>...without a single brain-byte spent on ...

This is a glorious Gibson-esq turn of phrase that I hope goes down in history and is picked up in common vernacular.

Back on topic: The more I know about technology the less I want it or trust it to work. I assume this is similar to Pilots not wanting somebody else to fly, or surgeons not wanting to go under the knife.

We know, that we don't know enough about autonomous driving. Instead of the 'unwashed masses' saying "gee-whiz that is cool", we think "this isn't ready yet!"

We know that, but also we ought to know that pushing through the hard problems by rolling out systems operating world-wide and interacting with real people is the only way forward toward improved safety, reduced mental slavery to the menial task of driving, and the time and relationship freedom that comes with it. So yep, I let my Tesla do lots of driving. And I do it knowing that the brake pedal and the steering wheel are both manual controls that I can use to override the car at any time, no matter what. That is why I feel so comfortable.

And you know what? It's wonderful. It really is. I am free to look around and see other people on the freeway. They look so bored. So tired. So used up. Meanwhile my wife and I, we turn on the careoke machine and sing our way to the destination. It is absolutely the way to go. You can take my Tesla and its AP functions out of my cold dead hands. Maybe that's how I go, and I'm alright with it.

I wouldn't feel comfortable in a vehicle that may, or may not react to some situation on the road ahead. Because one day it will decide to do $something_really_stupid and you won't be able to react in time/correctly because you'll be too busy singing karaoke. With some extra bad luck, you'll die/kill someone else because of that.

Yeah, but is that a bigger risk than some dumbass in a truck blowing a red light and plowing into my door? Based on where Tesla is at I don't think it is. They're already reasonably below the median risk we all accept for driving at all. After all, my butt can feel that the car is doing something seriously unexpected way before my eyeballs can. So I'm going to keep singing, with my thumb gently on the wheel and one eye on the road.

With all due respect, that is just as likely to happen with human drivers as well.

> is the insane amount of PR, politics and marketing talk by people who have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA

I have seen this too much. People who have a deep understanding of how things work are busy learning and doing. People who can spent their energy with politics and marketing can do it because they are not busy learning and doing. I which there was a solution for this. Corporate IT departments are particularly full of this.

I wonder why the self-driving car hype folks don’t simply lobby to make more trains.

(I mean the ones who have been successfully marketed to here, not the marketers).

We had self driving vehicles for 30,000 years. I’ve thought about just getting horse brains hooked up - but people probably don’t want their cars spooked by plastic bags.

How do you know the people bullish on self driving cars haven’t also lobbied for trains? There’s a lot more standing in the way of trains being built in the US, unfortunately. To me, self driving cars are just the second-best thing, and one that might actually happen. It’s a bit too late for trains to take over in most of the country.

Predicting with All-Caps confidence that autonomous driving is "decades away" is at least as indefensible as overly optimistic predictions were.

I think autonomous driving advocates would do well to look at the history of computer handwriting recognition, an easier technical problem with lower consequences that received significant investment over decades. But it has never gotten good enough to succeed in the marketplace against alternatives.

Why? It never exceeded consumer expectations, which are extremely high for automated systems. Even a correctness rate of 99.9% means multiple errors per day for most people. Consumers expected approximately zero errors, despite not being able to achieve that themselves, sometimes even with their own handwriting!

Because handwriting is made by humans, there is some percentage of it that simply cannot be reliably recognized at all. But people hold that against computers more than other people because computers are supposed to be labor saving devices.

Likewise because roads are made by people, and other cars are driven by people, so a self driving car will never be able to be perfectly safe. But that is essentially what advocates are promising.

That’s especially true if people expect the same level of convenience, especially in terms of time. People speed and take risks all the time when driving, in the name of saving time. I think it’s likely that an autonomous car optimized for safety would also be a car that just takes a lot longer to get anywhere with.

Speed matters. It’s a big reason we all use touch keyboards on our phones instead of handwriting recognition.

> [comparison to hand writing recognition]

Excellent point, stealing that. I work in automotive and an engineer, traveled around the world, think the realistic possibility of self driving cars without major changes in how we make roads, everywhere, is extremely low.

My error rate in recognizing handwriting would be much higher than a free, open-source recognizer. I am very bad at recognizing other people's handwriting. I don't understand your need for 0 errors. Real life is full of errors and imperfections, there is chaos everywhere. Seems like you expect unachivable.

Handwriting recognition works very well if you can capture the actual strokes used while writing and not just the end result.

