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Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock

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Re: Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock

#121

Post by sandworm101 »

jtbayly wrote: post #2

Waymo 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…

Read the contract if you can. I guarantee that they have not put down a billion dollars for all those cars. This isn't like ordering from Amazon. This is a complicated delivery contract. It will have stages. Money will be owed according to a schedule. If things don't work out, there will be many places where delivery can be delayed or the order canceled. Waymo has to have a plan to pay for this in the long run, but they aren't today putting down all the cash.

If you are buying 10,000 cars, what you are essentially doing is taking on that car manufacturer as a partner. You are betting that you will need the cars, and they are bettering that you will be around to pay for them. Everything remains speculative.

Re: Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock

#122

Post by the-pigeon »

georgeecollins wrote: post #99
totaldick wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rodney Brooks has a history of skepticism about AI (said in 2009 that he doesn't think AI is even possible), as does Gary Marcus (who's been anti-deep learning since 2011). "AI is hype" hit pieces always quote them.

I assume you are trolling, but in case someone misses your user name: To say that the director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence lab for ten years and the founder of the a successful AI workstation company and the most successful robotics company in the world "has a history of skepticism about AI" is idiotic.

Why?

There's certainly people who work with particular tech that are pessimistic or optimistic about it.

Re: Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock

#123

Post by dang »

phyzome wrote: post #95
comesee wrote: post #60

> “Rather than building AI to solve the pogo stick problem, we should partner with the government to ask people to be lawful and considerate,” he said. “Safety isn’t just about the quality of the AI technology.” Wow. What a goal post move. I don't think this is how successful technology spreads. Governments usually accomodate tech because it proves itself in the market, not vice versa.

Seriously, fuck that guy. > Drive.AI founder Andrew Ng, a former Baidu executive and one of the industry’s most prominent boosters, argues the problem is less about building a perfect driving system than training bystanders to anticipate self-driving behavior. In other words, we can make roads safe for the cars instead of the other way around. I'm not going to give up on crosswalks just so you can make money on your…

Please don't post like this to HN. It degrades discussion and encourages worse.

Downward-spiraling is the internet default, so effort is needed to avoid it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock

#124

Post by Animats »

Another bad article.

As I keep pointing out, the way you start to do automatic driving is by first profiling the terrain to see where you can go. If it's not flat road, you don't go there. Doesn't matter why it's not flat. Then try to classify other road objects and predict their behavior. This only matters for moving objects.

Waymo gets this, as we know from Urmson's talk at SXSW a few years back. Most of the DARPA Grand Challege vehicles got this, because they had to drive off-road, where you have to profile terrain or else.

Tesla does not get this. Cruise may or may not get this. Uber - well, Uber's system detected the pedestrian and ran into her anyway, which should end with someone in jail.

There's this mindset that you just throw deep learning at camera images and automatic driving comes out. Musk claimed that. It didn't work. We don't hear much from Tesla about self-driving any more. Udacity's self-driving course is also deep learning based.

As for how much testing is required, read the California DMV accident reports.[1] This gives you a sense of what the real-world problems are. 25 minor accidents so far this year. Mostly Cruise. The most common problem, especially with Waymo, is being rear-ended while cautiously entering an intersection with limited visibility. Their system will start forward to get a better view, then detect cross traffic and stop. What may help there is some convention such as rapidly flashing the brake lights when a sudden stop is likely and there's a vehicle close behind.

On the LIDAR front, Continental's flash LIDAR is already working well enough that drone makers are buying it. Continental is ready to produce that thing in volume, but they need volume orders from automakers before the price comes down.

[1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/auton...

Re: Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock

#125

Post by Zhenya »

freerobby wrote: post #96
Zhenya wrote: post #33

I'm continually astounded by the Tesla hasbara: "Tesla and a host of other imitators already sell a limited form of Autopilot" Imitators? You mean GM, Mercedes and VAG that have had these systems for longer than Tesla are just bad copies of the glorious Tesla autopilot? Unreal.

All due respect, have you used any of the Autopilot clones? There are endless debates about what's better on paper, but everybody I know who's actually used them says Autopilot is much more mature. Comma.ai seems to be right on their tail, but it's an aftermarket system requiring a fair bit of DIY (so it's not very accessible yet for most end users). Tesla was first to market with auto steering, and seems to have the…

But the other companies aren't imitators even if what you're saying holds true. They have products that did, before or at the same time, similar functions. Did they actually copy Tesla once the functionality was released on the Model S? The answer is 'no'.

