The crux here is not really about semi-automation for highway driving in personal cars, but about companies that can only hope to live up to their investors' hype if they get rid of human costs, like Uber. And the idea that the capabilities of a car-for-hire could be fully automated to the point of removing any human from the service is utterly ridiculous to anyone who has ever seriously considered what that problem entails. Navigating a vehicle from point X to point Y via chaotic and ever-changing city streets and highways is the easy half of that problem.
Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”
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Re: Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”
#62I have to wonder what motivates him to admit this, surely hyping his technology is a formula for attracting funding, right? Why admit your job has such a long-time until return?
Re: Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”
#63One thing I would love someone to explain is how can people assume cars are going to be automated soon when both planes and trains haven't been automated for various reasons. They are different issues I have gathered but essentially shouldn't trains be dead simple but to this day at least the trains(not metras though) often have someone to stop the train in case of emergencies. Planes are more complex but have lower…
>when both planes and trains haven't been automated for various reasons. I thought both were already highly automated?
Some trains are very automated. And there is autopilot/autolanding for jets, BUT the pilot has to engage them, and they can't be used in all circumstances. That is to say that they are about as automated as the Tesla Autopilot. Once you get on the highway, the car can keep course and maintain the appropriate speed.
This is a long way off from the world of "Enter the destination from my garage, take a nap, and wake up an hour later at my destination," of "Full Autonomy." There is a distinct inflection point of utility where Autonomous vehicles require you to be paying attention to take over in emergency, and the point at which that is no longer required.
Re: Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”
#64It speaks to the trends of the day that an article which says something patently obvious to people in the tech field is considered news. This reality seems like it may pose a problem though, as some people's business models and valuations depend on this article being wrong. The thing is, we don't need full level 5 to get useful stuff out of this line of tech development. But in terms of the futurist vision of driverl…
You're right, and we're already benefitting and have been for years: basic electronic cruise control saves a ton of fuel just by taking the job of maintaining highway speeds away from the human.
We'll continue to benefit at each level: speed match, safe-distance maintenance, emergency brake, lane follow - there are already people alive who would be dead without them - you can find them in 5 seconds on youtube. The fact that articles have to keep trotting out same sad story of the bloke who drove into a truck while watching movies when he should have been driving tells you a lot about how safe these systems actually are - if there were dozens of counter examples, we wouldn't be hearing from the head of Toyota's RI, we'd be drowning in dashcam snuff films.
All that said, yes, I agree it's obvious that level 5 is a different beast to all of the 'easy stuff' that we have now: classic case of where the edge cases cover more area than the core of the domain does.
Re: Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”
#65I've been saying this for a while. The problem is that people are mostly familiar with the rate of overcoming traditional technical challenges (e.g., making your current computer/phone more compact, improving graphics quality, making cameras and screens with more pixels, etc.). What people don't realize is that full autonomous driving will require more than just faster/smaller/cheaper technical innovation - it will r…
It really makes the insane gamble of the Uber VC's ultimately terminal.
Re: Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”
#66the hype around it is fun, but the reality is that autonomous driving is harder than anything we've done before as a species and we have a bunch of the best minds working on it already (as the article notes).
rockets and electric cars are really cool, but those have largely been engineering challenges. autonomous vehicles are in the basic scientific research stage. i can't imagine we'll see true autonomous vehicles within the next 20 years.
i say this not to discourage the efforts to build this wonderful technology, but only to temper expectations, so that we avoid implausible conclusions like "uber will save itself by replacing its fleet with autonomous cars in the next 5 years".
Re: Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”
#67One thing I would love someone to explain is how can people assume cars are going to be automated soon when both planes and trains haven't been automated for various reasons. They are different issues I have gathered but essentially shouldn't trains be dead simple but to this day at least the trains(not metras though) often have someone to stop the train in case of emergencies. Planes are more complex but have lower…
Can it be that railways are often monopolized, and getting access to the infrastructure is difficult for new companies, which hampers innovation?
Re: Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”
#68One thing I would love someone to explain is how can people assume cars are going to be automated soon when both planes and trains haven't been automated for various reasons. They are different issues I have gathered but essentially shouldn't trains be dead simple but to this day at least the trains(not metras though) often have someone to stop the train in case of emergencies. Planes are more complex but have lower…
>when both planes and trains haven't been automated for various reasons. I thought both were already highly automated?
Automated: yes. Autonomous: no.
There's a fundamental difference between the two. Airplane autopilots are basically scripted, and operate fully within the parameters set by the pilot. There is almost no intelligence, and very little adaptivity there. The pilot needs to reprogram the autopilot manually when the flight plan changes, for example. Flight conditions can change in many ways that require the autopilot to be reprogrammed, reconfigured, or even switched off. Airplanes have actually crashed more than once because the pilot configured the autopilot incorrectly.
I don't know much about trains, except that fully automating without adapting all the rail infrastructure is more difficult than you would imagine, for example because there is basically no standardization in how semaphores are placed, for example.
Re: Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”
#69It speaks to the trends of the day that an article which says something patently obvious to people in the tech field is considered news. This reality seems like it may pose a problem though, as some people's business models and valuations depend on this article being wrong. The thing is, we don't need full level 5 to get useful stuff out of this line of tech development. But in terms of the futurist vision of driverl…
Exactly. I park in a very small space in a busy city. While backing out I must monitor the street, pedestrians, and the cars parked to the front, back, and side of me. Just this week, I missed one of those variables and cost myself $500 in damage. This is something a backup camera and automated system can and already does easily help with, and is a major efficacy leap. Small steps like this can really add up. What I…
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Re: Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”
#70One thing I would love someone to explain is how can people assume cars are going to be automated soon when both planes and trains haven't been automated for various reasons. They are different issues I have gathered but essentially shouldn't trains be dead simple but to this day at least the trains(not metras though) often have someone to stop the train in case of emergencies. Planes are more complex but have lower…
If we had autonomous planes it wouldn't significantly reduce cost or increase usage. But there is a lot of investment in autonomous drones. Planes also have a very high safety bar to begin with, which cars do not. Same thing about trains, there's very little value in doing so, and resistance in the form of unions in some locations. Some trains are fully automated though, here's an article with some more info: https:/…
Gill Pratt is not "some dude" -- he's a robotics researcher with a PhD from MIT, and was a DARPA program manager [0].
[0] http://corporatenews.pressroom.toyota.com/article_display.cf...