I doubt it. My handwriting is at least average neatness, and stroke based recognition systems still make multiple errors per sentence. It's just a frustrating waste of time and now that we have touch screen keyboards there's no longer any point to handwriting recognition.

The only handwriting recognition system which ever worked correctly with a low error rate was Palm Graffiti. It forced the user to learn a new shorthand writing style designed specifically to avoid errors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_(Palm_OS)

The secret to Palm Graffiti's market success was that it hacked user expectations.

Because it asked users to learn a new way of writing, when the recognition failed, users were more likely to blame themselves, like, "Oh, I must have not done that Graffiti letter right, I'll try again."

But when it came to recognizing regular (i.e. natural) handwriting, users believed inherently (i.e. somewhat unconsciously) that they already knew how to write, and the machine was new, so mistakes were the machine's fault.

While we're sharing anecdotes, my handwriting is remarkably terrible, and the iPadOS Notes app does a good job of transcribing it.

I think this supports the grandparent's point about using the actual strokes, including angle and azimuth, to reconstruct intent.

I was also fairly proficient with Graffiti, back in the day, but I consider that an input method, not handwriting recognition. I was facile with T9 as well.

Analyzing the individual strokes works flawlessly with Chinese and Japanese, where the stroke order is fixed (occasionally with a few variants). If you have the stroke information and the user writes correctly you can recognize characters that even humans would fail to read from the finished glyphs.

That's great, but I would wager that nearly 100% of all writing ever done in human history was done without capturing the strokes while writing. Therefore, while this added accuracy is great, it is virtually useless for most written work.

Isn't that a bit irrelevant? If we are talking about patterns that work well for the user, clearly writing everything traditionally and then going back and taking pictures of everything is a cumbersome process. Writing on iPad or similar is clearly the medium in which this shines, at which point you do capture the strokes.

That only works if you can assume that everybody using the system you're desiging has access to the underlying technology. Sure, if you're desiging some new system (like an autonomous vehicle on a closed loop, controlled system / system purpose built to perform digit recognition as it is written on it, but why wouldn't you just have the user directly input on a keypad) then you'll get a better result, but in the general, real world, case (autonomous vehicle on city streets with other vehicles / recognizing digits from scanned input without the stroke data) then your special case optimization are impossible and for all general practical purposes do not apply, so appealing to their assistance in increasing accuracy doesn't actually do anything to help the system perform better.

While that's true, having the ability to capture strokes now allows machine-learning models to better determine what potential strokes were used to make a specific shape. Just because we didn't have it for everything doesn't mean it's not useful for adding accuracy to the past.

So by analogy, autonomous driving will work very well if we can capture all the roads as they're being built?

> "handwriting recognition... has never gotten good enough to succeed in the marketplace against alternatives."

There is little market demand for handwriting recognition, and thus little active research goes into it. Not because it is a difficult or problematic technology, but because better alternatives exist that make it irrelevant.

Even if someone were to come up with an absolutely perfect handwriting recognition system, most people wouldn't use it. Why? because the advent of multi-touch screens means that most people can type much faster than they can hand-write anyway.

This is all true today, but it was not true in the past. There was a time in the computing industry when everyone believed that pen interfaces with handwriting recognition would be a crucial enabler for highly mobile computing. Both Apple and Microsoft built major product launches around this idea in the early 1990s.

Oh, absolutely. I remember that era well. But I'm talking about today, of course.

What changed was that touch screens became better. The old capacitive touch screens were clunky, slow, inaccurate. You could put a keyboard on them, but the lag and poor accuracy meant you couldn't really touch type comfortably. Then multitouch came along and made on-screen keyboards much more responsive and accurate.

But also, Blackberry and (pre-smartphone) phones with SMS made people more comfortable with the idea of using keyboards for text entry on handheld devices. And crucially, auto-correct and predictive text entry covered up for accuracy errors and made text entry by keyboard even more attractive.

I wouldn't bet on it but I also wouldn't call it indefensible. Fully autonomous driving is a very complex problem with a very long tail. Being able to drive semi-reliably on American highways doesn't mean that you're almost done, not even close.

An other handicap for self-driving cars is that the problem is effectively harder at the start when the majority of the traffic will still be operated by human drivers who are a lot harder to predict reliably than an other autonomous vehicles.

Beyond that, I strongly believe that software engineering is still ridiculously immature and unable to deliver safe, reliable solutions without strong hardware failovers. We have countless examples of this. We simply don't have the maturity yet, we're still figuring out what type of screwdrivers we should use and whether a hammer could do the trick.

