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Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

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

#101

Post by taf2 »

xiaolingxiao wrote: post #45
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…

Indeed amazing because I know employees at Tesla who take it home on autopilot in the freeway! It’s also very unsafe ans I dot believe camera only is the way to go, but at least it can drive for more than a mile.

I bought an iRobot and I really think if they incorporated a camera it could be significantly better. There are obvious things it picks up and gets stuck in like shoelaces and power cables. Obviously a vacuum is not self driving but it’s a similar problem and at least my casual observation is that proximity sensors along won’t solve real world navigation because we need some kind of inference to understand what the impact of an objects presence would be if we ran over it or not... I believe there has to be a solution with many sensors visual and lidar mapping makes sense too

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

#102

Post by rrrrrrrrrrrryan »

yholio wrote: post #30

Clearly, we should aim for a less ambitious goal: ultra-compact self driving vehicles on dedicated and physically separated lanes, where cars cannot be encountered unless it's their fault, similar to bike and tram lines. This could increase city trafic capacity by an order of magnitude in congested central zones and suplement public transport in suburban, dispersed areas that cannot be properly served by buses. And i…

My father's a civil engineer, and has told me they've been trying to do this since the 70s. The original plans were to put a magnetic strip beneath one lane of our freeways that could allow simple lane-keeping and some basic communication to keep the cars properly spaced, then raise the speed limit up 100+ mph for those lanes.

The problem is, once you ask anything of government infrastructure, it may take forever. I could maybe see it eventually happening if these companies lobby heavily for toll lanes, where autonomous zero-passenger vehicles pay the bulk of the fees.

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

#103

Post by yholio »

paxys wrote: post #79
yholio wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it would be the same network, with some road space dedicated to cars being repurposed for public transit. Cities do this all the time for buses.

Cities usually go as far as having dedicated lanes for buses on a few main thoroughfares. That is a far cry from having a self driving car not encounter any human driver during the drive from my home to my office or the grocery store, for example.

The goal is not to never encounter a car, but that the encounter is mediated with very robust and proven technology that is compatible with both human and current level AI, like a V2X enabled trafic light or a steel bollard. A car can still hit the pod if it disobeys the red light, but the driver would be culpable and the incident itself would be similar to a car hitting, say, a bike - not the fault of the bike.

As for the density of such infrastructure, you don't need it on every street, just within a short walking distance to be practical, a few hundred meters maybe. Once you can reach the hail point, it can take you non-stop to any other in the area served, so something like 30 Km/h top speed can go a long way.

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

#104

Post by FreakyT »

xvilka wrote: post #97
jimrandomh wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Rail in the US is spectacularly expensive; look up a few recent rail projects with dollar figures attached, they're billions of dollars each. That's the same order of magnitude as the cost of an entire self-driving research program (Waymo has taken $3B of investment, according to its Wikipedia page), which, if successful, would scale quickly and easily to the entire world.

If the US companies can't do it just hire Chinese or Japanese ones who have enormous experience to build the infrastructure way cheaper.

Exactly this -- plenty of other countries have figured out how to build rail systems without massive cost overruns.

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

#105

Post by maxerickson »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #52
justapassenger wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Level 2 has 0 semblance of reliable autonomy. Those are completely different problems.

It is a defined level of vehicle autonomy by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE). https://www.sae.org/news/2019/01/sae-updates-j3016-automated...

I think they mean the green bits there are the part where the car can be relied on to drive by itself (with the blue bits requiring constant attention).

Arguing about what to call it is boring. Is Tesla close to having a system that can drive without attention, decide it isn't sure what to do and safely request driver attention? Or does it just have the bit that can successfully navigate a lot of situations?

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

#106

Post by criswell »

wongarsu wrote: post #83
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.

Yeah, but humans.

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

#107

Post by phire »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #52
justapassenger wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Level 2 has 0 semblance of reliable autonomy. Those are completely different problems.

It is a defined level of vehicle autonomy by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE). https://www.sae.org/news/2019/01/sae-updates-j3016-automated...

I personally believe that level 3 is completely useless. It requires the driver to be completely aware and ready to take over the driving with a second notice whenever the car gets in over it's head.

It seems like level 3 is more dangerous than a 100% manual car.

Even high-end level 2 seems dangerous.

Until we get self driving cars to level 4, were they don't require the driver to play attention, I don't think self driving cars should be on the road.

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

#108

Post by ktal »

xiaolingxiao wrote: post #45
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…

Indeed amazing because I know employees at Tesla who take it home on autopilot in the freeway! It’s also very unsafe ans I dot believe camera only is the way to go, but at least it can drive for more than a mile.

Freeway driving is much, much easier than in-town roads - there's been successful autonomous freeway driving since the 90s.

When you drive on the freeway, everyone's going the same way (or at least you'd hope), the configuration of the road is well known, lines are consistent, etc. It's all the little things that need to be accounted for - opposing traffic, pedestrians, parked cars, random obstacles, and any number of other road, traffic and obstacle configurations that exist, that make consistently and safely driving elsewhere difficult for autonomous systems.

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

#109

Post by cycrutchfield »

xiaolingxiao wrote: post #45
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…

Indeed amazing because I know employees at Tesla who take it home on autopilot in the freeway! It’s also very unsafe ans I dot believe camera only is the way to go, but at least it can drive for more than a mile.

You are able to drive home and you are camera only. I don’t think it’s too far-fetched

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

#110

Post by wheelie_boy »

FreakyT wrote: post #100
ethbr0 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 endin…

> Autonomous cars solve that in the same way an personal automobile currently does, albeit removing the inconvenience of actually driving. The problem with autonomous cars as compared to rail is that autonomy doesn't solve the other fundamental problem of cars: congestion. If I waved my magic wand and replaced every car in the bay area with a self-driving one overnight, roads would still clog at rush hour.

If anything, self-driving cars would make congestion a lot worse. If I had a self-driving mini-RV, I would live further from the city, and do my morning routine during my commute. Maybe take a small nap or get some work done.
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