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Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

bloomberg.com

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Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#71

Post by sgtfrankieboy »

rvz wrote: post #30
sgtfrankieboy wrote: post #16

So? Okay, we're not there yet with autonomous vehicles, and have spend tons of money on it. But the tech we have now didn't exist a decade ago. Give it another decade.

Another decade for prototype self-driving cars to cover another state part of the US? $100BN in funding these gadgets and contraptions that don't work. Not even Tesla FSD can drive itself reliably at night without supervision, because it is not Level 5. Until LiDAR becomes more cheaper and these cars CAN drive themselves safely at night without supervision in any state at scale and as advertised like a robotaxi, then…

>Another decade of researching a cancer cure to cover another different type of cancer? $1400BN in funding these cancer treatments that don't work. Not even radiotherapy can fully cure cancer...

Thats how I read it, sorry. We made tremendous leaps in the past decade with improving automated driving, is it fully automatic? No. Does it mean we should somehow stop funding it? No.

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#72

Post by Fricken »

case0x00 wrote: post #4

This article is kind of a wrapper for the linked bloomberg article, which is more interesting IMO. Driving of cars is a massive cooperative game with high stakes, and autonomous cars essentially need AGI in order to play to a degree that is safer than a human with other humans. Fully autonomous cars would be sick, but IMO you'd need massive infrastructure changes (realistically restricted to cities/urbanized areas) i…

This bullshit shows up in every HN thread on autonomous vehicles. Really only on HN. It's wrong, uninformed, and won't seem to go away.

The challenges self-driving cars have nothing to do with infrastructure and everything to do with the other moving objects on the road. It's not that the vehicles can't detect the other things on the road. It's that they can't anticipate reliably what they're going to do.

(However you may be correct that we need AGI or something close to it to do autonomous vehicles robustly)

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#73

Post by wainstead »

sgtfrankieboy wrote: post #16

So? Okay, we're not there yet with autonomous vehicles, and have spend tons of money on it. But the tech we have now didn't exist a decade ago. Give it another decade.

This. I recall most predictions saying 2024 would be the tipping point, but even then I doubt regulations at the local and national level will change that fast.

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#74

Post by paganel »

noobermin wrote: post #19
case0x00 wrote: post #4

This article is kind of a wrapper for the linked bloomberg article, which is more interesting IMO. Driving of cars is a massive cooperative game with high stakes, and autonomous cars essentially need AGI in order to play to a degree that is safer than a human with other humans. Fully autonomous cars would be sick, but IMO you'd need massive infrastructure changes (realistically restricted to cities/urbanized areas) i…

Why should we change city infrastructure to work with less than AGI driven cars? It sounds instead like yes, AV companies are over selling what they can do and they should be restricted to things like highways and the like where the easier, less complex driving environment already exists. Cities are by far the most complex relative to every other driving environment, in fact there is a good argument that, in cities,…

Not all driving outside city areas happens on the highways.

My brother lives in the countryside (somewhere in the EU), and, as a driver, he shares the paved road just outside his house with the village’s cows (including his two cows). I don’t see any non-AGI system being able to negotiate that, as at times is difficult even for me, a reasonably AGI system, to make sense of it all when I encounter a herd of loose cows on the road.

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#76

Post by AtomicOrbital »

FL33TW00D wrote: post #38
batmanturkey wrote: post #32

WHY is a fully autonomous vehicle even interesting to pursue, given that wheeled vehicles and their infrastructural requirements are such a large expense and social and environmental problem relative to the benefits provided? I mean, out of all the moonshots, why die on this particular hill? I consider an actual hyperloop to be a much more compelling vision for the future: those pneumatic tubes the banks use in subur…

Those infrastructure requirements are already satisfied - and ~3000 people died on US roads last year.

30,000+ fatal vehicle accidents annually, not 3000

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#77

Post by MontyCarloHall »

subroutine wrote: post #56
roenxi wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to nit-pick and say you're estimating some novel metric. The value add would be somewhat higher than that because the alternative is a human driver, so the value-add of the software is approximately ($/h value of driver x hours) that it frees up to do something else. Plus all the evidence I see suggests that whatever the current state, sooner rather than later computers are going to be superhuman at driv…

I think computers will become superhuman at driving under the right conditions . However, there will inevitably be conditions that require the use of general intelligence (rather than driving heuristics), and in those situations all you can do is pray the computer acts rationally despite not having GI. I think self driving cars have already passed the test of "number of crashes" or "number of fatalities" per mile dri…

>I think self driving cars have already passed the test of "number of crashes" or "number of fatalities" per mile driven.

This is not definitively known. The distribution of conditions under which self driving cars operate is very different from the distribution of human driving. Self driving car miles are disproportionately on the highway, with little traffic, in perfect weather (i.e. by far the safest driving conditions). In addition, we don’t know how many disengagements (or remote interventions) would have resulted in an accident.

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#78

Post by almost_usual »

brutusborn wrote: post #23
noobermin wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should we change city infrastructure to work with less than AGI driven cars? It sounds instead like yes, AV companies are over selling what they can do and they should be restricted to things like highways and the like where the easier, less complex driving environment already exists. Cities are by far the most complex relative to every other driving environment, in fact there is a good argument that, in cities,…

One good reason is to help the AIs make better decisions through greater certainty. For example, if a road sign has machine readable data there is a greater certainty that an AI will interpret it correctly. This could affect safety and ease of implementation.

The environment requires too many constraints, in a city it wouldn’t be unusual for someone to vandalize these road signs.

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#79

Post by andrepd »

case0x00 wrote: post #4

This article is kind of a wrapper for the linked bloomberg article, which is more interesting IMO. Driving of cars is a massive cooperative game with high stakes, and autonomous cars essentially need AGI in order to play to a degree that is safer than a human with other humans. Fully autonomous cars would be sick, but IMO you'd need massive infrastructure changes (realistically restricted to cities/urbanized areas) i…

Cars are bad. Electric cars are a bit better than ICE cars, and self-driving cars might one day be better than human-driven cars. But they're still terrible: they're still big, inefficient, polluting, loud, dangerous, and take up precious space. Cars are completely unsuited to cities, and cities which are designed around cars are terrible.

This to say: the future is having cars removed from cities entirely. Focusing on self-driving technology, or on electric cars as if they're going to "save the planet", is entirely the wrong direction imo.

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#80

Post by bumblebritches5 »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #53
batmanturkey wrote: post #32

WHY is a fully autonomous vehicle even interesting to pursue, given that wheeled vehicles and their infrastructural requirements are such a large expense and social and environmental problem relative to the benefits provided? I mean, out of all the moonshots, why die on this particular hill? I consider an actual hyperloop to be a much more compelling vision for the future: those pneumatic tubes the banks use in subur…

I mean, 1.3M people die every year in road accidents. Real number is likely far higher since reporting isn't uniform across the world. That's at least one reason to warrant the investment.

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