They are basically trying to replace trains with their less efficient robotrucks driving between “transfer facilities”.
Anyone who needs it “just in time” loads it on a truck and the ones who don’t throw it on a train, generally speaking. In order for them to compete they would have to be somewhere in the middle price wise which, theoretically, shouldn’t be all that hard if they don’t have the cost of a driver. Minus the costs of all the trucks that are going to get disabled once people figure out they can be easily hijacked out in the middle of Texas.
I’d imagine this will be a lot harder now since they won’t have VC money to subsidize their business model and have to compete in a highly regulated market where the DOT will shut them down in a heartbeat if they get up to the usual Silicon Valley tricks.
> these pie in the sky valuations can fluctuate so wildly, why should they be trusted?
They shouldn’t. Valuations are analogised to market cap. This is almost more idiotic than the crypto convention.
Multiplying the price paid for Series F preferred stock by the number of common shares is asinine. They’re different securities. In a bill market, the mistake is subtle. In a bear market, the lie is revealed.
Though as a general principle, what happened here was just, "some rich people thought <company> would be worth a lot of money, and then they were wrong." Nothing super shocking here, obviously that will happen all the time.
Crypto startups are only a symptom, the problem is much deeper with startups in general. Tons of non-crypto startups don’t generate a profit. They have all been burning VC money and this was okay because they were able to offload the shares to the public. The party is now over and we are going to start seeing lots of startups fail.
Every hardware company, companies that make physical hardware, hinges on this. It's viewed as key to raising any kind of money, it's a cost of entry. Typically companies I hardware will have dozens or hundreds of patents, it's just key. Look at how many patents tesla has, vs this, and one has been successful one not. If you were raising money from serious investors for a hardware project and said you don't have any patents, you should be laughed out of the building. It's what your selling, it's a key part of the ip moat.
Does anyone have (or has anyone read) any smart summary/analysis about the phase we find ourselves in with the autonomous driving industry?
Is it like CVML was in a desert for some decade(s) where there were no big advances, but lots of hope and unrealized claims of some impending breakthrough, only for lots of money to be dumped into it, and companies to be led astray? Are we waiting for some major improvement in algorithms, or hardware, like GPU progress, and things will suddenly take off?
Or are there fundamental difficulties that are startups (and their researchers) keep banging their heads against thinking that they're the ones to be able to solve it? Or just that they need to go through the same mistakes over and over but make little progress?
It seems to have been a decade and what, $20B poured into this, but we are really not much closer to the goal? (and I'm not even sure whether we mean solving the AV problem, much less achieving a viable business model) Sure Waymo is driving in San Francisco, but that seems like a very handheld single example.
Looks like, that some problems can’t be solved just throwing money at them. Modern hardware is light years away from the one in Prometheus Project. Radars, lidars and cameras are superior now. Heck one can design and build dedicated ASIC for cheap nowadays. Maybe taking Nvidia Drive and tweaking it is just not enough to get there.
The way I think about is that when we drive as humans and an obstacle appears, we have over 15 years of knowledge that we have to determine our next step. And we coalesce a lifetime of knowledge in a matter of seconds.
These modern algorithms do not try to implement general AI. They do not work with 15 years of knowledge. They just recognize some patterns with no understanding of what they’re are looking at. It’s a different and
easier approach but I think it has some severe limits that will
never be overcome.
To me it’s like a software programmer that copies Stack Overflow snippets but doesn’t really understand programming. They get only so far
I would feel much safer having a more advanced AI (not the current ones) driving cars.
It's not like humans get better at driving with each year of driving. Some become more reckless, people become old, some might think they can have some drinks before sitting behind the wheel and it takes 15 years to get 15 years of experience. What about that over-confident 19 year old who wants to show off their "skills"?
And 15 years of one driver's perception of safe driving is nothing compared to swarm intelligence of AI for driving. If you have 10,000 autonomous vehicles driving for a single day and combine that data at the end of that day to improve driving, that's collectively over 25 years (assuming the human equivalent drives each day of the year) of "knowledge" in one single day. Every day.
Being a father with 2 small kids who drives their kids by bike to kindergarten / school - with a large section of that road is shared by SUVs, vans and bikes (while each side is blocked by parked cars or narrow garage exits built into the building), I can't wait for safe, autonomous vehicles to become the norm.
There's a possibility that all the particles in my body might leap simultaneously one foot to the left, or that I might transform into a bowl of petunias. The question is how likely playing chess or riding in a car might squash me like a pancake.
We accept a not insignificant risk by driving ourselves and riding in cars driven by humans. Happily, it's not hard to estimate the risk that a machine-controlled car poses by letting them roam around. We can compare that with human-controlled cars and start shifting between controllers according to their risk profiles. I'd much rather have a machine-controlled car than a human asleep at the wheel.
