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

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

#231

Post by jimmytidey »

usrusr wrote: post #159
jimmytidey wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think non-human payloads make more sense for virtually every kind of innovation: -- Radically reduced safety margins, if the vehicle itself contains no humans. -- You can often move cargo at any time of day or night, and therefore do a much more sophisticated job of collaboratively load-levelling traffic. -- Doesn't matter how uncomfortable a non-human payload is with in reason. Acceleration, cornering, waiting, da…

Humans are freight units that embark and disembark and change vehicles autonomously with very little instruction. Other freight units aren't. Parcel hubs are a hard problem that's far from solved enough to set them up in masses.

You can have humans 'embark' and 'disembark' the freight, the same way we do now...

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

#232

Post by dontreact »

cs702 wrote: post #206
bastawhiz wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm genuinely curious why you think Tesla is ahead compared to Waymo and Cruise. Autopilot struggles in my car on some fairly boring roads, while Waymo and Cruise are both operating real taxi services in vehicles without drivers. I can understand the argument that Tesla has lots of data from real world driving. But Google also has fleets of cars mapping out every road in the world.

Please keep in mind that I'm talking about FSD Beta, not the current production software, which is dozens of versions behind. Are you on Beta 10.69.2.3? If I had to articulate my reasons: * Judging by the videos available online, my perception is that many situations that were impossible for Tesla FSD Beta a year ago have become uneventful in recent weeks. Take a look at Chuck Cook's videos for example (I like the fa…

I'd sum up your points 1,2,3 as "more data". This would be a reason to think they can one day be ahead if they can take advantage of this, but not evidence that they are currently ahead.

Occupancy networks: waymo has published research on this before Tesla announced this at AI day (not clear to me who got there first though https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.03875v1.pdf)

Tesla's Dojo -> Waymo has TPUs to train on

To me all of this is outweighed by the fact that Waymo has a driverless deployment and Tesla does not. I am pretty biased because as a Tesla owner I am pretty pissed off at this point at how the false positives on the system in detecting close following are stopping my safety score from getting high enough to even be able to access the product I purchased.

But it is pretty hard to say one way or another.

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

#233

Post by 411111111111111 »

TomSwirly wrote: post #219
cs702 wrote: post #185

In the short run, technological progress is much slower than anyone hopes, but in the long run it is much faster than anyone expects. My favorite example is that in 1987, the scientific consensus was that it would take "at least 100 years" and likely much longer to sequence the entire human gnome.[a] But the vast majority of it was sequenced by 2000, only 13 years later. Moreover, just two decades later, anyone could…

> but in the long run it is much faster than anyone expects I saw the first Moon landing. At the time, everyone, the experts, the public, everyone, expected us to colonize the Solar System within a few decades. We expected that fusion power would be too cheap to meter and that burning fossil fuels would be a thing of the past. We expected human life expectancy would soon rise to over a century in developed countries.…

> Americans have lost about two years of their life, basically because of their group mistrust of medical science.

I don't think that's the actual reason for the decline, it's more likely another effect of the real cause. While I'm not American, it's the same story all over the world: our diet keeps getting worse, there is plastic everywhere which breaks down into micro plastics which end up in the water we drink etc. We're preparing our food with carcinogenic utensils (everything "non stick") and all of our western societies went from a healthy worker/academic career choice into mostly just getting exploited by the established players.

There have been a lot of societal changes since the post WW2 times, and summing that up into "losing trust in medical science" is a very confusing take, especially if you consider all the medical professionals that spread outright lies to profit. (The person that started the antivax movement was a doctor as a notorious example)

And drug companies that sold bad medicines (knowingly!) As they judged the cost of liability to be lower then the cost of not selling the drug.

Just to be clear, I'm not saying that any of these things are causing this decline either. Our societies have just changed too much since to make any confident claims about their impact.

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

#234

Post by cwalv »

andrepd wrote: post #85
paganel wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sparsely populated rural areas are really the only place where personal autos make sense. Long distance highway travel is better serviced by train. And transportation inside the city is better serviced by literally anything except a car (bikes, e-bikes, subway, trams, scooters, walking).

