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Mass layoffs reported after Starsky Robotics fails to find buyer, investors

freightwaves.com

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Re: Mass layoffs reported after Starsky Robotics fails to find buyer, investors

#31

Post by shiftpgdn »

pyb wrote: post #27
2J0 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know of deep fake employment opportunities designed exclusively for identifying opportunities for IP larceny. This is a huge reason for locking down everything if you have any relatives of important people in your organisation as interns. This is the oldest privilege escalation hack I know of, and you might want to see if your outside legal will support a fake interview process for your own people via a headhunter.…

Not sure I understand what you are denouncing ? The fake vacancies I had in mind are not so malicious. But for the candidates, in aggregate, they are a waste of precious time and energy. - Company has still opportunities on their website, in order to look healthy, when they are in fact laying everybody off (as is the case in the OP) - Company publishes an offer for legal reasons, but in fact wants to hire a cheaper r…

Those are all real problems but there is an insidious one where you pretend to poach an employee from a competing firm but instead just do everything you can to brain dump them during the interview.

Re: Mass layoffs reported after Starsky Robotics fails to find buyer, investors

#32

Post by rtkwe »

walrus01 wrote: post #28
chooseaname wrote: post #25

> “Our approach is taking the drivers out of the truck and have them working remotely to make high-level decisions while the truck is on the highway,” Seltz-Axmacher told FreightWaves in May 2019. “To be honest, I don’t think that a super-computer can be built that is smarter than a truck driver.” Probably why they didn't get funding. VCs don't want to hear that (even if it may be closer to the truth than anyone want…

This seems like a setup that while a logical architecture decision, would be reliant upon really rock solid mobile broadband on the routes driven by its trucks. Like, seven nines reliable. I saw videos of their test setup with a driver at a desk workstation/"cockpit" which was driving a remote truck. Imagine if a human needed to make a decision with less than a few seconds of reaction time, at freeway speeds, and the…

I think their goal was to have highway driving completely handled by the self driving systems with maybe call outs if it gets into a situation it can't figure out (weird construction zone or accident it needs to move around). For covering the gaps existing technologies might even be enough, a combination of auto breaking, adaptive cruise control and lane keeping would be a pretty solid gap fill.

There's several things that could be done in the city if it experiences drop outs. A creep mode where it moves quite slowly till the network improves would let the lower bandwidth or latency connection still be used safely.

Personally I always thought the answer would be self driving on highways to cargo hubs for delivery by human drivers. Or maybe self driving trucks with sleepers so if it got into a confusing situation it could stop/pull over and wake the driver to deal with it and allow the driver to sleep while the truck keeps moving.

Re: Mass layoffs reported after Starsky Robotics fails to find buyer, investors

#33

Post by Iwork4Google »

chooseaname wrote: post #25

> “Our approach is taking the drivers out of the truck and have them working remotely to make high-level decisions while the truck is on the highway,” Seltz-Axmacher told FreightWaves in May 2019. “To be honest, I don’t think that a super-computer can be built that is smarter than a truck driver.” Probably why they didn't get funding. VCs don't want to hear that (even if it may be closer to the truth than anyone want…

Well there is good reason they don't want to hear it. It's a stupid idea. The last thing you want is some driver 300 miles away on a computer not paying attention, or with the ability to crash a semitruck, or with the uncertainty that your entire fleet goes down if your network goes down, or if someone finds a weakness in your security and starts crashing all your trucks. I mean whatever moron was responsible for this path in this company (likely the CEO) should be fired and replaced. It looks like at this point they will just end up liquidating this company anyway.

Re: Mass layoffs reported after Starsky Robotics fails to find buyer, investors

#34

Post by mdszy »

rtkwe wrote: post #32
walrus01 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like a setup that while a logical architecture decision, would be reliant upon really rock solid mobile broadband on the routes driven by its trucks. Like, seven nines reliable. I saw videos of their test setup with a driver at a desk workstation/"cockpit" which was driving a remote truck. Imagine if a human needed to make a decision with less than a few seconds of reaction time, at freeway speeds, and the…

I think their goal was to have highway driving completely handled by the self driving systems with maybe call outs if it gets into a situation it can't figure out (weird construction zone or accident it needs to move around). For covering the gaps existing technologies might even be enough, a combination of auto breaking, adaptive cruise control and lane keeping would be a pretty solid gap fill. There's several thing…

>maybe call outs if it gets into a situation it can't figure out

How would it predict that these situations are coming with enough time to hand off to a human driver? I think it would need some form of crowd sourced or externally gathered data. The truck itself couldn't gather this in time.

>A creep mode where it moves quite slowly till the network improves would let the lower bandwidth or latency connection still be used safely.

Sounds like a traffic nightmare.

>Personally I always thought the answer would be self driving on highways to cargo hubs for delivery by human drivers

I do agree with this. I firmly believe that full self driving will probably never be possible for anything except for Interstate/main highways that are well maintained and very standardized in their construction, markings, etc.