In the mid 1970's, computers playing chess had in 20 years gone from being utterly trivial to beat if you know the rules, to easily beating amateurs and playing mildly interesting games against top humans like Greenblatt vs Bobby Fischer in '77.
And it was clear that the power of the chess computers would keep scaling with Moore's law as they could look further into the future and store more of a complete opening book.
In the late 80's the first versions of Deep Blue were playing serious games against Kasparov under standard time control, even though it took until 1997 to beat him - one can argue that Kasparov was also still developing during this time, since his rating peaked in 1999.
Can you find a citation from after 1980 from someone with a bit of understanding of chess and computers, saying that computers would never beat humans?
In the 70s, there was widespread misunderstanding of what artificial intelligence would be good at. Take a look at Hubert Dreyfus' _What Computers Can't Do_ (1972). To be fair, he was correct in some respects, but I think with flawed reasoning.
> You shouldn't, there is no AI capable of doing better than a human, and there does not appear to be any currently known method of creating one.
I don’t care that much if it’s better than the best driver, I care if it’s better than the driver checking their phone, blowing through stop signs, etc. As a cyclist, I reckon that it’s the most selfish 10% of drivers that represent 90% of the risk; if they’re replaced by self-driving I’d feel safer even if it also means the good drivers aren’t quite as good.
The ones which are not checking their phones can't detect semis or cyclists for quite some time. So You're replacing the 10% with their electronic versions.
But if AI can be better than humans at driving a car, then it can also be better than you at driving a bicycle. Will you accept AI-augmented tools on your bike? I see automatic braking and speed limiters as very easy first steps. Then geofencing to prevent bicycles on pedestrian paths. All of that is dead simple with curret tech.
Yeah, you only have a ~seven times higher rate of death per mile traveled as compared to a car. It’s just there are significantly more car miles traveled so more car related deaths.
Check your stats. In most of the largest countries (India, China, Russia etc) buses are actually more dangerous than cars. One bus crash can be more dangerous than dozens of car crashes.
And my phone just had a weather alert. -35c tomorrow, possible -50c with wind chill. I'm sure I'll see not a single bicycle ... but definitely a few snow mobiles. They are ridiculously dangerous and polluting, but at least they aren't cars.
I would imagine that a very large portion of all deadly crashes (buses included) involve a car.
Cars are pretty safe for their drivers; they are just very dangerous for everybody else. So, if you split 'passenger deaths' by 'vehicle category' you're going to have a lot of situations where a car hits a bus/cyclist/pedestrian, the driver survives, and whoever they hit does not. This creates misleading statistics.
> I care if it’s better than the driver checking their phone, blowing through stop signs, etc. As a cyclist, I reckon that it’s the most selfish 10% of drivers that represent 90% of the risk
We have a(n imperfect) mechanism to catch and penalise those drivers.
An ex-colleague of mine was incapable of sticking to the speed limit (she drove me round Paris once, that was an exciting ride...). Eventually she collected enough speeding tickets [in the UK] that she was within one ticket of losing her driving licence completely. At that point, she [finally!] slowed down.
Q: What's our proposed mechanism for detecting errors made by AI "drivers" and enforcing improvement?
> What's our proposed mechanism for detecting errors made by AI "drivers" and enforcing improvement?
Lawsuits by the families of the fallen?
Have be a big lawsuits though — an 80 year old taken out by a robocar is just “the cost of doing business” so there would have to be multiple school busses on fire to make a dent.
Except we all know that that's a truly terrible way to persuade corporations (with deep pockets, lots of lawyers, and even more lobbyists) to do the right thing, isn't it?
I didn't say "best driver" I said better than a human - even an average human.
I'll copy/paste something I wrote before:
The computer would have to be 99.99999% reliable to simply match humans.
The accident rate is around 74 per 100 million miles (and fatalities is 1.13).
It's unclear exactly how to turn that into a percentage, but no matter how you do it it's quite high.
Say an accident takes 5 minutes, and people drive 30 miles/hour. Then that works out to 99.999% for humans. If you use the numbers for fatalities then it's 99.99999%.
I.e. 99.99999% of the time, as whole across all [US] humans, people drive in a way that does not cause a fatality.
Do you know any computers that can simply run with 5 9's of reliability? Never mind actually do something complicated?
Your line of reasoning (which is very common on this topic) is just fascinating to me.
You start with the assumption that it's possible to build something almost perfect, far better than we have today. Then you proceed to say that if we had this thing it would make life much better than today. Therefore we should work hard to build this thing.
I mean, if you replace "self-driving cars" with "anti-gravity technology", your line of reasoning can be applied just the same. But nobody is pouring billions into anti gravity startups?
