
The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car - bcg1
http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-george-hotz-self-driving-car/
======
jpfr
Prototypical case of the 80/20 rule. He has implemented the happy case. But
that system is nothing people realistically would want to drive their cars.

What he did is impressive. But the results are not that outlandish for a
talented person.

1) Hook up a computer to the CAN-Bus network of the car [1] and attach a bunch
of sensor peripherals.

2) Drive around for some time and record everything to disk.

3) Implement some of the recent ideas from deep reinforcement learing [2,3].
For training, feed the system with the oberservations from test drives and
reward actions that mimick the reactions of actual drivers.

In 2k lines of code he probably does not have a car model that can be used for
path planning [4] (with tire slippage, etc.). So his system will make errors
in emergency situations. Especially since the neural net has never experienced
most emergencies and could not learn the appropriate reactions.

And guess what, emergency situations are the hard part. Driving on a freeway
with visible lane markings is easy. German research projects autonomously
drove on the Autobahn since the 80s [5]. Neural networks were used for the
task since about the same time [6].

[1] [http://www.instructables.com/id/Hack-your-vehicle-CAN-BUS-
wi...](http://www.instructables.com/id/Hack-your-vehicle-CAN-BUS-with-Arduino-
and-Seeed-C/)

[2] [http://arxiv.org/abs/1509.02971](http://arxiv.org/abs/1509.02971)

[3] [http://arxiv.org/abs/1504.00702](http://arxiv.org/abs/1504.00702)

[4]
[http://www.rem2030.de/rem2030-wAssets/docs/downloads/07_Konf...](http://www.rem2030.de/rem2030-wAssets/docs/downloads/07_Konferenzbeitraege/Ruf-
Ziehn-et-al-2014-Evaluation-of-an-Analytic-Model__ICMC2014.pdf)

[5]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_Prometheus_Project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_Prometheus_Project)

[6]
[http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2874&c...](http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2874&context=compsci)

~~~
bcohn91
Why is the first comment on HN minimizing this truly impressive project? Of
course it's not perfect, he's ONE person.

~~~
Aleman360
Because this article reinforces our bizarre cultural notion that one person
deserves all the credit for some innovation.

Nevermind the ridiculous amount of engineering that was required to build all
the tools he's using and the order of magnitude more engineering required to
make this a safe, mass producible product.

But nah, let's just praise the founder, allow him to get rich while we all do
the dirty work.

~~~
wdmeldon
This comment is depressingly cynical. This is probably the single best
definition of "hacking", as the community often refers to it, that I've seen
in a very long time. One guy starts working on something only the biggest
companies in the world dare attempt, throws together a minimal prototype built
on top of existing technology. Just look at the picture of it.

Claims of commercial viability or beating Tesla are a bit ridiculous, but this
is pretty damn amazing.

~~~
cafebeen
I think it's a fair comment given his quote "I know everything there is to
know" and the headline of the article claiming he's "building a self-driving
car by himself". I've always thought the "hacker" community attributed value
to sharing and building off other's work, but maybe times have changed.

~~~
Tepix
Seems obvious to me that the journalist was manipulating what he said which
was that he is deeply familiar with the state of the art of AI tech.

~~~
cafebeen
To expand on that: '“I understand the state-of-the-art papers,” he says. “The
math is simple"', which seems like an attitude of someone without a solid
understanding of ML. But who knows, maybe he's figured out something the rest
of the field hasn't...

------
paragpatelone
"His self-funded experiment could end with Hotz humbly going back to knock on
Google’s door for a job."

The biggest thing here IMO is this is self-funded. Any startup trying to do
what he is doing in this environment would have raised $50 Million, hired
100's of engineers from top notch schools, become accepted in YC, and have
Marc Andreessen, Paul Graham, Sam Altman and all singing their praises.

Kudos to him for being self-funded.

~~~
bgp
Creating 1 job is better than hundreds?

~~~
eterpstra
Well, Hotz did state that, “The truth is that work as we know it in its modern
form has not been around that long, and I kind of want to use AI to abolish
it. I want to take everyone’s jobs. Most people would be happy with that,
especially the ones who don’t like their jobs. Let’s free them of mental
tedium and push that to machines. In the next 10 years, you’ll see a big
segment of the human labor force fall away. In 25 years, AI will be able to do
almost everything a human can do. The last people with jobs will be AI
programmers.”

~~~
zxcvbnmmnbvcxz
Yeah and the world will split in rich and poor people with poor starving.

~~~
noir_lord
What interests me about your argument is the assumption that the "poor
starving" will just sit by and passively accept that.

The reason we don't have an insurrection on our hands _now_ about wealth
disparity is that while the wealth of the super wealthy has accelerated hugely
so has the general living standard of the poor, if (when) the jobs go away
that will no longer be the case and then you are talking about a brutal
escalation into a full insurrection and while the technology and wealth will
be on one side, the last 15 years in the middle east has shown what committed
people with pickups and AK's can do against an on-paper massively superior
opponent.

