It will happen but the timelines are looking much longer than people were promising two years ago to get investment. The reality of the difficulty of the edge cases and long term reliability has been made more clear and the hype is fading. Now it's time to slog through the real and difficult work of making what we have reliable and safe.
The dream of driverless cars is dying
31–40 of 124 posts
Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying
#32Reminds me of this famously wrong column dismissing the Internet back in 1995: https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirv... > How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, pr…
He wrote a great book "Silicon Snake Oil" that is full of things just like this he was so very wrong about, it's a great read still. He complains about how bad things were in the late 90s, but somehow misses how things will get better. It's really worth reading. Somewhere there's a great review, written somewhat recently, on all the things he had wrong. I can't seem to find the one I'm thinking of. I guess he was cor…
I remember at the time he was always touted as a "futurist", but he didn't ever seem to get the "future" part of that word
Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Snow seems like one of the easier problems, honestly. Pretty much all the "technical" problems seem pretty straightforward. Waymo already posted an article where they talked about how they can filter falling snow out of their LIDAR input, for example. It's the social problems that are hard for AI, like how to handle a construction zone that looks like you need to break the law to get around. Those don't always have e…
> It's the social problems that are hard for AI, like how to handle a construction zone that looks like you need to break the law to get around. For these cases, the car could have a manual mode (?)
A huge benefit was people without a license being able to use the car alone.
Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying
#34Reminds me of this famously wrong column dismissing the Internet back in 1995: https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirv... > How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, pr…
To be fair, I find the experience of reading a book or newspaper on at the beach is still inferior to having the dead tree version.
> To be fair, I find the experience of reading a book or newspaper on at the beach is still inferior to having the dead tree version.
Oh, yes, sitting on a wet and windy beach trying to read a newspaper sounds superior to reading it on an e-reader in every conceivable way.
Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's the social problems that are hard for AI, like how to handle a construction zone that looks like you need to break the law to get around. For these cases, the car could have a manual mode (?)
A huge benefit was people without a license being able to use the car alone.
Ok, how about remote-controls :) Like where you have a control-center with trained drivers who take over in case of problem-situations.
Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying
#36Reminds me of this famously wrong column dismissing the Internet back in 1995: https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirv... > How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, pr…
However, there is a difference, and I think an important one. With the internet, every piece of needed technology was either in place or easily imagined; with driverless cars, I don't think anyone can claim that is true. While ML/deep learning have made impressive strides in the past years, it is still a big leap to say these same technologies are enough to drive a car in the wild. They may be, but it also may be man…
But ML and DNNs are not supposed to be driving cars. The big players (Waymo and Cruise) are using DNNs only for perception.
Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
However, there is a difference, and I think an important one. With the internet, every piece of needed technology was either in place or easily imagined; with driverless cars, I don't think anyone can claim that is true. While ML/deep learning have made impressive strides in the past years, it is still a big leap to say these same technologies are enough to drive a car in the wild. They may be, but it also may be man…
But ML and DNNs are not supposed to be driving cars. The big players (Waymo and Cruise) are using DNNs only for perception.
Isn’t perception necessary for driving?
Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying
#38Personally, I’d be happy with just automated freeway driving. That seems like an easier problem to solve (no pedestrians, complex traffic controls, cars going the other way or turning across your path, and visibility is usually pretty good). Why not focus on and perfect that first?
Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying
#39We're going to get driverless cars one way or another. Even if the problems are much more intractable than we first gave them credit for people are too clever. Take driving in the snow, for instance. It might be completely impossible to do it safely for the next twenty years by having a computer manage the drive path, but designs might create the ability for cars to form mini-trains where the lead car is driven by a…
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Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying
#40My 2016 23k Honda Civic can drive itself down the highway. Gas, break, stear - it can do it all on a clearly marked highway. As can Subarus and probably many others. I just know what my friends and coworkers have. Saying no car maker has shipped anything is a blatent lie.
What kind of highway? We have a 2016 Outback with EyeSight and basically never use it. Lane keeping beeps for every line of tar sealant on the road. Adaptive cruise control puts the pedal to the metal once it's 2 MPH lower than the set speed. Like, I don't want the engine to rev to 8K RPM while I'm going uphill, alright? Has nobody heard of an easing curve?