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Uber sells self-driving unit in deal that will push Aurora’s valuation to $10B

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Re: Uber sells self-driving unit in deal that will push Aurora’s valuation to $10B

#231

Post by dekhn »

arcticfox wrote: post #224
dekhn wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One pedestrian death due to cars occurs on average every ~200 million car-driven miles. Is that really bad? (the math is based on # of US miles driven in 2017 divided by the number of car-caused pedestrian fatalities in the same year)

Is that right? That seems phenomenally bad. I feel like I have normal American driving habits and I drive a standard 10k miles per year... So I'm going to kill a pedestrian every 100 years? Assuming I drive normally for ~50 years, 500k miles, I have a 50% chance to kill a pedestrian?

only assuming a random naive model. how careful you are and how dangerous the location also matter.

Re: Uber sells self-driving unit in deal that will push Aurora’s valuation to $10B

#232

Post by freyir »

thesimon wrote: post #6

Wasn't Uber's whole money losing strategy based on the vision that one day they'll use their self-driving cars to get the driving done for cheaper?

Kalanick said that self-driving was “existential” to the company.

But in context, he didn’t mean Uber needed self-driving to exist. He meant Uber can’t be left out if self-driving becomes a reality.

In that sense, the sale seems pessimistic. They no longer see self-driving on the horizon, or they aren’t on track to deliver the technology themselves.

Re: Uber sells self-driving unit in deal that will push Aurora’s valuation to $10B

#233

Post by dekhn »

grumple wrote: post #205
dekhn wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One pedestrian death due to cars occurs on average every ~200 million car-driven miles. Is that really bad? (the math is based on # of US miles driven in 2017 divided by the number of car-caused pedestrian fatalities in the same year)

There’s one death per hundred million miles driven. One per million would mean one in 2 drivers kill someone in their lifetime.

corrected- thanks. I hate being off by two orders of magnitude.

Re: Uber sells self-driving unit in deal that will push Aurora’s valuation to $10B

#234

Post by jfoster »

colechristensen wrote: post #220
lr4444lr wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the loss of agency to machines, not the raw numbers that scares people. Why do you think so many people are unduly spooked after airline accidents due to mechanical or computer error?

It’s the fundamentally different kind of danger from machines. They make mistakes we can’t understand. I can understand a person being distracted, reacting slowly, not seeing me, etc. I can also mitigate this risk. Crossing the street I can make eye contact with a person and be really confident that they aren’t going to run me over. Walking in front of a robot? I have no internal model for the kind of mistakes they m…

You do develop an internal model for the behaviour of machines, though.

Examples:

Elevators where the doors take extremely long to close on their own.

Elevators where the doors close too soon after opening.

Elevators where the limb sensors are not very responsive.

Cars that take a couple of tries to start in cold weather.

Automatic doors that are a little bit slow to open.

Etc.

Re: Uber sells self-driving unit in deal that will push Aurora’s valuation to $10B

#235

Post by lmm »

dekhn wrote: post #183
LeoPanthera wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What I never understand is what happens when a new situation that the system did not previously train for happen? This happens to human drivers all the time, and humans are really bad drivers even in situations that have happened before. I fully expect AI drivers to be safer than human drivers.

One pedestrian death due to cars occurs on average every ~200 million car-driven miles. Is that really bad? (the math is based on # of US miles driven in 2017 divided by the number of car-caused pedestrian fatalities in the same year)

Motorists are IIRC the third-biggest killer of young people.

Re: Uber sells self-driving unit in deal that will push Aurora’s valuation to $10B

#236

Post by jfoster »

tintor wrote: post #178
LeoPanthera wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What I never understand is what happens when a new situation that the system did not previously train for happen? This happens to human drivers all the time, and humans are really bad drivers even in situations that have happened before. I fully expect AI drivers to be safer than human drivers.

Human drivers can adapt to a new unseen before situation.

Sometimes they try to drive through floods. They also seem to randomly run red lights. Also, what's with the way they keep veering out of their lanes?

Re: Uber sells self-driving unit in deal that will push Aurora’s valuation to $10B

#237

Post by rtsil »

ntsplnkv2 wrote: post #203
cercatrova wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100 to 200 years is a very long time. Look at the exponential nature of technology, and even deep learning. Only in 2012 had the image network reached 90% accuracy levels, and now we have all sort of networks for all sorts of things, including style transfer for videos.

There's nothing to suggest technological growth will be exponential forever. It's just as likely we've gotten all the easy stuff the last century and now everything else is much harder.

That supposes that we've reached the flattening upper section of the S-curve of technology, right about now. There's nothing that suggests that. Various techs do reach that stage periodically, but nothing indicates that technology in general does, quite the contrary.

And what the past sees as hard often becomes less hard (I'm not going to say easy, because technology is never easy) in the future thanks to the accumulation of knowledge and increased speed of processing data.

Re: Uber sells self-driving unit in deal that will push Aurora’s valuation to $10B

#238

Post by argonaut »

pmiller2 wrote: post #63
jeromegv wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everytime someone mentioned that idea I thought it made no sense. The Uber strategy is to delegate all the cost to a 3rd party (the driver and their own car). The idea of spending billions of dollar on hundreds of thousands of cars around the world and maintain them hardly seemed like what they were setup to do. They wanted the exact opposite. Externalize all cost, labor, material, etc. and just develop a software th…

How do drivers make any money while keeping the overall price less than a taxi? Factor in fuel and maintenance, and drivers are already getting pretty screwed on these platforms.

Taxi medallions used to cost hundreds of thousands (SF) to more than half a million (NYC). Nowadays they still cost tens of thousands in SF and hundreds of thousands in some areas like NYC.

Also, more efficient use of time from app-based routing.

Re: Uber sells self-driving unit in deal that will push Aurora’s valuation to $10B

#239

Post by lhorie »

ghaff wrote: post #217
scythe wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A much more durable change is the shift in social norms towards intoxicated driving being unacceptable under any circumstances. Just 40 years ago the DUI threshold was .15 and even then the penalty was light. Today it's .08 with talk of lowering it, penalties have been ramped up multiple times, and nobody sees DUI enforcement as a technicality. That's a pretty big opportunity for any firm that gets you home from the…

I don't disagree with that but is the shift in drunk driving norms really enough to shift from owning cars to taking taxis? In my experience, most people don't primarily use cars to go out drinking--including among those in a position to just take Ubers instead.

Personally, I think drunk driving isn't that much of a factor: drinking is a relatively short term kind of planned activity. What I think has a much bigger impact is long term stuff, like the desire to live downtown and/or housing prices (with downtown condos and midtown townhouses being more affordable than big detached homes in burbs)

I know families that are rather against the idea of owning a car and arrange housing around that consideration. They prefer to rely more heavily on public transit and the occasional car rental or cab/rideshare.

Re: Uber sells self-driving unit in deal that will push Aurora’s valuation to $10B

#240

Post by nhumrich »

neolog wrote: post #199
mlboss wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read somewhere that there are different levels of "tech" company. A truly tech company would work without any human intervention for multiple days without breakdown. A non-tech company involves human in every tasks required for work. Most of the companies fall somewhere in between. Ride services/Food delivery company cannot function without humans.

Are there any companies that work for days without human intervention?

google search, netflix, facebook, gmail, roomba, apple, microsoft, slack, youtube, AWS, wordpress, github, jira, the list goes on
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