It would seem full driverless with nobody in the car is the big deal here. It doesn't really matter is someone will be behind the wheel later, you already had the thing driving around with no human to intervene in case it does something crazy. Don't see how that's an intermediary step.

But I don't think that we're cool with the idea that because the number of humans threatened by an accident is reduced by somewhere between 50 and 20%, it's okay for flagrantly unsafe cars to be on the road.

It's really difficult to keep track of pedestrians and cyclists when driving, whereas a driverless car has 360° nightvision.

I'm arguing for the case where the human as NO information.

Let's say, there's a bicycle/motorbike somewhat behind your cars.

For a human driver, it can be seen in only one of the 3 rear mirrors at any point in time. Unless it's slightly behind-left or behind-right (e.g. to take over) in which case it's in the dead angle and can't be seen at all.

By turning his head and using the mirrors, a human cannot see most of the 360° around a car. There are obstructed angles, not to mention that the human can only look toward one direction at once.

The self driving cars with 360° vision can see things that a human couldn't. It has a chance to react where the human didn't.

Major destinations with big parking lots could be on the system. Convention centers, sports stadiums, major hotels. Again, the driver gets out at a convenient unloading point and the car drives and parks itself.

All autonomous driving would be around 15-20mph. At that speed, slamming on the brakes is an adequate solution to almost all problems.

But airport security was too touchy an issue a decade ago. What if one of the self-driving cars had a bomb in it? Might be worth another look now.

You don't consider a car that can drive itself to the pickup location empty to be "completely driverless"?

Looks like the bigger problem might be people suing over accidents where they were distracted and forced to make a split second decision, when they 'reasonably' expected the car to be able to handle the conditions. (Not trying to shift the goal posts, just sharing a separate concern).

I've rented a car before where the only thing they verified is that I presented a credit card with the same name as the one on my driver's license, which they never asked to see because I had already put in the number online. I guess it's possible they were able to look up my photo from DMV records and were matching my face to it, but I'm guessing not.

Never mind the fact that now you have to worry about drunks, making sure insurance is cleared and people have perfect records (and know how to drive), want to drive at all (I don't -- isn't that what I'm paying for?), etc.

If I am engaged with my phone, I am not supervising/shadowing the car.

I envision future photos-videos of driver and driver less "vehicles" at a busy intersection just like horses and early cars.

Personally, I expect that this evolution will be roughly as significant as what was catalysed by the horseless carriage.

Horseless carriages drive on roads that were minimally modified from what the horses used (in some parts of Pittsburgh, for example, they never swapped out the Belgian block).

Seems like it would basically be a two-step process. First, you need autonomous vehicles which work on roads as we have them now. Once they're common, they can start adding features which can take advantage of more sophisticated infrastructure when it comes. Sort of like how early cars had to work on paths built for horse carriages, but once they were common we could start building things like freeways.

Government has to get involved. Sometime and somewhere. Public safety is one aspect

I suggested to one town councilman that our town introduces a bill (ordinance) banning driver less vehicles. Just like we can ban oversized vehicles and parking in the winter. Our government should ban then now while it is not yet happening.

He thought it would be a good idea not to ban them but to capture a licensing fee.

Hopefully this will get introduced at the next meeting

PS: I don't necessarily agree w/ bans or taxes, just don't like the up/down culture of 'popularity'. The sooner the texters & PMGo players are relegated to child seats, the better for all drivers/passengers/riders, IMO.

I'm certain that I won't be driving a car ever in 2030

Computer vision actually started out in the 60's because how hard could it be to classify objects in images? Well, decades later and it's still a hugely unsolved problem.

Robotics can be broken into 3 main categories: perception, planning, and controls. Perception is always the weak point. Robots just cannot see and understand their environments like people can. When you put a robot in a dynamic environment, they fail spectacularly. To give some idea of this, look at videos of robots falling down at the DARPA Robotics Challenge - and keep in mind those were made by teams of top roboticists with millions of dollars in a highly constrained environment (it's hard to say that obstacle course was "real").

I really, really doubt it's going to happen in a few years. I would love to be wrong though.

AFAIK Google's cars rely on radar to identify the position of objects, which I would think is vastly easier.

Of course, there's still the interesting challenge of classifying objects into traffic partipicants and obstacles.

When there are billions of $'s to be made. Generally there is way.

I understand from where you are coming. But if the trend grows, and one companies sees the billions coming. Others are forced to innovate. Also a whole new ecosystem is born.

See pre iPhone and post iPhone mobile industry. Sometimes you need one company to do something insane to drive others down the same path.

State of the art offline CNNs have been doing classification quite well recently, arguably better than humans. See the Inception-v3 paper: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1512.00567v3.pdf

Now, interpreting the words I say is a different matter, but as far as transcription I'd say we are at basically 100% right now and have been for a while.

What? Sometimes I use Google's speech to text and a majority of the time it's a waste of my time. "Food near me" is not "fool's errand" (the irony isn't lost on me) and "gyms nearby" is not "Jim Dougherty", both are search terms I used last night.

Google Voice to Text, from my experiences, is bloody amazing for Chinese. My Chinese is abysmal (think "never gets the tone right") and for short phrases/sentences I've never had Google fail on me. Maybe it fails on larger sentences but it would be difficult for me to believe.

Japanese is another language it does very well in. I can only count on one hand how many times it has made a mistake - and usually repeating myself a tad slower and with less slurring and it will pick it up just fine.

So it might not work for everyone in the world but at some point soon it will properly be there for most national languages.

Amazon Echo is far from perfect, but it's the perfect example of the rapid improvements in technology + building an interface that "just works"

Wheel less driving, first show me it drives in the pouring rain at night when the roads aren't lit. Show it having the ability to obey posted speed limits, adjust to construction, and the like.

