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Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

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Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#121

Post by dwighttk »

gist wrote: post #32
djsumdog wrote: post #15

I think a lot of people in this field did see this coming. I knew a few people in this space about a year ago and I pretty much hear: "realistically, 15 years out at the earliest." I really really hate the concept of a driverless car. It's an incredibly difficult problem space; and for the same cost, America could build up municipal rail and bus infrastructure to where they were in the 1940s/1950s. We need more citie…

> I pretty much hear: "realistically, 15 years out at the earliest." And honestly any number is simply just 'pulled out of the ass' anyway. It's not as if they can see daylight on all the problems that need to be solved or predict various soft issues (the government only one example). So this is not that someone is building the atomic bomb and can realistically judge more or less the scope of the problems that need t…

my rule of thumb is: Anything over 5 years is n to infinity +/- 1 year.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#122

Post by frgtpsswrdlame »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #95
Animats wrote: post #71

Driverless cars are coming along just fine. Waymo is making steady progress. The sensors are getting better. The problem comes from all those "fake it til you make it" startups, Uber and Tesla being the worst. Both have killed people. This is mostly about sensors and geometry. Machine learning has a role, but only in target identification. That's how Waymo does it. The fake it til you make it crowd had the fantasy th…

Hasn’t Tesla autopilot saved more lives than it took? So it’s more net beneficial (so far) than cautious Waymo?

There's no evidence of that assertion.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#123

Post by rockinghigh »

dwighttk wrote: post #116
djsumdog wrote: post #15

I think a lot of people in this field did see this coming. I knew a few people in this space about a year ago and I pretty much hear: "realistically, 15 years out at the earliest." I really really hate the concept of a driverless car. It's an incredibly difficult problem space; and for the same cost, America could build up municipal rail and bus infrastructure to where they were in the 1940s/1950s. We need more citie…

rail and bus infrastructure is never going to be feasible in the small town in Texas where I grew up, 1.5 hrs from Ft. Worth. Not to mention all the even smaller towns in that county and the counties around it. How is one supposed to move 3 horses across the state using rail and buses? What about my parents driving to surrounding lakes to kayak? Just cary that on a train that for some reason actually goes to these la…

We're talking about commute and long-distance travel. In most scenarios, you don't carry that much luggage. You don't carry your horses and kayaks when you go to work or travel overseas.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#124

Post by TheLoneAdmin »

yannyu wrote: post #85
iabacu wrote: post #74

The argument that autonomous tech will save lives is the most dangerous. This will take decades to be true. The same companies who are pushing for that narrative, are also the first ones to blame the drivers when their tech goes wrong. There’s so much data fudging to push for those narratives — they want the credit for lives saved, and at the same time don’t want the blame or liability for accidents caused.

Or maybe we hold driverless cars up to an unfair standard. Today, 3000 people die in the US every single day because of car accidents. Many, many more are injured or disabled. Why would we expect driverless cars to reduce that to 0? Shouldn't it be good enough if they reduce it to 50%? 25%?

Note that the 3000 daily deaths is worldwide, not just the US. The daily US total is about 100. I do agree that any improvement on those numbers with AI should be applauded.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#125

Post by zrail »

dwighttk wrote: post #116
djsumdog wrote: post #15

I think a lot of people in this field did see this coming. I knew a few people in this space about a year ago and I pretty much hear: "realistically, 15 years out at the earliest." I really really hate the concept of a driverless car. It's an incredibly difficult problem space; and for the same cost, America could build up municipal rail and bus infrastructure to where they were in the 1940s/1950s. We need more citie…

rail and bus infrastructure is never going to be feasible in the small town in Texas where I grew up, 1.5 hrs from Ft. Worth. Not to mention all the even smaller towns in that county and the counties around it. How is one supposed to move 3 horses across the state using rail and buses? What about my parents driving to surrounding lakes to kayak? Just cary that on a train that for some reason actually goes to these la…

Of course there are going to be wide swaths of the United States where passenger rail and bus service isn't going to make much of a dent for local transportation.

Regional transportation is an entirely different question. Is there a rail line running through the small town in Texas where you grew up? I bet there is, and I bet there is the remnants of a passenger station too. What would it mean to your small town if people could easily commute by rail to the bigger city 45 minutes away? I bet people would be more interested in living in that small town.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#126

Post by WalterSear »

djsumdog wrote: post #15

I think a lot of people in this field did see this coming. I knew a few people in this space about a year ago and I pretty much hear: "realistically, 15 years out at the earliest." I really really hate the concept of a driverless car. It's an incredibly difficult problem space; and for the same cost, America could build up municipal rail and bus infrastructure to where they were in the 1940s/1950s. We need more citie…

"The idea that sharing rides is good has become almost axiomatic in transportation discussions. At conferences I have seen people declare that robocars are pointless if they are not shared -- ie. people who are not travelling together ride together in them. The positive of sharing is so axiomatic that public transit is seen almost as a good in and of itself, rather than a means towards real goals like energy efficiency, low cost, and higher road utilization.

It has has attained this status as revealed truth because it is indeed roughly true -- more people together in a vehicle done right will indeed use less energy per person and less road space. But the "done right" is very important as it is commonly done quite wrong.

As I have studied robocars, this has led me to the discovery that some of our old assumptions are wrong. In particular, more sharing is not always good, and the styles of sharing (including the vehicle sizes) of current public transportation are almost certainly not the optimum sizes, and that smaller vehicles are likely more optimal once we eliminate the need for drivers and move to a highly communicating world.