Re: Mass layoffs reported after Starsky Robotics fails to find buyer, investors

#35

Post by nathanaldensr »

topynate wrote: post #30
walrus01 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like a setup that while a logical architecture decision, would be reliant upon really rock solid mobile broadband on the routes driven by its trucks. Like, seven nines reliable. I saw videos of their test setup with a driver at a desk workstation/"cockpit" which was driving a remote truck. Imagine if a human needed to make a decision with less than a few seconds of reaction time, at freeway speeds, and the…

The trucks could have AI that worked most of the time. Not well enough to rely on for normal operations, but good enough for a fallback in case of losing connectivity. Some made-up numbers to explain my point: Consider a situation where the remote operator will make the right response 99.9% of the time, failing 0.1%, and the AI is 20 times worse, making an error 2% of the time. The actual error rate will be (0.1% * c…

Ah yes, the mythical "AI" that has yet to be invented.

Let's just sprinkle in some AI and it'll work!

Re: Mass layoffs reported after Starsky Robotics fails to find buyer, investors

#36

Post by newaccount1234 »

seibelj wrote: post #14

Why couldn’t they raise more money or get acquired? I thought self-driving car startups were worth $1mil per engineer (at least!) in an acquihire let alone semi-functional tech. Was it a scam?

You should check your figures. I believe Drive.ai, one of the leaders in the industry, was acquired for about $500,000 an engineer last summer. The numbers you are thinking of are more appropriate during 2016-2018 when the hype train was at full speed. Last summer there was a palpable feeling that the industry was beginning to 'consolidate'. I would not be surprised if all of the non-OEM, non-Google backed AV companies go bust soon.

Re: Mass layoffs reported after Starsky Robotics fails to find buyer, investors

#37

Post by rtkwe »

mdszy wrote: post #34
rtkwe wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think their goal was to have highway driving completely handled by the self driving systems with maybe call outs if it gets into a situation it can't figure out (weird construction zone or accident it needs to move around). For covering the gaps existing technologies might even be enough, a combination of auto breaking, adaptive cruise control and lane keeping would be a pretty solid gap fill. There's several thing…

>maybe call outs if it gets into a situation it can't figure out How would it predict that these situations are coming with enough time to hand off to a human driver? I think it would need some form of crowd sourced or externally gathered data. The truck itself couldn't gather this in time. >A creep mode where it moves quite slowly till the network improves would let the lower bandwidth or latency connection still be…

There are source out there for accidents, traffic information and construction where the system could pretty reliably predict when it's going to encounter an odd traffic pattern that would be better handled by a human than the automated systems. In cases where there's a decision needed extremely quickly we're generally talking about an accident or near accident that relatively simple existing assistance systems like autobraking and obstacle avoidance would handle.

Trucks are already really slow compared to traffic inside cities and in the rare cases where they're in this mode on a highway they're probably already in a slow traffic area because they're dealing with construction or accident areas.

Re: Mass layoffs reported after Starsky Robotics fails to find buyer, investors

#38

Post by SuoDuanDao »

2J0 wrote: post #24
pyb wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fake vacancies is a huge and underreported problem for jobseekers. It is impossible to tell just from the job description.

I know of deep fake employment opportunities designed exclusively for identifying opportunities for IP larceny. This is a huge reason for locking down everything if you have any relatives of important people in your organisation as interns. This is the oldest privilege escalation hack I know of, and you might want to see if your outside legal will support a fake interview process for your own people via a headhunter.…

I wonder how much of that information would be actionable though... I remember a story I heard at my last employer, one of our younger designers had brought some work home and his father, a VP for a rival company, saw his screen and exclaimed "This makes so much more sense! Why aren't we doing this?!"

But of course, they didn't start doing it like that because they had a huge workforce already trained on their own process and the juice wasn't worth the squeeze. I'm not sure how I would actually exploit a rival's meeting minutes even if I had them and no scruples.

Re: Mass layoffs reported after Starsky Robotics fails to find buyer, investors

#39

Post by derefr »

nathanaldensr wrote: post #35
topynate wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trucks could have AI that worked most of the time. Not well enough to rely on for normal operations, but good enough for a fallback in case of losing connectivity. Some made-up numbers to explain my point: Consider a situation where the remote operator will make the right response 99.9% of the time, failing 0.1%, and the AI is 20 times worse, making an error 2% of the time. The actual error rate will be (0.1% * c…

Ah yes, the mythical "AI" that has yet to be invented. Let's just sprinkle in some AI and it'll work!

The exact cases where human reaction times fail are already taken care of by local subsumptive AI† in cars. For example, collision avoidance is “AI”; lane-keeping and adaptive cruise-control are “AI”; etc. For that matter, an automatic transmission is “AI” in the sense of abstracting away a clutch and gears under a prediction of when you’d want them used.

† ...which doesn’t actually imply anything to do with Machine Learning. Your computer downclocking when it overheats rather than catching on fire, is an example of “subsumptive-architecture artificial intelligence”, even though it’s a hand-coded algorithm doing the subsumption. The “artificial intelligence” in this case refers to the emergent property of the layered subsumptive processes, not to the processes themselves.

Re: Mass layoffs reported after Starsky Robotics fails to find buyer, investors

#40

Post by ddispaltro »

derefr wrote: post #39
nathanaldensr wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, the mythical "AI" that has yet to be invented. Let's just sprinkle in some AI and it'll work!

The exact cases where human reaction times fail are already taken care of by local subsumptive AI† in cars. For example, collision avoidance is “AI”; lane-keeping and adaptive cruise-control are “AI”; etc. For that matter, an automatic transmission is “AI” in the sense of abstracting away a clutch and gears under a prediction of when you’d want them used. † ...which doesn’t actually imply anything to do with Machine…

Don't forget anti-lock brakes.
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