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Tesla's self driving algorithm's overlay [video]

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Re: Tesla's self driving algorithm's overlay [video]

#241
post #234
post #140

It still strikes me why so many people are still against a future with self driving cars. Sure, people throughout history are scared of change & new tech. But if you look at this video and compare the amount of stuff the camera catches AND processes, with the things you are seeing & processing, it's really hard for me to see me being better at it than a computer. The reality of driving (as a human) is that most of it…

Show me a self-driving car functioning in the middle of a blizzard and we can start talking. Southern California and the weather it experiences is a poor representation of what is required for self-driving to replace humans.

Isn't that asking for too much? Most humans can't drive safely in blizzards. And unlike self-driving cars, many humans are overconfident in their abilities. If a self-driving car recognizes dangerous conditions (poor visibility, malfunctioning sensors, etc), it can simply stop.

It seems as long as these machines are safer on average than humans, they're worth deploying.

Re: Tesla's self driving algorithm's overlay [video]

#242
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've gotten the impression that the "firing people in weird and capricious ways" bit has been greatly exaggerated. I do think anyone taking this has to expect grueling and challenging work. The job description practically demands that.

Anecdotal evidence here, but I have a friend who worked in their palo alto office for several years. One day as Elon was walking through the Fremont factory he saw a large empty floor space and asked someone why there were no workers occupying that space. It was then decided that her job would be moved from Palo Alto to Fremont. She was not fired in a weird and capricious way, but she was managed out of the company i…

That happens in pretty much all big companies.

Re: Tesla's self driving algorithm's overlay [video]

#243
post #140

It still strikes me why so many people are still against a future with self driving cars. Sure, people throughout history are scared of change & new tech. But if you look at this video and compare the amount of stuff the camera catches AND processes, with the things you are seeing & processing, it's really hard for me to see me being better at it than a computer. The reality of driving (as a human) is that most of it…

I would much rather we invest billions into existing public transit solutions as a community. A light weight electric train doesn't need advanced LIDAR + AI to navigate, it can transport 100x people than a single car.

Well, that depends on what problem you're solving. Self-driving vehicles aren't solving mass transportation. They're solving ubiquitous personal transportation. They may also solve mass transport by being cheap, ubiquitous, and by performing an end-run around the piles of local regulation that restrict mass transit.

Re: Tesla's self driving algorithm's overlay [video]

#244
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- I thought fully autonomous driving was meant to be done by now? One thing that Elon did is gathering lots of video data instead of perfecting LIDAR, and at this point it seems that he was right: until detecting objects in 3D from video data is completely solved, self driving can't work. After it's solved, LIDAR is not needed. - Tesla & SpaceX have a reputation for being a terrible place to work When I'm looking for…

> When I'm looking for jobs, my main criteria is market cap / number of employees, and Tesla (as most startups/small companies) was very bad before the stock price went up. Now with high stock prices Tesla can afford to pay market rates (even if it's in stock). You don't care about the work culture at all?

Of course I care, it's just in my experience it's much easier for a company to provide any kind of benefits when the company has money for employees.

Before 2008 when I was working at Google, we were just getting more and more fun stuff all the time, and it seemed like it's never ending. I was together with about 200 people in the Zurich office.

After the stock price went down, although we just had a hiring stop, the food got worse, the bonuses got smaller, and later every new year more and more people came, the stock went up, but the benefits got worse every year until the point where you have to stand in a queue to go to toilet if you are a male.

I think Google is still a great place to work at, but very far from what it was 13 years ago.

Re: Tesla's self driving algorithm's overlay [video]

#245
post #140

It still strikes me why so many people are still against a future with self driving cars. Sure, people throughout history are scared of change & new tech. But if you look at this video and compare the amount of stuff the camera catches AND processes, with the things you are seeing & processing, it's really hard for me to see me being better at it than a computer. The reality of driving (as a human) is that most of it…

I don’t think object recognition is the important bit. Human’s are unbelievably adept at filtering out noise subconsciously and focusing on important things. We’ve evolved for this over many millennia. We will never be able to compete with machines for broad, shallow intelligence because that scales relatively linearly with CPU.

The real issue is decision pathways which you can’t depict in a video, and are the real issue with self driving. The sheer solution space is so massive that even simulating with current DL techniques isn’t feasible with current hardware.