I believe there are strong arguments that while shared travel is beneficial, we actually have too much of it in most transit systems, and not enough in private cars. That the 'shared' future is one of van-sized group vehicles with a mixed fleet of more personal cars with 1-4 seats."

https://ideas.4brad.com/sleeper-cars-and-unexpected-efficien...

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#127

Post by cevn »

SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #101
tomjakubowski wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't speak for Montreal, but there are countless counterexamples of cities in wealthy countries (not as wealthy as the US) where metro users are drawn from more or less every income level. Turns out you can actually make riding a metro into a good experience with a bit of effort. New York, Chicago, Tokyo, Taipei, London, Berlin, Munich come immediately to mind. And as sibling commenters have pointed out, in some p…

Taipei... yes, absolutely. That was a great experience and easy to use. NYC... altright, better than 15 years ago but still not great at all. Not as good as Germany or DC. Tokyo... lol, no! While clean and efficient, it’s a joke that you have different rail stations owned by different companies, different cards that may work on each other but probably not. The ticket machines are almost all cash only. And instruction…

Suica cards work practically everywhere. You can poke a button to use english, usually clearly labeled. You need cash everywhere in Japan so not sure why that surprised you. My experience with Tokyo metro was pretty good. I've never seen a metro as well-organized despite 15 private rail companies splitting the system. The only problem is the operating hours, the last train rush is insane some nights.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#128

Post by dstroot »

Fricken wrote: post #107
Nydhal wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry I can't back up my claims but you will be proved wrong with time. I would bet in less than 10 years you'll have camera only fully autonomous systems.

From Sterling Anderson, former director of Autopilot who oversaw the implementation of HW2: >Perception is a game of statistics.Crudely speaking, if we have three independent modalities with epsilon miss-detection-rates and we combine them we can achieve an epsilon³ rate in perception. In practice, relatively orthogonal failure modes won’t achieve that level of benefit, however, an error every million miles can get b…

First, thanks for sharing this! Second - based on the language used I can’t tell if he is saying Tesla’s camera and Radar approach will work, or that it won’t. The only thing that I pulled out was that if we increase the types of sensors we get better results because they have different strengths and weakenesses.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#129

Post by InitialLastName »

100ideas wrote: post #69
djsumdog wrote: post #15

I think a lot of people in this field did see this coming. I knew a few people in this space about a year ago and I pretty much hear: "realistically, 15 years out at the earliest." I really really hate the concept of a driverless car. It's an incredibly difficult problem space; and for the same cost, America could build up municipal rail and bus infrastructure to where they were in the 1940s/1950s. We need more citie…

"in most of America we need to get back to the point where cars are no longer a necessity" - ...because why? I am assuming in good faith you might say: because a world in which a greater proportion of people travel via multi-passenger vehicles like the buses and trains of public transport networks is a better world because these transportation solutions are 1) more efficient per passenger (does this help w/ reducing…

> are there other particular benefits to a world with significantly more (conventional) public transportation / less cars that I failed to articulate?

- Substantially reduced traffic on surface streets (a bus or subway is MUCH more densely packed with humans than a road full of cars).

- Encourage more walking and overall fitness

- Improved safety for non-mechanized road and sidewalk users (reduced traffic will do more for pedestrian safety than automated traffic will, I promise).

- Less space required to be devoted to parking and streets, so better land utilization.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#130

Post by dragontamer »

fabiospampinato wrote: post #117
Animats wrote: post #71

Driverless cars are coming along just fine. Waymo is making steady progress. The sensors are getting better. The problem comes from all those "fake it til you make it" startups, Uber and Tesla being the worst. Both have killed people. This is mostly about sensors and geometry. Machine learning has a role, but only in target identification. That's how Waymo does it. The fake it til you make it crowd had the fantasy th…

> The fake it til you make it crowd had the fantasy that you just hook up some cameras to a machine learning system, train it, and you have self driving. There are about 7 billion instances of those learning systems though. Will this be replicated with machines in the next 10 years? I have no clue. Is this doable at all? Sure.

There's absolutely no equivalence between a CNN created today with deep learning, compared to the Neural Network in a human brain.

The problem with the human brain is one of inattention. CNNs / Artificial Neural Networks can remain at attention 100% of the time due to their artificial / machine nature.

But CNNs, despite being at 100% attention the entire time, still have issues determining if that splotch on the screen is the sky or an 18-wheeler.

https://electrek.co/2016/07/01/understanding-fatal-tesla-acc...

--------------

Artificial Neural Networks / Convolutional Neural Networks have a very long way to go before they reach human equivalence. In contrast, sensor systems or LIDAR brute-forces the problem. LIDAR can see things human's can't see, and advanced sensors can tell you (at least, in clear conditions) the location and velocity of virtually every object around the car.

Fake-it till you make it camera-only driverless cars are clearly hype that relies upon a fundamental misunderstanding. Just because CNNs are kinda-sorta like the visual cortex of the human brain doesn't really mean that it works like one.

CNNs have really cool visual learning properties. But I've yet to see one 100% successfully tell you background vs foreground in pictures like a human brain can do. Even in clear weather conditions, the CNN can confuse a truck for the sky and still run full speed into an 18-wheeler.

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