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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

#171

Post by n0tth3dro1ds »

Fricken wrote: post #169
n0tth3dro1ds wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everything has been carefully mapped out ahead of time This doesn’t scale. This is also how Zoox, Tesla, and Cruise do their demo videos to scam more money out of investors: they collect ultra-HD maps in a very narrow area or a very specific route. Then they drive the route/area about a thousand times, recording each drive. Then they upload the drive with the fewest mistakes to YouTube. Just like me taking a thousa…

Many of the original Google self-driving car project members came over directly from Google Street view, which has since scaled all over the world. Autonomous vehicles have big scaling issues, but it's not the maps holding them back.

Street view is not an ultra-HD map for autonomous driving. Cruise isn’t using street view, or anything so primitive and easy to collect in comparison, to navigate SF. And it doesn’t scale in and of itself without being backed by a search ads monopoly that prints money at will.

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

#172

Post by Kye »

Tenoke wrote: post #90
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…

Statements about X specialized task requiring AGI are questionable now, just like they were questionable when they were said about Chess, Go and Video Games.

Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results.

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

#173

Post by satisfice »

There is no good reason for self-driving cars. This is not a problem that anyone has been clamoring to solve. Human-caused death by driving is a small problem (quoting statistics does not in any way make it into a big problem, nor do the people who quote those statistics compare them with statistics about how much safer robot drivers are, because no reliable statistics exist).

If you think that deaths and injuries are intrinsically bad, then look at the stats for injuries while skateboarding (https://skateboardsafety.org/injury-statistics/). Surely you think something must be done about that, right? But we don't care, because the FACT of injury is not the important thing. The important thing is fairness; reasonableness; agency. People on skateboards and who do other dangerous things are choosing to risk themselves and we think that's okay.

Human-caused accidents are considered by society (that's you and me) to be acceptable because we have agreed to the bargain. This is not so with robotic drivers. I have NOT CONSENTED to share the road with robot drivers because they are not bound by the same social bargain-- their real drivers are programmers, who risk nothing. Uber was not charged at all in the killing of that pedestrian in Arizona. Only the human safety driver was, who rashly had bought into the supposed safety of self-driving cars.

I don't want to ride in a box where no one takes responsibility in case of disaster. EVEN IF, there are fewer accidents. This is the key point: AI stands for "Automated Irresponsibility" or "Agency Interrupted." Irresponsibility is the bigger problem; or loss of agency.

If you truly, madly believe that mere numbers are the crux of morality, then consider. If you save 10 people from drowning in your boat, is it okay for you to pull out a gun and shoot one of them in the head before returning to shore? You will still have saved 9 people. You're a hero, right? Obviously, this is not okay-- because HOW one dies matters. Responsibiliy and agency matter.

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

#174

Post by biztos »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #133
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.

I'm about as big of a fan of mass transit as you can get, but this is completely overblown. That's $1Bn for the hundred largest cities in the world. Assuming even 40% of that went to the US, that's $1Bn for the top 40 cities. That leaves out 22 entire states [0], and like 75% of the population... Look to NYC, LA, and SF for what $1Bn gets you... It's about 1 mile of subway [1]. And it takes close to 15 years to build…

I don't think you're refuting the parent post so much as lamenting the difficulty of doing anything "infrastructure" in today's America.

There are lots of places all over the world where $1B would make a big difference in many, many people's lives -- and where people eagerly ride the busses they actually have, which are often not that nice.

Do we need things to work in the USA for them to be worth doing?

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

#175

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

BlargMcLarg wrote: post #155
wolframhempel wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the goal is to solve public transport by having a fleet of autonomous vehicles that pick you up where you are and drop you off where you need to go and would roam freely in between - basically driverless, electric ueber. As cars need charging, they would congregate at some charging plot outside the busy areas. Personally, I rather like this vision as it combines the best of public transport and car traffic. E…

This isn't going to work for the most obvious case: rush hour. Which is the case that is the root cause of most issues. If you're still stuck with peak road usage nearly equivalent to that today, your goal isn't to solve prominent issues today.

If you have a networked grid of cars you can run them much closer together and increase road capacity. (Even with failures, likely less dangerous than leaving critical decisions to individual human drivers.) You can also automate away the poor behaviours that contribute to delays.

This would require collaborative networked/distributed self-driving, which is not the same as the let's-use-this-as-an-excuse-for-AI-research individual self-driving we have today.

But really most people shouldn't be commuting anyway. WFH should be much more of a thing, even if it's not full-time.

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

#176

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

kybernetyk wrote: post #132
iinnPP wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the UN, it's enough to save over 40million lives (for almost two years) We have our priorities all twisted.

And what after those 2 years?

Same question applies to self-driving research.

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

#178

Post by nikanj »

ChildOfChaos wrote: post #160

It will come eventually, but I wonder how much of my lifetime I will be able to appreciate it, i'm already almost 40 and I don't drive. I live in a small city, I can walk most places and I get the train to larger cities for social events, I save a huge amount of money and I love it. But the trains are awful, good, decent public transport and self-driving transportation would be awesome. I might never get to the point…

The roads clogged by cars would be replaced by the roads clogged by self-driving cars. Self-driving cars are not the solution to awful public transport

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

#179

Post by jmartrican »

oblio wrote: post #128
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.

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.

My commuter train be packed though.
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