Yes, harder than hype and deluded optimism expected. Plenty of people have seen through the hype and delusion for years now. Level 5 requires AGI. AGI is probably nowhere close to being realized - humans may well be centuries away from reaching the necessary technological level. Humanity might never get there at all. In any case, if humanity ever developed AGI, it would revolutionize the world. Self-driving cars would be one of the most boring and mundane applications.
Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected
61–70 of 287 posts
Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected
#62This meme of shock and surprise that self-driving cars haven't appeared overnight is just media BS. Yes, all technology development is a gradual process and we may not know how long it takes. Companies working on it have pitch decks and investors so they give their best or most optimistic estimates.
Go back a couple of years and look on just about any thread about self-driving on a forum such as this one and you'll find no shortage of people arguing that they're just around the corner. Because, after all, that's what the SV hypesters were saying and they'd never lie.
> you'll find no shortage of people arguing that they're just around the corner
Ya, but around the corner no one thought that would be 2020. The strawman is always to place around the corner as tomorrow, but many people just mean in a decade or two.
Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected
#63I've been beating this drum for years (but I'm a nobody, so it's like pissing in the wind): 1. Anything less than 100% FULL automation is MORE dangerous than manual driving, because the "driver" will almost certainly lack any situational awareness. When the need for manual intervention happen, it will be at the moments where you need maximum awareness and split second reflexes. 2. There are SO many edge cases and nev…
I have some confidence we'll get there on limited access highways because there are a lot fewer of the things that you describe there. That doesn't really help the people who want to be driven around everywhere. But it would actually be a really nice feature for the majority of people who own and drive cars.
Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected
#64Alternate 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…
> Once a driver knows the car next to them isn't driven by a person it changes their behaviour.
If the car next to me isn't driven by a person, but is bristling with high resolution cameras that will immediately upload footage of my face to the authorities if I collide with it, I would indeed change my behavior.
Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMHO cars are for getting between cities, or between places in non-cities; within a city, the economical long-term solution is to just replace the roads (save for cargo corridors) with some kind of pod rail network, i.e. self-driving four-seater trolleys. The exceptions become far fewer if there's nothing on the "road" but other rail-bound vehicles. In such a future, if you lived in a city but owned your own real car…
> some kind of pod rail network, i.e. self-driving four-seater trolleys If you go that far, the problem is already trivial right? Just making roads specifically for self-driving vehicles would make the problem trivial. What the companies are trying to accomplish is self driving cars in current conditions.
My point was an economic one:
• cities can afford to "change the problem" to fit the solution (as they already have huge transit-system and other public-works budgets, and extensions to cities are mostly centrally-planned.) Some cities in Europe have already entirely banned cars.
• everywhere other than cities—e.g. small rural towns only connected via roads—doesn't have the resources to "change the problem." (But also, roads are optimal in this resource-constrained context, anyway: you can spend very little laying down massively-long stretches of road, pushing the costs onto the people who wants to drive on it in the form of vehicle maintenance.) But "everywhere other than cities" also doesn't pose nearly as complex a problem in the first place as cities do (at least in AI judgement terms, not in sensor-requirements terms.)
Thus, it makes sense to choose a hybrid solution, where cities gradually de-car themselves, while self-driving cars get licensed to work everywhere except cities.
Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
And the amazing part is there are millions of drivers on the road right now that have absolutely no idea how to handle those cases, and do an exceedingly bad job of it. From the very new drivers, to people who simply don't drive often, to people who got their license in another country where the rules are entirely different (me!), to the very elderly who are losing their sight, reflexes and judgement and people playi…
> It's a wonder only 35,000 people are killed on US roads every year. vs > do an exceedingly bad job of it. No, they're doing an amazingly good job of it. Given the cumulative number of miles driven and the conditions driven in it should impress you rather than that you come to the conclusion they are doing a very bad job. If the current crop of AI would be unleashed in those same conditions the carnage would be unbe…
Respectfully, it sounds like you've only read about driving and have never been in or driven a car.
People are _terrible_ drivers. Cars are safer than they've ever been. The number of deaths is not the right metric to evaluate driver quality.
Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected
#67I 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 anything on the road)
Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected
#68When I was starting my engineering career, it was right around when the first DARPA challenges had started. The hype was beginning, and my optimism towards technology was strong. I thought the predictions and timelines would be correct, and I still feel strongly that self-driving will be safer than humans in the long term. Recently, I bought a newer Subaru, with EyeSight. It has adaptive cruise and lane keep assist.…
> The adaptive cruise is really good. It's camera based, and I have had zero problems with it. It works well at night and in pouring rain. It'll even stay pretty close to the car ahead of you if you turn the "tolerance" all the way down. I'm always impressed. I checked, assuming it's actually using a radar - and you're right. They seem to use a stereo camera system. Neat. https://www.subaru.com/engineering/eyesight.h…
It's not impervious to bad weather, but pretty resilient. I'd say in the 2 years we've had ours the system has shut off maybe 3-4 times due to one of: a) very low and direct sun angle, b) very heavy rain, c) dense fog. Which, to be fair, are all difficult conditions for a human to drive in as well.
But I agree with the parent, the suite of driver assistance features is very good, but a long way from "self driving".
Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do wonder how much of the self-driving narrative at the peak of inflated expectations was the result of 1. Wild optimism fueled by how rapid the progress of ML had been in certain domains over the course of a few years combined with a lot of hype and general SV techno-optimism. (And the fact that a certain demographic so desperately wanted a robo-chaffeur to drive them around.) vs. 2. Hypesters and scammers who kne…
In the case of 1. I'm certain a whole bunch of it is people getting high on their own supply; aka pay a marketer to hype your thing, your competitor does same, then you become afraid of all the progress your competitor has made (which is imaginary marketing hype). I've actually seen this dynamic at work in "AI" land; it's gotten me work. I've even seen it happen within the same company: marketing dude talks to engine…
You definitely get into feedback loops. And if "everyone" is saying self-driving is right around the corner you also begin to doubt your own skepticism especially if you think others should be in a better position to know the reality than you are.
To your first point, I agree there was something of a big game of topper going on for a while. If anyone came out and said that they weren't going to have production self-driving for 10 years (much less 20 or 30). A lot of people, including on boards like this, would nod their heads sadly about how far behind $COMPANY was compared to a certain other car company that was already supposedly selling self-driving-capable vehicles.
Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected
#70Alternate 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…
That is an interesting point. I can see that human drivers will be much more willing to drive aggressively (i.e. play chicken) if they know the other driver(s) are AI and will take evasive action. For example, I avoid doing things on the road that an inattentive other driver might be slow to react to and hit me, such as suddenly cutting across 3 lanes of traffic.
A little bit like how some people aggressively brake in front of Tesla drivers