I just hope the super wealthy are smart enough to see this coming and avoid
it, it would be spectacularly brutal.

------
thedz
> “I understand the state-of-the-art papers,” he says. “The math is simple.
> For the first time in my life, I’m like, ‘I know everything there is to
> know.’ ”

Yep, he's still in his twenties.

~~~
josefresco
I wish I could upvote this more. A person in their 20's knows nothing, but
thinks they've outsmarted the world. It's not until your 30's that you realize
how big of an idiot you were/are and how much of the world you actually
understand (read: little).

~~~
mikeg8
This whole: "Twenty year olds don't know shit but 30 year olds are so
enlightened" sentiment needs to stop. I agree that many younger people _think_
they understand more than they do but that's just part of growing up and we
all go through it.

~~~
YooLi
You are misunderstanding the sentiment. No one is saying 30 year olds know
everything, they are saying 30 year olds _realize_ they don't know everything.

~~~
sirkneeland
Or as Socrates put it, "the only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing"

(probably one of the more Buddhist-ish gems from Western philosophy)

------
1024core
Like most hard problems, it's easy to pick off the low-hanging fruit and claim
that you have solution.

Self-driving cars (in some form or the other, under some loose definition of
"self" and "driving") have been around since the 20s. But it still remains a
vexing problem.

It is quite easy to program a car to stay between 2 cars and follow the car in
front. It is quite another to have the same car drive on (a) a road without
lane markings; (b) in adverse weather conditions (snow, anybody? Hotz should
take the car to Tahoe); (c) in traffic anomalies (ambulance/cop approaching
from behind; accident/debris in front; etc. etc.); and so on.

No offense to GeoHot, but I'd love to see his system work in rush-hour 101
traffic; or cross the Bay Bridge, where (coming to SF) the lanes merge
arbitrarily.

The key challenges are not only to drive when there's traffic; but to also
drive when there's NO traffic, because lane markings, etc. are practically
nonexistent in many places.

Having said all that, I still admire his enthusiasm and drive(no pun
intended). Tinker on!

~~~
darkmighty
TBH, since it's a training based system it's "just" a matter of making sure
the training set is large enough, including the situations you mentioned
(assuming the training method is robust, generalizes well, etc). I would love
someone knowledgeable to give an estimate, but I would guess you need at least
a handful (10+?1000+?) of examples of each edge case (involving bicycles,
pedestrians, weird road designs, street signs, and so on) -- and there are
many of them I suspect (at least 100s?). Estimating you'd take about 1 hour
between experiencing a tricky scenario while driving around, this should put
the number of hours at something like 100,000+ -- not easy to come up with by
himself (that's about 50+ years of driving 6 hours a day).

Mobileye is doing something interesting by curating the reliable parts of the
dataset (e.g. they have curated databases of traffic signs for each region) --
again not something you could do own your own, and seemingly archaic (hence
GeoHot's criticism), but if you can afford it can speed up the training
significantly.

Tesla is a massive resource here because they already have a huge fleet of
internet connected cars proving enough data to fill the aforementioned
training set in a matter of days or months: let's estimate their fleet at
40,000 cars -- then they could fill that minimum dataset in less than a day,
and in a month they might have a 100x safety margin. Of course, there's a big
technical problem of relaying all that video (maybe they just relay prediction
failures), but the data is there.

Another fundamental problem with exclusively hands-off training (and little
optimal control theory, etc) is picking up bad habits from drivers -- even the
best algorithms will have a hard time and be only about as good as a good
driver in each scenario, in the best case -- since the training data is acting
as a ground truth.

~~~
1024core
> I would love someone knowledgeable to give an estimate, but I would guess
> you need at least a handful (10+?1000+?) of examples of each edge case
> (involving bicycles, pedestrians, weird road designs, street signs, and so
> on)

The problem is: there are new edgecases born every day.

Consider, for example, an accident where the cops have set up flares. How
often do you come across one of those? Very rarely, I imagine. And even if you
did come across it in your training set: how does the ML know that you are
following the cops' signals, and not just randomly switching lanes? That the
flares are a critical signal?

~~~
darkmighty
Good point, but if you consider the Tesla dataset... it's formidable. Every
day they could collect data enough for ~55 years of driving a lot every day.
Even if you never encountered this case, if it happens at all it's likely to
be seen many times (probably 100+ in a few months) in that dataset. After
driving cars have gone mainstream, this may start to be seen as a design
problem by traffic agencies: they might standardize ways to deal with traffic
a little more.

Ultimately as long as the cars driving autonomously is small enough and
procedures change slowly enough you should be able to continously update the
driving system.

But let me reinforce that a pure learning approach even with very large
datasets may not be efficient as one would like -- the curation of signs is a
good idea, and manually reviewing accidents and near misses (a highly human-
intensive task) and perhaps flagging bad driving behavior (probably after some
outlier screening, which can be good or bad) will be important to get it
really good with the training-intensive approach (and not the top down optimal
path planning and control approach).

EDIT: Mobileye CEO discusses some interesting design issues and manual
validation (and shows they have lots of data, good sign)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kp3ik5f3-2c&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kp3ik5f3-2c&feature=youtu.be&t=7m51s)

------
ixtli
It's somewhat frustrating that he continues to get the credit for "hacking the
iphone" when he was neither the first nor the only person on the project. The
"iPhone Dev Team" was a group of five to ten people who built tools to
jailbreak the phone and unlock the radio. If anything, the first person was a
guy called Nightwatch who was also associated with various .tif exploits to
unlock the PSP. As near as I could tell at the time he worked in some capacity
for a South American university. Geohot worked only on the baseband unlock and
was forced out of the closed discussions when he released exploits before
everyone had time to prepare. This is important because some peoples
participation in the project could have potentially affected their employment.
Luckily I don't know that anything bad happened, but suffice it to say the kid
is not a team player.