I am still surprised at how much current systems love to tail gate let alone don't suggest obeying posted limits.

The hype right now is so great that even if the reality is amazing it will be disappointing.

For example, a train of self driving trucks can be led by 1 in the front. Yes, I know, REAL trains exist, but they don't go everywhere. A train of self driving trucks could save a lot of money.

If self driving Taxis don't work in the rain, then Uber can just NOT drive them when it is raining! For example, Maybe the penetration rate will be very low in Seattle, but very high in Texas. Disrupting 20% of the Taxi market by eliminating drivers is still a very big deal.

And for trucks, will you let supermarkets go dry once it starts raining? Otherwise you need to keep drivers on retainer. And then you might as well just have them drive for minimum wage.

When it is sunny, the self driving cars are out and about, and the price is low.

When it is raining, the self driving cars stop taking passengers, and the price goes up, with surge pricing, which is handled by human drivers.

You don't keep drivers on retainer. You simply publish the price, and if the drivers like the price, then they can accept the job. If not, then they don't. If there is a shortage, then you use surge pricing until the shortage no longer exists at the given price point.

For trucks and supermarkets, if it is raining then you pay human drivers. If not, then self driving. BAM, labor costs have gone down by 50%.

Uber doesn't have any interest in self driving cars succeeding. It's a PR distraction to justify the exploitation of drivers ("you shouldn't complain because you are lucky to have a job at all when self driving cars are coming any day now").

Self driving cars that don't have drivers would completely destroy Uber's actual business model which is based on undercutting current taxi companies by shifting the capital, maintenance and insurance costs onto the drivers.

Think about what you're saying here. If manual driving is still required 60% of the time there will still be mass-unemployment of taxi and truck drivers. These guys are not paid well enough that they can afford half the amount of income that they currently have.

It's Level 2 ("adaptive cruise control in combination with lane centering") that's the problem. Therein lies the deadly valley - good enough that the driver can tune out, but not good enough to handle trouble. That's where Tesla is. Level 2 with strongly enforced hands-on-wheel seems to be OK, but don't let the driver take their hands off for long periods.

Practical, reliable ML stems from enormous data sets. And I can't see a way of obtaining the necessary data volume other than sitting in Level 3 for a product cycle...

When they say, A future model will be wheelless. What they're saying is a car in 15-25 years will be wheelless. Which is about on track with the parent poster's time frame.

Most the large Semi-Truck manufacturers seem to be progressing along a similar track. Ford's forecasts of 20 years forward actual sees a complete stop of consumer vehicles moving completely over to driver-less fleet vehicles.

But Uber need the press more than ever after losing China and having to have a growth story for their large valuation.

Surely the pay is far less for the passive driver? If not I assume it will be soon.

First, Uber drivers are already not making much. Drivers I've talked to here in SF say they are near $15/hour (though they can more in the form of bonuses if they hit certain hours-driven targets).

Second, the job of a passive driver will actually be both more boring and harder -- you have to pay attention while doing nothing, but be ready to take over in a second. It's like being a passenger, except you can't distract yourself in anyway. I'd much rather just drive.

Let's have the same conversation about Minneapolis, Dallas, St. Paul, Austin, Kansas City, etc. Austin is a great example of a city with a lot of unemployement and underemployment due to the massive student population. Can't you imagine a college student riding around listening to lectures on the radio (assuming they're actually trying to do their job) for $8/hr? I can. And I can see the next student saying "I'll do it for $7.50".

Seems like a perfect situation for an accident.

Would I devote hours being behind the wheel? No. I would try to find a job UNIXing for food because that's what I know. But we're not talking about me. We're talking about folks who have a driver's license, a clean driving record and can pass a background check. If they don't have to supply the vehicle the financial barrier to entry is much lower.

So yes I honestly think there will be downward pressure on wages for what is essentially a passive job. Sure you have to pay attention to prevent accidents, but that's it. Time to get out dragon dictate and start verbally writing the next Great American Novel.

While shifting the costs of vehicle purchase and maintenance from the driver to Uber is a factor, it's not enough to make driver wages "far less," and Uber has already been offering various assistances to drivers towards vehicle ownership, so nothing very dramatic is happening there -- and in any case, none of that savings will make it to the passenger, who ultimately is paying for the vehicle.

Making "far less" money than a typical Uber driver means around minimum-wage job or below. Let me suggest that there is no large pool of people who are interested in a roughly minimum-wage job with no security or prospect for advancement, who can plausibly save you from dying in a car crash.

(PS: There is no way that Uber would allow its drivers to dictate a novel while a passenger is in the car).

I expect that "supervised by humans in the driver's seat" here means "the car is fully self-driving, but we're still doing development and testing and we don't trust it enough yet". You can test these things on private roads, but eventually you need to get them out into the real world and collect data, figure out where the failure points are, etc.

But for sure they're building a fully-autonomous no-driver-needed car, and it's not ready yet so someone has to be there to take over when it fails.

I.e. the reason that this exists is not to have some mostly-autonomous driver-assistance in place right now; that's useless to Uber. Rather it's part of the process of testing and improving the completely driver-less cars that they're working on.

And with current approaches to self driving cars you need lots of data, sensors, fast and reliable internet connection, accurate maps and so forth, all of which are not at the level needed to have autonomy on all roads. So even if the algorithms would be good enough you'll need much more than that to get to self driving cars.

On the other hand a human only needs one working eye and a way to steer the car to be able do drive pretty much anywhere.

Consider that we used to let horses do most of the steering and low-level control of our road-based vehicles.