> Is there an example of anything that's completely automated that's dangerous?

I think this is just the usual goal post moving, if a machine does it then we decide it wasn't really dangerous for a machine to do it.

Garmin Autoland will take a plane which is otherwise working and is in the sky and put it back on the ground because the pilot has a problem (e.g. your plane nut husband finally has another stroke† while taking you and the kids cross country, you've never learned to fly but you just press the button like you were taught and the plane will tell you to remain calm while it figures out where to land and gets itself back down). It isn't cheap (the system needs to control flight surfaces, engines, radios, brakes, more or less everything on a plane) and of course it can't fix a broken plane, but a random non-pilot is going to do a much worse job and "land an aeroplane" seems like it counts as dangerous to me.

> The thing is, if you have "partial" self driving, you might as well just drive yourself IMHO.

If you live in the relatively small service zone for Waymo, you just get in the car and it drives you elsewhere in the zone, like a taxi, except the car is driving. Waymo doesn't want you "partially" driving anything, it doesn't want you near the wheel or pedals, it would prefer if you watch a video or read a book.

† In some countries private pilots have to be fit, but the US has gradually decided that eh, it's your plane, your risk, the main obstacle today for medically unfit private pilots is getting insurance.

> Garmin Autoland will take a plane which is otherwise working and is in the sky and put it back on the ground because the pilot has a problem...

Indeed. For reasonable values of "land" and "on the ground." It's better than a non-trained pilot, but it also relies heavily on the concept of "emergency" in aviation, in which everything else is put on hold and everyone else gets out of the way.

It has basically nothing to do with driving a car.

First, the sky is large - "Big Sky Theory" is the term for it, and it generally means that you can fly around however and wherever you want without hitting anyone. Yes, there are controlled airspace segments, various levels for flying around, but the reality is that if you just ignored all of that and flew a plane from A to B, you wouldn't hit anyone (almost always). It breaks down a bit around airports, and there have been the occasional "plane A not talking to anyone and plane B not talking to anyone colliding" events, but they are exceedingly rare.

Second, large airports are going to be (almost by definition) controlled airspace, with ground response crews. And there are common airbands for radio communication. The Garmin system relies on these things.

If you hit the "Oh Crap!" button, yes. It will control an otherwise operational plane down to landing at some airport (I believe it prefers controlled airspace and emergency services, though I don't know details), and it will clear the road in front of it by setting the appropriate emergency transponder code and broadcasting prerecorded messages on the appropriate frequency that basically amount to "Get out of my way, I'm coming in for a landing at this airport on this runway." Which, for an incapacitated pilot, is absolutely the right thing to do. I'm fairly sure it won't clear the active runway, though. That's a problem for the humans on the ground.

But - literally everyone else in the sky will get out of their way, and ATC will ensure that. If there's an A380 on approach and this system is triggered near the airport, if ATC needs the A380 to get out of the way, they'll tell them to go around and go hold somewhere until the Cirrus is dealt with.

It's really a very, very different class of problem than self driving cars.

> I think this is just the usual goal post moving, if a machine does it then we decide it wasn't really dangerous for a machine to do it.

I've seen a lot of goalpost moving in the other direction on this one, to be honest - Self Driving Cars started as "never have an accident again!" and have slowly migrated to "look, you suck at driving, the robot sucks less, so stop bitching when the robot runs over grandma"

*runs over grandma who us trying to ilegally and suddenly cross the street right in front of the car

Yep, turns out that's the sorta shit you have to deal with when operating a motor vehicle.

Is your bar that the environment should adapt to the tech rather than the other way around? If so, I’d encourage you to take a course in human factors engineering

*runs into a stationary median which is literally bolted into the road, in broad daylight

Have you seen the aerial pictures of the area? There's pretty clearly a path through the median that's inviting pedestrians to cross there.

*in the dark, on a highway

It is so, so much easier to have a computer land a plane than to travel through a road infrastructure made for humans.

There are no roads, no obstacles, usually not even other planes constraining your plane for any autopilot situation. With autolanding, "other planes" might start becoming an issue, but it's still a vastly different level from the momentary and immediate coordination necessary between cars on public roadways.

Also, the operating environment is rather stable for aircraft. You won’t find thing’s like construction cones blocking off airspace that was once available. Even if airspace availability was changed, its not likely to create an immediate hazard (with some caveats like military testing ranges)

Autoland is impressive but it really is more equivalent to a system (in a car) that automatically applies the brakes than to a full self driving system.

Autopilot is simple and a solved problem. Self driving is not either.

I'd very much not want to be in an airplane whose landing strategy was "automatically apply the brakes". Navigating to an airport, lining up with the runway, and gently bringing down the plane seems significantly harder than auto-breaking.

Garmin Autoland is much more than "apply the brakes", as I understand. But it's still guiding your plane through an essentially empty environment, not something in the same ballpark as autonomous driving.

Well, more or less, the "apply the brakes" system still has to detect obstacles and calculate the optimal way to brake and so on. So it has to deal with dynamic environmenrs. Autoland, not so much.

> I think this is just the usual goal post moving, if a machine does it then we decide it wasn't really dangerous for a machine to do it.

I strongly disagree. Most machines are not capable of killing you because it makes a mistake.

Do you have an example of something humans did that could kill them that was automated completely that still can kill them, but generally does not anymore? An elevator is one example, but in the case of an elevator its a very bounded problem to solve, and even still hundreds die for unnecessary elevator deaths yearly.

Not to mention an elevator is not an entropic environment. A full self driving car would have to be able to deal with ice suddenly falling on the ground, people crashing around them, etc.

