
Alphabet exec says self-driving cars 'have gone through a lot of hype' - apsec112
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/23/alphabet-exec-admits-google-overhyped-self-driving-cars.html
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puranjay
I often wonder if all these projections about self driving, VR, and before
that, 3D printing, are essentially wish fulfillment for and from a biased
audience. I'd _want_ to say that self driving cars are just around the corner,
because that's the future I want to live in.

In that case, I wonder what it says about our present reality. The need to
make such gloriously optimistic projections about self driving cars
essentially indicates that driving isn't fun to a lot of people (ergo, car
makers are making boring cars), or that commuting is too unpleasant (ergo,
city planners have been slacking)

~~~
mettamage
I don't see VR and 3D printing as wish fulfillment. While they're both
relatively niche (from my consumerist perspective), they do fulfill roles.

VR is good for therapeutic immersive reasons, for example [1]. And 3D
printing, well, shooting rockets into the stratosphere, for example [2].

IMO VR and 3D printing are real, albeit niche. Self-driving cars aren't fully
there yet.

[1] [https://www.geekwire.com/2018/snowworld-melts-away-pain-
burn...](https://www.geekwire.com/2018/snowworld-melts-away-pain-burn-
patients-using-virtual-reality-snowballs/)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSAB2KNgVso](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSAB2KNgVso)

~~~
mumblemumble
I'd still say VR and 3D printing are (historically) overhyped. Within their
respective niches, they're very effective technologies. But there's also this
idea they're going to change the consumer landscape, because everyone's going
to have one in their home, and use it all the time.

e.g., my experience with consumer-grade 3D printing is that it still kind of
sucks. It makes home fabrication marginally more convenient than it was
without 3D printing, and a lot more aggravating. Even with the rise of gig
economy 3D printing services, which have made me a lot happier by removing the
hassle of actually operating a 3D printer and giving me access to much better
equipment than I'd ever buy for myself, I find that the best executed prints
that I order still require significant manual finishing time. It's still just
an extremely far cry from the "You'll never need stuff shipped to you because
you can just print it at home" hype that surrounded the technology 5 or 10
years back.

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riantogo
FWIW Here is my anecdotal experience. I have be driving a Tesla Model 3 for 1
year now. I don't have their Full Self Driving package but had added on
Autopilot (adaptive cruise control plus lane keeping). 75% of my commute (and
lot more on trips) is the car driving itself. I'm of course ready to take over
any moment but with all the help from the sensors it is definitely much safer
than depending on my senses alone. Over the months the self driving has become
more natural, reliable and safer. Over the next several years it will only
keep getting better. It has a huge positive impact on reducing driver fatigue.

I know that the topic at hand is about L5 fully autonomous, but wanted to
share that though robotaxis are still some ways out, big benefits to personal
driving is already here. From here things will rapidly evolve towards the
ideal state.

~~~
scott_s
What do you still do manually?

An important concept pointed out in these conversations before is that human-
in-the-loop driving is a moving target. That is, it's possible we may never
get to the point of fully automated driving because we may discover that the
safest method is humans doing some small fraction, and automated systems doing
the rest. Since we have partial automation now, and will continue to in the
future, we're not asking "When will automated systems replace human drivers?"
but "When will fully automated systems replace humans using partially
automated systems?" Because we're constantly improving the partially automated
systems, we're constantly raising the bar that a fully automated system needs
to meet.

~~~
vl
> What do you still do manually?

If there is no car in front of you, stop and start at lights and
intersections. Turn (while with FSD package it takes highway ramps
automatically, it’s not reliable on any complex highway intersection). In
heavy traffic, you have to change lanes manually, automatic system is not
aggressive enough.

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kp98
In 2013 Google said it would have autonomous cars by 2018

In 2017 Google said the cars would be available in months according to the
article.

Last year Elon Musk said there would be 1mm robo taxis by the end of 2020.

These corporations leverage the public's lack of understanding to spin a tale
to investors and the market. Then, this tale got co-opted by politicians like
Andrew Yang who say 4 million truckers will be out of work in 5-10 years, so
we need to vote for him + UBI to protect us from the threat of AI in the
future.