> Sparsely populated rural areas are really the only place where personal autos make sense

This might be true, if rural areas and densely populated uran areas were the only 2 states, but there's a lot of intermediate density in between

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

#235

Post by cypress66 »

cs702 wrote: post #206
bastawhiz wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm genuinely curious why you think Tesla is ahead compared to Waymo and Cruise. Autopilot struggles in my car on some fairly boring roads, while Waymo and Cruise are both operating real taxi services in vehicles without drivers. I can understand the argument that Tesla has lots of data from real world driving. But Google also has fleets of cars mapping out every road in the world.

Please keep in mind that I'm talking about FSD Beta, not the current production software, which is dozens of versions behind. Are you on Beta 10.69.2.3? If I had to articulate my reasons: * Judging by the videos available online, my perception is that many situations that were impossible for Tesla FSD Beta a year ago have become uneventful in recent weeks. Take a look at Chuck Cook's videos for example (I like the fa…

As someone who also likes to watch Chuck Cook, I don't think Tesla is close to waymo.

Tesla fsd in its current state will either crash or do some serious fuck up if you let it unattended for a few hours or maybe less (based on the disengagements in those videos). Forget about driverless Tesla with the current fsd. Waymo has been operating driverless since 2019.

I do agree that it is progressing very nicely. Imo tesla fsd needs 2 more years and a hardware update and it will be there.

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

#236

Post by 123_abc »

cs702 wrote: post #185

In the short run, technological progress is much slower than anyone hopes, but in the long run it is much faster than anyone expects. My favorite example is that in 1987, the scientific consensus was that it would take "at least 100 years" and likely much longer to sequence the entire human gnome.[a] But the vast majority of it was sequenced by 2000, only 13 years later. Moreover, just two decades later, anyone could…

I think the quote you are referring to in the article [a] states "At the time, that [the 500 genes already sequenced] was thought to be about 1% of the total, and given the pace of discovery, it was believed that complete sequencing of the human genome would take at least 100 years"

The 'given pace of discovery' I would read as an extrapolation using (then) available technologies, not as a scientific consensus about what would be possible using new technologies in the near future.

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

#237

Post by lolc »

davedx wrote: post #208
paganel wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Oh come on, it’s just collision avoidance, you don’t need general AI for that

Collision avoidance that needs object permanence including theory of mind (for cows). How hard could it be?

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

#238

Post by kitsunesoba »

flohofwoe wrote: post #184
kitsunesoba wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fewer people owning cars and instead hailing from a shared pool of autonomous EVs as needed sounds like a solid improvement over the current situation.

Car sharing is already a thing without self-driving, yet people still seem to prefer their own car. That all sounds to me a bit too much like the 50's flying car utopia.

I think the big difference is convenience. Car sharing as it exists requires prior planning/coordination, you can’t just grab one on a whim. That’s enough friction that a lot of people would prefer to own a car instead, especially when you consider that a huge part of the appeal of a car is agency and freedom — no need to operate on anybody else’s time tables or predefined stops, just step out and go wherever you please. The closest we have to autonomous hailing is Uber/Lyft, but that becomes prohibitively expensive, not to mention there’s places Uber drivers won’t want to pick you up from or take you to.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of public transportation )lived in Japan for a while and loved the trains) and think it should be greatly expanded, but driving in the US isn’t going away any time soon and so alongside efforts to improve public transportation, efforts should also go into autonomous driving to try to take even more cars off the road. Ideally the bulk of commuters and errandrunners would be using rail, with the second largest group using autonomous car sharing, and the last and by far smallest group still owning their cars.

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

#239

Post by tgv »

tkk23 wrote: post #37
tgv wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not only off topic, it's also wildly unrealistic (IMO). 1$/day may seem little, but that's for middle-class US standards, and it gets proportionally worse when you realize many people make more than one trip per day. What incentive do you have for people to pay that amount?

With self-driving cars, you don't have to own cars anymore. That $1 per day frees your $5.000 per year budget for owning a car.

A short taxi ride costs much, much more than 1$.

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

#240

Post by cs702 »

GioM wrote: post #223
cs702 wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right. I updated my comment. Thank you!

Whole genome sequencing is commercially available for $299. https://nebula.org/whole-genome-sequencing-dna-test/

Not quite pocket change, but getting close!
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