mindstalk: (robot)
When self-driving cars first started getting talked about, like 10 years ago, many people were enthusiastic and anticipatory. I was skeptical, because as someone who walks around dense cities, driving safely and effectively in such felt like a human-complete AI problem, needing theory of mind, social interaction, and a large amount of adaptation to unforeseen circumstances.

Also because while in some things like chess or Go, rather dumb computers beat humans through powerful search, a more common AI pattern is that a fairly simple system can get 60-90% of human performance, but then stalls despite a lot of effort. Which is fine when you're making models for targeting direct mailing, and poorer performance can be balanced by much faster turnaround time and it's just moderate amounts of money at stake anyway. Less fine when even a missing 1% of performance may mean people die, or alternatively that traffic is frozen as cars can't figure out how to safely push through busy streets.

(The direct mailing example is from my first full-time job; we could build a decision tree, to predict response rates to a direct mailing, that was said to be 60% of a hand-crafted model but took a few hours instead of a few months to create. A machine translation course in grad school included various systems that could do 60-95% as well as humans, on fairly narrow word tests, but improving that was Hard. Statistical translation, rule-based, hybrid, all stalled.)

Basically an application of the Pareto principle: 20% of the work can get you 80% of the performance. Except it might be more like 1% of the work gets you 80% of the performance; since we don't *have* human-equivalent AI in most of these domains, we can't even say how much work it actually takes.

Early articles were along the lines of "we're making lots of progress! (but can't drive in the rain or snow and are tested mostly in low-density sunlight)", which for some people sounded like "we're almost there but for a bit more work" but to me sounded like "we're already spending years on the *easy* stuff, imagine what the hard stuff will be like."

More recent articles have been more like "wow, this is harder than we thought", with even the executives in charge of developing and selling this stuff saying like "thirty years away" or "never" or "far in the future", or "decades away".

Singapore reportedly has deployed them, as someone on Facebook likes to keep saying, but a friend there observed various caveats: 10 MPH, a bounded area, not mixed with other cars, safety driver, and attendants trying to shoo pedestrians out of the way. Also see. And this is the state of the art!

So, "ha ha!"

I'll also include a FB thread I made two years ago about predictions, and include just one example of receding predictions:

2014: Volvo promises fully self-driving cars by 2017, 3 years later.
2017: Volvo promises partial self-driving cars by 2021, 4 years later.

Date: 2019-12-31 23:44 (UTC)From: [personal profile] l33tminion
l33tminion: Yay! (Yay!)
360 degree vision, constant alertness, super-human reaction time, and an accurate physics model are huge advantages for automated driving, if the rest can get good enough to leverage those. You're right about the low-hanging-fruit, but wouldn't bet against enough of the hard stuff being ground out that the advantage of automated driving becomes huge "soon". (I'd be surprised by less than five years and also somewhat surprised by more than three decades.)

Date: 2020-01-01 01:48 (UTC)From: [personal profile] l33tminion
l33tminion: (Bookhead (Nagi))
I don't think that I am being more optimistic than "researchers in the field" in general, despite your examples here, based on the research I saw presented on the subject at this year's NeurIPS.

I'm surprised John Krafcik is being so modest, given what Waymo has accomplished in field trials. (Surely not everything, but it's not just low-hanging-fruit.) But his "never" is answering a different question than when fully autonomous driving technology will be widely deployed.

Date: 2020-01-01 01:14 (UTC)From: [personal profile] melita66
melita66: (Default)
This. Yes. I work at a software company which makes GIS (mapping, data analysis) software. I know how easy it is to have bugs, problems with interacting programs or code, etc. I'm even more skeptical about flying cars!

Date: 2020-01-01 01:37 (UTC)From: [personal profile] melita66
melita66: (Default)
I hadn't seen that xkcd yet. Thank you!

Flying cars--fewer things to interact with, but what are the "driving/flying" rules? Flight obstructions? Overhead wires, trees, etc.

F.M. Busby has flying cars in an off-world colony in his Rissa Kerguelen series, but it's not a very large city at all. IIRC, there were markings on building roofs.

Date: 2020-01-02 12:34 (UTC)From: [personal profile] elusiveat
elusiveat: (Default)
Flying cars is a fundamentally different problem but still a problem, yeah.

This article is not by anyone with technical expertise but I found it pretty persuasive, including photographs of ~100 years of actual flying cars:
https://www.ecosophia.net/progress-and-amnesia/
"It so happens that by and large, as a result of those pesky little annoyances called the laws of physics, the things that make a good car make a bad plane, and vice versa. To cite only one of many examples, a car engine needs torque to handle hills and provide traction at slow speeds, an airplane engine needs high speed to maximize propeller efficiency, and torque and speed are opposites: you can design your engine to have a lot of one and a little of the other or vice versa, or you can end up in the middle with inadequate torque for your wheels and inadequate speed for your propeller. There are dozens of such tradeoffs, and a flying car inevitably ends up stuck in the unsatisfactory middle."


I'd be curious to see expert commentary on the claims made, though.

Date: 2020-01-01 13:33 (UTC)From: [personal profile] thomasyan
Tangent: I like this illustration of sidewalks/pedestrians versus roads/cars

https://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/11/18/7236471/cars-pedestrians-roads

Date: 2020-01-02 13:14 (UTC)From: [personal profile] elusiveat
elusiveat: (Default)
Thanks for this.

Now, my biggest objection to self-driving cars continues to be that they are *cars*. So anyway we slice it I'm generally dismayed by the self-driving-car-utopians. We need to get way from these machines.

Date: 2020-01-03 17:20 (UTC)From: [personal profile] l33tminion
l33tminion: Have you really tried to save gas by getting into a car club? (Carpool)
Thanks for that, it's very interesting.

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