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The dream of driverless cars is dying

spectator.co.uk

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Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#41

Post by ilikehurdles »

mechanicalpulse wrote: post #34
hyperbovine wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A book or magazine on the other hand.. I definitely prefer in paper.

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#42

Post by sentdex »

People just expect it to happen much too quickly, there's no patience.

The time it takes to get from say a car that just drives about randomly to a car that drives pretty well 75% of the time is about a day's worth of work with today's technology. Going from 75-80% is a week or two. 80-85% is months. Getting to the 90% is years, and who knows what we need for 99+%.

I did a self-driving car in GTA V project that streamed on Twitch 24/7. If the car wasn't improving noticeably day by day, people were getting angry and frustrated, as if the car was meant to be perfectly driving within months, surely!

There's definitely a major disconnect between the hype and reality of what the challenge of self-driving cars is. The bubble is just simply bursting at the moment, but the dream itself is not dying amongst actual engineers. It's just dying for the people who never understood how absolutely challenging the problem actually is.

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#44

Post by freehunter »

paganel wrote: post #17
maxharris wrote: post #3

Reminds 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…

We still don’t have flying cars nor self-conscious robots, things that have been prophetized 100 to 50 years ago. Going back more in time we still don’t have a philosophical stone. The idea is that some technological prophecies are indeed wrong.

>We still don’t have flying cars

Why does no one consider a helicopter to be a "flying car"? What can a flying car do that a helicopter can't? The only difference I see is that a flying car would be cheaper and owned by more people, which a helicopter could easily be if people actually wanted a flying car. Helicopters are expensive because they're very niche devices.

The fact that almost no one owns a helicopter proves that people don't actually want flying cars.

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#45

Post by jpindar »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #26
3pt14159 wrote: post #12

We'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…

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…

How can it be both hard to handle a construction zone that you need to break the law to get around and also easy to handle snow piles that you need to break the law to get around?

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#47

Post by darkerside »

CPLX wrote: post #7

The part that I can't figure out is why everyone seems to act like driverless cars will be some kind of all-at-once phase change transition instead of being incremental. It seems almost a certainty that we will gradually ease into the concept. Some cars will be able to do some things autonomously, a little, for some people, some of the time. Eventually the cost/benefit levels will improve, more features will roll out…

Phase change is a great metaphor. Once conditions are right, network effects between particles coordinate to rapidly produce a reaction in the entire substance. The catalyzing particles here are people. Once people see that autonomous driving is "here", the incentives will be too powerful to ignore, for businesses, politicians, and others who live by exploiting opportunities. So yes, I think once change comes, it will be rapid and fairly complete. Possibly at cost of human life.

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#48

Post by mpweiher »

grigjd3 wrote: post #25

While I'd agree that driverless cars are not here today, that the hype is over-doing it, and that Tesla has tried to push too fast, there is a huge economic incentive to have driverless cars. If a system can be built to replace long haul truck drivers with even being slightly safer than a human driver, that saves some on insurance and tons on labor, not to mention not having to limit driving time per day. With those…

> If a system can be built to replace long haul truck drivers with even being slightly safer than a human driver

I think such a system can be built. It's called a train.

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#49

Post by Invictus0 »

Wolmar's argument is horribly uncompelling and betrays a bizzare technophobia. He talks about the hardware as if they're dark magic tools and his argument for the death of the cars is that reality hasn't lived up to press releases. This is an argument made with no understanding of the technological underpinnings of driverless cars, and while I agree that driverless cars are farther away than the press would have you believe, the author needs to dig in further to get a real understanding of what he's discussing.

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#50

Post by allannienhuis »

sixstringtheory wrote: post #40
agronick wrote: post #8

My 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?

Sounds like just a really poor implementation. My 2011 BMW does all of those things really well. I'd have hoped that safety systems like this wouldn't fall into the 'you get what you pay for' category, but I guess that's the case.

Not sure how to address that except through more regulation which doesn't exactly help on the innovation front...

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