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Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

rodneybrooks.com

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Re: Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

#91

Post by tsimionescu »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #68

>>> [self driving cars are rmeote controlled] in all cases so far deployed, humans monitoring those cars from a remote location, and occasionally sending control inputs to the cars. Wait, What now? I have never heard this, but from the founder of CSAIL I am going to take it as a statement of fact and proof that basically every AI company is flat out lying. I mean the difference between remote piloting a drone that ha…

Note that even the examples he gives are related to things like an operator telling the car to overtake a stopped truck instead of waiting for it to start again. So occasional high level decisions, not minute-to-minute or even second-to-second interactions like you have when flying a drone.

This is more like telling your units to go somewhere in a video game, and they mostly do it right, but occasionally you have to take a look and help them because they got stuck in a particularly narrow corridor or something.

Re: Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

#92

Post by [deleted] »

stouset wrote: post #69
AlotOfReading wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People living on the margins is fundamentally a social problem, and we all know how amenable those are to technical solutions. Let's say AV development stops tomorrow though. Is continuing to grind workers down under the boot of the gig economy really a preferred solution here or just a way to avoid the difficult political discussion we need to have either way?

I'm not sure how I could have been more clear that I'm not suggesting we stop development on robotaxis or anything related to AI. All I'm asking is that we take a moment to reflect on the people who won't be winners. Which is going to be a hell of a lot of people. And right now there is absolutely zero plan for what to do when these folks have one of the few remaining opportunities taken away from them. As awful as t…

[deleted]

Re: Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

#93

Post by tsimionescu »

ynniv wrote: post #25

It's long, so I'm skimming a little and... flying cars. If you don't know why we don't have flying cars, you're not a good engineer. It really doesn't matter what prestigious lab you ran, as that apparently didn't impart the ability to think critically about engineering problems. [Hint: Flying takes 10x the energy of driving, and the cost/weight/volume of 1 MJ hasn't changed in close to a hundred years. Flying cars r…

The article is responding to claims by CEOs of car companies, industry and business press, and other hype sources that keep predicting flying cars next year or so. It's predicting that, against this hype, it will not come to pass. Not sure why you've worded your comment in such a way as if the article was hyping up flying cars.

Not to mention, since we do have helicopters, the engineering challange of flying cars is almost entirely unrelated to energy costs (at least for the super rich, the equivalent of, say, a Rolls Royce, not of a Toyota). The thing stopping flying cars from existing is that it is extremely hard to make an easy to pilot flying vehicle, given the numerous degrees of freedom (and potential catastrophic failure modes); and the significantly higher impredictability and variance of the medium (air vs road surface).

Plus, the major problem of noise pollution, which gets to extreme levels for somewhat fundamental reasons (you have to diaplace a whole lot of air to fly; which is very close to having to create sound waves).

So, overall, the energy problem is already fixed, we already have point-to-point flying vehicles usable, and occasionally used, in urban areas, helicopters. Making them safe when operated by a very lightly trained pilot, and silent enough to not wake up a neighborhood, are the real issues that will persist even if we had mini fusion reactors.

Re: Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

#94

Post by tsimionescu »

sashank_1509 wrote: post #6

Feels too self-congratulatory when he claims to be correct about self driving in the Waymo case. The bar he set is so broad and ambiguous, that probably anything Waymo did, would not qualify as self driving to him. So he think humans are intervening once every 1-2 miles to train the Waymo, we’re not even sure if that is true, I heard from friends that it was 100+ miles but let us say Waymo comes out and says it is 10…

I think that, if it were true that Waymo cars require human intervention every 1-2 miles (thus requiring 1 operator for every, say, 1-2 cars, probably constantly paying attention while the car is in motion), then it would be fair to say that the cars are not really self driving.

However, if the real number is something like an intervention every 20 or 100 miles, and so an operator is likely passively monitoring dozens of cars, and the cars themselves ask for operator assistance rather than the operator actively monitoring them, then I would agree with you that Waymo has really achieved full self driving and his predicitons on the basic viability have turned out wrong.

I have no idea though which is the case. I would be very interested if there are any reliable resources pointing one way or the other.

Re: Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

#95

Post by FabHK »

LOL about the last paragraphs:

> Let’s Continue a Noble Tradition!

