
Driverless Cars Tap the Brakes After Years of Hype - mudil
https://www.wsj.com/articles/driverless-cars-tap-the-brakes-after-years-of-hype-11547737205
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ryebreadistasty
I wouldn't trust an autonomous vehicle at all unless it wasn't networked; in
fact I've made sure that my car isn't networked at all due to the fact that
autonomous or not they can be hacked by cutting power to everything except
power steering, the radio, and the car outlets. Networking and control of the
car being linked is asking for trouble, not to mention that somehow they
fucked up the non-autonomous cars so that it's possible to hack those and
drive them with a laptop too.

Link for the lazy: [https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-
tech/ne...](https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-
tech/news/computer-hackers-control-car-deliberate-accidents-national-security-
issue-a8066466.html)

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ddingus
Having driven very new cars, rentals mostly, there are few compelling features
that I can't just add to an older, not smart car.

And that is exactly what I plan on doing for some time yet. Frankly, the
bright nav screens, menus and other gunk prove quite distracting. I really
hate most of them. A few can be dimmed, or turned off, but none seem to
remember that state, always eager to display some warning or other.

Seems to me, if it always needs a warning, I really don't need it in the car.

I feel we are way over hype on self-driving vehicles. The tech is advancing
nicely enough, but the problem scope still seems very large relative to what
we've solved for.

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01100011
I guess I missed the predictions where people thought we'd have fully
autonomous vehicles by 2019. It seems to me that we're on track for having
something in a 5-10 year timeframe. Yeah, it won't be perfect, but it doesn't
need to be. In the meantime we'll see more and more driver assist technologies
which will slowly transition us to fully autonomous driving.

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perl4ever
I don't have specific references, but yes, for several years I have been
reading about how we are on the cusp of autonomous driving. For long enough
that I got bored of discussing it maybe a year ago.

In support, this article says "Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk in 2016
promised to demonstrate a vehicle traveling in fully autonomous mode from Los
Angeles to New York by the end of 2017."

Is it possible you don't remember the predictions because you weren't reading
about autonomous driving a couple years ago? It seems like trends and popular
obsessions come and go very quickly these days. If you blink, you can miss it,
like the rise and fall of bitcoin.

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dlp211
Or it could be that you were looking to techno-optimists for your predictions
while others were looking to those that actually were involved in the tech.

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perl4ever
I was a skeptic all along, because it seemed like the "techno-optimists"
failed to grasp the difficulty of writing software in general. I'm sure the
people that engaged in most online discussions that I remember were not
experts.

However, I don't see why you point to people actually working on self-driving
cars as if they would have been pessimists - why work on such things if they
didn't believe it was feasible?

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iambateman
There are tons of technical problems but the fundamental issue is our
expectations.

Driverless cars can’t just respond as well as a human would have - they have
to be better.

They have to “know” the black ice was there. Or the pothole was there. Or the
construction was there. And then they have to respond “reasonably”, which is
tough because computers are fundamentally “reasonless” machines at the moment.

If our expectations were driving during the day on a few defined streets in
nice weather, perhaps going a bit slower and with the understanding that
things may get a little jerky, I think we would be ok.

In other words...we need to give self-driving cars permission to be like we
once were: not amazing at driving.

We need to give the cars a learners permit.

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ec109685
That’s why they are deploying driver assitent technology now and human co-
pilots for any cars with autonomous driving capability.

Unlike with humans, the learning is transferable with driverless cars.

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masonic
The drivers provide _instruction_ in a form that will be retained by the
software?

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ec109685
Yes, via recording and labeling what the human does when it’s not engaged and
during any take overs when it is engaged.

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seibelj
I’m sure it will be 5 to 10 years away 5 to 10 years from now, just as they
were saying 5 to 10 years ago.

I do think it will happen someday but this is an insanely complex problem with
enormous danger and risk. I am most impressed with the AI hucksters who
convinced investors that the tech was close and then commanded 7 figure
salaries to work on it. An impressive feat!

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xbmcuser
I have never believed that we will get fully autonomus cars suddenly. But each
year cars will be able to do more on their own. It will be a gradual
transition. Where the driver's will let it park on it's own, drive on the
freeways/highway on it's own. To allowing it to go from the highway to home or
work on it's own on a regularly used routes. I feel people that dismiss
autonomuos cars completely and people expecting them to be perfect in the next
few years are both wrong.

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nine_k
Driverless cars are a much harder problem than driverless trucks.

Once the latter become day-to-day reality on highways, I'll become cautiously
optimistic about autonomous cars in cities.