~~~
kaizendc
Take some time to watch his YouTube video explaining the iPhone hack.

He starts the video by giving credit to other people involved in the project.

~~~
ixtli
Nice. Can you link me? I was involved in the project :)

~~~
willchronic
what was your osx86 handle? I was also involved in the early times but don't
recognize your name.

~~~
ixtli
It was ixtli. I wrote iPHUC and still own the repo, i think:
[https://code.google.com/p/iphuc/source/browse/trunk/AUTHORS](https://code.google.com/p/iphuc/source/browse/trunk/AUTHORS)

~~~
willchronic
ah the very early days then, nice. yeah I understand your take, George did get
credited for things that were a team effort (including a lot of work by gray).
but really a lot of that was the press who just based it off him being the one
to publish the unlock demo video, he just probably got tired of correcting
people.

as a counterpoint in which he was definitely a team player and not many knew
about, he helped us get iOS 3 for S5L8900 devices pwned when we couldn't get
the firmware files decrypted due to tricks that Apple put in iBoot (for only
that version too - taken out after), which involved using a built in
coprocessor and a payload in an assembly language that wasn't ARM and none of
us could recognize. so to try to work it out he actually reverse engineered
the structure of the assembly language to help figure out what it was doing,
which was really cool. I don't think the whole payload got fully "reversed" as
I believe one of us (it was either ius or myself) found a data sheet that
pointed to it being some type of 16-bit RISC based thing, but was still pretty
cool to see how he went about solving the problem. there was nothing directly
incentivizing him to help other than a fun challenge.

------
pjc50
The 21" monitor portrait-style in the car is fantastic.

The testing of a hacked-together system on the public road is not. He
_probably_ won't kill anyone, but if he were to I suspect he'd get the book
thrown at him in the way that everyday death-by-DUI drivers don't.

Actually I'll go futher with this criticism: we've just seen drones being FAA
regulated because users were unable to refrain from doing dangerous or
nuisance things with them, such as flying near airports. DIY self-driving car
research is similarly likely to damage the concept if it goes wrong.

~~~
ZanyProgrammer
That screen looks like the mother of all distractions.

~~~
bpicolo
Which theoretically doesn't matter if the car drives itself.

------
reneherse
For comparison, a similar hacker spirit underpins Tesla Motors propulsion
tech: Back in the early 2000's, there was a young engineer driving around Palo
Alto in a brilliantly hacked electric Porsche 944, which would do about 130mph
on the highway.

His name was JB Straubel, and nowadays he's Tesla's CTO.

Best of luck to Hotz!

------
jaybosamiya
> The last people with jobs will be AI programmers

Geohotz makes a decent point. The way the industrial revolution reduced manual
labour, and made thinkers and tinkerers much more valuable, the advent of AI
(true AI, mind you, not the tiny stuff that we currently assume) might
actually make us obsolete. It is a peaceful and yet terrifying thought.

~~~
dominotw
Can you point to one such job where someone lost his/her job to "AI"?

~~~
ProAm
Look at any automated warehouse these days. Pickers, stockers, warehouse
managers..... Those are going by the way side.

~~~
dominotw
Would you consider those machines AI?

~~~
emerongi
Narrow AI, yes. If it simulates a human action and adapts to the environment
to a small degree (e.g can recognize a screw bolt and pick it up even if it is
in a different location every time), it's a narrow AI.

~~~
ProAm
It can do even more than that. Warehouse organization, putting high usage/fast
moving objects towards the front of the warehouse, reorganizing based on usage
and expiration, restocking, kit packaging etc... Goes way beyond just picking
things up with a fork lift and moving them to a different location. All things
a person or team of people used to get paid in the 6 digits for are now just
run by robots and AI.

------
rhema
> Amazed, I ask Hotz what it felt like the first time he got the car to work.

>“Dude,” he says, “the first time it worked was this morning.”

I can't tell if this is a joke or unbridled hubris. Either way, self driving
cars seem like a new hacker space.

~~~
danielharan
Also: "Hotz hadn’t programmed any of these behaviors into the vehicle. He
can’t really explain all the reasons it does what it does."

Good luck to him understanding how to fix corner cases: he's built a black
box.

~~~
JustSomeNobody
This will be safe on the road for sure.