> The billionaire founders of both Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin had faith in the systems they had created. They both personally flew on the first operational flights of their sub-orbital launch systems. They went way beyond simply talking about how great their technology was, they believed in it, and flew in it.

> Let’s hope this tradition continues. Let’s hope the billionaire founder/CEO of SpaceX will be onboard the first crewed flight of Starship to Mars, and that it happens sooner than I expect. We can all cheer for that.

Re: Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

#96

Post by 4ndrewl »

sashank_1509 wrote: post #6

Feels too self-congratulatory when he claims to be correct about self driving in the Waymo case. The bar he set is so broad and ambiguous, that probably anything Waymo did, would not qualify as self driving to him. So he think humans are intervening once every 1-2 miles to train the Waymo, we’re not even sure if that is true, I heard from friends that it was 100+ miles but let us say Waymo comes out and says it is 10…

Nonsense. If you spoke about self-driving cars a few decades ago you would have understood it to have meant that you could go to a dealer and buy a car that would drive itself, wherever you might be, without your input as a driver.

No-one would have equated the phrase "we'll have self-driving cars" with "some taxis in a few of US cities"

Re: Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

#97

Post by tsimionescu »

khafra wrote: post #64
sashank_1509 wrote: post #6

Feels too self-congratulatory when he claims to be correct about self driving in the Waymo case. The bar he set is so broad and ambiguous, that probably anything Waymo did, would not qualify as self driving to him. So he think humans are intervening once every 1-2 miles to train the Waymo, we’re not even sure if that is true, I heard from friends that it was 100+ miles but let us say Waymo comes out and says it is 10…

> So he think humans are intervening once every 1-2 miles to train the Waymo Just to make sure we're applying our rubric fairly and universally: Has anyone else been in an Uber where you wished you were able to intervene in the driving a few times, or at least apply RLHF to the driver? (In other words: Waymo may be imperfect to the point where corrections are sometimes warranted; that doesn't mean they're not already…

To apply this benchmark, you'd have to believe that Waymo is paying operators to improve the quality of the ride, not to make the ride possible at all. That is, you'd have to believe that the fully autonomous car works and gets you to your destination safely and in a timely manner (at the level of a median professional human driver), but Waymo decided that's not good enough and hired operators to improve beyond that. This seems very unlikely to me, and some of the (few) examples I've seen online were about correcting significant failures, such as waiting behind a parked truck indefinitely (as if it were stopped at a red light) or looping around aimlessly in a parking lot.

You'd also have to believe that when you wished to change how your Uber driver drove, you'd actually have improved things rather than worsened them.

Re: Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

#99

Post by tsimionescu »

jdminhbg wrote: post #36
mvdtnz wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one said scam (although in the case of Tesla it absolutely is). It's just not a solved problem yet.

> It's just not a solved problem yet. Human driving isn't a solved problem either; the difference is that when a human driver needs intervention it just crashes.

This is not about crashes. By all accounts, the Waymo cars are mostly fully self driving, I beleive even the article author agrees with that. This includes crash avoidance, to the extent that they can.

The remote operation seems to be more about navigational issues and reading the road conditions. Things like accidentally looping, or not knowing how to proceed with an unexpected obstacle. Things that don't really happen to human drivers, even the greenest of new drivers.

Re: Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

#100

Post by FabHK »

ynniv wrote: post #25

It's long, so I'm skimming a little and... flying cars. If you don't know why we don't have flying cars, you're not a good engineer. It really doesn't matter what prestigious lab you ran, as that apparently didn't impart the ability to think critically about engineering problems. [Hint: Flying takes 10x the energy of driving, and the cost/weight/volume of 1 MJ hasn't changed in close to a hundred years. Flying cars r…

Not quite. It's about 3x. It also depends on whether you're talking fixed wing or rotary wings.

A modern car might easily have 130 kW or more, and that's what a Cessna 172 has (around 180 hp). (Sure, a plane cruises at the higher end of that, while a car only uses that much to accelerate and cruises at the lower end of the range - still not a factor of 10x.)

As another datapoint, a Diamond DA40 does around 28 miles per gallon (< 9 litres per 100 km) at 60% power cruise.

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