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gboudrias
I've read somewhere that driverless trucks are pretty much as hard as
driverless anything, because there's always that last mile in a city. It's
impossible for the ride to be 100% automated, and anything less is pointless
at the moment.

I think we'll need some extremely standardized "pre-last-mile" highway
exits/transfer points across the whole country to have the beginnings of a new
solution. And I doubt the Teamsters will be onboard with that.

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dehrmann
> ...there's always that last mile in a city

But what if that's the only mile driven by a human? Trucks drive autonomously
on highways in good conditions, then a human takes over for the last mile?

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WhompingWindows
There will be, and have been, people on both sides of the SDC debate, bulls
and bears, for years going back and forth. There are good talking-points for
bulls in that the technology improves yearly and there are local roll-outs,
there are great talking points for bears in delayed national-scale roll-outs,
and taking on the overoptimistic estimates of years past.

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dongping
What astounded me talking to people working in self-driving car start-ups and
spin-offs from incumbents, is that how little they care about simulation. The
last accident from Uber confirmed that yet again.

The fact is absolutely difficult to comprehend, when Waymo has allegely done a
huge amount of simulation.

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soup10
they should focus on mastering mundane routine driving and have a backup to
switch to remote controlled operation for risky or unusual situations.

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googlemike
I am not convinced you understand this problem space well. The very notion of
defining two such states is extremely elusive.

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threeseed
Might want to look into Toyota Guardian before dismissing the approach.

As it's exactly what they are planning to roll out in the short to medium
term.

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bitL
Almost all technical problems of self-driving cars are solved by current
algorithms once we get 100x faster HW, i.e. processing at 1000 fps instead of
10, making things like tracking, collision avoidance, vision, etc. trivial;
the only problem left is path planning (down to inch resolution with dynamic
vehicle models), which is coincidentally NP-hard and there is very little hope
to get it to human level in reasonable time (Waymo is still orders of
magnitude worse than an average human).

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lsc
>Almost all technical problems of self-driving cars are solved by current
algorithms once we get 100x faster HW,

That sounds off to me, because my understanding is that the computer is a
small portion of the cost and the mass of the self-driving car. If you could
solve the problem by just filling up the back seats with computers, someone
would have prototyped it, and probably even brought it to market as a way to
drive large vehicles.

(I mean, unless you were on some non-parallelizable process, but my
understanding is that most image processing tasks are massively parallel.)

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Jedi72
Driverless cars are IMHO a classic example of technology looking for a problem
to solve. Improving road safety, the biggest reason for them (again IMHO) can
be achieved with existing technology by implementing smart roads with sensors
and cameras as well as vehicle datalinks which can predict and warn when a car
is about to blow through an intersection in front of you or whatever, and
instantly alert authorities when a driver speeds or is driving erratically
(you might call this dystopian, but I would argue you have more freedom here
than with an autonomous car you literally cant drive over the speed limit).
The second major reason is automation, which I agree is nice, but if you
analyze the cost of trucking [0] you see that drivers wages and benefits
account for only 20%-40% of the operating costs in the trucking industry. If
you use the typical startup cliche that a 10x improvement is necessary to
really change a market, the economics of driverless vehicles just dont add up.
It seems like a great idea to rich east-coasters who wish they could work on
their daily commute, but outside of certain bubbles I don't think they make
any sense. IMHO.

0 - [http://atri-online.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/ATRI-
Opera...](http://atri-online.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/ATRI-Operational-
Costs-of-Trucking-2017-10-2017.pdf)

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luckydata
Oh c'mon, let's not be silly. One thing is to say it's unpractical to do now,
or maybe ever, but the problem is very real. Having the ability for a vehicle
to drive itself reliably on normal roads would have a transformational effect
on society, first of all the end of car ownership as we have it today.

~~~
Jedi72
But of you tackle the problem first, and not the technology, it makes more
sense to just build automated road systems. Dumb pod-like cars which are
driven by roadside controllers. If we decide to go down this route it can be
achieved with existing technology, today. This is the ultimate scenario most
people imagine with self-driving cars anyway, a future where hardly any of the
cars on the road are driven by humans. We should just go straight there.

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PhasmaFelis
That would be nice, but it would also require infrastructure investment on a
massive scale before it could even begin. Self-driving cars as currently
conceived function on existing infrastructure with zero changes.

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drb91
But cars are already broken: see LA, SF, NYC. Why double down rather than
invest in infrastructure?

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Eridrus
Because being easily deployable is a very important part of a technology.

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drb91
Only to short term business interests. Long term the costs of cars to society
are absolutely abysmal compared to bulk transit.

