
Steve Wozniak: 'I've given up' on Level 5 - clouddrover
https://europe.autonews.com/automakers/apple-co-founder-ive-really-given-level-5
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nvahalik
> Autonomous vehicles would fare better, he said, "if we were to modify roads
> and have certain sections that are well mapped and kept clean of refuse, and
> nothing unusual happens and there's no road work."

He's talking about trains and other modes of public transit. Which makes
sense. Of course, even those have occasional problems.

Personally, I'd love to simply find a way to make "mass transit" more
workable.

~~~
ianai
I wonder if anyone’s considered making a kind of modular way for vehicles to
connect to something like a train.

~~~
chongli
We have those; they’re called parking lots and they’re usually found at
commuter train stations.

Snark aside, I don’t think it makes much sense to try to merge cars together
at high speed. It’s a very complicated maneuver, requiring all cars behind the
intended merge point to back up and make room, and the consequences of an
accident have unlimited catastrophic potential. We could see hundreds of cars
destroyed in a massive collision.

Besides that, the costs seem astronomical: actually developing the technology,
making sure all car manufacturers comply with the standard, and replacing
every single car on the road with a compliant model. Wouldn’t it be much
easier to put all of that money into building high speed railways? We’ve
already perfected that technology.

~~~
notacoward
Docking wouldn't have to occur at high speed, or moving at all, for this to be
useful. For example, I live in Massachusetts and I have a car full of gear
that I'd like to have for my vacation in New Hampshire or New Jersey or
Michigan. So I drive down to the local train depot, where my car is docked (or
even just loaded onto) a train, I get in the passenger compartment, we're
reunited at the other end. Already more efficient than driving, and more
pleasant too. Now start adding tweaks like loading only the passenger
compartment, which is already a separate thing in electric vehicles. Or
running rails along one lane of existing highway, with docking/undocking at
existing rest areas. Once the basic "dock instead of driving" idea gets
established, it's possible to iterate on it.

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whack
I don't understand this obsession with achieving level-5. What would deliver
tremendous value for many people, is simply the ability to drive autonomously
on highways. Highway driving is so radically simpler, and can be achieved in a
fraction of the time. In addition, time spent on the highway is the majority
of people's time driving. Being able to sleep or read a book for 30-60 minutes
everyday, while commuting to work on the highway, would be a tremendous boon.
Being able to sleep overnight while your car drives you to your parents' city
500 miles away, would be a godsend. It would be great if we could focus on
making highway-autonomous cars mainstream, before worrying about level 5.

~~~
Balgair
The lives of the disabled and the impartially abled would be made astoundingly
better with such level 5 cars. Greater freedom of movement for those with
illnesses, mental disabilities, vision impairments, amputations, etc would
greatly improve their lives and thereby the lives of their caretakers and
loved ones too. No longer would your legally blind uncle need your help to get
to the doctor or to the store.

It's not obvious, but there are medical, familial, and personal liberty
implications to such self-driving cars too. I think that these implications
should be better championed by their engineers. Such cars can be wheelchairs
for the blind, etc. It would hit an emotional nerve better than the meme of
people sleeping on their way to work.

Level 5 will be a very very big deal.

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mjlee
In the politest way possible to Mr. Wozniak - this reminded me of the first of
Clarke's three laws:

> When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is
> possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is
> impossible, he is very probably wrong.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws)

~~~
peckrob
He says in the linked interview:

> "I don't even know if that will happen in my lifetime."

Not that I wish for Woz's death in any way, but he is 69 years old. The
average male life expectancy in the US is 78. Now, he's wealthy, so I would
expect him to probably live longer than the average, but 15-20 years would be
doing good.

15-20 years is also my personal expectation for when we will start seeing
truly autonomous self-driving vehicles.

Moreover, I think it will be incremental growth, not immediate massive
availability. I would expect the technology to be adopted in certain
controlled situations first, and in places where it makes economic sense. And
considering how long it can take for people to replace cars and for the
technology to filter down to more economic models, 40+ years before the
majority of cars are self-driving does not seem like an unreasonable estimate.

~~~
wiremine
> 15-20 years is also my personal expectation for when we will start seeing
> truly autonomous self-driving vehicles.

