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

This has been obvious all along to anyone who has ever driven or used a computer before and thought about the reality for more than a couple of minutes. But the press and VCs bought into the hype from the likes of Uber who needed to keep generating huge new investment to stay afloat and Tesla which is run by a delusional snake oil salesman who had a single hit with the Model S.

The shocking examples of crazy unexpected behavior in the article like street sweepers that do exactly what they are supposed to be doing and cyclists who don’t follow traffic rules blow my mind. Next we’ll learn that some streets have poorly painted lines or that road construction exists or that most human drivers exceed posted speed limits or that there is weather other than sunny and clear.

In a word, context.

Human brains are just context gathering pattern matching machines. We can't even count without all kinds of context being automatically bubbled up into our consciousness.

When we see other drivers, we can take all kinds of subtle hints about their behavior. We can easily tell if they have an unsecured load (not just if it's currently shaking). We can see the way someone is looking at the road to know if they are going to go, if they're hesitating, if they're high. We can know where the road is even though it's snowed out because of the approximate distance from the ditch you remember being 15 feet out alongside it.

There are zillions of cases like this in the long tail. Self driving cars leapt forward by being able to answer the vastly important contextual question of "what is this in my sensor?" -- but to do the rest, it's hard to overstate how much a computer would have to "be human". To be able to apply past experience, psychology and complicated inferences about "why is this in my sensor? what can I do about it?"

In the end, self driving cars will thrive, just in an environment that poses these kinds of questions as little as possible.

Or we'll actually get a breakthrough and be able to create NNs that allow machines to learn and apply a vast breadth of learned context to sensory input. Teach them vast amounts of unrelated things just as every human learns in the 16 years before they drive (and then some), and then effectively put extra-sensory humans on the road.

He didn't say that, and it was 640k at the time.

not quite true. when you show a kid something new you are literally exposing the kid to the thing thousands/millions of times. different angles, rotation, heck even if you’re just looking without touching from a fixed position your eyes will sample it a lot (saccades of your eye). you also connect/map the object to your prior knowledge. with an AI/ML model you’re starting from scratch. what makes learning “easy” for humans is the incremental nature of it + millions of years of evolution

also: humans can drive a car better than a machine because the roads are designed for humans and the other drivers are humans. the machines would destroy us at driving if the roads were optimized for machines.

No, the Trolley Problem will not be the biggest (or even a significant) hurdle until AI is so good that it's a moot point anyway. Self driving cars will do what humans do - they'll brake as hard as possible while trying to steer away from anything they're going to hit. If we're lucky they may distinguish between moving and non-moving objects and prefer to hit the latter on the assumption that the former are more important.

    if (going_to_crash()) stop();