The view I take is that planes have pilots for a variety of reasons, many of
which are not related directly to controlling a plane's path. We have 30 years
of data on flight and flights have fewer inputs to analyze, yet we still keep
pilots around because of the added sense of security and the utility pilots
serve on edge cases.

I think self driving cars will be very similar and the future where no one
drives probably will not exist for a long time.

Another thing I find interesting, the retort most bring to driverless cars is
that they will prevent needless deaths, but say for example America has 40,000
deaths due to car crashes per year, and 20,000 are preventable, but autonomous
vehicles malfunctioning causes 10,000 deaths. So a net result of 30,000 deaths
with autonomous cars. In terms of death the result is positive, but now you
are relinquishing control over your experience. Someone with excellent driving
skills, who never drinks and drives, and who follows the speed limit, faces a
way lower risk of death driving. However, self driving cars introduce new
risks to that individual, and for that reason I do not I believe the optimal
combination for drivers will be the same as for pilots: machinery + individual
control.

~~~
ehsankia
To be fair, Google did have autonomous cars by 2018, including fully driveless
ones, and available to select public users.

So in that sense, they didn't lie, but the scale of the roll out has been much
smaller and slower than what most people expected. I don't think Google
specifically made comments about the scale. Elon on the otherhand did mention
big numbers, which is a different story.

~~~
kp98
Thats a good point, you're right Google does have at least some version of
autonomous

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wil421
Self driving is way over hyped and lots of smart people bought into it. A few
years ago I kept commenting about it not being around the corner. A few people
compared my comments to “Less space than nomad.”

We’ve done the same to AI, what someone called AI a decade ago has been
reinvented as AGI. We are doing the same to self-driving cars. “What we really
meant by self-driving is self-driving in perfect conditions and normal
intersections. You’re thinking of autonomous self-driving or Level X self
driving.” All I’ve seen is driver assist tech improve.

~~~
mikestew
_A few people compared my comments to “Less space than nomad.”_

That's because some people should think harder about their comparisons before
they verbalize them. The quoted comment poo-pooed an existing product that you
could buy with a mere trip to one's local Apple retailer.

Poo-pooing the hype of something that hasn't even been invented yet? To take
take the opposite side of that argument with any fervor strikes me as arguing
for the sake of it. I mean, until I can ride in one, we could go on all day
about when they're likely to appear, couldn't we?

~~~
catalogia
> _That 's because some people should think harder about their comparisons
> before they verbalize them. The quoted comment poo-pooed an existing product
> that you could buy with a mere trip to one's local Apple retailer._

cmdrtaco was also criticizing the product as it existed at the time, not the
product it would evolve into which, in retrospect, made his criticism seem
ridiculous. He was criticizing the first revision which had poor connectivity
(firewire only) and little storage (5GB on launch, 10GB later.) The fourth
revision, the one that actually became a run-away success, had 20-60GB of
storage and was the first to have full USB support.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod#/media/File:Ipod_sales_pe...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod#/media/File:Ipod_sales_per_quarter.svg)

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tnecniv
I do a lot of this stuff, and have friends who did their PhD theses on
different engineering challenges in self-driving cars.

Everybody agrees we'll figure out autonomous cars sooner rather than later,
but nobody thought a 2020 timetable was going to happen. It's undeniable that
we've made huge advances since the first DARPA challenge, but there's a long
way to go before we get them to be sufficiently robust.

~~~
ProAm
30 years

~~~
tnecniv
That'd be my guess too. I'm not sure if we'd be able to do 100% of off highway
driving, but I imagine we'll be able to go cross country by then.

~~~
kmonsen
The joke is that it has always been, and will always be, 30 years until it's
here.

Also true for other things such robot assistants etc.

~~~
pintxo
Timescales: [https://xkcd.com/678/](https://xkcd.com/678/)

------
schmichael
What I wonder is how much of self-driving cars failure to deliver on earlier
timelines and roadmaps is attributable to AI. If it is will we see similar
blowback in other AI-related endeavors and yet another cooling of AI as has
befallen all past surges in AI progress?