Having driven in Canadian winters, I honestly agree that reliable autonomous driving in inclement weather is indeed decades away.

The visual recognition needed is well beyond the systems today.

Isn't that just "image de-obfuscation" though? Seems like narrow AI will be able to out-class humans at that in no time. You can generate as much training data for that as you want. Doesn't really require human-type intelligence. Though I guess you might mean that the obfuscation makes the edge cases even harder, which makes sense.

There's like fifty caveats that go along with this statement, but this is the internet so I'm just going to skip all that.

Something like half your human brain is devoted to visual processing.

There's a tendency to think that things like language is what makes the human brain special, or our ability to plan or think abstractly, and we talk about things like "eagle eyes", but the truth is humans are seeing machines with most everything else as an afterthought.

The reason your cat will attack paint spots on glass for hours and flips the hell out about laser pointers is because their visual systems are too simple to distinguish between those and the objects that actually interest them, like insects.

Vision is not the easy part of AI.

> Vision is not the easy part of AI.

I think it is, actually. Going from raw pixels to objects is the (relatively speaking) easy part. It's the next part (using that for planning and common-sense reasoning) that's the hard part. Machine learning has already advanced past humans in this regard for many classes of problems - which is part of the reason why captchas are getting so hard.

This was several years ago, hence the move away from obfuscated text (which was getting harder and harder to read): https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/artificial-intelligence/...

I'd be surprised if basic perception tasks as human-ness tests last more than a few more years.

citation for "half your human brain is devoted to visual processing"?

Since the internet places no weight on things like "common knowledge to anyone in the field" or "I took a bunch of classes on the brain in college", here's a random quote from someone at MIT: http://news.mit.edu/1996/visualprocessing

I have a car (Honda Pilot) where the company decided to make the lift gate window too high, probably to accommodate mounting the spare tire inside the cabin. This design makes you dependent on the rear camera for most reverse use cases.

It probably made a lot of sense in the Southern California design center. In Upstate New York, that camera is covered in road spray and salt, and my brain cannot see anything or act effectively without cleaning it. Even after doing that, it will get dirty again after a few minutes of driving.

I’d guess that a least a few dozen people will hurt by this decision.

Take this problem to the self-driving car and things get even worse. You’re going to have a lot of problems with sensor effectiveness that cannot be magically fixed with software.

It sometimes seems as if half the purpose of assistive driving systems serves to compensate for the absolutely horrible sight lines in a lot of newer vehicles.

And I have heard rumors of lobbying going on to get the requirement for rear view mirrors dropped when video feeds are provided to replace the functionality.

Here's my go-to example about the challenges of driving in a Canadian winter.

I was waiting for my bus to work one morning after a large snowfall. The snow clearing crews were hard at work, but the street was effectively blocked by piles of snow, men, and machines.

Yet, my bus arrived on time *driving down the sidewalk".

I am not sure how any self-driving system could have figured that out :)

And if it did, hollow sidewalks are a thing in some places, so...

On what grounds?

Sorry for the out of the blue unrelated reply, but I am currently stuck working as a technical consultant at one of the Big4, how did you make your way out of this? I feel like I am learning about antiquated technologies, and that pivoting to a software engineering job more aligned with my interests, skills, and sanity feels harder every day. Even something like you describe you are doing now sounds much better than what I'm doing now. Also I know exactly what you are talking about with the marketing and PR talk it is insane.

Some folks I know joined code camps/ lambda school like programs and got out. Alrernatively, if you work on clients, easy way is to accept a full time job at any of your clients you enjoy/tolerate working.

Sorry, late reply.

I got out by never really getting in I am afraid. I worked for 1.5 years in technical consulting as a student job while getting my informatics degree.

Once I obtained my degree, I declined an offer by said Big4 firm and took another offer where I got to go hands-on with coding. I had previous coding experience which helped and then amazing colleagues who boosted my start.

Yeah but speaking as someone kinda on the other side there are things like this 'actual Level 4' delivering stuff for real in Wuhan https://kr-asia.com/jd-com-uses-l4-autonomous-driving-soluti...

Fair enough it's not very good - that one just went 600m - but it's hard to argue it won't exist for decades when it exists now.

And historically going form sorta works but is rubbish in info tech eg. early cellphones, internet and so on - to works well doesn't seem to take that long. Five to ten years perhaps typically.

There's no reason to believe that's a level 4 autonomous vehicle, other than the marketing release of the company that makes it.

Going from early cellphones to smartphones was an engineering problem. All the technology was already available and it was a case of putting it all together in a way that worked and that could be manufactured at scale and for profit.

