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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

#331

Post by c7b »

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #311
katbyte wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Two thoughts: how sure are you that the safety levels achieved by humans during bad vision would be considered acceptable for AVs? And secondly: humans have access to a reasonable (non-artificial) general intelligence.

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

#332

Post by Gibbon1 »

SergeAx wrote: post #282
oblio wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be blunt about this. Most of this research is funded in the US and the hyper individualistic Americans as a group don't believe in public transport.

Self driving tech could and will be applied to public transportation too. With self-driving mini-buses we can serve more destination much more efficiently, fine-tuning commute supply to better fit the exact demand.

If San Francisco repealed Prop 13 the city could afford to hire drivers for a fleet of small buses.

Then again if you want a reason to hate Feinstein she's the one that got rid of the gypsy cabs in San Francisco.

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

#333

Post by oceanplexian »

joakleaf wrote: post #323
nichochar wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[Disclaimer] I worked for Cruise for 4 years. I agree with everything you said, but chuckled at this particular part (which is very wrong): > Tesla is significantly ahead of everyone else. Everyone in the industry knows that Tesla is nowhere near the tip of the technology. What Tesla does is _fantastic marketing_. Their whole self-driving division is just a mechanism to sell more cars. At a high level, this is why: -…

As someone who also follows the progress online and watch the presentations by Cruise, Tesla, etc, I agree that Cruise is well ahead of Tesla. It feels like Tesla’s main strategy is to add more data, more compute power, more simulation, and hope for “convergence”. Maybe that will work, but right now it feels like Cruise’s technology feels more mature and thought through.

They’re not though.

As of today I can’t buy a production car with Cruise. You don’t get points for building something that’s theoretically superior but not an actual product. It’s the same story with companies like Apple that wipe the floor of wannabe hardware companies with theoretically better specs. Like Apple, Tesla actually ships.

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

#334

Post by oceanplexian »

bastawhiz wrote: post #198
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'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.

They’re operating Taxi services in San Francisco. A city that doesn’t experience any real-world weather, with an area of like 50 square miles where speeds generally never exceed 25MPH. They also have humans watching cameras that take over when the self driving breaks down.

It’s a completely different problem space, like claiming someone built a train and therefore they can easily build self driving cars since they are both “driverless”.

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

#335

Post by grandmczeb »

dionidium wrote: post #291
Keyframe wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- 1.3 million deaths worldwide, annually (94% cause by human error) - existing infrastructure (roads) isn't going anywhere (no need to build anything) - reduced traffic congestion (autonomous vehicles can better react/drive) - improved supply chains (autonomous trucks) (can work 0-24) just to name a few off top of my head

> 1.3 million deaths worldwide, annually (94% cause by human error) You don't need full autonomy to mostly fix this, but the fixes are politically untenable (currently). The cars should be speed-governed, they should be speed-limit aware -- the car should routinely be overriding the desire of the driver. No, you can't go into the bike lane to get around traffic. No, you can't make the split-second decision to swerve…

In the real world political tenability matters a lot, so I don’t really think ”fixes” that ignore it are very interesting to discuss. But if we’re already assuming politics doesn’t matter there’s a much more effective solution: ban cars entirely.

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

#336

Post by spikels »

zinekeller wrote: post #67
Keyframe wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- 1.3 million deaths worldwide, annually (94% cause by human error) - existing infrastructure (roads) isn't going anywhere (no need to build anything) - reduced traffic congestion (autonomous vehicles can better react/drive) - improved supply chains (autonomous trucks) (can work 0-24) just to name a few off top of my head

> 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…

Little known fact: In Western Europe when they decided to prioritize the passenger train network it forced 80-90% freight onto trucks on roads.

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

#337

Post by oceanplexian »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #316
fooker wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I live in a small American suburb, have lived in large cities, and travel to Europe, NYC, LA, SF on the regular. And I wouldn’t trade my car and the ability to drive somewhere for anything in the world.

There are a lot of great things about cities but you are dependent on other people for everything in your life, and it can go sideways incredibly fast. I.e the energy situation in Europe, or with COVID-19. Personally I don’t know how it’s not obvious to the millions of people who live in places like that.

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

#338

Post by ufmace »

Lutger wrote: post #106

Huge waste of money that could have been poured into public transport to actually solve our problems and improve our lives. What a tragedy.

You cannot just add "public transport" to most of our existing cities to replace peoples' cars. The reason is that everything is too spread out, mostly due to the large parking lots everywhere. That may be sub-optimal in a certain sense, but it's the reality and you can't just snap your fingers and change it. Any bus-like thing would need far too many stops to be practical to be able to get people to a reasonable walking distance of where they want to go. That's why in basically every city where they've been added (distinct from being created due to organic demand), pretty much nobody who can afford any alternatives rides them, no matter how much money is dumped into them.

To do public transport right, you'd have to basically demolish the entire city and re-build everything from scratch to be friendly to pedestrians. Which is pretty much a non-starter, and even if you wanted to try would cost many orders of magnitude more than all of the self-driving car projects.

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

#339

Post by keeptrying »

nichochar wrote: post #283
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…

[Disclaimer] I worked for Cruise for 4 years. I agree with everything you said, but chuckled at this particular part (which is very wrong): > Tesla is significantly ahead of everyone else. Everyone in the industry knows that Tesla is nowhere near the tip of the technology. What Tesla does is _fantastic marketing_. Their whole self-driving division is just a mechanism to sell more cars. At a high level, this is why: -…

Tesla is far ahead on their ability to train a myriad number of heavy AI models (computer vision) at the same time.

That asset will probably be worth far more than the self driving system.

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