Re: Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock

#126

Post by robbrown451 »

chronic821 wrote: post #18
samirparikh wrote: post #14

I work on self-driving cars. Imho, companies need to collaborate on certain aspects like perception instead of competing. The vehicle is basically blind beyond the range of the sensors or if you miss a detection. Collaboration on these issues will lead to faster progress instead of competing.

> Imho, companies need to collaborate on certain aspects like perception instead of competing. I also work on self-driving cars. Why would I share technological innovations with another company?

Because they pay you for a license, might be one reason. Maybe some system (possibly backed by legislation) makes it easy for them to share technology without some companies being freeloaders and others being suckers.

Competition obviously is a powerful motivator, but sharing tech can reduce costs for everyone, at least in theory.

Re: Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock

#127

Post by mdorazio »

brookhaven_dude wrote: post #13
adrianN wrote: post #4

The 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…

Edges cases are what really matters in this case! Isn't there a saying that 80% of the code is written to handle 20% of the cases?

I like to think of it as an order of magnitude increase for each 9. Ex. If getting to 90% coverage takes 10 hours, getting to 99% will take 100, getting to 99.9% will take 1000, etc.

Re: Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock

#128

Post by ipsum2 »

brudgers wrote: post #117
Symmetry wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporations like Alphabet don't spend 1% of their revenue on something unless they're very confident it will pan out.

Alphabet spent $12.5 billion on Motorola Mobility in 2011 and sold it to Lenovo for $3 billion three years later. The lost $9+ billion? Nobody really noticed. For Alphabet, $1 billion is mad money, not the rent. Self driving cars are a moonshot.

The 9 billion was spent on patents. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola#Motorola_Mobility_dea...

Specifically, this section:

"According to the filing, Google and Motorola began discussions about Motorola's patent portfolio in early July, as well as the "intellectual property litigation and the potential impact of such litigation on the Android ecosystem".

Although the two companies discussed the possibility of an acquisition after the initial contact by Mr. Rubin, it was only after Motorola pushed back on the idea of patent sale that the acquisition talks picked up steam.

The turning point came during a meeting on July 6. At the meeting, Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha discussed the protection of the Android ecosystem with Google senior vice president Nikesh Arora, and during that talk Jha told Arora that "it could be problematic for Motorola Mobility to continue to exist as a stand-alone entity if it sold a large portion of its patent portfolio".

In connection with these discussions, the two companies signed a confidentiality and non-disclosure agreement that allowed Google to do due diligence on the company's patent portfolio."

Re: Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock

#129

Post by mdorazio »

freerobby wrote: post #96
Zhenya wrote: post #33

I'm continually astounded by the Tesla hasbara: "Tesla and a host of other imitators already sell a limited form of Autopilot" Imitators? You mean GM, Mercedes and VAG that have had these systems for longer than Tesla are just bad copies of the glorious Tesla autopilot? Unreal.

All due respect, have you used any of the Autopilot clones? There are endless debates about what's better on paper, but everybody I know who's actually used them says Autopilot is much more mature. Comma.ai seems to be right on their tail, but it's an aftermarket system requiring a fair bit of DIY (so it's not very accessible yet for most end users). Tesla was first to market with auto steering, and seems to have the…

As someone who has used Autopilot and many of its "clones" as well as worked with several OEMs on these features, Tesla's offering is not more mature, it's more irresponsible. Autopilot is a combination of ADAS features that many other OEMs have had for a while and deliberately chosen not to tie together due to safety concerns. These concerns have been validated multiple times now by Autopilot errors. The "clones" are deliberately less good because the manufacturers offering them care more about safety and reliability than about marketing beta products.

Re: Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock

#130

Post by mdorazio »

zwieback wrote: post #38

How much better than human drivers do self-driving cars have to be to succeed? If you take a metric like fatalities or damage per mile I'm guessing we ask our robots to be much better than humans, even though it doesn't really make sense. Over time the differential will come down but a better intermediate strategy would be to keep humans away from robot cars until collision avoidance techniques improve substantially.

FWIW, I've heard the "100x safer" number tossed out at conferences on ADAS. I.e. an autonomous vehicle needs to crash 100x less frequently, kill 100x less people, etc. for the public to truly accept it as better than human drivers.

Logically, this doesn't make any sense, but taking control away from people leads to some psychological hurdles.

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