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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

#81

Post by ghaff »

Analemma_ wrote: post #76
sentdex wrote: post #42

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 strea…

> People just expect it to happen much too quickly, there's no patience. > It's just dying for the people who never understood how absolutely challenging the problem actually is. You're laying a lot of blame at the feet of the excited people, but in their defense, much of their excitement is thanks to hucksters ( cough Elon cough ) who've been insisting that fully autonomous cars are just a year or two away. It's not…

Hucksters in combination with a massive game of Topper. The company that's honest and says they're 20 years away from door-to-door autonomy gets their stock downgraded and negative press because they're so far behind.

And, as you say, a lot of people assume the mostly unanticipated advances in deep learning in a short period of time carry over to everything even vaguely related to AI and cognitive science more broadly.

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#82

Post by freehunter »

mannykannot wrote: post #77
freehunter wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that doesn't answer the question of "what do people want to do with flying cars that can't be done with a helicopter"... it only answers the question "are people using helicopters as flying cars". You're making an extremely false assumption that "because people aren't using helicopters, that means helicopters aren't flying cars, and we all know people want flying cars". Extremely faulty. Let's beg the question an…

Saying 'extremely' twice, and in italics, does not make a point more correct. Nor does repeating a faulty argument, even if not in italics. I will leave it for someone who knows a thing or two about the realities of owning and operating helicopters to decide for herself whether helicopters match up to peoples' imagination of what a flying car would be. I was apparently mistaken in thinking that, on reflection, you wo…

Conversely, when someone writes out an argument with ideas and thoughts behind it and you come in and say "nah you're wrong", that doesn't actually make the argument wrong. And then when you're presented with more supporting arguments and you just say "I know you're wrong, but I have no arguments to actually prove you wrong", that still doesn't actually prove my argument wrong.

All you've done is said "nah bro", and when challenged, you then insulted my intelligence while admitting you have no actual argument against me. All you seem to be able to argue against is my argument style and then later my intelligence, which is not an argument against my opinion at all.

I'm really disappointed here, I wanted an actual conversation about why helicopters are not considered flying cars and all I get is someone saying "they're not because I said they're not".

Please, please actually argue against my points or don't argue at all. Insulting me is not an argument.

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#83

Post by hodgesrm »

glenra wrote: post #78
hodgesrm wrote: post #56

One thing I have never understood about the driverless vision is how it seems to ignore economically significant problems like (a) traffic congestion and (b) extremely inefficient energy use in transportation, especially personal vehicles. Just looking at the first problem, a four lane highway is a four lane highway, regardless of how vehicles comport themselves. It seems more productive to solve congestion by gettin…

> Just looking at the first problem, a four lane highway is a four lane highway, regardless of how vehicles comport themselves. Lanes are as wide as they are and following distances are as long as they are because people are terrible at driving. A mostly-driverless 4-lane highway could more than double capacity just by reducing following distances when computers rather than human beings are making the decision when t…

This would need some modeling to prove that you actually get that level of efficiency. Autonomous vehicles have a brownfield problem in that they would have to share the road capacity with conventional vehicles for a fair distance into the future. That consideration alone would likely reduce the efficiency gain considerably.

On the other hand if you could distribute traffic flow vertically the potential for scaling goes up considerably. It's a hard problem to solve (read: expensive) but building roads is not exactly cheap either.

BTW I'm not against autonomous vehicles. It would be great if they worked. But I think we're more likely to see near-term investment payoffs using it for incremental safety improvements, something that already seems to be happening.

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#84

Post by sidibe »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #63

Isn't the author already wrong? There are Waymo autonomous cars operating right now on public roads in Chandler, Arizona without safety drivers. Sure, those are very carefully mapped and selected routes, but they are not closed routes, they have to deal with anything that can happen on a public road. As any engineer knows, the last 10% is always harder than expected, but scaling from 0.1% to 90% coverage seems fairly…

I don't understand how the people considering driverless cars infeasible can reconcile this with what is happening already. Why would Waymo order 80,000 cars in the next year if they thought their project is all hype?

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#86

Post by toomuchtodo »

marcosdumay wrote: post #70
ghaff wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why anyone would say the "dream" is dying. If anything is dying, it's unrealistic hopes that fully autonomous vehicles will be widespread and dirt cheap to be driven around in by the end of this decade. I suspect the hype's been fueled by--in addition to the usual suspects--the growth of young professionals in urban areas who have this vision of never having to own a car and being driven around everywher…

> For that to be a reality... Those on demand trip services (Uber, Lyft, etc) are already cheaper than owning a car. What you describe already exists.

> Those on demand trip services (Uber, Lyft, etc) are already cheaper than owning a car.

Only until the VC dollars dry up.

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#87

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

StavrosK wrote: post #20
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…

This is how everything happens, and it's why we're living in the future even though we never realized it. We have a small square in our pockets that can do real-time translation, you talk into it and it'll say the same thing in another language. I remember reading about this exact thing in the 90s and thinking that it was completely incredible, but I didn't even notice it when it happened. We first got computers that…

>> This is how everything happens, and it's why we're living in the future even though we never realized it. We have a small square in our pockets that can do real-time translation, you talk into it and it'll say the same thing in another language.

For arbitrary language pairs, it doesn't. Try translating between Greek and Chinese or Japanese at a level sufficient to get around town and do everyday, tourist-y things.

Machine translation works well between pairs of languages that are very similar and for which there are many parallel texts. It's all downhill from there (e.g. you have to go via an intermediary language, typically English, to get to the target language etc, which starts to seriously degrade performance).

Auto-cars are not different. In ideal (i.e. laboratory) conditions they may work sufficiently well. Diverge from those conditions and you're gambling with the passengers' lives.

This has been the case for a very long time. I learned something recently that surprised me. To phrase it as a quiz: when do you think was the first coast-to-coast (completely) driverless journey? Answer below.

______________

When are we going to get the first car, hands off the steering wheel, feet off the pedals, drive coast to coast in the US? Yeah, well, it actually happened in 1995 with the Navlab Project from Carnegie Mellon University.

Courtesy of Rodney Brooks:

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/2nd-P...

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#88

Post by nradov »

marcosdumay wrote: post #70
ghaff wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why anyone would say the "dream" is dying. If anything is dying, it's unrealistic hopes that fully autonomous vehicles will be widespread and dirt cheap to be driven around in by the end of this decade. I suspect the hype's been fueled by--in addition to the usual suspects--the growth of young professionals in urban areas who have this vision of never having to own a car and being driven around everywher…

> For that to be a reality... Those on demand trip services (Uber, Lyft, etc) are already cheaper than owning a car. What you describe already exists.

Ride hailing services are only cheaper in a few dense urban areas where most trips are short and parking is very expensive. Everywhere else they're still an expensive luxury.

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#89

Post by nolemurs »

The substance of this article can be sumarized as "I talked to a bunch of people at a convention, and some had concerns, ohh, and I wrote a book about how I'm skeptical of driverless cars."

Regardless of how you feel about the future of driverless cars, this is a safe article to skip - there's no content.

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#90

Post by nradov »

netfire wrote: post #38

Personally, 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?

While driving on California freeways I have seen: pedestrians, complex traffic controls (law enforcement rerouting traffic or running moving breaks due to incidents), cars going the other way (drunk or confused), and terrible visibility (fog, snow, dust, heavy rain). It's going to take decades before automated freeway driving is perfected. Those edge cases can't just be ignored.
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