Did not expect Doctorow to be posting on Medium. I wonder what my biases are.
We've changed the URL from https://medium.com/@doctorow/100-billion-later-autonomous-ve... to the original source.
Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere
261–270 of 501 posts
Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere
#262In 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…
> Prediction: Before the end of the decade, this article will seem... short-sighted.
Can we say that all the self-driving optimists that were completely wrong about the last decade were shortsighted?
Also, no idea what progress in biotech has anything to do with self driving. Your argument is that because some tech advanced all other possible tech will advance, seems like a logical fallacy.
Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere
#263Recent and related:
Even After $100B, Self-Driving Cars Are Going Nowhere - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33106739 - Oct 2022 (107 comments)
Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s because self driving doesn’t provide much value until you can remove the human. If you can remove the human, last mile package delivery is suddenly super cheap; taxis are cheap; trucking is much cheaper; share car services are transformed as a business model. With the human still required you get nothing, so why invest at all?
I think a lot of people would be happy to put their feet up once they'd navigated onto a highway, or have their car go find a parking spot by itself, or come back from one. The sort of stuff Tesla is trying to do is in many ways far more practical except they keep diverting resources to FSD and end up not nailing thee more prosaic conveniences.
The cost benefit analysis just doesn’t add up though. I can see this adding a small amount to the purchasing decision of a prospective buyer, but without “remove the human” as the end goal these technologies do not provide the return on investment. No one has a crystal ball though, and a few years ago “autonomous vehicles” looked promising. It’s just that we are now looking at the sunken cost fallacy when it hasn’t worked out.
Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere
#265> It all sounds great until you encounter an actual robo-taxi in the wild. Which is rare:
I see them all the time. They work fine.
Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere
#266Earlier 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).
Even cities with decent public transport networks (such as Prague) tend to have a problem with tangential relations. Most lines go from some periphery to the center and to another periphery. If you need to travel between two peripheries, you have to be somewhat lucky to have a line connecting them at your disposal. Going through the center and back to the other periphery is possible, but usually takes too long. (e.g. 1h 30 min instead of 15 minutes by car).
Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
> existing infrastructure (roads) isn't going anywhere (no need to build anything) I think that this is a sunk-cost fallacy. Sure, you would need to build infrastructure for trains, but after that trains are now reasonably automated, can carry cargo, and do other things with the exception of stopping at the exact destination you wanted to (in other words, it requires predetermined stops which people outside the US sh…
Trains won't do last mile delivery.
Or have the train get your delivery drones close enough to the last mile for the battery to last :^)
Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 yo…
I recently drove a rented Tesla 3. On a highway in Norway it failed to detect speed limit signs in like 25% of cases. And if the speed limit sign was a temporary one due to road repairs it failed with those like 50% of times. And this is with stationary objects designed to be seen and easily grasped by humans.
Teslas do not read speed limit signs or basically any signs other than stop signs, including not reading “Do Not Enter” street signs. It is using the wrong speed limit because their maps do not list the correct speed limit.
Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
And then in those safe geofenced locations we could put down metal guide rails so that navigation is easier. And then use metal wheels with flanges to reduce rolling resistance. And then hook many cars together into one long vehicle. And ...
I'd be impressed a train service that had 8 parallel lines plus dedicated lines at each station so that it was economical for 1-5 people to alight directly at their destination.
Highways have that many lanes only near large cities, where rail lines are also fairly parallel if you look at maps.
Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere
#270In 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…
To be clear 23andMe does not do sequencing. They check for certain markers.
However full sequencing IS available and runs around $1000.
If I recall right the first human genome sequenced cost about $1 trillion. But we now have much better algorithms, mostly due to algorithms from works such as Knuth's AOCP.