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Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

theinformation.com

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Re: Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

#81

Post by jonwachob91 »

paxys wrote: post #18

No one can read this article yet it is instantly upvoted to the very top of HN. Goes to show how discussion forums like this one just serve to amplify people's existing biases rather than actually educate them on anything new.

> No one can read this article yet it is instantly upvoted to the very top of HN. Goes to show how discussion forums like this one just serve to amplify people's existing biases rather than actually educate them on anything new.

Maybe everyone that is upvoting it can read it b/c they subscribe to the news site, and maybe your comment shows your existing bias about your thoughts on other readers of this discussion forum?

Re: Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

#82

Post by beisner »

djsumdog wrote: post #28

I wrote this back in 2016 and I think it still holds today: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/self-driving-cars-will-not-so... Self driving cars are dumping an insane amount of time and effort into computer vision and AI for the wrong problem. For the amount of tax subsidies, our money, given to these companies, we could have put down insane amounts of rail. Hell, we could even do small personal autonomous rail car test…

The United States is structurally incapable of large-scale public works projects. There are a lot of reasons for this and they aren’t particularly partisan, rather reflect how decisions are made. My guess is places like China and Singapore will have the first true deployments of self-driving, because they’re actually capable of building road infrastructure to support it when it isn’t fully level 5.

Re: Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

#83

Post by wongarsu »

viburnum wrote: post #39

What I've never understood is how you're going to get a car to understand a construction worker or cop doing hand signals without artificial general intelligence. Why even bother with the car until you've figured that out in the lab?

Hand signals are pretty standardised and obvious, and even the first Kinect (XBox accessory from 2010) can estimate people's skeletons sufficiently well to figure out construction worker hand signals. I would expect that you can solve this pretty well even without any ML at all.

Re: Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

#84

Post by lotsofpulp »

lallysingh wrote: post #55
djsumdog wrote: post #28

I wrote this back in 2016 and I think it still holds today: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/self-driving-cars-will-not-so... Self driving cars are dumping an insane amount of time and effort into computer vision and AI for the wrong problem. For the amount of tax subsidies, our money, given to these companies, we could have put down insane amounts of rail. Hell, we could even do small personal autonomous rail car test…

It isn't the money that stops rail.

Even Silicon Valley levels of money don’t approach that needed to purchase the land required for rail.

Re: Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

#85

Post by ipunchghosts »

djsumdog wrote: post #28

I wrote this back in 2016 and I think it still holds today: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/self-driving-cars-will-not-so... Self driving cars are dumping an insane amount of time and effort into computer vision and AI for the wrong problem. For the amount of tax subsidies, our money, given to these companies, we could have put down insane amounts of rail. Hell, we could even do small personal autonomous rail car test…

I 100% agree with this. A much better endeavor would have been to built a robot highway and only allow autonomous vehicles on it. Like trains but using 4 wheeled vehicles.

Re: Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

#86

Post by xoxoy »

judge2020 wrote: post #54
closeparen wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Commuting 10k miles/year is nothing special. Only four nines is still an accident every year.

I'm talking about four nines in terms of reliability (not crashes) and on level 3, where the car still has all the regular driving controls - so if there is a problem or the system has high uncertainty about certain road situations it can force/return control to the driver and have them navigate the unknown situation. I'm also probably being too optimistic predicting four nines in 5 years, it'll probably be 10 years…

the issue is that randomly requiring non-professional drivers to take over during a trip is an underestimated danger. people get accustomed to it working 99% of the time and get lazy - then the 1% it fails and the driver is asleep or distracted or watching a movie and becomes a major safety issue.

ex all the horror stories of distracted Tesla drivers using autopilot like full autonomous driving today.

Re: Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

#87

Post by ethbr0 »

djsumdog wrote: post #28

I wrote this back in 2016 and I think it still holds today: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/self-driving-cars-will-not-so... Self driving cars are dumping an insane amount of time and effort into computer vision and AI for the wrong problem. For the amount of tax subsidies, our money, given to these companies, we could have put down insane amounts of rail. Hell, we could even do small personal autonomous rail car test…

I'd offer Kurzweil's (I believe?) observation that the futurist predictions that come true are those that substantially improve peoples' needs.

Even substantially expanded rail will never solve the problem of "I want to get from point A to point B, as quickly as possible, whenever I'm ready to leave" in a fundamentally different way. The transit to the starting station might be shorter, and the transit from the ending station will be shorter, but it's still the same experience.

Autonomous cars solve that in the same way an personal automobile currently does, albeit removing the inconvenience of actually driving.

The former is like-in-kind. The latter is fundamentally-different. Consequently, if I am a consumer, how much would I be willing to pay for the former vs the latter?

Cell phones became ubiquitous because they were a fundamentally-different communication experience ("Call a person instead of a location"). Transit will be the same way, if it changes.

Re: Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

#88

Post by dmead »

djsumdog wrote: post #28

I wrote this back in 2016 and I think it still holds today: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/self-driving-cars-will-not-so... Self driving cars are dumping an insane amount of time and effort into computer vision and AI for the wrong problem. For the amount of tax subsidies, our money, given to these companies, we could have put down insane amounts of rail. Hell, we could even do small personal autonomous rail car test…

so uber's entire self driving program cost the same as laying down new rail for one new major route. that is definitely not the same cost.

Re: Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

#89

Post by Skunkleton »

necubi wrote: post #12

The Information sometimes unlocks articles for HN readers, but for those that don't have access the biggest takeaway to me is that Uber has made relatively little progress towards fully autonomous cars despite a huge amount of investment. The most shocking detail: > Uber’s vehicles had also been having what the company refers to as a bad experience—such as a sudden jerk or a potentially dangerous movement—every one-t…

> That's really bad. While there are no uniform standards for what a "bad experience" entails, my general sense is that Waymo and Cruise (widely considered first and second) are doing 10-100x better by that metric.

For for that matter, ever 3 or 30 miles would also be really bad in my book.

Re: Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

#90

Post by RobLach »

29athrowaway wrote: post #74

I would not say they "wasted" that money. It's a moonshot, and the first to get it right will make far more than $2.5B in revenue.

A moonshot isn't something that you need to figure out how to achieve, it's something you already know you can do as long as you dedicate a lot of operational and material resources to it.
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