No, it doesn't have to be 'almost perfect'. Significantly better than what we have now (people with emotions and imperfect decision-making, ranging from 19 year-old newbie drivers, 45 year old over-confident CEOs with their SUVs driving in the city to 82 year old drivers who can barely walk so would rather drive) is already a HUGE improvement.
"self-driving cars is" not the same as "anti-gravity technology". People - including many innocent people - get killed every day because of reckless driving or human mistakes. People-driven cars also needs more infrastructure - more signs, more roadblocks / infrastructure, cluttering up the city, making it less human-friendly. Cars clog up the city, because people don't want to drive too far to work.
Concerning safety and making cities more livable, I only see upsides for autonomous cars. People can work in their cars coming from outside the city. The cars are safer and more reliable. There's less cluttering in the city (e.g. an intersection with 10 signs for each corner), because cars can also communicate in non-visual ways.
Plus we've made significant headway and it's not a fantasy anymore.
"anti-gravity technology"... is just a random technology. A solution looking for problems to solve, I suppose. With positive and negative consequences.
> I'm saying, an AI significantly better than what humans can do today, is just as much a fantasy as anti-gravity technology.
I think this is a key thing where we have differing opinions. I believe an AI taught to drive safely will be significantly better than humans at it. It's not a general purpose AI, just one that is taught to be better at driving. An AI doesn't get distracted as easily. They don't look to the sides for 2 seconds while driving 125 mph on the freeway. They don't check their emails while on a busy city road. They don't need 1-2 seconds to react to a baby stroller emerging from a line of parked cars.
My mind has slowly accepting the idea that "specific purpose AI" is already here. Working with an "AI-infused" coding assistant (Github Copilot), it took me a few weeks to get used to. But now I feel it can complete some of my coding assignments at a junior coder level (good effort, but I still need to check the work, sometimes it's non-sense, but many times it's pretty good). I can already off-load some of my routine work to this assistant.
> an AI taught to drive safely will be significantly better than humans at it.
That would depend on which human you have in mind. Some are 100 x more dangerous than others. (See the link below.) Or 100 x safer depending on what you consider normal
You don't happen to know about any statistics about fatalities per 1 billion vehicle-km for (partly) self driving cars?
> Overall, autonomous vehicles (AVs) were involved in more crashes: 9.1 crashes per million miles traveled, compared to 4.1 for conventional cars. However, compared to injuries experienced in traditional vehicle collisions, the ones involving injury were minor.
"Significantly better than what we have now" is the hard problem to fix.
We can fix autonomous driving today if we give them dedicated roads not shared with humans (no cars, no bikes, no pedestrians). Works perfectly fine with dedicated tunnels under cities.
An emotional and imperfect decision-making 19 years old can pass a driving exam where they drive around for 45 minutes in a mixed traffic environment without the inspector being forced to take control of the car. This is kind of absolute minimum standard is one that autonomous cars struggle with, especially when people try to make it cheap by removing radar and lidar.
What we have made slight headway on is that under very strict environments, with more restrictions on the driving than human drivers has to follow, with expensive sensors, and with a extremely good access to maps and information, then some autonomous transportation is possible. They still causes accidents and people will still get killed. It is debatable if they will kill less people than if human drove under similar restricted environment with access to equally expensive hardware and information, but it is some progress.
Couldn’t agree more. The quest for self-driving cars seems to be a capitalistic endeavor to offer the convenience of chilling in your car, and platform for all the services one could consume in the time they’d otherwise be driving.
If safety was the first principle, then traffic science and urban planning would lead the way until systems are simple enough for self driving cars to take over. It doesn’t seem we are in the place (in the US) where this type of private-public collaboration can take place at meaningful scale.
I’m not knocking all of the brilliant work that has been done but peddling self-driving cars for safety (not saying OP is doing that) just seems like a version of “making the world better (to be rich).”
The problem with autonomous driving is if you were to swap all cars on the road to autonomous ones and banned pedestrians and cyclists except for traffic light controlled crossings, it would go swimmingly.
Barring that, it's absolutely impossible. It's not a kind of problem where more powerful hardware in five or ten years will just magically solve it.
Cyclists, pedestrians but even cars in a parking -- it's not just a moving object, it's a human giving clues which we can read based on experience. You are veering into full artificial vision if you want to read this.
> The problem with autonomous driving is if you were to swap all cars on the road to autonomous ones and banned pedestrians and cyclists except for traffic light controlled crossings, it would go swimmingly
Would it? Teslas, the cars with most widely deployed autonomous driving system (unlike say Waymo which is still geographically fenced), get confused by regular things such as lights (stop lights getting interpreted as a red light) and vehicles in front.
