151–160 of 350 posts
I keep getting downvoted. I’ll keep saying it, we need government investment into self driving. It cannot be done by private sector alone.
It's bad enough private investors are wasting so much capital on self-driving. The last thing we need is the government doing the same.
Government has been studying this since the 1960’s…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's those edge cases that make me think real FSD (vehicles with no steering wheels) is a decade-timescale problem. Figure out 99.9% of driving, but otherwise take a family off a bridge when the sun is blinding the camera? Still need a steering wheel.
Driving in all conditions requires the computing power of a human brain. When we have computers that powerful, we can talk about L5.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I saw Levandowski do a presentation of self-driving at an Uber all-hands and it was then and there that I knew that self-driving is 20+ years away. The example video showed so many small things that we take for granted as a human driver that would need to be built in or hand coded that AI or neural nets would never be able to get. There just isn’t a way that you can train every single little thing that could cause an…
I think at a minimum all the cars need to be taking to each other over a protocol.
Funny in hindsight from 2016: "Lyft's president says 'majority' of rides will be in self-driving cars by 2021" https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/18/12944506/lyft-self-drivin... https://medium.com/@johnzimmer/the-third-transportation-revo...
Steve McConnell also talks about a common estimation pattern: managers keep asking if something can be sooner, and are only stopped when some engineer proves that a date is 100% impossible. Normally that means that the launch date starts out with a 1% chance of success. Clearly it was lower than that here, but I wonder if that's because a) it's very hard to prove what's impossible here, or b) the Uber/Tesla hype bubble was so intense that it didn't matter what the nerds said.
I learned to drive in Mexico at 13, where there are almost literally no rules or traffic signals (see the black arrow on the wall? that means don't stop). I remember thinking about how different things were when trying to get my driver's license in US at age 16 - almost easier - in spite of how many more rules there were. I wonder how self-driving cars perform when trained in a world of rules and order and are then t…
Funny in hindsight from 2016: "Lyft's president says 'majority' of rides will be in self-driving cars by 2021" https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/18/12944506/lyft-self-drivin... https://medium.com/@johnzimmer/the-third-transportation-revo...
Putting aside the question of whether the tech is there or not (and I would argue it isn’t there for commercial consumer use), the infrastructure and the laws will take years to catch up. This isn’t an overnight problem and many of the barriers are things that tech can’t just design around.
Funny in hindsight from 2016: "Lyft's president says 'majority' of rides will be in self-driving cars by 2021" https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/18/12944506/lyft-self-drivin... https://medium.com/@johnzimmer/the-third-transportation-revo...
I saw Levandowski do a presentation of self-driving at an Uber all-hands and it was then and there that I knew that self-driving is 20+ years away. The example video showed so many small things that we take for granted as a human driver that would need to be built in or hand coded that AI or neural nets would never be able to get. There just isn’t a way that you can train every single little thing that could cause an…
Humans have such incredible pattern recognition that we have built-in fear mechanics for when things are _not_ a pattern we recognize.
What percentage of the time do you experience fear when performing a task such as driving? Think about it - that's the margin for error that humans have in pattern recognition for that task.
In the end this makes sense; an actual car company is much better positioned to actually profit from marginal improvements in self-driving (read: safety improvements) year over year, rather than wait for the windfall of FSD taxi service at some unknown point in the future.
Toyota's entire market is convincing people (the bulk of whom will trade in in a few years) that a Camry/4Runner/Sienna is worth substantially more than an Altima/Tahoe/Pacifica based on a bunch of promises about reliability after 150k that the statistical first owner will never see (spare us all the anecdote about your relative who trades in at 300k on the dot, I have one of those too). If robotaxi fleets become the game then Toyota is gonna lose because commercial buyers who buy us a fleet of whatever has the lowest all things included TCO over 3/5/10yr tend to buy a hell of a lot of Chrysler 200s, Nissan Sentras, Chevy Colorados, Chrysler Pacificas, Ford Transit Connects, and other not so premium vehicles.
If FSD tech is viable in the next 20yr I'd be very surprised if the reality of what that will do to Toyota's business doesn't keep them from going all in enough to bring a viable version to market early enough to get a good market share at it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
nothing new here, AI has been "5 years away" since the 1950s
The world is already largely running on AI, just not the version of it that is in people's heads by watching sci-fi movies.
I don't know of anything important that's running on anything that can be reasonably called AI.
I think we can get by without Siri.
Of course, if you include the entirety of machine learning under the AI label, then whatever. But in my opinion, a principal component analysis does not an AI make. Statistical inference has been around since before computers were invented.