is specifically about the concept of "AI" that makes it so prone to the magical thinking that drives these boom-bust cycles.
"I tell adult audiences not to expect it in their lifetimes. And I say the same thing to students"
"Merely dealing with lighting conditions, weather conditions, and traffic conditions is immensely complicated. The software requirements are extremely daunting. Nobody even has the ability to verify and validate the software. I estimate that the challenge of fully automated cars is 10 orders of magnitude more complicated than [fully automated] commercial aviation."
- June 2015, Steve Shladover, transportation researcher at the University of California, Berkeley
https://www.automobilemag.com/news/the-hurdles-facing-autono...
"While I enthusiastically support the research, development, and testing of self-driving cars, as human limitations and the propensity for distraction are real threats on the road, I am decidedly less optimistic about what I perceive to be a rush to field systems that are absolutely not ready for widespread deployment, and certainly not ready for humans to be completely taken out of the driver’s seat."
- March 2016, Mary Cummings, director of the Humans and Autonomy Laboratory at Duke
https://www.commerce.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/c85cb4ef...
"With autonomous cars, you see these videos from Google and Uber showing a car driving around, but people have not taken it past 80 percent. It's one of those problems where it's easy to get to the first 80 percent, but it's incredibly difficult to solve the last 20 percent. If you have a good GPS, nicely marked roads like in California, and nice weather without snow or rain, it's actually not that hard. But guess what? To solve the real problem, for you or me to buy a car that can drive autonomously from point A to point B—it's not even close. There are fundamental problems that need to be solved."
- September 2016, Herman Herman, director of the Carnegie-Mellon University Robotics Institute
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d7y49y/robotics-l...
Re: Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock
#4The crashes that the article claims came from edge-cases that the engineers didn't account for weren't, in fact, edge-cases. The Tesla crashes are due to the way Tesla's system works, it doesn't recognize stationary hazards. Similarly Uber's system failed to brake for a hazard that it could clearly see. That's not an edge-case, it doesn't have to know that the object is a woman pushing a bicycle. It's a solid object moving steadily into the car's trajectory.
Re: Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock
#5This has been hanging out there for a while it's just that it never got much mainstream press. I wonder what it is specifically about the concept of "AI" that makes it so prone to the magical thinking that drives these boom-bust cycles. "I tell adult audiences not to expect it in their lifetimes. And I say the same thing to students" "Merely dealing with lighting conditions, weather conditions, and traffic conditions…
I'd argue that it's because (true/hard) AI represents, in many ways, the "final frontier" of scientific research. Not in a literal sense -- they'll always be something else to study. But the notion of creating a thinking machine is, in many ways, the ultimate goal of studying nature and the world around us: to allow us to understand the processes and phenomenon at work well-enough to be able to capture/manipulate/recreate them at will.
This isn't new though -- "thinking machines" have captivated audiences for millenia. See the Antikythera mechanism [1], the Turk [2], and so on. The ability to replicate the capabilities of our own brains is intoxicating -- it finally signals that we, homo sapiens, understand our own minds well-enough to recreate their abilities at will.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk
Re: Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock
#6This has been hanging out there for a while it's just that it never got much mainstream press. I wonder what it is specifically about the concept of "AI" that makes it so prone to the magical thinking that drives these boom-bust cycles. "I tell adult audiences not to expect it in their lifetimes. And I say the same thing to students" "Merely dealing with lighting conditions, weather conditions, and traffic conditions…
You don't have to solve the entirety of the problem for a solution to be useful.
The autonomous cars only drive when it's 80 degrees out, sunny and on predetermined paths? Still welcomed.
Re: Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock
#7Rodney Brooks gave an interview that was recently reposted on ArsTechnica. He has so much real world experience productizing AI and robotics that no one else really compares. He is not pessimistic just realistic about self driving cars. And he has great reasons why true autonomy is going to take a long time.
Re: Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock
#8This has been hanging out there for a while it's just that it never got much mainstream press. I wonder what it is specifically about the concept of "AI" that makes it so prone to the magical thinking that drives these boom-bust cycles. "I tell adult audiences not to expect it in their lifetimes. And I say the same thing to students" "Merely dealing with lighting conditions, weather conditions, and traffic conditions…
I'm glad to read these because I've been feeling like and been treated like I'm on crazy pills for thinking we aren't even remotely close to autonomous vehicles.
Re: Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock
#9Waymo seems to be the only question mark in my mind making me doubt my bet that we're a decade or more away from usable self-driving cars. If Waymo has truly solved the problem while everybody else is just trying to catch up and/or bluffing, I guess I wouldn't be that surprised. Edited to add: The reason is that they've apparently ordered 10's of thousands of these cars. Can they really use that many only in good-wea…
I tend to agree. Waymo ordered 62,000 Chrysler Pacificas with delivery slated for late 2018. Base retail on the hybrid model
is $40,000USD. Even if they got an unbelievably generous 50% discount, that means they're $1.24B USD serious, excluding the cost of the additional autonomous driving equipment. So this will either be one of the biggest debacles in Google/Alphabet's history, or they really are ready to go.
Re: Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock
#10As long as software is composed of primitive language derived statements and "functional" logic (IF, WHEN, WHILE, DO, GOTO, etc...) AI will remain a fantasy.