More importantly, if the robo car IS ACTUALLY safer than average human drivers (which is a stupidly low bar because that includes drunk and distracted driving), but has extremely weird, unpredictable failure modes like suddenly driving off a bridge with no warning 1 out of 1,000,000 times, how safe do you feel riding in this car? People don't like working with systems that have utterly inscrutable error conditions. The devil you know is much better.
I've heard it said the single best thing that could be done for airline safety is getting rid of pilots since most crashes are the result of pilot error. Then ask yourself if you would get on a plane without anyone flying it.
Driving is one of the most dangerous activities people undertake on a regular basis, yet we are all numb to the risk since it's just normal. Changing a major variable in the risk profile of driving by introducing autonomous cars is a big deal since the failure modes are so foreign.
I think the autonomous vehicle resources should be more focused in the short term in making "uncrashable" cars as we're a long way off from true autonomy. Systems like automatic emergency braking that live in the background and act when the driver is making a serious error to prevent or dramatically reduce the impact of an event the car is certain will occur.
> I've heard it said the single best thing that could be done for airline safety is getting rid of pilots since most crashes are the result of pilot error. Then ask yourself if you would get on a plane without anyone flying it.
The first one? Probably not. But going but a lot of comments here and else where, there are plenty of other people willing to be early adopters. People already do some pretty stupid shit with Tesla Autopilot.
5 years in with statistics to show? Yes, I would.
Of course, that logic of removing pilots could be completely flawed based on the chance that the only reason the pilots failed at all was because they had to step in when the automated systems could not handle the situation.
I love how you asked people to share a smart summary and analysis, but all you got was hackernews comment pontifications. Folks: pretty sure they meant a researched article that takes longer than a poop to write.
The Starsky postmortem 2-parter published on Medium reveals that:
1) true autonomy is worth less than a cup of coffee a day
2) safety isn't sexy
3) nobody knows which features sell.
Why I can’t see autonomous city bus companies. The speed is slow, route is rather short and predefined. April tags or UWB radio location beacons can be placed in cost efficient manner. Every city is screaming loud, that they can’t find enough drivers.
Driving a bus is a tactically complicated job. The rules of the road in a major city are already a little soft. They are doubly so for buses. They park where they must, and sometimes use their size to bully their way in.
I see often dedicated bus lanes around. And sometimes dedicated traffic lights for them. It’s difficult job, but that automatically brings the need for automation. I don’t know much people who want this low pay extremely high stress job. Some blue collar workers went for subway train driver’s career. It’s much easier.
That is (or can be) what's called bus rapid transit - basically build a train line but use busses.
They could probably be significantly automated, but I don't know that the cost would be worth it, as even the best ones still interact with normal traffic at times.
I think it’s already automated when the line planing was good. However some places like Munich have terrible delays and all the strange things not allowing getting on time by subway.
Let's not forget the passengers. When can you go, not go? What if someone gets in a fight? What if someone is sick? Can you recognize if someone is trying to flag you down?
Bit of a challenge to deal with them with software.
We don't even see automated tram companies. The thing moves on rails, has a dedicated traffic light and in an event of accident the driver is never guilty (at least where I live).
I think what you're asking for is called "metro". Trams still have to share the infrastructure with cars and pedestrians, meaning all the downsides, with none of the upsides people funding autonomous transit find enticing.
I think that's mostly due to the fact that the small market size makes it not quite worth it. With something like self riving the development costs are huge so you better capture a sizeable market.
There are tons of fully automated metros/subways (usually the prerequisites are grade separation and platform screen doors to minimise the risk of accidents). Multiple lines in Paris, the DLR in London, Copenhagen metro, ffs a line on the Sofia (in Bulgaria, the poorest country in the EU) metro.
There's a street near my house where I've seen the driver get out and start knocking on doors to find the owner of a particular car ! It's a narrow windy road with unrestricted parking, the drivers do an amazing job given the circumstances.
This. I won't believe in autonomous driving for consumer cars until I see a bus or truck that works with it first. They are much higher value (especially trucks), so, once it works, why not start there?
> Of course there are many lines that are but the majority. Even boring subway lines not intercity.
Many subway lines are automated. It just turns out that it is not cost effective to move between Level 2 (driverless, but the driver operates the doors and drives the train if needed) and Level 4 (fully unattended).
This is because the cost of the driver is less than the cost of having the system be fully autonomous. The Victoria Line in London, for instance, has been automatically operated since 1968. The driver just opens and closes the doors, and handles any unexpected situations.
To be fair I imagine there's no push to do so since they require someone present regardless. If something does go wrong or very unusual happens you don't want to drive someone there with potential hundreds of passengers stranded or valuable cargo blocking an artery.
> The speed is slow, route is rather short and predefined.
Not so for buses that serve rural communities. Where I live (admittedly an edge case) there are free-roaming ponies and cows that randomly create unpredictable obstructions and collision hazards.
