To add insult to injury, the manner in-use today of modeling humans as essentially just another kind of dynamic object breaks down extremely quickly once humans are normalized to the presence of autonomous robots. The humans change their own behavior model to achieve their own objective function. They're not dynamic objects, they're learning objects, and now your AV models (which will include human interaction and reaction behaviors on purpose if you're it right and on accident if you're not) breakdown along an entirely new longitudinal axis.
I think the AV market fundamentally broke when GM acquired Cruise for $1B seemingly out if nowhere.
1) Because the reality is that the DARPA Urban Challenge result was not assuredly generalizable, and it may be the case that there's still basic science to be done before the domain is just better, cheaper sensors & high-performance compute away from being productionizable.
2) It's not at all clear that deep learning is really iterating toward a solution to this problem either, but the improvements to methods and hardware have produced the ability to make very compelling demos, that even the purveyors of themselves might believe in, and show iterative improvements on the previous result, thus fueling more investment into something that isn't even known to be possible.
3) But, none of that would matter if GM hadn't decided to make a power move in throwing $1B at an acquisition and in one fell swoop turned an early stage unproven scientific research market into a super, super frothy capital market where it looked like anybody at any moment could be a unicorn without any clear reason or any fundamentals.
Investors went insane and the expectations and promises followed them.
I say this while on a car ferry. Getting on this boat required me to navigate several strange road markings and obey a half-dozen hand gestures from staff, including several that were contrary to the painted lines. No AI is even contemplating car ferries.
There aren't many car ferries around where I live. But there's plenty of construction...
That's a huge difference. Maybe you can address it with some sort of remote OnStar-like system but now you're forcing a remote operator to jump into an unknown context and take actions that were too hard for the AI.
I don't think we will ever change road infrastructure in the same manner on any appreciable scale. (Hell, there's a pothole in front of my street that's been there for 5 years).
This holds if you expect self-driving cars to be able to work like humans in picking up "body-language" cues around other drivers. But we can also approach the problem the other way around and set better fixed rules for how driving needs to be done and adjust the road and car infrastructure to make the problem simpler. Human drivers get away with breaking so many rules that the problem becomes much harder than it needs to be.
Found it: https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
The parent response would have these ideas checked:
(X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
...
(X) Asshats
(X) Jurisdictional problems
...
(X) Technically illiterate politicians
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(X) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
Automating being dismissive of discussion does sound like a great idea...
> Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
It requires setting stricter traffic rules and having them be followed. Something that's done everywhere in the world every year. It can be done as gradually and as locally-specific as needed.
> Asshats
We already have those on the road causing accidents. Traffic rules are there to punish this exact behavior. The fact that we don't enforce a few of them makes self-driving harder. I'm not "failing to account for asshats", I'm specifically targeting them.
> Jurisdictional problems
We already have different jurisdictions where different driving requirements exist. Having self-driving cars that are only allowed to drive in country X would be nothing new.
> Technically illiterate politicians
My suggestions was specifically to make the road rules stricter and enforced. This is not a technical issue, it's the boring old issue of what the road rules should be and who should follow them.
> Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
Enforcing road rules works fine even if done gradually. It also makes self-driving gradually simpler.
> It requires setting stricter traffic rules and having them be followed. Something that's done everywhere in the world every year.
But you mentioned two somethings: "Setting stricter traffic rules" and "having them be followed." The very first examples in the TFA were from Argo's testing i Pittsburgh:
Recently, one of the company’s cars encountered a bicyclist riding the wrong way down a busy street between other vehicles. Another Argo test car came across a street sweeper that suddenly turned a giant circle in an intersection, touching all four corners and crossing lanes of traffic that had the green light.
Setting stricter traffic rules is certainly done everywhere in the world every year. People failing to follow traffic rules is also done everywhere in the world every day, and that's the big problem. Fully autonomous driving requires the ability to make snap decisions that may have little to no precedence in your past experience. This may be a solvable problem for AI, but it's a really, really hard problem that self-driving aficionados seem to consistently underestimate.
...
ie where we want to use cars.
I don't need to go into everything that was said, you can google it. There was one thing said, however, that I think would be appropriate to touch on here. Kamen, just like you, claimed that traffic laws and the streets could be restructured to better accommodate the segway. That was the instant I knew the segway would not be taking off for a long, long time. If you need for people to restructure their laws and cities solely to accommodate your new technology, you should probably work a little bit harder on perfecting your technology. Because restructuring society's laws and transportation infrastructure simply to use your technology is probably not going to happen. The only time you get a radical restructuring of that nature is when the invention frees you from needing the infrastructure at all.
To be fair, this did happen -- with cars.
But that also sets the bar: to warrant re-architecting cities, an advance needs to be as superior to cars as cars were to horse transport.
Even restructuring a citys roadways for bicycles--a long-term, proven good technology--has been incredibly slow going. And this with something governments are actively trying to improve.
It will be decades until there is substantial enough change that self driving cars are viable as described in the great-grand-parent. And that's if it moves quickly.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18447674
What's next? Walls on sidewalks? Computers are not smart or dumb. They are machines. Anthropomorphizing them ("self") is foolish.
You're attacking a strawman. I'm not saying the solution to self-driving is to change the environment completely to make the problem trivial (i.e., walls on sidewalks). I'm saying that some of the poorly defined and even worse enforced rules of driving could be worked on and that would help self-driving as well. How much would be enough to bring it out of being AGI I'm not sure, but it would definitely help.
If you want to instead talk about making it safer for human drivers, fine, that's a different subject.
Human sensory augmentation will save lives, but that has nothing to do with the marketing ploy that cars can have self.
I haven't been in an accident in over 15 years
IMO, if allowing self driving cars on highways costs less than 100k per mile it’s a rather trivial expensive at 16 Billion in the US. Extending that to every road would be much harder to justify. Similarly, developing something like a set of more clear hand gestures for directing traffic would not be a major issue.
Honestly, the need for expensive changes seems unlikely, though some changes such as paint choices for lane markings would probably increase safety or efficiency.
So promising that it will be not just solved, but productized into a polished consumer gadget, in 5 or so years, was an astonishing, unbelievably foolish promise.
And worst of all, yes, it came from people who should have known better.
And as a quick aside: there's much talk about "ethical AI", but here's a more common AI ethics failure: taking money from funders, shareholders, and customers, with promises of imminent deliverables, while knowing full well that the AI advances required for that haven't happened yet, and there's no evidence for when they will, if at all.