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Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

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Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

#51

Post by mark-r »

krm01 wrote: post #28

It’s really just a matter of time. Those that started out optimistic (when it was hyped) but are now saying that they don’t see self driving cars can do the complex situations we humans supposedly can should have some patience. As the tech improves, and more data is used to train models, it’ll surely surpass humans in driving ability.

I have this argument constantly. Humans make mistakes too, so we will eventually have tech that makes fewer mistakes than humans. The problem is that humans have a unique ability to make sense of situations they've never specifically encountered before. No amount of training data will be able to make up for that, because there will always be situations so rare that they never made it into the data.

Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

#52

Post by pkaye »

aphextron wrote: post #36

It amazes me how Tesla can continue to just outright lie in their sales material about this. Right now you can purchase a brand new Model S with a "full self driving" package, even though no such thing exists, nor is there any timeline at all to when it will (if ever). Autopilot as it stands is nothing more than an advanced driver assist system with blindspot monitoring and automatic lane changing. Not even close to…

Didn't Elon Musk said by 2020 there would be robo-taxis?

Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

#53

Post by jacquesm »

bnegreve wrote: post #43
jacquesm wrote: post #26

Expected by who?

Apparently by General Motors, Google Waymo, Toyota, Honda and Tesla.

All of those except for Tesla have never made hard claims about being able to deliver full autonomy in the near future as far as I know.

Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

#54

Post by ghaff »

bravoetch wrote: post #2

This meme of shock and surprise that self-driving cars haven't appeared overnight is just media BS. Yes, all technology development is a gradual process and we may not know how long it takes. Companies working on it have pitch decks and investors so they give their best or most optimistic estimates.

Go back a couple of years and look on just about any thread about self-driving on a forum such as this one and you'll find no shortage of people arguing that they're just around the corner. Because, after all, that's what the SV hypesters were saying and they'd never lie.

Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

#56

Post by slavik81 »

heynk wrote: post #3

When I was starting my engineering career, it was right around when the first DARPA challenges had started. The hype was beginning, and my optimism towards technology was strong. I thought the predictions and timelines would be correct, and I still feel strongly that self-driving will be safer than humans in the long term. Recently, I bought a newer Subaru, with EyeSight. It has adaptive cruise and lane keep assist.…

I tried out a relative's Subaru on a 6h drive over the holidays. I really liked the adaptive cruise control for following behind folks who were not keeping a consistent speed. I just set it to a reasonable value at the maximum following distance and stopped worrying about my speedometer.

However, at one point the guy in front of me turned off onto a small side road. It was at night, and I don't think the car realized he had moved into a turn-off lane. It slammed on the brakes. I probably went from 90kph to 40kph before it realized I was not going to hit that car.

I completely failed to react to the situation. I was worried my erratic braking would cause an accident behind me, but in the moment, I didn't know how to stop it. That was not a type of emergency I had considered or prepared for.

Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

#57

Post by seanmcdirmid »

derefr wrote: post #35
Mattasher wrote: post #4

You have to wonder, when you see these stories, whether the engineers in charge of these programs spent much time driving around, trying to see the road like an AI might. In my experience, driving in the city, it's rare that I can go more than a few miles before some exception comes up that requires human judgment. Here's a few of the things I saw just last week: * Car double parked. Do I cross the center line to go…

IMHO cars are for getting between cities, or between places in non-cities; within a city, the economical long-term solution is to just replace the roads (save for cargo corridors) with some kind of pod rail network, i.e. self-driving four-seater trolleys. The exceptions become far fewer if there's nothing on the "road" but other rail-bound vehicles. In such a future, if you lived in a city but owned your own real car…

> some kind of pod rail network, i.e. self-driving four-seater trolleys

If you go that far, the problem is already trivial right? Just making roads specifically for self-driving vehicles would make the problem trivial. What the companies are trying to accomplish is self driving cars in current conditions.

Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

#58

Post by jeremysalwen »

cletus wrote: post #33

Alternate headline: Some people overstated how simple this problem was because they didn't know what they were talking about, could promote themselves as experts, could get funding for a self-driving startup or some combination of the above. I guess that isn't as pithy but it's closer to the truth. When it became clear that Uber's strategy (under Kalanick anyway) was premised on replacing drivers with AIs before the…

So you're saying we need to program our driverless cars to occasionally go on road-rage rampages if they're cut off too many times?

Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

#59

Post by scottlocklin »

ghaff wrote: post #24
scottlocklin wrote: post #8

You mean the output of VC firm and Silly Con Valley marketing centipedes isn't strictly true? Perish the thought! Next thing you know, you'll be telling me the advocates of strong-AI, 3-d printing, Virtual Reality and Drones as revolutionary technology might not be exactly accurate.

I do wonder how much of the self-driving narrative at the peak of inflated expectations was the result of 1. Wild optimism fueled by how rapid the progress of ML had been in certain domains over the course of a few years combined with a lot of hype and general SV techno-optimism. (And the fact that a certain demographic so desperately wanted a robo-chaffeur to drive them around.) vs. 2. Hypesters and scammers who kne…

In the case of 1. I'm certain a whole bunch of it is people getting high on their own supply; aka pay a marketer to hype your thing, your competitor does same, then you become afraid of all the progress your competitor has made (which is imaginary marketing hype). I've actually seen this dynamic at work in "AI" land; it's gotten me work.

I've even seen it happen within the same company: marketing dude talks to engineer, gets it all wrong and exaggerates capabilities; then CEO demands to know why the capabilities in his sales literature don't exist in the product.

I call it "human informational centipede."

Hypesters and scammers always around; excepting in Theranos type cases, they mostly don't really push the needle. Pretty sure Irene Aldridge didn't change perceptions of HFT much, for example.

Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

#60

Post by seanmcdirmid »

takk309 wrote: post #15

I am a traffic engineer and one of the things that I do regularly is write 10 year traffic plans for small to medium sized cities, think 60,000 people max. When a lot of the self driving hype was really kicking off, I was told to make sure to incorporate them into the plans. This mostly consisted of a few sentences about self driving and that was it. When modeling future traffic growth, the client would always say, "…

> "these numbers a pretty high, do you thing self driving cars will lower them?"

My answer would be no: the opposite, if self driving cars work out, people will probably just drive more! The only traffic gains would come from 100% self driving cars that could then be optimized somewhat globally.

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