Came here to say the same things. Woz is awesome, but not a Spring Chicken.
I'm 42, and I tell my 13 son I expect him to see it in his lifetime. If I get
it when I'm old and can't drive anymore, I'll be really happy. And if the
industry beats expectations, all the better!

~~~
peckrob
Same. I'm 38, and I've told my 7 year old that I would expect that her
grandchildren's generation probably won't need drivers' licenses. I think that
period from about 20 years from now until then will be a somewhat
uncomfortable overlap period where people will still need to know _how_ to
drive, but that computers will be doing more and more of the actual day-to-day
driving.

The only thing I could see that would shorten the interval is legal
approaches. Such as, if the technology proves sufficiently adept, for it to be
declared as a mandatory safety feature on par with seatbelts and airbags. But
even then there will still be non-autonomous cars on the road (just as there
are still cars on the road without seatbelts and airbags) for many, many
years. Again, unless you take the extra legal step and ban them from the road.

That doesn't mean it isn't worth _doing_. Something that we fail at a lot in
the modern world is thinking long-term, beyond our own lifetimes. Just because
something might not get done during my lifetime doesn't mean that we shouldn't
do it, just that others may have to finish the work we started. Ultimately,
society will be better for the investment we are making now.

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londons_explore
This on the same day Waymo cars seem to be roaming around entirely with nobody
in or around them on public streets[1].

[1]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_1YLHW65M8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_1YLHW65M8)

~~~
kuschku
Honestly, the Yandex self driving experiments seem much more credible than
what Waymo is doing.

Waymo is testing its cars in a situation without any snow, rain, mostly
without street parking, without pedestrians, in a city so hostile to
pedestrians no one’s walking around.

99% of the work isn’t in getting the self driving to work in perfectly
controlled sunshine conditions as Waymo has it working right now, 99% of the
work is in getting all those edge cases working.

It’s gonna be decades before waymo cars can handle small mixed use streets
with children playing on them, pedestrians, cyclists, and street vendors in a
european city.

What they’re doing is amazing given the tech they have — but it’s not enough
to reach actual level 5. It’s the same issue why most self-driving solutions
only work on highways.

~~~
fastball

      It’s gonna be decades before...
    

Citation needed.

We can very accurately identify children, pedestrians, cyclists, and street
vendors with machine vision. And with the LIDAR that Waymo is using, very
accurately tell where they are and more importantly _where they 're going_.
Stopping for those things is pretty low on the "problems that need more work
for Level 5" agenda.

~~~
acollins1331
That's not something you'll find a citation for. As someone who has worked in
the industry it's not as simple as "see child; stop". What's also happening
behind you? Beside of you? Do you swerve? How quickly do you stop?

You're very right that OD works great, that doesn't mean you can train a
neural network to make the right decision though.

~~~
fastball
You barely even need NN for this - it's basically pathfinding.

Find the path to where you want to go, avoid the parts with negative weights.

