Last I heard, Alphabet's solution to the problem of self-driving was a tying the cars very tightly to Google Maps - reliably using just camera and lidar to make driving decisions apparently still isn't sufficient for self-driving but having a map showing the logic of traffic flows makes the process much easier (quick googling seems to indicate many self-driving solutions are similar here).

Thus it is going to be hard to avoid a network connected car and it seems likely that network will be the Internet.

> Thus it is going to be hard to avoid a network connected car and it seems likely that network will be the Internet.

Well, I agree that maps as a second source of information can be important for autonomous vehicles. However, I don't understand why "map" would imply "network connected". Offline navigation systems with detailed maps have existed and still exist for more than twenty years now. I fear that the "offline autonomous vehicle" will solely fail to manifest because of business decisions (online being "more convenient" for both the end-user and the company), not because of technical limitations.

Well, sure keeping maps offline could allow the connection to not be constant but the maps would require very frequent updating since being out of date could have dangerous consequences, and the updating would be most easily done by network.

Edit: which is to say, maps aren't really secondary parts of current systems but more like "co-primary" parts. The cars aren't planning identify traffic lights where they don't expect them.

Relying on a map at runtime for identifying traffic lights g is preposterous. A self-driving car that ignores any temporarily modified or new signaling would be a disaster.

Hey, I can understand not liking it but so far, maps are absolutely "integral" to the operations of self-driving cars. Maybe they'll be less "preposterous" later.

"Almost all of the fully autonomous vehicles currently allowed on public roads are still under the direct supervision of human pilots, and they’re only driving on roads that have been heavily studied and mapped in three dimensions."

See:

https://www.consumerreports.org/autonomous-driving/self-driv...

or "Cars will only be able to drive themselves if they have access to high-precision maps. The digital material contained in today’s navigation systems is not enough. To be able to drive itself safely, a car needs to know its position on the road down to the centimetre. "

https://www.mercedes-benz.com/en/mercedes-benz/next/connecti...

It's integral to a certain class of self-driving cars. Waymo relies on centimeter-level mapping of the environment, and sure, could not possibly operate without a map. The car establishes its exact environment in the world using the maps, and I presume then looks for things then in that environment to track.

Comma.ai, on the other hand, feeds their AI the camera feed and the sensor signals from the car, and it responds, as far as I know, almost entirely based on that stimulus. Of course, Comma.ai's car is presumably less predictable, it relies on a black box to "think", but you could feed it the general concept of what path to take from A to B, even a set of waypoint GPS coordinates of where to turn, and hypothetically, such a car could navigate to that destination otherwise offline, or with the grade of maps reasonably available offline. It's intended to drive like a human drives: Based on the information it perceives in the world around it.

Comma.ai doesn't appear to have cars that even approximately drive themselves (it's got adaptive cruise control, sure, but so does every car company now). It has a camera. Sure they have a proposal to not use maps, but they don't have a result.

For me it would be I only want my vehicle to update when I say so on a network I trust that is probably firewalled. I would prefer this rather than my car updating OTA via someone else's wifi or even the cellular network. This would reduce the risk of a hostile actor taking control of the vehicle when you are most vulnerable. When you're actually driving it.

> Offline navigation systems with detailed maps have existed and still exist for more than twenty years now.

When a dashboard GPS is out of date, it's irritating. When your car's autonav system is out of date, your car is useless.

"map" doesn't imply "network connected". "Google" does.

In a similar way I want an assistant in my phone, but I don't want it to be internet connected either. It's going to know the most personal things about me so I want absolute discretion.

This mindset set me off writing my own. ;) It's been a lot of fun.

Yes, probably the only way. I'm catching up on Neural Nets to try and do the same. Now just need Stephen Fry to lend me his voice.

Do you really need AI though? I am using a simple branching tree structure for commands and queries I know I want, and since it's for my use I already know those commands, and they tend to match my conversational style to begin with.

For the purposes of outside knowledge queries you might not be able to come up with in advance, there's good cause to outsource those rare requests out to the Internet: Just do it intelligently. Require a prefix instruction for an outside request.

For instance, I went ahead and implement Wolfram's API for knowledge queries. They have a great "spoken answer" endpoint, which replies with a string meant to be piped straight to speech output. So I "ask wolfram how tall abraham lincoln was", my program hands everything AFTER "ask wolfram" to the Wolfram API, and Wolfram's API gives me a string back with exactly what I asked.

Now sure, I'm not entirely offline at that point, but everything regarding my personal data, home automation devices, etc. is under my control, and any time I reach out, it's specifically using a command authorizing it to do so.

Of course, caveats before you think my project sounds impressive: A. It's written in Visual Basic. B. Speech recognition isn't working (yet).

If you are interested in speech recognition, Mozilla just released a big open corpus of speech data and some trained models.

Visual Basic is a fine programming language with very weird syntax. Hell, Microsoft has put out .NET bindings for CNTK so you could even use that.

Old Microsoft Speech API would be a good fit here. I miss it. Back in 2007 I made myself a voice control interface for changing music playback. Trainable, completely off-line. Worked like a charm.

Well, that's the point of the article: "connected" is a spectrum, not a binary option. Iranian centrifuges weren't "connected", and yet the virus destroyed them.

Specifically, look in the article:

>First allow me to address what I think won't work:

>Trying to air gap autonomous devices.