Uber’s First Self-Driving Fleet Arrives in Pittsburgh This Month • Hacker News Board

Re: Uber’s First Self-Driving Fleet Arrives in Pittsburgh This Month

#221

Post by throwaway049 » Thu, Aug 18, 2016, 9:45 PM UTC

technofiend wrote: post #146

throwaway049 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're paying attention to prevent collisions then it's not a passive job. And if I got into a car to find the 'driver' dividing their attention between the road and their novel then I would get right out again.

It doesn't require a great deal of attention, either, and it's still mostly passive. Unless you're suggesting we should outlaw conversations or listening to the radio we're past the idea that people need their full undivided attention to drive. The question now is just what's the minimum.

I've seen people die in the ED because they treated driving as a passive activity. I find your hyperbole about outlawing conversations unhelpful. I very much look forward to computers having better driving skills than I had when I used to work in the ambulance service.

Re: Uber’s First Self-Driving Fleet Arrives in Pittsburgh This Month

#222

Post by jrussino » Thu, Aug 18, 2016, 9:51 PM UTC

Idontagree wrote: post #219

jrussino wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not the former, this a step in the R&D process that is working toward the latter (and can act as PR in the meantime). I expect that "supervised by humans in the driver's seat" here means "the car is fully self-driving, but we're still doing development and testing and we don't trust it enough yet". You can test these things on private roads, but eventually you need to get them out into the real world and coll…

It's exactly the former, not sure why you say it isn't since you went on to explain the former and say that's what the car does.

I guess what I mean is, this is not a finished product that's a regular car with a "hands-free" mode; it's a prototype for a fully-autonomous driver-less car that's still under active development.

I.e. the reason that this exists is not to have some mostly-autonomous driver-assistance in place right now; that's useless to Uber. Rather it's part of the process of testing and improving the completely driver-less cars that they're working on.

Re: Uber’s First Self-Driving Fleet Arrives in Pittsburgh This Month

#223

Post by euyyn » Thu, Aug 18, 2016, 10:32 PM UTC

soundwave106 wrote: post #183

aianus wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the robots double the profit margins then you can sell half as many widgets and make the same profit.

Right, but the robots displace jobs to the point where only 1/4 of the amount of people can actually afford to buy your widget, your profit will fall. (Obviously, if jobs merely shift, as has happened in previous technological disruptions, this scenario isn't a problem.)

Usually there's much much more people buying any given thing than people producing it.

Re: Uber’s First Self-Driving Fleet Arrives in Pittsburgh This Month

#224

Post by euyyn » Thu, Aug 18, 2016, 10:33 PM UTC

dexterdog wrote: post #177

pythia__ wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People may yet make a comeback as a premium service since they can do things that self-driving cars can't like help a passenger carry bags.

Wouldn't that be a destination service? There is no need to carry a person/bot that is just needed at the endpoint.

I had a big Uber driver help my family this morning put their luggage into the trunk of his car.

Re: Uber’s First Self-Driving Fleet Arrives in Pittsburgh This Month

#225

Post by fiveoak » Thu, Aug 18, 2016, 10:45 PM UTC

mentat wrote: post #220

fiveoak wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eventually, it might be. However just because the car has better sensors doesn't mean it will react better than a human would with less information.

No, but it also doesn't mean it won't react better. Are you presenting an argument here?

Sensor quality shouldn't be used to justify driverless cars being safer than a regular person driving a car. It's useless unless the car can actually use it to make a better decision than a human.

Re: Uber’s First Self-Driving Fleet Arrives in Pittsburgh This Month

#226

Post by dlubarov » Thu, Aug 18, 2016, 11:25 PM UTC

gambiting wrote: post #119

puranjay wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much has the recent interest and investment in self-driving cars impacted this estimate? 5 years ago, I would have said that level 4 automation is 20 years away. With all these billions pouring in, I'd cut that projection in less than half. I'm certain that I won't be driving a car ever in 2030

And interestingly, seeing challenges ahead, I don't think we will have 100% autonomous cars before 2050, if not later. 50 years ago, we were certain that perfect image recognition is just few months of work away, or at least enough money poured into it will solve the problem. It's 2016 and our best of the best image recognition algorithms can't even tell a zebra and a sofa in a zebra print apart. Since automatic cars…

> It's 2016 and our best of the best image recognition algorithms can't even tell a zebra and a sofa in a zebra print apart.

