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

nytimes.com

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

#161

Post by Causality1 »

After Musk's announcement that Tesla will stop selling cars to consumers after cracking Level 5 autonomy, I've stopped even looking forward to it because he's right. Why would a manufacturer sell a self-driving car for $50000 when they can make $300000 off of it as a taxi over its lifetime? Why would anyone make a non self driving car when for a couple thousand dollars in parts they can make money off of it for a decade?

Level 5 self-driving is the death of private car ownership. That may sound great to people living in a city but for those of us to whom visiting family means dirt roads it's stomach-churning.

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

#162

Post by beat »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #44
suprfnk wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a human can do it, I see no reason why an autonomous system can't, eventually, do it. It might take a very long time, but "never" seems short-sighted.

Humans can't do it. When your stopping distance (including reaction time) exceeds your visibility there's no way to drive safely, but humans do it anyways.

Which is why I keep saying autonomous driving doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be better than humans. And that's a much lower bar, because we are lousy drivers.

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

#163

Post by krisrm »

magashna wrote: post #111
crispyambulance wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not sufficient for these systems to just be "better" than humans in terms of accidents/mile/vehicle, they have to be FAR BETTER than humans. Today, when accidents occur, blame and liability goes to the responsible parties. We're talking about millions of accidents and millions of drivers. If you suddenly have a car that drives, the blame and liability for all accidents then gets focused like a giant magnifying g…

Why can't we accept a little better now and keep striving for far better? Seems stupid to have an all or nothing approach, especially when plenty of luxury vehicles have pieces of automated driving in them already. Liability is for insurance leeches to figure out

If the added liability of "a little better" self driving car is too much to make a self driving car profitable, companies won't build them.

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

#164

Post by magic_beans »

leesec wrote: post #94
mhermher wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will a computer ever write War and Peace or compose the 9th Symphony too? How about solve an unsolved math proof? No reason it can't be automated, right?

All these things are literally on the AI horizon.

And how long exactly is that horizon?

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

#165

Post by beat »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #79
leetcrew wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When your stopping distance (including reaction time) exceeds your visibility there's no way to drive safely, but humans do it anyways. this is bad, but not quite as bad as it sounds. most of the time, you only need to stop as fast as the car in front of you. it's pretty uncommon to encounter a stationary object in the middle of the travel lane. in fact, outside of driving on surface streets in the city, I can't re…

Accident rates in the US on the highway are on the order of one per million miles. And in a million miles of driving you will encounter quite a few stationary or otherwise unexpected objects in the middle of the travel lane.

Good example - deer.

But human drivers hit deer all the time, and it's often unavoidable. An autonomous driver is probably more likely to miss a deer than a human, due to substantially better reflex time.

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

#166

Post by HALtheWise »

When read literally, there is no way that any system ever, human or automatic, will be able to drive on "any road" with "perfect safety". Crazy freak accidents happen, and human drivers regularly aren't able to handle them. On top of that, most people just can't safely drive in thick fog, icy conditions, or pouring rain. No amount of intelligence will allow a car to drive through a sufficiently flooded street.

Just like with human cars, the important metric is just whether they can drive acceptably safely in the environments that they attempt to go. There's enough low-hanging fruit from faster reaction times and 360 sensing to make that feasible without needing to solve the AI-complete problem. Nobody's asking them to be able to drive at 70 MPH through a fog bank in Alaska with ice on the road, even if that is technically part of the requirements for Level 5 that even humans can't obtain.

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

#167

Post by beat »

chillacy wrote: post #136
mhermher wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You will never define a complete and consistent algebra. You will never exactly measure the momentum and position of a particle. They're not brutally hard problems, they're not possible. We know that there are a set of things that are impossible. Why is recreating human intelligence in silicon beyond that consideration?

Things are impossible till they aren’t. It’s not like we solved Go the board game, but we did build some killer AI which has now surpassed all human players. And that was within a matter of years: first it was a fluid game of human intelligence impossible for a machine, then it was obvious machines could be better.. but look at this other thing humans are still better at.

Google's AlphaZero AI went from not knowing chess at all to beating the best current software (Stockfish) in mere hours. It's a whole new world out there.

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

#168

Post by gooseus »

flippinburgers wrote: post #152
gooseus wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody said the snake oil salesman doesn't also offer aspirin and stuff that is actually valuable... in fact they'd be a shitty caricature of a snake-oil salesperson if they didn't. I agree it's overly strong language and I admire Teslas for what they are (fancy toys, his words) and SpaceX more than I can adequately communicate... however, his claims about Hyperloop, the Boring Company, Neuralink, and yes, even those…

To compare Elizabeth Holmes with Elon Musk is just absolutely bizarre on your part. She truly was a snake-oil salesperson. I find the claim that individuals who lie like this are "holding back progress" to be totally subjective. What does that even mean?

It means that when you defraud investors over outlandish claims, even if you believe you can do what you are claiming, then you have destroyed trust and made it harder for everyone else in the industry (who isn't making shit up) to get the funding to do the real work that creates real progress.

You seem to have skipped/ignored the whole paragraph where I give Elon lots of credit and then the part where I how people were treating Holmes before it was common knowledge that she was making shit up.

I don't believe she did that because she wanted to defraud investors, she just believed her own hype and was willing to lie more than most to maintain that hype... if you don't think that these exact conditions affect Elon, or the people that feed him information, then I think maybe you're suffering from some the negative effects of excessive fandom.

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

#169

Post by Edmond »

Detractors of self-driving cars are always eager to lap up a story like this as proof that it will never happen or it would take decades...."Years" doesn't mean decades, even 10 yrs is a relative short time, i owned my last care for about 13 yrs.

Some proponents of self driving cars might have gotten too ahead of the hype train but nevertheless, self-driving is here and soon would be common place.

It would obviously take some time to turn over the current inventory of non-self-driving cars but even that would happen faster than most people anticipate. Americans already replace their cars quite often and it is hard to think of a more compelling nudge to replace your car than the prospect of not having to actively drive it.

As for the outstanding technical challenges, I am often baffled when people point to that as a reason for skepticism...it is the whole point of the endeavor, to solve those problems.

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

#170

Post by random314 »

mordymoop wrote: post #116
gamblor956 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A million miles is not a lot. For comparison, the people of LA drove a million miles by 5a this morning. The drivers in SoCal will drive over 100 million miles just today. The fact that many accidents involving human drivers still make the news is telling. It's not commonplace.

This is a weird hill to want to die on. Self-driving is currently statistically safer than human driving. Yes, caveats, for only the domains on which self-driving has been well-trained.

Can you cite these statistics? Has any fsd car driven 1 million miles with no operator on the wheel?
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