I kinda agree that buses, metro, trains, could be automated for the benefit of not having to find workers.
However, I do think the handful of jobs do still make a difference. I recently visited a country which has conductors in each tram (so a driver and a separate conductor who goes around selling/checking the tickets while it drives). Everything else in the country is pretty much modern, always-online, and the majority of people pay with their phones - yet I still found it nice to see those simple, cheap jobs not be automated away. I'd much rather hold my phone to a thing and say thanks when that thing is a human, it's much nicer for me.
We lose touch to others so much already, why automate away perfectly efficient jobs? I haven't been in a bus that was late because the bus driver messed up.
TL;DR: I'd much rather have things done by humans as long as the machines replacing them aren't much better. Those are people who rely on those jobs to survive, and I don't see a point in replacing them.
"TL;DR: I'd much rather have things done by humans as long as the machines replacing them aren't much better. Those are people who rely on those jobs to survive, and I don't see a point in replacing them."
I'd rather have universal basic income and a strong social safety net, so no one needs jobs to survive.
Automating away the jobs that people don't want to do is a step towards making that more economically feasible.
> The company joined the Y Combinator accelerator's 2016 batch with the initial intent of building self-driving shuttles for use on college campuses.
As a change from constantly drumming up YC founders and companies who do make it (some usually off of similarly inflated valuations), it'd be interesting to see if they do talk about just how and why unicorn startups like Embark (seemingly) lose their way.
Since Sequoia is still holding their Embark shares, and the company’s enterprise value is zero, here’s effectively a chance to invest at a seed round valuation together with the famed Sequoia.
Funny how that would have sounded like a very exciting opportunity just 12 months ago, and now you can’t find any takers.
Does anyone have good examples of pre-product, pre-revenue companies going public actually working out, especially more recently?
I know access to capital is a big factor in this decision, but especially post Sarbanes-Oxley I have the feeling the forces against finding product-market fit are so incredibly high for public companies. Having seen first hand what that really means: The implicit taxes on morale of regulation, compliance, disclosure duties, transparency, auditing, bureaucracy etc. are so gigantic that I have a really hard time imagining the viability of this. I've found it's pretty hard to attract high freedom high responsibility talker-doers to a public company for those reasons.
That's certainly a driving factor behind startups staying private for longer than ever and continuously rising VC round amounts, but I already found it's hard enough for a profitable company with product-market fit to go public and still keep their top talent that I don't want to imagine what that feels like pre-revenue.
Sarbanes-Oxley was a response to generations of deliberate malfeasance by C-level executives across all market sectors.
Corporations in general continue to show record profits, year after year, despite all this kwetching about "regulation, compliance, disclosure duties, transparency, auditing, bureaucracy etc."
The religion of capitalism seems to have chosen "whining" as its liturgical music, while still raking in the cash hand-over-fist, looting our society and our economy, and destroying our climate and our ecosystem.
How humiliating for humanity to be destroyed by a group of whingers!
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 166 ms ] threadBased on what specifically, at what cost once launched, how much will they charge, how much will the cheapest non-autonomous competitor cost, etc?
Anyone who needs it “just in time” loads it on a truck and the ones who don’t throw it on a train, generally speaking. In order for them to compete they would have to be somewhere in the middle price wise which, theoretically, shouldn’t be all that hard if they don’t have the cost of a driver. Minus the costs of all the trucks that are going to get disabled once people figure out they can be easily hijacked out in the middle of Texas.
I’d imagine this will be a lot harder now since they won’t have VC money to subsidize their business model and have to compete in a highly regulated market where the DOT will shut them down in a heartbeat if they get up to the usual Silicon Valley tricks.
They shouldn’t. Valuations are analogised to market cap. This is almost more idiotic than the crypto convention.
Multiplying the price paid for Series F preferred stock by the number of common shares is asinine. They’re different securities. In a bill market, the mistake is subtle. In a bear market, the lie is revealed.
They shouldn't be, not as a general rule anyway.
Though as a general principle, what happened here was just, "some rich people thought <company> would be worth a lot of money, and then they were wrong." Nothing super shocking here, obviously that will happen all the time.
How can you work on something as nascent as autonomous trucks for six years and not come up with even a single unique idea?
Is it like CVML was in a desert for some decade(s) where there were no big advances, but lots of hope and unrealized claims of some impending breakthrough, only for lots of money to be dumped into it, and companies to be led astray? Are we waiting for some major improvement in algorithms, or hardware, like GPU progress, and things will suddenly take off?
Or are there fundamental difficulties that are startups (and their researchers) keep banging their heads against thinking that they're the ones to be able to solve it? Or just that they need to go through the same mistakes over and over but make little progress?