~~~
rasz_pl
Are YOU safe on the road? Have you tested all corner cases on yourself?

------
hamhamed
> “Frankly, I think you should just work at Tesla,” Musk wrote to Hotz in an
> e-mail. “I’m happy to work out a multimillion-dollar bonus with a longer
> time horizon that pays out as soon as we discontinue Mobileye.”

> “I appreciate the offer,” Hotz replied, “but like I’ve said, I’m not looking
> for a job. I’ll ping you when I crush Mobileye.”

> Musk simply answered, “OK.”

I have to agree with Elon here, Hotz is such a good fit there. But Hotz knows
best, if he thinks he can take down Mobileye then he did the right decision,
sucks that Tesla wouldn't back it. I'm sure other car companies would buy
Hotz's software

~~~
ocdtrekkie
I'd be far more interested in a piece of software for my car put out by Hotz
than either Google or Tesla. Because the latter two are almost certainly going
to keep it proprietary as heck. (Tesla has notoriously actually called people
to ask them to stop tinkering with their car when they detect the interface
has been connected to.)

~~~
testuser111
> "He says he’s come up with discoveries—most of which he refuses to disclose
> in detail"

~~~
ocdtrekkie
We'll see where things get in the future. If I wasn't sure where I was going
yet, I might hold a few things close to the vest initially too. There's a
short-term value too, where he has to ensure Google or Tesla or Uber doesn't
become too dominant first. I really hope self-driving systems are an
ecosystem, not a monoculture.

------
antoniuschan99
He seems like a pretty cool and level headed person. If you watch the video,
they're working on phase 3 of car automation which is basically when you're on
the highway (or on the smaller roads) and the car takes over for you. It seems
like google is working on phase 4, which I feel is basically too far off (no
reason for us to need cars that can drive themselves without anyone in it).
Also, Tesla, Mercedes, those are all phase 3 (Autosteer).

Also pretty cool he's working in his garage :P.

~~~
baby
he says phase 3 takes 99% of your driving task. So I guess it would be way
more than that.

~~~
yoodenvranx
I think this number of "99%" is only valid for the large US suburbs which are
way easier to navigate than a typical small town in Germany/Europe. Over here
we have so many narrow streets, millions of pedestrians and bicycles,
construction zones and so on. More often than not it is difficult for a human
to figure out what is going on so it will be much harder for a car to do the
same.

~~~
baby
Yup, I thought about Marseille the other day and I don't see how a self-
driving car could drive there.

------
iblaine
>The smartest people I knew were in high school, and I was so let down by the
people in college.

He seems like a good person to get into business with. He's so non-judgmental.
Reminds me of myself and all the stupid things I said to VCs in my 20s.

~~~
ragnarok451
Aren't judgmental people the best kind of people to get into business with? At
least as long as they can judge people/situations accurately. Because that
implies that they will make better decisions for your company w.r.t hiring
initial people and choosing strategies

~~~
analyst74
Being able to assess people is completely different from being judgmental.

The former is a result of experience and social intelligence; the latter is
mix of bad attitude and superiority complex.

------
deftnerd
@imgeohot - Before launch, you should look into a communications protocol
between the vehicles. It appears to me that the new LiFi standard might be
perfect. You might be able to use the laser range finders themselves to
communicate between vehicles.

What to communicate? I'm not sure, to be honest. Road conditions or
notifications of the position of obstacles is one obvious thing. Advertising
the current version of the software and pushing signed OS upgrade binaries is
another. Voice/Video chat with other vehicles in range would be cool, as is
media syncing and discovery.

Building in some kind of Bitcoin based payment protocol would be fun too. You
could load your cars Bitcoin wallet with some funds and tip cars around you
all over the LiFi.

I'm not saying you need to build all that stuff, just put in a good hackable
messaging protocol into the system before wide release :-)

Great work man. Good to see people with a good hacker ethos accomplish really
cool things.

~~~
sp332
The cars could signal a turn ahead of time, or indicate how hard they're about
to brake. With a large enough network, they could even predict traffic
patterns and choose a different route.

------
blinkingled
>At Google, he found very smart developers who were often assigned mundane
tasks like fixing bugs in a Web browser; at Facebook, brainy coders toiled
away trying to figure out how to make users click on ads.

I'm not sure those two are equally horrible though - fixing complex bugs
requires using lot of skills and the high you get when you finally nail it is
nothing to miss.

Getting people to click on ads though - that's genuinely depressing.

~~~
Jonovono
Ok cool, you find one of them enjoyable. He (subject of the article) finds
them both terrible.

~~~
blinkingled
Yes, anyone can find anything enjoyable or terrible - but the point I was
trying to make was that most hackers enjoy bug fixing by nature and Geohot
seems to be exceptional that he despises bug fixing as mundane.

