Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’

Nothing makes a huge group of us cringe more, than people saying it's just around the corner. The worst part is it also comes from people who should know better.

>Waymo’s CEO, John Krafcik, has admitted that a self-driving car that can drive in any condition, on any road, without ever needing a human to take control—usually called a “level five” autonomous vehicle—will basically never exist. At the Wall Street Journal’s D.Live conference, Krafcik said that “autonomy will always have constraints.” It will take decades for self-driving cars to become common on roads. Even then, they will not be able to drive at certain times of the year or in all weather conditions. In short, sensors on autonomous vehicles don’t work well in snow or rain—and that may never change.

https://www.cnet.com/news/alphabet-google-waymo-ceo-john-kra...

https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/07/the-dream-of-driverless-...

Self-driving tech muggle here.

Could someone explain to me why any average Joe with minimal intellect can drive a car using only a pair of eyes but it's difficult to build a fully self-driving car even with 8+ cameras, GPS, LIDAR and other sensors us humans don't have?

> ... "autonomous vehicles" will be a reality for "ordinary people" in less than five years, Google co-founder Sergey Brin said Tuesday.

That's from 2012 [1]

[1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2491635/self-driving-c...

We don't need self-driving cars that can go anywhere (ie. level 5) for them to be widely useful. A car that only worked in bright sunshine on a preprogrammed set of roads would be immediately useful to me.

We're using a lot of sensory data to compensate for the fact that the "AI" driving the car is really dumb. It lacks any meta-level understanding of the problem domain and is essentially a stimulus-response system similar to a very simple insect or even a single celled organism.

We can drive a car with much more limited sensory input because we have a very high level cognitive model of what we are doing. Better model equals better decision making on far less information.

Slight tangent:

Having kids was an interesting chance to observe how far we are from "real AI." You can show a 3 year old one example of an object and after a few seconds they can subsequently identify that object in any lighting condition or from any angle. They can identify it with one eye closed. They can identify variations of it, pictures of it, and line drawings of it. One example, seconds. The human brain absolutely destroys any AI/ML we have.