Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected • Hacker News Board

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

#101

Post by jacquesm » Fri, Feb 14, 2020, 9:17 PM UTC

technofiend wrote: post #88

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…

>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 jokingly call it management myopia: anything I don't understand can't be that hard.

> anything I don't understand can't be that hard.

Brilliant line, that probably goes a long way towards explaining why software in general simply sucks from a users perspective.

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

#102

Post by pasttense01 » Fri, Feb 14, 2020, 9:17 PM UTC

mark-r wrote: post #51

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.

But what really matters is the overall statistics: The self-driving doesn't know how to handle this one in a 10,000 situation. But in the other 9,999 of 10,000 situations the self-driving vehicle is equal or better. Thus the self-driving vehicle averages out to be a lot safer.

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

#103

Post by 0x8BADF00D » Fri, Feb 14, 2020, 9:17 PM UTC

There’s a huge bubble in the autonomous vehicle space. I foresee Waymo being able to do it, only because I know some of the crazy smart people that work there. It won’t be until the end of the decade though.

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

#104

Post by falcolas » Fri, Feb 14, 2020, 9:18 PM UTC

mullingitover wrote: post #64

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…

> Once a driver knows the car next to them isn't driven by a person it changes their behaviour. If the car next to me isn't driven by a person, but is bristling with high resolution cameras that will immediately upload footage of my face to the authorities if I collide with it, I would indeed change my behavior.

Being excessively cautious makes you an unpredictable driver as well. Unpredictability is the antithesis of safe driving.

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

#105

Post by ctdonath » Fri, Feb 14, 2020, 9:19 PM UTC

skywhopper wrote: post #30

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, "…

I'm always baffled by folks who assume self-driving cars would reduce traffic. No matter what, even if they are privately owned, truly self-driving vehicles could only increase traffic. If they can be dispatched without a human driver to pick up groceries or take-out, for example, there'll be a lot more trips. And sharing self-driving cars rather than owning them would surely be more likely to increase the number of…

I envision herds of driverless vehicles slowly cruising randomly, summoned when needed, avoiding the cost of parking.

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

#106

Post by pasttense01 » Fri, Feb 14, 2020, 9:20 PM UTC

tjpaudio wrote: post #27

To anyone with a detailed understanding of the current limits of machine learning, this should be no surprise; unsupervised learning is far from solved and ML in its current state will always be plagued by the cat and mouse game of edge cases. The reality is the industry has decided to go this way anyways because it has a good profit outlook if you can get it to work, which is the only thing funding the endeavor. Con…

And what happens if the network breaks down? Everything gridlocked. Conversely if one vehicle breaks down the rest of the cars just go on by.

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

#107

Post by ctdonath » Fri, Feb 14, 2020, 9:21 PM UTC

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…

"Lie"? Rather a harsh phrasing.

The only thing unleashing it is the decision to turn it on, which is largely up to regulators.

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

#108

Post by SilasX » Fri, Feb 14, 2020, 9:23 PM UTC

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…

>When it became clear that Uber's strategy (under Kalanick anyway) was premised on replacing drivers with AIs before the cash ran out I couldn't see general self-driving vehicles coming within 20 years. I still say that's true.

Even so, this never made sense as a business strategy, unless Uber somehow has a comparative advantage in achieving self-driving cars and then can get a long monopoly on them.

If they don't -- if others have SDCs around the same time, then sure, their costs go way down, but they can also charge a lot less, because the competition has the same "advantage"!

It's like:

"Hey, man, do you really think your grocery store can make those superhuge profits when you sell at the wholesale price?"

'Oh, no, I have a plan. You know those barcodes they're putting on products now? I'm going to invent a way to integrate that with the checkouts, and boom, I don't have to pay for people to put price tags on. Labor costs go way down!'

Same problem: "No, you're not. Someone better at that will, and they'll sell the tech to all grocery stores."

There was never a reason to believe Kalanick's operation as it stood in 2010/11 had that comparative advantage, so that strategy never made sense. And today, not surprisingly, Uber is one of the worst at SDCs, and is correspondingly unlikely to have that advantage.

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

#109

Post by rafaelvasco » Fri, Feb 14, 2020, 9:24 PM UTC

As the article said, we're in that awkward transition period. The problem is that it puts people's lives at risk, even though most deaths could be avoided if the drivers hadn't been so negligent, like watching their smartphones while the car AI operated the car, sleeping etc. It's a turbulent transition, but the tech is here to stay, and it'll not only keep improving, but the advancements in AI due to self driving research will surely benefit several other areas;

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

#110

Post by reggieband » Fri, Feb 14, 2020, 9:25 PM UTC

theresistor wrote: post #97

reggieband wrote: post #83

I've been watching Lex Fridman's youtube podcast and there is a recent interview with Jim Keller [1]. Keller is a chip designer famous for his involvement in multiple chips at Intel, AMD, Apple and he was co-author of the x86-64 instruction set. He also worked for Tesla. There is a point in the conversation where Lex and Jim clearly disagree about how "easy" self-driving AI should be. Lex is clearly pessimistic and J…

Jim Keller went back to Intel in 2018.

My mistake - I should have checked his bio rather than assume based on the content of the discussion. I've updated my comment to change his association to Tesla to the past tense, Thank you.