421–430 of 769 posts
Seriously, Google has had so many growth businesses in their hands and just fails to execute on them. This might be for one part because of its internal structure but I get the impression that many of these things look not exciting enough for its leadership.
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I'm not sure what your point is. Fully autonomous is still in progress, and still has work to do.
That people are talking as if it's just round the corner, that taxi drivers and truckers are about to become obsolete. Whereas I understand the technical challenges are much greater than is stated, it may even be they won't be all overcome.
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There are a few other things they could compete on: - Availability. Who has the largest network and highest availability? - Car Design. Who has the most comfortable or fully featured cars? - Safety. Who has the safest car? Who has the safest track record? It might eventually become a race to the bottom, but I think there's still plenty of opportunity to compete on other fronts for at least the next five years.
Ability to clean / autonomously clean itself. I think this will be the next big thing for car ride fleets.
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The point is that we are far far further away than commonly accepted. The day a computer can distinguish between a plastic bag in the road and a child is the day I'd support them on the road.
Do computer drivers have to be perfect, or is it enough to be much better than human drivers?
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I don't disagree with you but people said the same thing about amazon for over a decade....
what economies of scale does ride sharing have?
That said, Facebook has a much larger network effect than Uber. The friction to create a profile and attend an driver orientation on a competing ride broker network is much smaller than telling your everyone on your Facebook friends list you're moving to Diaspora.
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Tesla will have 100,000 prototypes being trained in shadow mode for a billion miles per year across the globe within a year. Tesla will compare quite favorably
One can scale up the first 99% of an autonomous driving os pretty fast just using pattern recognition, but the devil is in the edge cases. We haven't heard much from Google because they've been programming and validating all the unglamorous little problems that training data and a neural net can't solve alone. 4 way stops, passing motorcyclists and stuff like that, where old fashioned hand coded features are necessar…
I don't believe your hand coded features will outperform ML trained over a billion miles, even in the long tail rare events.
Sure ML is bad at rare events, but hand coded features also map poorly to such rare events, because it's unlikely you'll be able to imagine them all, or even manage to handle categories of rare events well.
Furthermore, I believe it would be possible to train an ML based rare-event detector, which simply detects the difference between "regular driving I'm familiar with" and "something funny is going on, I haven't seen this much in the training dataset", and then refer to a remote human to resolve the issue.
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The page about technology says, "Our sensors observe that the cyclist has extended their left arm. Detecting the cyclist's hand signal, our software predicts that the cyclist will move to the left side of the lane." This suggests to me that they're trying to deal with situations like the ones you've brought up.
There is a difference between "trying to deal with" and "product on sale next month". These cars are overhyped. They've been just around the corner for the last 10 years. They are the Duke Nukem Forever of Silicon Valley.
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Tesla will have 100,000 prototypes being trained in shadow mode for a billion miles per year across the globe within a year. Tesla will compare quite favorably
And how many of those miles are in conditions like: * that road with the one-foot deep pothole (it's more like a sinkhole at that point, though) in the middle of a lane * the perpetual construction zone where there are five layers of lane markers, only one of which is the actual layer of lane markers * the 10% grade two-lane winding road in the dark with 2 inches of snow on the road and more coming * open highway wit…
We can likewise say there are some situations a machine shouldn't be driving.
As long as the machine can identify when it is incapable as a driver, it's only the same as the human pulling over for a nap because they can't stay alert.
Sure, if you ran a taxi service with such a system you'd have to send a regular taxi to pick up the customer, but it's only the same as any other kind of breakdown like a puncture.
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Why wouldn't Toyota just launch Toyotas On Demand? If the cost of the car and fuel are the only significant costs, Toyota could probably do it more cheaply than Uber. Uber's network effect is its driver network. It will find it a lot harder to compete if you no longer need drivers, when it has to compete with real car companies that could be able to undercut them on cost.
> Toyota could probably do it more cheaply than Uber. I agree. The fact that autonomous cars will likely reduce ownership will put a squeeze on car companies, and it might make sense for them to branch into service areas, as they can get the cars at cost. I guarantee that for 10,000 Camrys purchased by Uber and 10,000 Camrys built and shuffled to a ride service division by Toyota, Toyota's ride-sharing division will…
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> Also: Private car ownership is going to fall off a cliff shortly after autonomous ride services arrive. Which probably means general demand for vehicles will fall off a cliff. I've seen this sentiment so many times now that I have to ask a serious question to anyone who echoes this sentiment: Do you own a personal car right now? If so, why? All of this... excitement over the transformations that self-driving vehicl…
I can't add anything profound, but I will say that 40+ years ago I camped at Disney's Ft. Wilderness campground, with all my many brothers and sisters. The electric trams had a routine schedule that came around and stopped almost in front of your campsite, all of kids would simply jump on, go to anywhere in the park like the stores, the showers, the outdoor theater, and hop off again. It was incredibly liberating and…
They do, though, you just haven't been to places where this is standard. Try finding a place that's more than 10 minutes walk from public transit: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Warsaw,+Poland/