~~~
Cyph0n
Hackers enjoy bug finding or simply building new stuff. Why would they like
fixing bugs? Why would any developer enjoy it for that matter? Yes, it's
something necessary that all developers should know how to do, but that
doesn't make it enjoyable.

~~~
blinkingled
A nagging bug is ultimately one more thing you don't understand. I don't know
about anyone else but as someone who loves to take apart things I don't sleep
well when I find there's something out there that I don't understand. Besides
bugs are a given if you're building something new and if you don't find them
interesting you're not going to fix the most challenging ones. If you ever
followed Linux kernel development you'll find many hackers enjoy fixing
challenging bugs.

------
hias
Sorry, but how can this be legal? With his homemade solution, he is not only
endangering himself but all the other people in the cars around him.

Usually before you are allowed to use something like this on a public road
your stuff has to be tested and approved by the state. At least this is how it
is in Europe, does this not matter in the states?

~~~
bosdev
He's sitting behind the wheel ready to take over, it's not quite the same as
making a cup of tea while the car drives itself.

~~~
hias
Yes, but what if his system suddenly decides to turn hard right for no reason
while driving fast and he runs into another car, human, tree, whatever and he
has no chance to react quickly enough? This is different to a PS3 crashing
because he made some error.

~~~
imgeohot
The steering is massively torque limited by the car's EPS module(5x lower
limit than Tesla). It can't turn hard right, it can lazily list to the right,
giving you tons of time to react.

I actually have put a lot of thought into safety :)

~~~
skykooler
How do you train it for emergency situations (i.e. a car suddenly turning left
in front of you)? I'd imagine it would be hard to get many of those in the
training data set.

~~~
jonnycowboy
Easy, you drive in a simulator! (ie: backfeed/simulate LIDAR and camera data
using a video game (GTA5 for example)). Then try to simulate lots of near-
crashes, reactions to traffic lights, signs, etc. Hotz's code just reacts to
inputs. Simulate the inputs and you can run any training case you want.

~~~
imgeohot
Exactly the plan for outlier cases. Though perhaps not GTA...

~~~
k0doque
Maybe partner with the creator of the XXX simulator series, you could make
some kind of "MMO" where each participants have to run errands the safest way
possible while interacting with each other, and upload the training data. Some
player could be randomly elected as "maverick" whose goal is to crash and
cause accident, the other player would have to handle them.

And if driving in highway is a problem, why not use a test terrain complete
with fog generator? With RC car representing pedestrian, other car, animal,
... feed the video first into an AR system and then give it to the neural net.

anyway good hack, I wish you well :)

------
hellofunk
I don't know what's going to happen with this project of his, but this
certainly is an interesting article:

>Sitting cross-legged on a dirty, formerly cream-colored couch in his garage,
Hotz philosophizes about AI and the advancement of humanity. “Slavery did not
end because everyone became moral,” he says. “The reason slavery ended is
because we had an industrial revolution that made man’s muscles obsolete. For
the last 150 years, the economy has been based on man’s mind. Capitalism, it
turns out, works better when people are chasing a carrot rather than being hit
with a stick. We’re on the brink of another industrial revolution now. The
entire Internet at the moment has about 10 brains’ worth of computing power,
but that won’t always be the case.

~~~
coldtea
Regarding slavery that's a fatalistic attitude that's not very good for the
advancement of human societies.

The other side of the coin of his "technology outgrew slavery, and thus we got
rid of it", is that if tomorrow's technology demands some moral monstrosity,
to "work better", we can't but bend over and accept it.

Neither human struggles (from the civil war to MLK and Rosa Parks), nor
desires and leadership come into any of this, neither is "working better"
(towards what? for what purpose? etc) defined.

~~~
hellofunk
I agree. But still quite an interesting article, one of the more entertaining
reads I've had in a while.

------
tmalsburg2
Surprised that no one else commented on this: It is completely mad and
irresponsible to test a self-driving car on a public highway especially since
the one who has built it admits that he has no idea what it is doing. Hotz is
putting other people's lives in grave danger and everyone is applauding him
for that.

~~~
jimmies
>the one who has built it admits that he has no idea what it is doing

When did he do that?

~~~
tmalsburg2
No time to read the article again to find the quote but the problem is really
inherent to the technology. It is very difficult to know what a neural network
extracted from the training data, and therefore it is extremely hard to know
how it will behave in the future and especially in emergency situations that
were not part of the training data.

------
dangirsh
I met Hotz at SpaceX, and can assure you he's not as cocky as this article
makes him out to be.

------
ericjang
During my internship at Google I watched Hotz give a talk on QIRA and his
Pwnium exploit.

George Hotz working his magic on the computer is the most fucking legit thing
I have seen in my life.

~~~
whiteshadow
Was that talk made available online? Would be curious to see it!

~~~
ericjang
Regrettably, not on the Internet. If you get a job at Google you might be able
to search for it on the intranet :)

------
dkns
Absolutely exciting stuff. Imagine if you have 100, 1000 or 10000 cars each
with deep learning software on board. Have them all upload data after each
drive to central repository and download updates from other cars. You might
start without stuff like 'react to that deer that just jumped on the road' but
when you have 10 000 or 100 000 cars that learn and share their knowledge
between them you'll quickly learn a lot of corner cases.

