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

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

#201

Post by LinuxBender »

amelius wrote: post #126
sgtfrankieboy wrote: post #16

So? Okay, we're not there yet with autonomous vehicles, and have spend tons of money on it. But the tech we have now didn't exist a decade ago. Give it another decade.

Perhaps we should pour more money in adapting the infrastructure to these cars, so they can become more like a train in some sense. And perhaps we can design city centers to be car free.

adapting the infrastructure to these cars

This is an important piece I have not seen addressed in the US. In places where there is snow and ice on the road a good part of the year self driving cars will need help from sensors and guide objects in some form. Perhaps sensors injected into the road? Humans barely manage in my area because people have a cognitive awareness and memory of the terrain. Road lines are often absent. Sidewalks are obscured. Even simple things like parking at the grocery store is relative parking and people just make a best-guess as to where a spot is.

I am also curious if any testing has been done in snow blizzards and squalls. Squalls can occur without warning and visibility drops to nothing.

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

#202

Post by YawningAngel »

hasmanean wrote: post #154
_0w8t wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Signs are nice but the simplest way to know the speed is to store it in a database and look it up from position. In fact roads should have barcoded position markers everywhere. That way you could navigate without gps and all road signs could become virtual. Just download a road marker update.

That's not really how speed limits work though. People take their cues from road design and conditions, not what the speed limit actually is. Virtually changing speed limits is dangerous because it causes you to think you are altering the behaviour of traffic without actually doing so.

https://youtu.be/bglWCuCMSWc?t=280 goes into detail on this

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

#203

Post by occz »

Sahbak wrote: post #41
batmanturkey wrote: post #32

WHY is a fully autonomous vehicle even interesting to pursue, given that wheeled vehicles and their infrastructural requirements are such a large expense and social and environmental problem relative to the benefits provided? I mean, out of all the moonshots, why die on this particular hill? I consider an actual hyperloop to be a much more compelling vision for the future: those pneumatic tubes the banks use in subur…

Automatic public transportation will solve a lot of issues.

Luckily, that already exists in driverless trains.

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

#204

Post by oliveshell »

onethought wrote: post #119
Fricken wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla doesn't come anywhere close to having the sensor suite or compute to be taken seriously as a developer of level 4 autonomy.

What sensor suite is that?

Radar, ultrasonic proximity sensors, and/or LIDAR, presumably.

Tesla has famously removed all radar/ultrasonic sensors from their newer cars in favor of a purely camera-based system.

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

#205

Post by TheLoafOfBread »

Self driving cars are slowly degenerating from intelligent autonomous machines to just another version of train - see sensors in a road/signs, special lanes, etc.

If they can't drive on existing roads together with human drivers, then they are utterly pointless.

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

#206

Post by cs702 »

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.

Please keep in mind that I'm talking about FSD Beta, not the current production software, which is dozens of versions behind.

Are you on Beta 10.69.2.3?

If I had to articulate my reasons:

* Judging by the videos available online, my perception is that many situations that were impossible for Tesla FSD Beta a year ago have become uneventful in recent weeks. Take a look at Chuck Cook's videos for example (I like the fact that he always highlights the failures).

* Judging again by the videos available online, my perception is that Tesla FSD Beta has encountered and had to deal with more crazy edge cases than any other system. A possible explanation for this is that for a long time Tesla FSD Beta hasn't been geofenced or restricted only to certain types of roads, like highways. You can test it anywhere in North America.

* Tesla FSD Beta currently has 160,000 individuals testing it without road restrictions. As far as I know, no other system has been exposed to similar open-ended large-scale testing.

* Occupancy networks look like a real breakthrough to me -- DNNs that predict whether each voxel in a 3D model is occupied by an object, using only video data as an input. I understood the high-level explanation of these DNNs on AI Day 2. I haven't seen anything like it from anyone else.

* Tesla's DOJO also looks like a breakthrough to me. I understood the high-level explanation of it on AI Day 2. IIRC, DOJO cabinets are 6x faster at training existing neural networks than Nvidia rigs, at 6x lower cost, so call it ~36x more efficient.

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

#207

Post by badpun »

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.

Compared to general self-driving, it's relatively simple to make self-driving taxis work in just a couple of cities (preferably ones with minimum adversarial weather, too) - you just test the code against that particular dataset until it performes reasonably well, manually fixing the edge cases along the way if need be. It's still a monumental, multi-billion dollar project, but I would be surprised if it wasn't achievable.

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

#208

Post by davedx »

paganel wrote: post #74
noobermin wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should we change city infrastructure to work with less than AGI driven cars? It sounds instead like yes, AV companies are over selling what they can do and they should be restricted to things like highways and the like where the easier, less complex driving environment already exists. Cities are by far the most complex relative to every other driving environment, in fact there is a good argument that, in cities,…

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…

Oh come on, it’s just collision avoidance, you don’t need general AI for that

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

#209

Post by Gys »

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…

A person overestimates what he/she can do in a day and underestimates what he/she can do in a year. I read that somewhere and I often think of that. Seems also applicable to a bigger scale.

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

#210

Post by davedx »

dm319 wrote: post #163
benj111 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sheep are worse. They run from one side of the road across you to get away from you.

Add to that the vagueness of where the road ends and field/bank begins for many country roads.

You don’t need AGI to do edge detection it’s purely a vision problem
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