Re: Tesla's self driving algorithm's overlay [video]

#246
post #140

It still strikes me why so many people are still against a future with self driving cars. Sure, people throughout history are scared of change & new tech. But if you look at this video and compare the amount of stuff the camera catches AND processes, with the things you are seeing & processing, it's really hard for me to see me being better at it than a computer. The reality of driving (as a human) is that most of it…

There's no evidence that computers are any better at driving than humans, and there is no evidence that this generation of machine learning will be able to tackle this problem sufficiently. All signs point to driving requiring an understanding of what's going on around you, which this generation of ML does not provide. On the other hand, there is a lot of hype and promises being made without the results to back them…

> computers are any better at driving than humans

Does it matter though? If it drives like my grandma, I can still do other things while in a car and hate commuting/traffic jams a bit less.

Re: Tesla's self driving algorithm's overlay [video]

#247
post #140

It still strikes me why so many people are still against a future with self driving cars. Sure, people throughout history are scared of change & new tech. But if you look at this video and compare the amount of stuff the camera catches AND processes, with the things you are seeing & processing, it's really hard for me to see me being better at it than a computer. The reality of driving (as a human) is that most of it…

I'd suggest reading the NTSB report on the pedestrian killed by Uber's "self-driving" vehicle [0]. The vehicle misclassified Elaine Herzberg so many times in the seconds leading up to taking her out at 40 mph - its clear to me that none of this is ready for public use. We are so normalised to vehicular violence. This would never be allowed in any other sector, say healthcare for instance. [0] https://www.ntsb.gov/new…

To be fair, jaywalking at night away from any streetlights on a road with a 45 mph speed limit is a risky endeavor whether or not there are autonomous cars on the road. It seems likely the outcome would have been the same if the car was being operated by a typical human driver.

Re: Tesla's self driving algorithm's overlay [video]

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's no evidence that computers are any better at driving than humans That's a vacuous statement. Evidence would be a deployed self-driving fleet. At which point it would be mission accomplished and we wouldn't be discussing this. Now if you want theoretical considerations instead of evidence, then consider the lower reaction times of machines.

> That's a vacuous statement. That's just your opinion, while my comment is a statement of reality as it stands. > Evidence would be a deployed self-driving fleet. This is also just your opinion. Evidence could also be a self-driving vehicle that doesn't drive under the beds of trucks, run people over or is statistically safer than human drivers. > Now if you want theoretical considerations instead of evidence, then…

> That's just your opinion, while my comment is a statement of reality as it stands.

No, perhaps I am to blame for incomplete quoting, but you're asking for evidence about the future, whether machine learning will be able to tackle this problem. So it's not just about current computers but also future computers. We can make predictions, but hard evidence would require a time machine or some first-principles proof that humans are the optimal arrangement of atoms for car control.

> however the results are just not there.

Well of course, but what information does that add to the discussion? That level 5 autonomy is an achievement that lies in the future is a premise of this thread and I think most people take this as fact. Bemoaning the absence of evidence for the results of a technology that's expected to only arrive in the future... doesn't make sense.

Re: Tesla's self driving algorithm's overlay [video]

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you compare both? Computers can process millions of objects and things all at the same time, with a error margin than any human being would love to have.

It doesn't matter how many objects a system can process if it can't recognize what they are or which ones are actually important, like say, the truck crossing in front of you.

They don't need to recognize what objects are as much as they need to compute the expected and predicted paths of those objects.

Re: Tesla's self driving algorithm's overlay [video]

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I thought fully autonomous driving was meant to be done by now? Musk was bullshitting when he made that prediction. Maybe he did it because he had bought his own bullshit. Personally I think what's more likely is that he was cynically conning people. In reality, I think no-one is anywhere close to fully self driving cars. I would be surprised if we saw fully self driving cars any time in the next 50 years. The whole…

> for some reason often believed by otherwise quite smart people I don't understand why so many smart "tech people" fall for the hype. Maybe it is because "machine learning" is just abstract enough that even the most jaded developer thinks they can treat it like a black box where if you pour enough videos, photos and LIDAR readings for training into the top it will somehow spit out a fully autonomous self driving car…

The way you suggest the future of automotive transport rests on a fast food chain drive through suggests a kind of astroturfing social media advert. If burgers were that important, the burger company would partner with the self driving car company and find a way.

None of those things are physically complex - the car will be able to see or lidar if a space is big enough for it to park in, pulling over to pick up a friend is no different to pulling over to let you out at your destination, and a drive-through is moving forwards slowly and steering a bit like all low speed driving is. None of them require the dexterity of folding soft wet fabric, and the market for $30,000+ vehicles is much larger than the market for $30,000+ washing machines.

One simple answer is: you don't. Self-driving car owned by 's food delivery service.

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