I'd be quite happy if they could just drive up and down the motorway themselves in reasonable conditions. Seems like we're pretty close to that already, and that hasn't even required wiring them all up to talk to each other.
Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’
171–180 of 445 posts
Re: Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Tesla which is run by a delusional snake oil salesman who had a single hit with the Model S Being that dismissive and willfully ignorant discredits your entire argument. A snake oil salesman produces nothing and hoodwinks people. I drive my "snake oil" every day and not only is it the best car I've ever driven, it's the coolest thing I've ever owned. I routinely watch his "snake oil" launch huge payloads to orbit a…
It's hard to judge Tesla at this point, most automotive companies really can't be judged until their vehicles are on the road heavily for over a decade. I've said this before but I can't imagine a Tesla on the road today being on the road in thirty years. Hopefully I'm wrong. Otherwise we're going to have a lot of 'good for the environment' vehicles in landfills like cellphones. While the gas guzzling 30+ year old To…
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Re: Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
Will a computer ever write War and Peace or compose the 9th Symphony too? How about solve an unsolved math proof? No reason it can't be automated, right?
All these things are literally on the AI horizon.
There's an emotional component to art, and I don't see nearly as much work on artificial emotions as I do on task-oriented artificial intelligence.
A lot of people are working to create a car smart enough to drive humans anywhere. How many people are working to create a car smart enough to refuse to drive because it's feeling inspired to write music instead?
Re: Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just Waymo was driving over 1 million miles a month in 2018. How many people have they killed? The fact that an autonomous vehicle or Tesla "autopilot" fatality makes national news is telling. It's not commonplace.
The average is 1.25 fatalities per 100 Million miles driven, so not that telling yet.
Presumably that average is taken over all conditions, implying that the average is well below 1.25 fatalities per 100 million miles driven in the conditions waymo is driving in.
Re: Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’
#175Detractors of self-driving cars are always eager to lap up a story like this as proof that it will never happen or it would take decades...."Years" doesn't mean decades, even 10 yrs is a relative short time, i owned my last care for about 13 yrs. Some proponents of self driving cars might have gotten too ahead of the hype train but nevertheless, self-driving is here and soon would be common place. It would obviously…
> As for the outstanding technical challenges, I am often baffled when people point to that as a reason for skepticism...it is the whole point of the endeavor, to solve those problems.
Right, but that's an absolutely massive issue. I could say that I am embarking on a project to enable me to flap my arms and fly, you might say that's not possible, but I say that's the whole point of the endeavor, to solve these problems!
The article outlines many very real problems that do not have answers. We can hand-wave and say "well, we'll solve them" but until we have any idea how, and the time it'll take to do them, "years" absolutely does mean decades, if not longer.
> self-driving is here
No, it isn't.
Re: Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’
#176It doesn't have to work perfectly - it just has to work better than humans. Our sensors ain't real great in snow and rain, either.
It needs slightly more than that: when it fails, it needs to be able to demonstrate that no human would’ve succeeded in its place.
This isn’t a moral or a technical issue, just public relations. If a system reduces road deaths from ~30,000 per year to 365 per year, but one of those deaths was it mistaking a grey skirt for an open road [1], there will still be calls for its use to be outlawed — basically what’s happening now with antivaxxers, and they’re hard enough to deal with when all the evidence is against them.
[1] just to give a concrete example
Re: Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In short, sensors on autonomous vehicles don’t work well in snow or rain This is a curious line of reasoning for me. Why are humans allowed to drive in snow or rain though? Your sensors work considerably worse in snow or rain, and there is abundant evidence over the entire history of cars that humans butcher each other with motor vehicles in snow or rain constantly. The bar is simply that an autonomous car has to b…
5G will give vehicle position better than GPS, will they use this instead of sensors for Lane detection?
Lane detection isn't really the big problem here, though. It's whether there is an obstacle on the road in front of you.
Re: Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’
#178When read literally, there is no way that any system ever, human or automatic, will be able to drive on "any road" with "perfect safety". Crazy freak accidents happen, and human drivers regularly aren't able to handle them. On top of that, most people just can't safely drive in thick fog, icy conditions, or pouring rain. No amount of intelligence will allow a car to drive through a sufficiently flooded street. Just l…
It's actually not a very useful quote because, as you say, taken literally it's an impossibly high bar. What is required to be useful is either
1.) Demonstrably better than human (whatever that means exactly) for a well-defined subset of roads and conditions such as interstate highways under some subset of weather or
2.) Demonstrably better than human for any roads and conditions that a typical adult human would typically be able to navigate door-to-door safely.
1. is a very useful driver assist system, and likely a big win for safety, but you still need a sober adult driver available to take over with reasonable notice. 2. is what you need for robo-taxis to be practical.
Re: Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’
#179We don't need self-driving cars that can go anywhere (ie. level 5) for them to be widely useful. A car that only worked in bright sunshine on a preprogrammed set of roads would be immediately useful to me.
But it's a far cry from the initial promise. For instance, Uber can't replace their drivers with self-driving cars if they need to bring all their drivers back when it rains.
Re: Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well said. Autonomous navigation is still a huge open research problem, in the sense that we don't even know how it _could_ work, there is no AI work capable of integrating all of the necessary pieces. Heck, we don't even know how simple bird or lizard intelligence works, much less be able to replicate human cognition that goes into operating heavy machinery in a busy multi-agent social context. So promising that it…
> much less be able to replicate human cognition that goes into operating heavy machinery in a busy multi-agent social context This holds if you expect self-driving cars to be able to work like humans in picking up "body-language" cues around other drivers. But we can also approach the problem the other way around and set better fixed rules for how driving needs to be done and adjust the road and car infrastructure t…
That's a stereotypical engineering solution and fails to account for how humans actually act in the real world. Humans will always break some rules. As a taxpayer I don't think huge infrastructure changes or lots of increased traffic enforcement are a good use of limited public resources.