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Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

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Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

#261

Post by amanaplanacanal »

nunez wrote: post #67

I have a feeling that self-driving will be one of those things that everyone will be opted into. Self-driving becomes much easier if everyone is playing by the same ground rules (with either the same set of cars or a common protocol through which cars communicate). Trying to engineer away the entire problem space of driving seems intractable (think: you have to engineer for drunk drivers doing damn well nearly anythi…

Even if everybody in every vehicle (including motorcycles?) is forced to opt in, you still have pedestrians, bicycles, scooters, animals, and who knows what else on the roads. This feels like an impossible problem.

Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

#262

Post by close04 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #227
close04 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. The only way to call today's cars "self driving" is to narrow down the conditions of driving to the point where it's just as ridiculous as my "3 words" example, and then realize they're still not narrow enough. > the majority of the miles The "miles" metric that's not very relevant, not all miles are created equal. Driving in a straight line with almost zero challenges is nothing like driving as a whole. Woul…

> Would a power supply that's only able to take idle loads (majority of the time) be considered any good? How about a phone that can only make calls only most of the day? When the models without those downsides require constant strong attention and nearly unbroken eyesight? Yes , sell me those models now . I'll switch between manual mode and somewhat-limited-feature mode when necessary.

You may have missed the point and there’s not much room to dumb it down. If you have to narrow the definition of driving so much then it’s not actually driving.

Many cars spend a lot of time idling, especially in crowded cities. Would you call them self driving because they can perform unattended this very, very narrow task (but long) from the whole activity of driving?

As for the “yes sign me up” I call bluff. There are plenty of situations in daily life where you need to have constant supervision. You wouldn’t let your child operate in them under the assumption that “there’s a good chance they won’t die”. You will take the constant supervision in place of the device that only works for 1% of the features you need and even then it might kill.

Take an iron that can iron by itself but only small, cotton clothes, and once in a while it burns down the house. Do you leave it unattended? Do you even call it self ironing?

Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

#263

Post by Johnny555 »

rootusrootus wrote: post #254
Johnny555 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have local information that cars don't yet know (but they probably will someday -- cars can send detailed road conditions to a central database, or they can communicate with other cars, so the car in front of you can say "watch out, there's a big pothole 8 inches from the left lane line" and your car will try to avoid it. What do human drivers do there when they are unfamiliar with the road? Seems like the auto p…

> What do human drivers do there when they are unfamiliar with the road? I assume the same as me -- I avoid water-filled ruts whether I'm familiar with a particular road or not. It may well get advanced enough some day to pick up the difference between wet pavement and water rut, and car-to-car communication could potentially help, but that's a level of technology improvement that feels considerably farther away than…

Car to car communication is already here:

https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/15/volvo-cars-in-europe-will-...

Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

#264

Post by clairity »

taco_emoji wrote: post #118
Mattasher wrote: post #4

You have to wonder, when you see these stories, whether the engineers in charge of these programs spent much time driving around, trying to see the road like an AI might. In my experience, driving in the city, it's rare that I can go more than a few miles before some exception comes up that requires human judgment. Here's a few of the things I saw just last week: * Car double parked. Do I cross the center line to go…

I honestly can't picture a self-driving AI that doesn't just amount to straight-up General Intelligence. Not only does driving involve predicting the trajectory of various moving objects (already very hard), it involves predicting the behavior of various other intelligent agents as well as communicating with them. Especially that last one -- nobody seems to consider how much we communicate while driving. Several type…

i would love to see mechanical eyes on the front of self-driving cars to signal emotion/attention, like from the pixar cars movies. =)

Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

#265

Post by GeorgeTirebiter »

jacquesm wrote: post #45
csours wrote: post #11

Disclaimer up front: I work for GM, I don't work on SDC. As I see it, self-driving is a cursed[0][1] problem. If you could choose a different problem space, or to ignore some complications, self-driving would merely be very hard. But the requirement to handle ANY external behavior with ANY external conditions and navigate to ANY destination, while also maintaining safety is impossible* satisfy. One cursed corner of t…

This is spot on. The Always/Never is well articulated, it is exactly why I got rid of a vehicle with auto braking. It did it twice when it wasn't supposed to and that was more dangerous than if it had never triggered at all. And yet, in an actual imminent crash it would have probably responded a lot quicker than I ever could. Still, I'm not going to be scared twice in a month by my car doing stuff 'on its own' to my…

Could you share which company's auto-braking had the false positives? What is the acceptable false-positive threshold for you to use auto-braking again? Also, did your system tell you why it decided to brake (albeit incorrectly)?

Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

#266

Post by GeorgeTirebiter »

csours wrote: post #11

Disclaimer up front: I work for GM, I don't work on SDC. As I see it, self-driving is a cursed[0][1] problem. If you could choose a different problem space, or to ignore some complications, self-driving would merely be very hard. But the requirement to handle ANY external behavior with ANY external conditions and navigate to ANY destination, while also maintaining safety is impossible* satisfy. One cursed corner of t…

Sensor fusion? Absolutely required. Also, I think "AI Fusion" is needed, where different AI approaches evaluate a situation. Maybe a supervisor DNN AI which is looking at the output from the AIs below, inferring patterns.

DNNs (alone) are incapable of Level 5. OTOH, it's conceivable that in this limited domain, a "Society of AIs" might yield 'acceptable' performance ( 1K deaths per year? ).

I would also like to see a given driving system rated at maximum speed for autonomous use. If you're moving at 5 MPH and your stopping distance (reaction time + coming to a stop) is 5 feet, then your 'Zone of Despair' is the 5 feet in front of you (and some on either side). If you absolutely know this Zone is clear, you can proceed with confidence.