------
tragomaskhalos
"“Hold this,” he says, dumping a wireless keyboard in my lap before backing
out of the garage. “But don’t touch any buttons, or we’ll die.”"

Quality.

------
erjjones
Self-Driving cars are very exciting but we know it can be done - super cool
that Hotz got this working. Now he could really impress the community if he
could solve 6 additional concepts [http://gizmodo.com/6-simple-things-googles-
self-driving-car-...](http://gizmodo.com/6-simple-things-googles-self-driving-
car-still-cant-
han-1628040470?trending_test_four_a&utm_expid=66866090-68.Fycr7CNTRMO9chDASrU7Hg.1&utm_referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F)

------
michael_h

      He thinks machines will take care of much of the work tied to producing food and other necessities. Humans will then be free to plug into their computers and get lost in virtual reality.
    

Well, that's an astronomically depressing future.

~~~
orky56
The more technology can seamlessly take care of the foundation of humanity's
needs, the better. Leisure is a very new concept and only came about when
humans were able to destress from not having to worry about their next meal or
getting attacked by predators. Despite all the progress, much of humanity
still faces some basic problems due to inequality and access to resources.
Technology combined with some other cultural and structural changes can do
away with those issues for good.

~~~
michael_h
Of course, but once our needs are seamlessly taken care of we're going to just
"plug into our computers and get lost in virtual reality"? _That_ is the
depressing bit.

~~~
orky56
I think he's made the assumption that virtual reality would be the ultimate
form of leisure since as the article states, it would allow us to experience
things our world can't create on its own. We'll leave it up to each individual
to decide whether that's depressing or the ultimate goal.

------
pyoung
Looks like the car he is using already comes with adaptive cruise control and
lane keeping assist[1]. Can someone with more knowledge on the subject chime
in on how/what he is doing that improves upon those?

[1]
[http://www.acura.com/Features.aspx?model=MDX&modelYear=2016&...](http://www.acura.com/Features.aspx?model=MDX&modelYear=2016&context=Interior#lane_keeping_assist_system)

------
dvh
I always thought default Ubuntu WM is only used by the people who don't know
how to change it.

~~~
Glyptodon
Or those of us who don't care about it enough to change it. There are a lot of
things that in the right context are not worth bothering about.

------
nascentmind
Congrats geohot. Come up with a good development framework for people to build
on and it would be awesome. This is good innovation and engineering.

Like the article said it sure beats writing code to make people click ads or
fixing some obscure deadbeat bug in some useless software which nobody uses.

------
hcrisp
_“I don’t care about money,” he says. “I want power. Not power over people,
but power over nature and the destiny of technology. "_

This has echoes of J.R.R. Tolkien:

 _Anyway all this stuff is mainly concerned with Fall, Mortality, and the
Machine. By the last I intend all use of external plans or devices (apparatus)
instead of development of the inherent inner powers or talents -- or even the
use of these talents with the corrupted motive of dominating: bulldozing the
real world, or coercing other wills. The Machine is our more obvious modern
form though more closely related to Magic than is usually recognised. . . .
The Enemy in successive forms is always 'naturally' concerned with sheer
Domination, and so the Lord of magic and machines._

------
SuperKlaus
"George Hotz will be a panelist at Bloomberg Businessweek Design 2016 on April
11, 2016."

------
edward
He is hiring: [http://comma.ai/hiring.html](http://comma.ai/hiring.html)

------
Wonnk13
Can anyone recommend a AI/economics book regarding the implications of a
population where jobs are no longer necessary?

~~~
suhastech
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU)

Also, a book with the same name

------
RIMR
This the same guy that Sony wanted to put in prison for figuring out how to
run code on the PS3...

That stunt is also what lead to a coordinated attack against PSN that took the
service down for more than a month.

~~~
free2rhyme214
Link?

~~~
giancarlostoro
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iUvuaChDEg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iUvuaChDEg)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Computer_Entertainment_Am...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Computer_Entertainment_America,_Inc._v._Hotz)

------
quantumgoo
If it passes the written and driving tests at the local DMV, should the car be
given a driver's license?

~~~
knodi123
no, because that's silly.

------
pfista
Is it really the best approach to only train from real world scenarios without
any programmed constraints? Most humans are terrible drivers and there's a
reason so many people die every year in car accidents. It seems like his
approach might be more organic but it'd also be really hard to provide
training data around emergency situations as others have mentioned here.

------
politician
If a self-driving car is designed around neural networks, then does that
remove the liability dilemma introduced when such a car is involved in an
accident? The car panicked and crashed.

If we could move the liability to the car itself, then maybe we could just add
the car to its own insurance policy, you know, as if it were a dependent, like
a teenage driver.

~~~
_yosefk
Wow, here's a ton of possibilities! The neural net powered bank computer stole
your money and used it to pay the CEO a bonus - move the liability to the
computer! The possibilities are endless.

~~~
politician
I meant to say that the liability moves to the guardian which is how common
insurance schemes work when dependents are involved.