~~~
acollins1331
Great idea, maybe you should call Waymo.

~~~
fastball
It's not a great idea because it's already done.

Again, the hard part is not "here is a human, avoid it". That part is done (in
Waymo's case).

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filleokus
I've been skeptical for a while now, perhaps overly so, about the prospects
for "real" autonomous driving, i.e outside of Californian highways.

I wonder when the public / the press is going to start question the story
about full self driving coming "soon".

AFAIK Musk is still saying that the autonomous Tesla ride sharing service is
planned for mid 2020, and that full self driving will be at least beta tested
by end of this year.

But if these promises are not delivered on, someone ought to start questioning
how fully autonomous cars really are progressing.

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archi42
Hm, "self-driving car roads"-exclusive roads or lanes don't seem like a bad
idea, [edit] they could really help in adoption of self-driving cars, and cars
supporting automatic chaining into a "train"-like construct[/edit]. Except
maybe that roads are expensive and require plenty of space; after all, cars
are a highly inefficient mode of transportation :(

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davnicwil
It is really interesting to think about how arbitrarily difficult the problem
of self driving cars becomes when they must be backwards compatible with
existing infrastructure and co-exist with it for quite a long period of time,
decades probably.

As Wozniak alludes to here, it might just be intractable (within a few-decades
timeframe, probably not on a longer one) without concessions to adjusting the
infrastructure to make the problem space smaller and solutions simpler and
more practical.

Banning or limiting human drivers on certain roads, repainting surfaces with
thick white lines for tracing, automated checking for obstacles and cleaning,
sensors along the side of highways, networking self driving vehicles, reducing
speed limits -- all things that could vastly reduce the complexity but doing
them or getting people to want to spend money on them might be very hard.

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buboard
I m seeing this as a general trend in investment: they seem to have doubled
down on certain moonshots such as robot cars, space travel, quantum computing,
virtual reality , lab grown meat to the detriment of more reachable tech such
as CRISPR or tele-work or even fusion

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jfoster
> There is simply too much unpredictability on roads, he said, for a self-
> driving car to manage.

What does an autonomous vehicle need to do in response to a highly unpredicted
case on the road? Stop.

Can an AI offer a confidence score as to how well it understands a situation?
Yes, that's how they work.

Can an autonomous vehicle brake to a stop in response to an unrecognised
situation? Based on the above, yes.

I mean, I wonder how hard Woz has been trying to create an autonomous vehicle
prior to announcing that he's given up. Or is he just trying to tear down
those that are actually turning this into a reality?

~~~
buboard
Stopping can be just as dangerous, from causing accidents to blocking an
ambulance.

~~~
jfoster
It wouldn't really happen all that often though.

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martythemaniak
First, not a dig at Woz, but he's 69 and average male US life expectancy is
78.7. Saying he won't see level 5 in his lifetime is not a very bold claim.

Second, I don't understand people's fixation on Level 5 in particular. There
are vast numbers of human drivers who cannot meet that criteria, perhaps even
the majority of drivers. Despite this, they drive (in situations they feel
comfortable), and have a profound impact on how society is structured. Woz
will probably see both level 3 and level 4 cars and they'll have similarly
profound impacts.

~~~
tzs
> First, not a dig at Woz, but he's 69 and average male US life expectancy is
> 78.7

You need to add about 6 years, because he's 69. As you get older, your life
expectancy goes up. For an average US male at 69, they can expect 15.09 more
years.

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Deukhoofd
> "I don't even know if that will happen in my lifetime."

The man is almost 70, so that's not that unlikely.

~~~
mellosouls
Tbf AI hype and failure like this has been around for long enough for even
young people to confidently make that assertion.

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randomsearch
It is not necessary to be able to deal with unanticipated situations, only to
be able to recognise them as such. For self driving taxis, a remote human
operator could then intervene.

~~~
simonh
What do you think the typical delay would be between identifying an unknown
situation, and a remote operator assessing the situation and taking positive
control of the vehicle?

If your answer is more than a small fraction of a second, I have some
concerns.

~~~
sergiosgc
You can relax the time requirement if the vehicle stops on unexpected
conditions. If it finds roadworks and successfully identifies it as unknown,
it stops and requests manual operation for traversing the obstacle.

~~~
sokoloff
If it _gets out of the way_ and stops, fine. If it just says “screw it,
halting right here”, it’s going to quickly find itself the subject of public
outrage and be banned until resolved I’d think. (I think figuring out a
possibly creative way to "get out of the way" might be approximately as hard
as the rest of the self-driving challenge.)

Imagine every hundredth car during rush hour detour just stopping for no human
driver valid reason.

Imagine areas where you’ve driven where you can’t even keep a voice call
connected, let alone the data rates needed for remote piloting assistance.

Imagine Boston’s Big Dig and these not-quite-autonomous cars facing an unknown
situation en masse inside a tunnel under water...

I’m 2/3rds of Woz’s age and don’t expect level 5 in my or my kids’ lifetime.
Level 5 is a very high hurdle.

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valine
If you have enough training data cars encountering “new” situations should be
very rare. I don’t think it’s a deal breaker for level 5 autonomy.

~~~
als0
“Very rare” doesn’t cut it for modern safety standards.

~~~
fastball
It does if it's a lot better than human drivers.

If your new standard is _safer_ than the existing "standard", nobody says
"well actually that's not _enough_ of an improvement".