It's a hellishly difficult problem; but I don't think it requires AGI to solve 'adequately'.

Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

#267

Post by Dylan16807 »

close04 wrote: post #262
Dylan16807 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Would a power supply that's only able to take idle loads (majority of the time) be considered any good? How about a phone that can only make calls only most of the day? When the models without those downsides require constant strong attention and nearly unbroken eyesight? Yes , sell me those models now . I'll switch between manual mode and somewhat-limited-feature mode when necessary.

You may have missed the point and there’s not much room to dumb it down. If you have to narrow the definition of driving so much then it’s not actually driving. Many cars spend a lot of time idling, especially in crowded cities. Would you call them self driving because they can perform unattended this very, very narrow task (but long) from the whole activity of driving? As for the “yes sign me up” I call bluff. There…

> If you have to narrow the definition of driving so much then it’s not actually driving.

I don't care what you call it. I just want to be able to ignore the road until the car beeps at me. (with at least 10 seconds of warning)

> Many cars spend a lot of time idling

But a car can't be idling while I use it. A computer can have idle power levels while I browse the web, and a phone that works in a certain range of hours is still very useful. If you wanted to make an analogy for "useless", that didn't come across.

> You wouldn’t let your child operate in them under the assumption that “there’s a good chance they won’t die”.

> once in a while it burns down the house

Who said anything about 'a good chance'? You said those products worked for specific uses. You didn't say they would also fail at random, even inside those limits. This is a different scenario now.

If the car can handle "a straight line with almost zero challenges", sign me up for that easy highway driving. It's only when you remove the word 'almost' that it becomes a cruise control missile / deathtrap.

Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

#268

Post by perl4ever »

SilasX wrote: post #244
perl4ever wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you mean competitive advantage, not comparative. I got a D in my only economics class, but I think that I've seen comparative advantage used to mean that "X is better at doing Y than doing Z", whereas competitive advantage is "X is better at doing Y than Z is at doing Y". If you're not using it as jargon, then the fact that it is jargon might be confusing.

If you’re going to insist on proper jargon, you might want to refresh first. Comparative advantage [1] in X means you suffer a lower opportunity cost (forgone profit from what you could have done) to produce X than others. A canonical example would be the doctor who is a better secretary than their secretary (produces more value per hour, looking only at secretarial value). The secretary still has a comparative advan…

"Comparative advantage [1] in X means you suffer a lower opportunity cost"

Yes, however I don't see a relevant difference between that and my phrasing.

It still looks to me as though you were clearly describing a lack of competitive advantage, while using the word comparative. Sure, you can discuss comparative advantage if you want.

Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

#269

Post by rmtech »

cletus wrote: post #33

Alternate headline: Some people overstated how simple this problem was because they didn't know what they were talking about, could promote themselves as experts, could get funding for a self-driving startup or some combination of the above. I guess that isn't as pithy but it's closer to the truth. When it became clear that Uber's strategy (under Kalanick anyway) was premised on replacing drivers with AIs before the…

> couldn't see general self-driving vehicles coming within 20 years. I still say that's true.

20 years is a long time, arguably you're already wrong because self-driving vehicles already exist. But Self-driving with the ability to replace Uber drivers will be here by 2030 at the latest.

Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

#270

Post by close04 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #267
close04 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may have missed the point and there’s not much room to dumb it down. If you have to narrow the definition of driving so much then it’s not actually driving. Many cars spend a lot of time idling, especially in crowded cities. Would you call them self driving because they can perform unattended this very, very narrow task (but long) from the whole activity of driving? As for the “yes sign me up” I call bluff. There…

> If you have to narrow the definition of driving so much then it’s not actually driving. I don't care what you call it. I just want to be able to ignore the road until the car beeps at me. (with at least 10 seconds of warning) > Many cars spend a lot of time idling But a car can't be idling while I use it. A computer can have idle power levels while I browse the web, and a phone that works in a certain range of hour…

Self driving systems today are the nurse but you're still the doctor. And you wouldn't call the nurse a doctor just because they can do the more simple or common tasks.

> I just want to be able to ignore the road until the car beeps at me. (with at least 10 seconds of warning)

You may want it but you are not getting that from any "self driving" system in use now. It's even illegal for you to do so. And that isn't self driving anyway, it's driver assists like ACC and LKA assisting you in very particular conditions as long as you're still in control and alert.

> But a car can't be idling while I use it.

If you're in traffic and the car isn't moving it's idling. In a traffic jam you may even idle more than you move, and many highways and crowded cities give you exactly that.

> You didn't say they would also fail at random

It was an analogy to self driving cars killing people even with those very narrow specific uses so I didn't think I had to spell it out. That was my whole point. Consider it spelled out now.

> If the car can handle "a straight line with almost zero challenges" [...] It's only when you remove the word 'almost' that it becomes a cruise control missile / deathtrap

If a system left to its own devices turns a degraded lane marker into a major life threatening challenge then it just makes my point that you're the driver and it can only assist.

To be a driver you are tested in all kinds of conditions. But you consider a car to be "a driver" because it can drive a straight line most of the times?

Self driving cars today are Silicon Valley's "not hotdog" app. That was meant as a joke but it fits the current situation of self driving to a T. Great if your needs are ultra specific relative to the whole spectrum of the task at hand and you're willing to take the risk of getting killed in the process.

For a narrow enough set of conditions you can define anything almost any way you want and be correct.

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