Clearly, you can't meaningfully punish computers. Hah, or banks, for that
matter.

------
samlittlewood
Interesting to see an nvidia shield box on his shelves [0] - I've been playing
with one, and the Tegra X1 SoC in there is an absolute beast. Nvidia are
pushing this chip for automotive, supported by freely available learning and
vision toolkits.

I'd not be surprised to see some interest and support from nvidia on this (if
not, then they should REALLY look into it).

[0] [http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-george-hotz-self-
driv...](http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-george-hotz-self-driving-
car/img/feat_hotz52__03.jpg)

~~~
hokkos
The NVidia Jetson TX1 platform is indeed very interesting, it has the
VisionWorks API with lot of CUDA accelerated primitive useful for autonomous
driving : SLAM, Optical Flow, ...
[https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/visionworks](https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/visionworks)

------
nojvek
I really like his 4 stage definition of self driving car. I don't really care
about the fully autonomous like the google car. I've driven the adaptive
cruise control VW in europe and that was an amazing experience. The only thing
missing was lane control which this guy has done. Personally, where self
driving really shines is long trips on the highway. All I really want is
smarter cruise control that can stay on one lane and not bump into anything,
and ideally send an alarm if it thinks it needs help.

------
macawfish
This one takes the cake for me: “It scares me what Facebook is doing with AI,”
Hotz says. “They’re using machine-learning techniques to coax people into
spending more time on Facebook.”

------
pakled_engineer
His AI strategy that doesn't use IF statements sounds influenced from the
Sussman & Radul paper the Art of the Propagator. In this related course you
also learn how to program AI decisions based on pattern matching like him
giving space to a cyclist and the AI later doing the same
[https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6.945/](https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6.945/)

------
iamleppert
Can we get some third party verification here? I live in Potrero and would
like to take a ride in his car, or at least help out with his project... hit
me up man!!

------
giancarlostoro
He does a bit of interesting projects, hacking the iPhone, Android and even
the PS3 to the point of being sued by Sony [1]. Geohot has potential, so it
will be interesting what we see him accomplish, hopefully some company doesn't
swoop in and ruin his progress.

[1]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iUvuaChDEg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iUvuaChDEg)

------
devy
The article mentioned Elon's delaying tactic. I wonder what would happen if
Hotz's idea/project was bought out by Tesla.

------
Grazester
Geo Hotz amazes me!! With that said, can he be prosecuted for using his
driverless car on public roads without a license to do so?

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Possibly, since California I think has specific laws governing self-driving
cars, and it sounds like he wants to test it there. If he's in a state that
doesn't have laws on self-driving cars, it'd probably be up to existing laws.
Is he driving recklessly?

------
jacquesm
> ‘I know everything there is to know.’

Except the law when it comes to exceptions for being in control of your
vehicle at all times. Somebody take this guys license before he kills someone
due to a divide-by-zero. Testing this in an abandoned parking lot would be ok
with me (probably still against the law but fine). In traffic is a definite
no.

------
lavezzi
Probably best that he's working on his own, doesn't seem like the kind of guy
you'd want to work alongside.

~~~
copperx
Or people tinkering with far more interesting things...

------
tuxguy
[http://comma.ai/hiring.html](http://comma.ai/hiring.html)

------
bparsons
Good to see smart people working on something actually useful, and not another
group chat or instagram clone app.

~~~
nascentmind
Yes it is. Such smart people should be working on these things and should be
encouraged. Of course his system is still a lot rough and a lot of work has to
go into it but he is just one person doing a lot of thinking. In the interview
he has a lot of enthusiasm which is really nice.

------
mandeepj
> In the coming weeks, Hotz intends to start driving for Uber so he can rack
> up a lot of training miles for the car.

Really? I did not expected this from him. Why don't he put his
sensors\cameras\kit on few other hundred\thousand cars and pay them some money
or get some early adopters.

------
J0-onas
So how does his technology/software react on dangers? The video only shows how
he keeps his lane...

~~~
reviseddamage
Probably really bad now, or doesn't react at all and also probably will
collide in critical and dangerous positions. But that is also not the future.
The future is how does it interact in non-dangerous positions long-term while
other cars are self-driving in compliance.

~~~
dexterdog
Is it that hard to detect a clear danger like a car that suddenly stopped in
front of you on the highway?

~~~
dubbel
Not hard to detect for the sensors, the questions is how (if) the software
reacts.

He uses an artificial neural network to make the driving decisions.

You train them by showing millions of situations (images of the surroundings,
information about the cars current state and information about the imminent
past in this case) and the wanted reactions/solution/answer (how to drive in
this case). Hotz probably has enough "normal" data, because you hold the line
all the time when driving and apparently there were enough situations where
the car in front slowed down and he slowed down.

From the latter case you could guess that the car would break more rapidly if
the car in front stops more rapidly than in the training sessions with a human
driver (you would have to test that, as you usually cannot just look at the
trained neural network and see that, because they become insanely complex
after a certain depth).

