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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

#311

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

katbyte wrote: post #301
mota7 wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excellent example: "reflective cistern tank with a reflection of the back of a truck transporting stop signs" People tend to forget just how hard the edge cases in vision are!

It’s weird to me people forget how bad vision can be for driving and Exocet Tesla to somehow be better then our own eyes. How often a do you encounter situations like bad fog/sun set/rain at night where it’s a total struggle to drive and you slow right down to a crawl and even then only do alright because of a ton of inference? i think Tesla deciding to go vision only will be regarded of one of the greatest blunders…

The counterargument to this is that since humans reach acceptable safety levels with vision only, it must be possible to do self driving with vision only. That said, augmenting vision with other methods does seem like a no brainer for better performance.

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

#312

Post by sneak »

andrepd wrote: post #79
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 . Focusin…

Los Angeles has already been built, however.

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

#313

Post by birdyrooster »

Salgat wrote: post #305
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.

Aren't Waymo and Cruise constrained to specially tailored cities? Autonomous driving that can be activated literally anywhere in the country is far more impressive, even if it has cases where it doesn't perform as well.

The more far flung reaches are are served well by traditional vehicles and the people are trained to use driving machines since most of the workers are agricultural. The city centers and suburbs are a big enough win even if it isn't as magical as taking a self driving trip from a small cottage in northern Vermont all the way to a campsite up in Big Sur.

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

#314

Post by rayiner »

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…

> In the short run, technological progress is much slower than anyone hopes, but in the long run it is much faster than anyone expects.

But it doesn't happen in predictable ways. A particular area of technology hits a wall and plateaus all the time, for myriad reasons. In 1950, you might have thought that by 2022 we would have done a lot more with nuclear technology or supersonic airplanes than we have.

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

#315

Post by rospaya »

martythemaniak wrote: post #197

It's really bizarre that people are treating autonomous EVs as somehow pitted against transit. The core of public transit is having a monopoly on local service and using profitable routes to subsidize unprofitable ones for the benefit of the public. Transit agencies don't build their own vehicles, they buy them and operate them. Having the option to buy autonomous EVs does not change the core of public transit, but i…

An EV self driving car still has the same capacity and takes up the same amount of space in rush hour like a regular gas guzzler. Without denser zoning and lifestyle changes, nothing will change.

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

#316

Post by Gibbon1 »

fooker wrote: post #271
andrepd wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 . Focusin…

>the future is having cars removed from cities entirely. Sounds somewhat authoritarian to impose your idea of the 'future' to inconvenience a large number of people.

If you live in an American suburb you're swimming in that sort of authoritarianism.

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

#317

Post by bj-rn »

rasz wrote: post #22
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…

Are there even any racing/sim games with solved driving AI? All the ones I can think of cheat, replay hardcoded paths, and/or are terrible. And thats with perfect information about the world and other cars.

GT Sophy maybe? https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-outraces-human...

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

#320

Post by civilized »

rayiner wrote: post #314
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…

> In the short run, technological progress is much slower than anyone hopes, but in the long run it is much faster than anyone expects. But it doesn't happen in predictable ways. A particular area of technology hits a wall and plateaus all the time, for myriad reasons. In 1950, you might have thought that by 2022 we would have done a lot more with nuclear technology or supersonic airplanes than we have.

Yeah. There's a lot of variance in the timing of milestones, which leads to people drawing all sorts of overgeneralizations from the few examples they happen to know. The most popular example being "Moore's Law and FAANG market caps prove that everything in technology develops exponentially, which is a word that means super-fast"
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