My understanding is its not the sensor or control technology to blame for the
pace of progress which makes me think AI isn't as capable of learning the
extremely complicated task of driving as expected.

~~~
murph-almighty
> If it is will we see similar blowback in other AI-related endeavors and yet
> another cooling of AI as has befallen all past surges in AI progress?

Anecdotal: I've noticed a lot of talk about ML/AI at my place of work is very
hand wavey and talked about by business analysts who don't know what they're
talking about. My friends at other places of work see this too.

I wouldn't be surprised if there was a large-scale loss of faith in AI simply
because too many people tried to half-assedly leverage "using AI" for a
promotion.

~~~
2muchcoffeeman
I did the Andrew Ng course because even technical people were talking about it
in a really hand wavy way.

I feel that even the names ‘Artificial Intelligence’ and ‘Machine Learning’
were chosen as a marketing ploy.

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carapace
(Apologies to anyone who's heard this before.)

The self-driving car (or "auto-auto") is a kind of sci-fi fetish.

What I want, and what could be built today I think, is a self-driving golf
cart, covered in nerf and airbags, that doesn't go any faster than five or ten
mph. It can do things like take seniors to and from the pharmacy or doctor
appointments safely.

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lalos
What I don't understand about self-driving cars is that once all cars are
'self-driving' enabled then there won't be a need for the complicated AI and
computer vision work since if all cars have the tech might as well just have a
standard where they are constantly communicating their position with each
other (add signs and traffic lights to the mix). The challenge then would be
to how to efficiently route all cars simultaneously. I have the opinion that
all this investment in the long run will be discarded and will only be useful
in the transition period where roads are shared by humans and algorithms.
Thoughts? Is this future vision shared by people involved in the self-driving
world?

~~~
eclipxe
It can take decades for a competent company to migrate database systems. What
you're describing is migrating _every car on the road, everywhere_ to self
driving/communication tech. That will take 50-75+ years IMO.

~~~
lalos
True, you could minimize the requirements of self-driving systems by making
license plates carry obligatory modules that transmit information to self-
driving cars. The train of though is that this is an area where working
together might have a bigger pay-off.

~~~
scott_s
Those modules will sometimes stop working, and then you're back to having the
solve something that looks a lot like the current problem.

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scarmig
This is one of those unintentionally hilarious headlines.

~~~
mbreese
It used to be funnier... it changed between the time I saw the headline and
clicked on the link. For the curious, it used to read: "Waymo says self-
driving cars have been overhyped."

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pwinnski
...by Waymo, among others!

~~~
aantix
I think Tesla ultimately wins this battle. They have the real-time driving
conditions and reactions being reported for likely every tricky intersection
in the U.S.

That’s a big competitive advantage compared to Waymo’s simulations and paid
drivers.

~~~
toast0
Tesla certainly has a lot of real world data on conditions and human behavior.
It remains to be seen if the sensors deployed on their customers' vehicles are
sufficient to the task of self-driving, however. And if they're not, that data
gathering may not turn out to be very useful. Given that they don't have a
system that can avoid stationary firetrucks or gore points, I think it's fair
to say Tesla haven't figured out the requirements yet. There's a meta question
about the privacy aspects of the data gathering and if customers have provided
meaningful consent.

At least Waymo usually gets rearended by other cars as a result of being timid
(except for the time they ran into a bus by being courageous and assuming the
bus would move).

~~~
jerf
TIL: [https://2qibqm39xjt6q46gf1rwo2g1-wpengine.netdna-
ssl.com/wp-...](https://2qibqm39xjt6q46gf1rwo2g1-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-
content/uploads/2016/08/web1_160808_EDH_GoreStreetG_S.jpg) (A graphic defining
what a "gore point" is.) This graphic is from
[https://www.heraldnet.com/news/dont-cross-the-gore-point-
whe...](https://www.heraldnet.com/news/dont-cross-the-gore-point-when-merging-
onto-the-interstate/) , although at least in my browser was shrunk and hard to
read.

I actually thought for a moment that 'gore point' was a dark joke about places
that Teslas tend to hit with their autopilots.

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duhi88
"Five years out"

~~~
dang
I can't find that text in the article. Who are you quoting?

~~~
virmundi
It’s a reference to the general claim about self driving cars, super batteries
that make solar competitive, etc. these things are always just 5 years away
forever.

~~~
dang
It's best not to use quotation marks to make it look like you're quoting
someone when you're not.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20quotation%20marks%20quoting&sort=byDate&type=comment)

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moretai
Don't be a slave to the money then.