But probably the car never "saw" bricks falling of the truck before you or
even a kid running from the left side. Those are edge cases, that are unlikely
to happen, especially on a motor way. But I'd still like to know whether his
software would just apply the nearest trained case and see it as noise, or
notice that something is off here and alarm the driver.

Definitely a cool project, don't get me wrong. But I get kind of sad when the
work of thousands of scientists who worked on the theory and the work of
Tesla, Google and big car manufacturers gets dismissed by "but look at this
guy" (in general, not directed at you).

------
myztic
_(This is completely Off-Topic but it 's been bothering me for such a long
time now and I never got sufficient answers)_

Why am I seeing Ubuntu on Screens of developers, experts, et cetera in Cover
Stories such as these, most of the time with the 100% plain Ubuntu Desktop
with all the craziness that comes with it? It feels like this is the case 90%
of the time. Two more (recent) examples I can remember:

1) Fyodor (Guy behind nmap) running plain Ubuntu on a Notebook while giving a
speech at a conference

2) Developers at Honda (Video was an Asimo promotional video) running plain
Ubuntu

Since in my personal opinion Ubuntu is not the technically superior choice in
these cases (though that can be debated), it can not simply be explained with
it being backed by a company, there being support you can buy for the system
if you need it.

What motivates technically extremely skilled people to use "Plain Ubuntu"
instead of one of the many alternatives?

I really don't understand, please enlighten me!

(I actually think it's worth "spending" some Karma on this if I for once get a
satisfying answer)

~~~
Daneel_
Most of these people have passed the stage of caring about the desktop itself.
I would say they are simply interested in a bash shell that sits on a
reliable, well maintained, stable distro with good community knowledge.

When you spend all your time at a prompt you don't really care about unity vs
cinnamon vs anything else.

Debian is stable and has fantastic package management, and Ubuntu builds on
that with a vibrant community and wide support. For these users, Ubuntu 'just
works' and lets them get on with what they want to do. It's about as simple as
that.

~~~
grahamannett
curious what myztic would recommend as well? ubuntu may not be 'ideal' but it
works and installs a lot easier than arguably any other linux distro. i have
no problem using debian/arch/etc but if you are just trying to get up and
going ubuntu seems to always be the easiest.

~~~
nascentmind
I personally use xubuntu. What myztic meant was using "plain ubuntu" instead
of alternatives like xubuntu, lubuntu or kubuntu.

Xubuntu is medium light for me and is fast. Previously I had only fluxbox on
Kubuntu for the KDE apps which was extremely fast but with bugs in fluxbox I
switched.

~~~
myztic
Nope, I really meant Ubuntu compared to other Operating systems /
Distributions.

------
daemonk
It looks like he has various sensors for gathering driving data. But how do
you really know when you have gathered enough dimensions of data in this
situation? How do you train for edge cases?

I imagine there will still have to be some hard rules in case the AI
encounters edge cases.

------
joe563323
Response from Elonmusk
[https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/677403793651175424](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/677403793651175424)

------
Allamaprabhu
But my intuition say. Google has fairly large amount of data. Their cars drove
much distance than his leading them more space to test. More data to test more
intelligent systems will be.

------
JustSomeNobody
So its more a fancy autopilot than a self driving car.

~~~
sp332
You're aware that "auto pilot" literally means "self driver", right?

~~~
Johnny555
Yet few people would call an airplane with auto-pilot a "self-flying plane",
even with advanced autopilot that can take off and land itself.

Autopilot is understood to mean a limited computer assist that can help with
routine tasks, but not expected to allow a plane to fly without a pilot.

~~~
sp332
What more would a plane need to be "self-flying" beyond taking off,
navigating, and landing?

~~~
Johnny555
The ability to handle unusual emergency or unexpected conditions - the same
thing that's needed to call a car "self-driving".

------
dominotw
Would be interesting to see demo that is not just car self-driving in a
straight(ish) line.

------
pedrodelfino
What a cool article!

------
mschuster91
The fuck. Hotz is awesome... The only coder with a skillset so diverse yet
immersive I know is Fabrice Bellard. I'd love to see them on a team
together... probably will invent true AI O.o

------
ck2
I really liked Hotz until he went to work for the dark side (google's android
security) and decided to make smartphones harder to root instead of easier.

~~~
anchpop
I dunno, it's still pretty easy. I think if google really wanted to they could
make it quite a bit harder. And fixing exploits that give apps root access
would prevent malicious apps from abusing it, no?

------
et2o
I love this guy's personality.

------
ginsmar
Great!

------
kevando
> 99%

------
frik
He must have rich patents or a sponsor. The Lidar isn't cheap (50k).

~~~
sureshv
$8k -
[http://velodynelidar.com/vlp-16.html](http://velodynelidar.com/vlp-16.html)

~~~
frik
It looked like the VLP-32. The VLP-16 is pretty new, I am surprised it's
already available, last time I checked it wasn't. Google cars use the VLP-64
which costs 70+k.

------
samfisher83
The guys hacked the PS3. That guy can build a self driving car.

