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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

#131
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, good luck marketing a product which only works when everyone is lawful and considerate, and otherwise has a considerable chance of killing occupants or pedestrians.

Cars that you can buy today are such a product. As are kitchen knives.

The expectation with cars is not that everyone is lawful and considerate, but that everyone has a decent chance of being held accountable for their actions.

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

#132
post #90
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? Neurons work exactly like if/then statements. If (input > level) {transmit information}

Ummm.... no. You might be able to make the case that a neuron can be simulated with a very complex set of if-then statements, but that assumes that we can know everything about the state of a dozen inputs, which we can't. At any rate, the brain is not a computer: https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-informati...

i like that this essay puts the complexity of the brain into perspective, but the distinction between a computer and an organism is kind of arbitrary. brains are physical systems that can be modeled mathematically. if you can create a mathematical model of a thing, you can execute that model on a computer. a brain isn't a classical computer, but that doesn't mean that a computer can't simulate a brain.

we currently lack the ability to recreate a brain-like entity, but the subtext that i am reading here is that the complexity of the brain is such that accurately modelling a brain in mathematical terms is impossible. the "brain-as-computer" model may not be accurate, but everything that exists can be expressed in mathematical (and therefore compute-able) terms.

i doubt that cyberbrains will run on anything that we recognize as a general-purpose cpu. gpu micro-architecture is already a significantly more efficient option for performing nn computations. as our grasp on this stuff improves, more specific silicon is being developed to make it even more efficient.

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

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think you have that flipped. 20% of code covers 80%. As you try to get to 100% coverage of all possible scenarios the complexity gets in some cases exponentially harder as all the low hanging fruit is picked

So he is exactly right : 80% of the code handles edges cases. You are the one who is flipped.

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

#134
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At the scale of Alphabet, $1.25B about 1% of of 2017 revenue and about 5% of operating income. [1] Alphabet isn't betting the future on it. Relative to the automotive industry sixty thousand vehicles in 2018 compares to about 100,000,000 vehicles worldwide per year. [2] Compared to the number of cars in my driveway and the balance of my checking account, the numbers are big. At industrial scale, they are small. If al…

The Alphabet-scale comparisons are fair wrt to whether this is a "big" bet or not, but trying to minimize this via comparison to total world sales or California registrations less so (given that a primary promise of transit AVs is that they may replace many privately-owned vehicles).

While some have projected how many traditional vehicles they can displace, I don't think anyone really knows how that'll play out. I doubt any of these companies will go making bets that obviously rival the scale of traditional vehicle sales/ownership at the time they're made, especially before they get a sense of how reliable AV transit affects the decisions individuals make about car ownership as they face major maintenance, repairs, and replacement.

I've read one projection that says each could replace 10 traditional vehicles. If that worked out, it seems like a bet on 10m vehicles, enough to replace all 100m sold worldwide, would be astonishingly bold. If you assumed an initial scope of the entire US, the equivalent bold bet would be 1.7m vehicles. If you reduced the scope to California, that bet would be about 200k vehicles. If we guess that the difference between "astonishingly bold" and "bold" is an order of magnitude, these would be reduced to 1m, 170k, and 20k...

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

#135

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…

I don't know what's up with Uber, and why they crashed into any object in the middle of a freeway with no other cars nearby, but Deep Learning is part of everyone's systems, including Waymo. Terrain analysis is great, for static terrain, but once you need to classify what objects are, or predict where they are going to go, that gets a lot less feasible as the only approach.

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

#136
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…

All journalists covering the self-driving car beat are basically required to ignore Waymo so they can continue writing “When will cars drive themselves? Experts say nobody knows” articles. If you ignore Waymo it’s a race; if you include Waymo it’s not. This article makes the further error of assuming “AI” is required for self-driving cars, rather than just a shitload of code.

>> “When will cars drive themselves? Experts say nobody knows” articles.

Nobody knows because it has yet to happen. We have all seen demos and studies but that doesn't convince anyone not involved in the tech. Cars will be capable of driving themselves when I see one, sans humans, ask to merge in front of me on the highway. It will happen when I see one navigate the lineup to the ferry I take every week. It will happen when I see one accurately obey hand signals from a human directing traffic. Not youtube vids. It will happen when I see it with my own eyes. Just like electric cars, we will have to see them on the roads playing the game we all play every day. Until that tipping point, driverless remains a myth that happens in a faraway place.

So put them on the road. Let's give it a try. Maybe it works. Maybe it doesn't and people die and they sue. That's been part of driving since day one. Roll the dice. I'm sick of the endless debates.

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

#137
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'.

> They have products that did, before or at the same time, similar functions.

I don't think that's accurate. Autosteer is the fundamental innovation of Autopilot, and no other manufacturer released a system that "did, before or at the same time, similar functions" as Autosteer. Other manufacturers have since released systems that technically check the box of turning the wheel. But the value of a system isn't how it's described on paper; it's how useful it is on real roads. I haven't seen anyone release a system that's competitive with Tesla's except for Comma.ai (which is a very special case as they are not an OEM and only sell raw hardware).

"Imitators" wouldn't be my word of choice (it feels needlessly pejorative), but until someone actually innovates beyond what Tesla has done, I think it's fair to frame the conversation as the gold standard vs everything else.

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

#138
post #132
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ummm.... no. You might be able to make the case that a neuron can be simulated with a very complex set of if-then statements, but that assumes that we can know everything about the state of a dozen inputs, which we can't. At any rate, the brain is not a computer: https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-informati...

i like that this essay puts the complexity of the brain into perspective, but the distinction between a computer and an organism is kind of arbitrary. brains are physical systems that can be modeled mathematically. if you can create a mathematical model of a thing, you can execute that model on a computer. a brain isn't a classical computer, but that doesn't mean that a computer can't simulate a brain. we currently l…

I don't think it's arbitrary. You even distinguished in this comment between a brain and a simulation of a brain. Steel is a physical system that can be modeled mathematically. Accurately simulating steel doesn't make steel.

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

#139
post #123
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Can you tell me more about downward-spiraling, and how this relates to the guidelines?

The guy in the article seems to be implying that pedestrians don't have the right to be in the road. I think it's pretty OK to be dismissive of that.

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

#140

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…

> 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

This actually highlights a really hard problem that (perfect) self driving will need to solve: theory of mind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind

Not only does the AI need to empathize and predict how typical humans react, they also need to be easy for humans to empathize with. Humans typically use themselves as a template for a reasonable range of reactions. So when the capabilities don't match up (like needing to scoot up to process how to cross where a typical human wouldn't need to), it will violate their expectation of you. So in this case being cautious is considered a crazy and erratic behavior to a human. (e.g., "what were you thinking?! why did you stop!? shouldn't you've seen that the road was empty?!")

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