With vehicle autonomy, the problem is that we don't know how to create autonomous AI agents yet, so we don't know how to make a car driven by such an agent. Claims of level 4 autonomy should, at this point, be treated like claims of teleportation or time-travelling back in time: theoretically possible but we don't know how to make it happen in practice.

The issue is that there are so, so many edge cases to worry about. Simple example: someone decides to troll you in your self-driving car and steps out in front of it. You don't have controls in the car, so you can't go around them - you have to wait for them to move.

In reality, it seems like it would resolve quickly - you get out and yell at them, call the police if that doesn't work, etc. But it can get more sinister - criminals _already_ block the road to force drivers out of their car to rob them[1][2]. Now, if you know that might happen, you can just drive around the obstacle. Unless, of course, you're in a self-driving car where you might not even be able to get it to do a u-turn. Related issues would be areas where the practical advice is "don't stop" - not even at red lights - if you're there late at night due to the risk of car jacking[3][4] (this might be out-of-date now, to be fair). Can rules like that be encoded into a self-driving car?

OK, yes, you probably could find a way to do it. But that's almost certainly just the tip of the iceberg in terms of "ways people will fuck with self-driving cars" and "things people do that are technically illegal but still safer than the alternative." Could you solve enough of those in 5-10 years, _on top of_ making self-driving cars work in sun/rain/snow/fog/night/tornados/etc safely and consistently? I think that's very unlikely. Decades seems far more likely to me.

[1] https://abc7chicago.com/593111/

[2] (Non-EU only) https://wgntv.com/2015/03/31/robbers-set-up-fake-road-blocks...

[3] https://eu.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/detroit-city/201...

[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskLEO/comments/2rzsdz/are_there_an...

Have you seen the roads in Alabama? They have this weird, red asphalt and rarely any edge lines. In Louisiana they have these elevated roads over the bayou that don't seem to have break-down lanes. In Tennessee they have roads that go through mountains with shocking curves and gradients. Pot holes, broken lights & signs, weird parking lots, new construction, and seeing a small ball roll near the road and knowing that a kid might be coming after it soon.

It seems like it would take an endless list to cover every new edge case. Our technology is a amazing, but I almost think the edge case is places where autonomous driving makes sense.

The thing I trust the least is the operators they want to put in these cars. They better be completely autonomous, self-maintaining, and somehow tamper-proof. It's a really tall order, which I hope we do fulfill one day. But maybe I'm a pessimist, and they have it all figured out already.

Re robbers, car jackers and the like in some ways you may be better with a self driving car as they seem to be covered with cameras and report back to base the whole time so the crooks would be photographed and the cops called. Already the Tesla cameras have caught a few https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqBWt9rRx-U

Re all the edge cases - yeah that'll take a while.

There was a movie which featured autonomously driving trucks, they were held up and stolen from by the bandits putting a cow in front of them, then just taking the cargo while it was stopped.

You can certainly have all the cameras that you need but if the bad guys have their faces covered and identifying marks hidden then you're not going to be able to do much.

> There was a movie...

I'm pretty sure there is an early scene in the movie Solar Crisis[1] that plays out similarly to what you're describing. This movie was on one of the cable movie channels when I was growing up, so I got a higher-than-normal dose of it.

I don't remember a cow, though (but then this probably isn't the only sci-fi movie out there with such a scene). I think one of the characters first parked a motorcycle in the road, but the truck plowed through it. After that, they stood in the road instead, and that caused the truck to screech to a stop right in front of them, blasting a message on a PA about how they were breaking the law by impeding it.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Crisis_(film)

Yes, that’s going to be very helpful to the investigators when they finally figured out what happened to the car and to your body. Might not be helpful to you, though....

License plate can be covered (or more often - using stolen car) and balaclavas cost just few dollars.

If it is know it is stolen a hi tech truck can be remotely ... of course there is another kind of risk. But if one just ensure only one guy can open the container or the container is fixed with pin certain distance from a driver etc.

Ther is always a way.

Five years ago or so, video from "DARPA robot challenge" type events would easily give the lie to "superb autonomy" claims. I just found this[1] more impressive, but at its 20x playback speed. I imagine that playback at 1x could still serve as a reality-check and counterexample.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6-heLIg85o

You think that's bad? Listen to sales types talk about "blockchain" sometime.

note that "gradient descent" isn't AI either. it's more computational linear algebra: a heuristic for numerical methods used to solve (usually to a local extrema) systems of equations without direct analytical solution(s).