State of the art offline CNNs have been doing classification quite well recently, arguably better than humans. See the Inception-v3 paper: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1512.00567v3.pdf

Re: Uber’s First Self-Driving Fleet Arrives in Pittsburgh This Month

#227

Post by serge2k » Thu, Aug 18, 2016, 11:59 PM UTC

adrianN wrote: post #66

jayjay71 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it actually doesn't make that much difference. The problem, I believe, is that people are used to rapid advances in software. Lots of small iterations can take you a long way, but sometimes you just reach a hurdle which requires a breakthrough. A fully self-driving car would need a huge breakthrough in perception (which most people categorize under AI) in order to work. Computer vision actually started out in…

Last time I checked Google's self driving car was doing pretty well already without major breakthroughs. I suppose there still are problems when the weather conditions are less than ideal, but you can't compare it to /r/shittyrobots.

How does it do in a snowstorm? Heavy rain?

Re: Uber’s First Self-Driving Fleet Arrives in Pittsburgh This Month

#228

Post by serge2k » Fri, Aug 19, 2016, 12:07 AM UTC

sbarre wrote: post #7

I wonder how Uber drivers feel about working for a company that is actively trying to make them obsolete. Not passing judgement or anything, just kind of a strange thing to contemplate.. Uber kept saying they were disrupting the taxi industry by letting more people participate when really in the end they're trying to remove the people from the equation altogether.

Probably about as well as they feel about a company that insists they are contractors.

Re: Uber’s First Self-Driving Fleet Arrives in Pittsburgh This Month

#229

Post by tcoppi » Fri, Aug 19, 2016, 12:59 AM UTC

fucking_tragedy wrote: post #197

tcoppi wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you used Google Voice in the past ~year? I have a standard american accent so I might be the best case scenario for it but I haven't seen it miss a word I've said anytime I can remember in a year or two. I mostly use it in the car to reply and send texts, works even with the radio and ventilation on. I've used an Amazon Echo and that is right 99% of the time too. Now, interpreting the words I say is a different…

> Now, interpreting the words I say is a different matter, but as far as transcription I'd say we are at basically 100% right now and have been for a while. What? Sometimes I use Google's speech to text and a majority of the time it's a waste of my time. "Food near me" is not "fool's errand" (the irony isn't lost on me) and "gyms nearby" is not "Jim Dougherty", both are search terms I used last night.

shrug I don't have these issues at all. I just tried "food near me" and it worked perfectly fine. Like I said I might be the best case scenario since I speak in a basically standard american broadcast english accent.

Re: Uber’s First Self-Driving Fleet Arrives in Pittsburgh This Month

#230

Post by argonaut » Fri, Aug 19, 2016, 1:27 AM UTC

dlubarov wrote: post #226

gambiting wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And interestingly, seeing challenges ahead, I don't think we will have 100% autonomous cars before 2050, if not later. 50 years ago, we were certain that perfect image recognition is just few months of work away, or at least enough money poured into it will solve the problem. It's 2016 and our best of the best image recognition algorithms can't even tell a zebra and a sofa in a zebra print apart. Since automatic cars…

> It's 2016 and our best of the best image recognition algorithms can't even tell a zebra and a sofa in a zebra print apart. State of the art offline CNNs have been doing classification quite well recently, arguably better than humans. See the Inception-v3 paper: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1512.00567v3.pdf

None of that changes the fact that they're easy to fool and have some pathological cases (that gambiting alludes to) that most humans consider quite dumb.