It seems to have been a decade and what, $20B poured into this, but we are really not much closer to the goal? (and I'm not even sure whether we mean solving the AV problem, much less achieving a viable business model) Sure Waymo is driving in San Francisco, but that seems like a very handheld single example.
Looks like, that some problems can’t be solved just throwing money at them. Modern hardware is light years away from the one in Prometheus Project. Radars, lidars and cameras are superior now. Heck one can design and build dedicated ASIC for cheap nowadays. Maybe taking Nvidia Drive and tweaking it is just not enough to get there.
These modern algorithms do not try to implement general AI. They do not work with 15 years of knowledge. They just recognize some patterns with no understanding of what they’re are looking at. It’s a different and easier approach but I think it has some severe limits that will never be overcome.
To me it’s like a software programmer that copies Stack Overflow snippets but doesn’t really understand programming. They get only so far
It's not like humans get better at driving with each year of driving. Some become more reckless, people become old, some might think they can have some drinks before sitting behind the wheel and it takes 15 years to get 15 years of experience. What about that over-confident 19 year old who wants to show off their "skills"?
And 15 years of one driver's perception of safe driving is nothing compared to swarm intelligence of AI for driving. If you have 10,000 autonomous vehicles driving for a single day and combine that data at the end of that day to improve driving, that's collectively over 25 years (assuming the human equivalent drives each day of the year) of "knowledge" in one single day. Every day.
Being a father with 2 small kids who drives their kids by bike to kindergarten / school - with a large section of that road is shared by SUVs, vans and bikes (while each side is blocked by parked cars or narrow garage exits built into the building), I can't wait for safe, autonomous vehicles to become the norm.
You shouldn't, there is no AI capable of doing better than a human, and there does not appear to be any currently known method of creating one.
> I can't wait for safe, autonomous vehicles to become the norm.
I wish I could tell you different, but the reality is you could wait the rest of your life and it would not happen.
I mean, you aren't wrong. But we can almost certainly do better than where we currently are.
We accept a not insignificant risk by driving ourselves and riding in cars driven by humans. Happily, it's not hard to estimate the risk that a machine-controlled car poses by letting them roam around. We can compare that with human-controlled cars and start shifting between controllers according to their risk profiles. I'd much rather have a machine-controlled car than a human asleep at the wheel.
In the mid 1970's, computers playing chess had in 20 years gone from being utterly trivial to beat if you know the rules, to easily beating amateurs and playing mildly interesting games against top humans like Greenblatt vs Bobby Fischer in '77.
And it was clear that the power of the chess computers would keep scaling with Moore's law as they could look further into the future and store more of a complete opening book.
In the late 80's the first versions of Deep Blue were playing serious games against Kasparov under standard time control, even though it took until 1997 to beat him - one can argue that Kasparov was also still developing during this time, since his rating peaked in 1999.
Can you find a citation from after 1980 from someone with a bit of understanding of chess and computers, saying that computers would never beat humans?
I don’t care that much if it’s better than the best driver, I care if it’s better than the driver checking their phone, blowing through stop signs, etc. As a cyclist, I reckon that it’s the most selfish 10% of drivers that represent 90% of the risk; if they’re replaced by self-driving I’d feel safer even if it also means the good drivers aren’t quite as good.
statistics…
And my phone just had a weather alert. -35c tomorrow, possible -50c with wind chill. I'm sure I'll see not a single bicycle ... but definitely a few snow mobiles. They are ridiculously dangerous and polluting, but at least they aren't cars.
Cars are pretty safe for their drivers; they are just very dangerous for everybody else. So, if you split 'passenger deaths' by 'vehicle category' you're going to have a lot of situations where a car hits a bus/cyclist/pedestrian, the driver survives, and whoever they hit does not. This creates misleading statistics.
We have a(n imperfect) mechanism to catch and penalise those drivers.
An ex-colleague of mine was incapable of sticking to the speed limit (she drove me round Paris once, that was an exciting ride...). Eventually she collected enough speeding tickets [in the UK] that she was within one ticket of losing her driving licence completely. At that point, she [finally!] slowed down.
Q: What's our proposed mechanism for detecting errors made by AI "drivers" and enforcing improvement?
Lawsuits by the families of the fallen?
Have be a big lawsuits though — an 80 year old taken out by a robocar is just “the cost of doing business” so there would have to be multiple school busses on fire to make a dent.
Umm, maybe.
Except we all know that that's a truly terrible way to persuade corporations (with deep pockets, lots of lawyers, and even more lobbyists) to do the right thing, isn't it?
I'll copy/paste something I wrote before:
The computer would have to be 99.99999% reliable to simply match humans.
The accident rate is around 74 per 100 million miles (and fatalities is 1.13).
It's unclear exactly how to turn that into a percentage, but no matter how you do it it's quite high.
