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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

#331

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

howlgarnish wrote: post #243
cmsj wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"turned out"... it's been starkly obvious since day one that true self-driving is a problem that requires general intelligence to solve. All you have to do to know that is drive a car and think about what's actually required to successfully drive from A to B in the real world.

Waymo is running self-driving cars with paying passengers and no backup drivers right now in Phoenix, and last I checked we don't have general AI yet. https://www.reuters.com/article/waymo-autonomous-phoenix/way... Sure, you can move the goalposts and say it's not "true" self-driving until it can handle all environments and weather conditions and whatnot, but self-driving cars are here. The question is how fast they'…

The obvious question is, why does this work in Phoenix?

Where I live, road conditions are changing all the time. There’s new construction, new roads opening, temporary (a few hours at a B time) changes in lanes where you have to drive against the normal direction of traffic.

You can call it moving goal posts, but to deploy them generally, they either have to have general intelligence, or you need to input construction schedules, so that it won’t take certain roads during certain times. And then what? You can’t order a ride to certain locations?

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

#332

Post by twic »

pmiller2 wrote: post #241
argonaut wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not convinced. Do you have evidence that "more efficient use of time from app-based routing" actually results in drivers making more money?

"app-based routing" is a mirage anyway. When you request an Uber ride, your request is advertised to drivers in the area, who can choose to accept it. There is no routing happening.

Sure, the driver then drives a route given to them to by the app, but so does everybody else, just in that case, the app is Google Maps.

AFAIK, the only routing cleverness is that the end of a shift, drivers can request to only take passengers who are heading in the direction of their own home. That's useful.

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

#333

Post by howlgarnish »

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #331
howlgarnish wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo is running self-driving cars with paying passengers and no backup drivers right now in Phoenix, and last I checked we don't have general AI yet. https://www.reuters.com/article/waymo-autonomous-phoenix/way... Sure, you can move the goalposts and say it's not "true" self-driving until it can handle all environments and weather conditions and whatnot, but self-driving cars are here. The question is how fast they'…

The obvious question is, why does this work in Phoenix? Where I live, road conditions are changing all the time. There’s new construction, new roads opening, temporary (a few hours at a B time) changes in lanes where you have to drive against the normal direction of traffic. You can call it moving goal posts, but to deploy them generally, they either have to have general intelligence, or you need to input constructio…

Waymo has been dealing with construction since day one. If the road is entirely blocked, Google Maps/Waze is already capable of changing routes on the fly.

There will always be corner cases that automation can't deal with, but Waymo will have some human troubleshooters around for that. So do us humans, for that matter: when a car breaks down, most people call the mechanic instead of applying their own general intelligence to fixing it.

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

#334

Post by Shivetya »

mikesabbagh wrote: post #160

This self-driving system promise keeps getting delayed! It looks to me this is a case of a donkey led by a carrot on a stick (investors are the donkey here). What I never understand is what happens when a new situation that the system did not previously train for happen? what if this situation is deadly? Will all the Uber cars decide to jump off a cliff because of a wrong signalization or bad weather? What will the T…

well the one issue that should be obvious to all is that self driving cars suffer worse from the problem people suffer from, signage and markings on roads is still either incomplete or in some cases in error.

People screw up every day driving and the lives lost is very high but going by how my Tesla drives I am going to say impede traffic by slowing down. My car does slow down, safely, when it gets confused or contradictory feedback, and I am curious what the in beta FSD software will do. Their new technique looks vastly improved.

Traffic aware cruise control which many cars have along with limited lane keep assist can go a long way to making the drive safer but many don't use TACC except on highways

Look at it this way, its coming. However it is all one sided because again I emphasize, we need better and more consistent signage and road marking.

US wise, the HOV and Express lanes are probably the most perfect use case for self driving cars. Get into the lane and it should be hands off until exit.

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

#335

Post by KMag »

ablekh wrote: post #317
kovek wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you explain why are AS/400 relatively popular? I don't read much about these mainframes, and am a user of Personal Computers (macbook, thinkpad) and EC2 instances (something that runs Linux?) , so I am not sure what AS/400 servers are, but I'd love to learn more!

Well, by "relatively popular" I meant that AS/400 servers (aka AS400 or IBM iSeries or IBM System i: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System_i ) have been quite popular mostly only within certain industries and/or niches (e.g., banking, insurance, manufacturing, supply chain). They are still widely used there for legacy reasons, however demand for AS/400 developers (which implies proficiency in RPG language, since,…

I wouldn't want to work on the AS/400 systems, but its Technology-Independent Machine Interface (TIMI) was basically Android Runtime decades before flip phones were even a thing: ship all of your userspace binaries as bytecode, and compile that bytecode to optimized machine code for your CPU at program installation time.

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

#336

Post by swyx »

bobthepanda wrote: post #329
_coveredInBees wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, how is ride-sharing / cabs a dying industry? People are always going to need to get from point A to point B, and if anything, the younger generations are less likely to own cars. Public infrastructure is never going to fill the gap except in certain urban areas.

Are they willing to pay the actual cost, though? I know that where I live I've started blanching at how much it actually costs to take an Uber, which is now approaching what taxis cost.

cost is fine if you don't take one every day, which in a remote work world is not at all a stretch

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

#337

Post by deegles »

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)

That is true, but what if it was the same car (software) killing every pedestrian? Right now every situation is unique, but being judged based on who wrote the software is the worst case scenario for self-driving regulation IMO.

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

#338

Post by hijklmno »

When will investors learn to separate hype from what's possible - Augmented reality, blockchain, self-driving cars, AI? The reality on the ground is a lot different than all these startup peddlers have you believe. This makes it a lot difficult for people who are actually building useful things raise money.

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

#339

Post by reader_mode »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #166
mikesabbagh wrote: post #160

This self-driving system promise keeps getting delayed! It looks to me this is a case of a donkey led by a carrot on a stick (investors are the donkey here). What I never understand is what happens when a new situation that the system did not previously train for happen? what if this situation is deadly? Will all the Uber cars decide to jump off a cliff because of a wrong signalization or bad weather? What will the T…

> 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.

Eventually sure - but in the start one road block I see is not just total numbers of accidents but also the way it fails. Human failure modes are relatively well known and we build our infrastructure around them - AI not so much.

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

#340

Post by ntsplnkv2 »

satvikpendem wrote: post #273
ntsplnkv2 wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That jump happened because of groundbreaking discoveries in physics, chemistry, and biology. We are reaching the ends of that, though. Particle physics has been at a standstill for decades. Fusion power is still a pipe dream. Global warming continues to go on without a technological answer in sight. False AI promises are not evidence of anything. Nothing AI is doing now is genuinely artificial intelligence. Biotech?…

The point is that it's unknown what will happen in the future. In 1889, the US patent office commissioner had said that we should close it, as "everything that can be invented has been invented."

Of course no one can predict the future, that's true of anything. Not really an argument. We can only go by previous data - and previous data shows that we are anomalous, a tiny blip throughout time.
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