Say an accident takes 5 minutes, and people drive 30 miles/hour. Then that works out to 99.999% for humans. If you use the numbers for fatalities then it's 99.99999%.
I.e. 99.99999% of the time, as whole across all [US] humans, people drive in a way that does not cause a fatality.
Do you know any computers that can simply run with 5 9's of reliability? Never mind actually do something complicated?
You start with the assumption that it's possible to build something almost perfect, far better than we have today. Then you proceed to say that if we had this thing it would make life much better than today. Therefore we should work hard to build this thing.
I mean, if you replace "self-driving cars" with "anti-gravity technology", your line of reasoning can be applied just the same. But nobody is pouring billions into anti gravity startups?
"self-driving cars is" not the same as "anti-gravity technology". People - including many innocent people - get killed every day because of reckless driving or human mistakes. People-driven cars also needs more infrastructure - more signs, more roadblocks / infrastructure, cluttering up the city, making it less human-friendly. Cars clog up the city, because people don't want to drive too far to work.
Concerning safety and making cities more livable, I only see upsides for autonomous cars. People can work in their cars coming from outside the city. The cars are safer and more reliable. There's less cluttering in the city (e.g. an intersection with 10 signs for each corner), because cars can also communicate in non-visual ways.
Plus we've made significant headway and it's not a fantasy anymore.
"anti-gravity technology"... is just a random technology. A solution looking for problems to solve, I suppose. With positive and negative consequences.
If cars drive above people instead of next to them that would also solve that problem.
People get injured and killed every day because they don't have anti-gravity tech and are trying to lift or move heavy objects.
You can make all the same arguments.
And most of the "people are stupid" problems with cars are better solved by other tech like driver monitoring - Volvo is already deploying this.
Self driving cars/buses is just a fairytale used by Tesla/Uber/etc. tech bros to try and defend their valuations.
I think this is a key thing where we have differing opinions. I believe an AI taught to drive safely will be significantly better than humans at it. It's not a general purpose AI, just one that is taught to be better at driving. An AI doesn't get distracted as easily. They don't look to the sides for 2 seconds while driving 125 mph on the freeway. They don't check their emails while on a busy city road. They don't need 1-2 seconds to react to a baby stroller emerging from a line of parked cars.
My mind has slowly accepting the idea that "specific purpose AI" is already here. Working with an "AI-infused" coding assistant (Github Copilot), it took me a few weeks to get used to. But now I feel it can complete some of my coding assignments at a junior coder level (good effort, but I still need to check the work, sometimes it's non-sense, but many times it's pretty good). I can already off-load some of my routine work to this assistant.
That would depend on which human you have in mind. Some are 100 x more dangerous than others. (See the link below.) Or 100 x safer depending on what you consider normal
You don't happen to know about any statistics about fatalities per 1 billion vehicle-km for (partly) self driving cars?
To compare with https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic...
Edit: i found:
> Overall, autonomous vehicles (AVs) were involved in more crashes: 9.1 crashes per million miles traveled, compared to 4.1 for conventional cars. However, compared to injuries experienced in traditional vehicle collisions, the ones involving injury were minor.
https://1800injured.care/self-driving-car-accident-statistic...
If that's reliable info, then they'll eventually get better than an average human in the US (or are already).
And in some countries, they could be an amazing improvement -- see the insane amount of fatalities, in some countries (Wikipedia link above).
We can fix autonomous driving today if we give them dedicated roads not shared with humans (no cars, no bikes, no pedestrians). Works perfectly fine with dedicated tunnels under cities.
An emotional and imperfect decision-making 19 years old can pass a driving exam where they drive around for 45 minutes in a mixed traffic environment without the inspector being forced to take control of the car. This is kind of absolute minimum standard is one that autonomous cars struggle with, especially when people try to make it cheap by removing radar and lidar.
What we have made slight headway on is that under very strict environments, with more restrictions on the driving than human drivers has to follow, with expensive sensors, and with a extremely good access to maps and information, then some autonomous transportation is possible. They still causes accidents and people will still get killed. It is debatable if they will kill less people than if human drove under similar restricted environment with access to equally expensive hardware and information, but it is some progress.
If safety was the first principle, then traffic science and urban planning would lead the way until systems are simple enough for self driving cars to take over. It doesn’t seem we are in the place (in the US) where this type of private-public collaboration can take place at meaningful scale.
I’m not knocking all of the brilliant work that has been done but peddling self-driving cars for safety (not saying OP is doing that) just seems like a version of “making the world better (to be rich).”
Barring that, it's absolutely impossible. It's not a kind of problem where more powerful hardware in five or ten years will just magically solve it.
Cyclists, pedestrians but even cars in a parking -- it's not just a moving object, it's a human giving clues which we can read based on experience. You are veering into full artificial vision if you want to read this.
Would it? Teslas, the cars with most widely deployed autonomous driving system (unlike say Waymo which is still geographically fenced), get confused by regular things such as lights (stop lights getting interpreted as a red light) and vehicles in front.
It's simply almost impossible to guarantee, and convince society's institutions, a computer car will perform better than a human.
And if a human still has to be sitting in the driver's seat paying attention?
The financial justification flies out of the window.
Driving is one of the most dangerous activities people undertake on a regular basis, yet we are all numb to the risk since it's just normal. Changing a major variable in the risk profile of driving by introducing autonomous cars is a big deal since the failure modes are so foreign.
I think the autonomous vehicle resources should be more focused in the short term in making "uncrashable" cars as we're a long way off from true autonomy. Systems like automatic emergency braking that live in the background and act when the driver is making a serious error to prevent or dramatically reduce the impact of an event the car is certain will occur.
The first one? Probably not. But going but a lot of comments here and else where, there are plenty of other people willing to be early adopters. People already do some pretty stupid shit with Tesla Autopilot.
5 years in with statistics to show? Yes, I would.
Of course, that logic of removing pilots could be completely flawed based on the chance that the only reason the pilots failed at all was because they had to step in when the automated systems could not handle the situation.
I'm interested in this too.
City buses will be the last to go automated.
They could probably be significantly automated, but I don't know that the cost would be worth it, as even the best ones still interact with normal traffic at times.
Shouldn't that be automated first?
Bit of a challenge to deal with them with software.
The difference is probably that they don't have to interact with unknown factors (humans in cars).
They have to slalom around badly parked cars, delivery vehicles, roadblocks, take alternative routes, &c. dozens of time per day
Many subway lines are automated. It just turns out that it is not cost effective to move between Level 2 (driverless, but the driver operates the doors and drives the train if needed) and Level 4 (fully unattended).
This is because the cost of the driver is less than the cost of having the system be fully autonomous. The Victoria Line in London, for instance, has been automatically operated since 1968. The driver just opens and closes the doors, and handles any unexpected situations.
Not so for buses that serve rural communities. Where I live (admittedly an edge case) there are free-roaming ponies and cows that randomly create unpredictable obstructions and collision hazards.
However, I do think the handful of jobs do still make a difference. I recently visited a country which has conductors in each tram (so a driver and a separate conductor who goes around selling/checking the tickets while it drives). Everything else in the country is pretty much modern, always-online, and the majority of people pay with their phones - yet I still found it nice to see those simple, cheap jobs not be automated away. I'd much rather hold my phone to a thing and say thanks when that thing is a human, it's much nicer for me.
We lose touch to others so much already, why automate away perfectly efficient jobs? I haven't been in a bus that was late because the bus driver messed up.
TL;DR: I'd much rather have things done by humans as long as the machines replacing them aren't much better. Those are people who rely on those jobs to survive, and I don't see a point in replacing them.
I'd rather have universal basic income and a strong social safety net, so no one needs jobs to survive.
Automating away the jobs that people don't want to do is a step towards making that more economically feasible.
As a change from constantly drumming up YC founders and companies who do make it (some usually off of similarly inflated valuations), it'd be interesting to see if they do talk about just how and why unicorn startups like Embark (seemingly) lose their way.
That's not to say YC is particularly at fault.
"... completely reimagined the car battery ..."
https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/ohm-yc-s15-is-making-a-ligh...
Funny how that would have sounded like a very exciting opportunity just 12 months ago, and now you can’t find any takers.
I know access to capital is a big factor in this decision, but especially post Sarbanes-Oxley I have the feeling the forces against finding product-market fit are so incredibly high for public companies. Having seen first hand what that really means: The implicit taxes on morale of regulation, compliance, disclosure duties, transparency, auditing, bureaucracy etc. are so gigantic that I have a really hard time imagining the viability of this. I've found it's pretty hard to attract high freedom high responsibility talker-doers to a public company for those reasons.
That's certainly a driving factor behind startups staying private for longer than ever and continuously rising VC round amounts, but I already found it's hard enough for a profitable company with product-market fit to go public and still keep their top talent that I don't want to imagine what that feels like pre-revenue.
Corporations in general continue to show record profits, year after year, despite all this kwetching about "regulation, compliance, disclosure duties, transparency, auditing, bureaucracy etc."
The religion of capitalism seems to have chosen "whining" as its liturgical music, while still raking in the cash hand-over-fist, looting our society and our economy, and destroying our climate and our ecosystem.
How humiliating for humanity to be destroyed by a group of whingers!
Moderna
https://unlimitedhangout.com/2021/10/investigative-reports/m...
their share price is up and down like bitcoin....