Fully automated train systems? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_train_system...

Not nearly as complex a problem as self driving cars, but I'd still rather not get hit by a train

Yes, not nearly. Not anywhere close to the complexity needed for self driving cars. Trains run on closed, limited, well-signaled infrastructure, which (comparably) makes it fairly easy to "avoid other trains" (as long as the signaling, coordinated externally, works--if it doesn't the train is likely programmed to just stop until it does again).

My understanding of trains is that most of the safety advances have come from better signaling, not the automation of the trains themselves.

> hundreds die for unnecessary elevator deaths yearly

Elevator deaths are extremely rare in industrialized countries (a couple dozen per year in the USA), and most are of people working on the elevator (e.g. accidentally falling down the elevator shaft), not passengers riding in an elevator. I think construction elevators are also quite a bit less safe than ordinary passenger elevators.

Typical elevators are one of the safest forms of transportation, substantially safer than stairs or ladders.

You mean, like the entire rest of his comment? Garmin Autoland...

The Garmin Autoland is not equivalent to full self driving? That's like self parking which has existed for a while now. In any case planes are inherently orders of magnitude safer than cars to begin with due to the lack of obstacles/chaos.

It frustrates me to no end when people compare autolanding (even the Garmin kind), or worse, general autopilots, with self-driving cars.

Anyone who does that has either never traveled in an airplane (even just as a passenger), or just never observed and thought about the vastly different levels of interaction planes have with their environment.

Did you forget what you originally wrote? You said:

> Do you have an example of something humans did that could kill them that was automated completely that still can kill them, but generally does not anymore?

And I pointed out that the parent comment had already provided an example. Now you are arguing with me that the example given, about Garmin Autoland, isn't comparable to self-driving... Which isn't at all the example you asked for in the first place. Maybe focus and read a little more, write a little less. You'll be more easily understood.

> Do you have an example of something humans did that could kill them that was automated completely that still can kill them, but generally does not anymore?

My understanding from looking at research is that airplanes by experienced pilots rarely killed people... and they... still don't even when (partially) automated? There doesn't appear to be definitive evidence that autopilot is safer [2] as many of the innovations in safety have been conflated with procedural improvements.

In fact there are studies [1] that suggest autopilot is actually making flights unsafe as pilots are becoming complacent and airplanes do not flight themselves completely from point to point including taxiing.

In other words, no, plane automation is not an example as it does not satisfy the criteria of "generally does not" compared to the baseline of no automation.

[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/001872088502700...

[2]https://www.eurocontrol.int/sites/default/files/publication/...

Try not to be so condescending, sheesh.

You wrote:

> The Garmin Autoland is not equivalent to full self driving?

This has nothing to do with your argument criteria of:

> Do you have an example of something humans did that could kill them that was automated completely that still can kill them, but generally does not anymore?

> Try not to be so condescending, sheesh.

I didn't mean that to be condescending out of turn, but if you are going to engage in an argument by posting a strong disagreement and an opinion:

> I strongly disagree. Most machines are not capable of killing you because it makes a mistake.

You cannot change the criteria for an example that you asked for simply because you don't feel like arguing that the example did or did not meet your criteria, nor can you do so simply because you didn't bother to read it carefully.

So no, I'm not being condescending out of turn, you really needed some correction on that. Sheesh.

How is it the goalposts moving? Dangerous in the context of that question doesn't mean the solution is dangerous. Dangerous there means that a screwup would be dangerous. Or maybe where a 'simple' screwup would be dangerous for some subjective value of 'simple.'

Garmin autoland seems like a perfect example of something dangerous that's completely automated.

No point in comparing planes to cars.

You can, today, go to Pheonix Arizona, download the Waymo One app, and summon a full self driving vehicle. This happened silently at the end of 2020, and was overshadowed by the ongoing pandemic doom and gloom. https://blog.waymo.com/2020/10/waymo-is-opening-its-fully-dr...

On the subject of danger. Literally everything we do is dangerous to some degree. Everything. Self-driving does not need to be perfect, but only better than human drivers. We're likely already at that point with Waymo vehicles.

On the subject of automation. Humanity is on track to have the computational power to perform whole brain emulation decades before 2100. Even if we don't solve the general AI problem through other pathways, we will solve it through this path. Ethical problems aside, once this is achieved, everything will be automatable at a human level of competence.

> On the subject of danger. Literally everything we do is dangerous to some degree.

I don't disagree with your take and I'm a self driving car proponent, but I'm worried about what process we take to get there.

One thing I've taken away from the pandemic is that people seem to have no problem imposing their tolerance for risk on others. Seems like we are on a path to play this dynamic out again in how self-driving cars come to market unless that safety profile is really well controlled and understandable.

Even if at a population-level self-driving is slightly safer statistically than person-driving, there are enough edge cases to give me pause right now, and at the individual-level it may raise my risk either as a pedestrian or driver and certainly changes what is predictable behavior [1].

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/04/why-its-so-hard-to-prov...

> On the subject of automation. Humanity is on track to have the computational power to perform whole brain emulation decades before 2100. Even if we don't solve the general AI problem through other pathways, we will solve it through this path. Ethical problems aside, once this is achieved, everything will be automatable at a human level of competence.

Is this actually true? I haven't heard of this. You're saying we will have an AI as good as a grown educated adult before 2100? I can't believe this at all - do you have a citation?

This is the kind of thing that is very misleadingly true. If you simply take growth in computing power and extrapolate to the end of the century, and compare it to the current best estimate of human brain computing power, then yes, we'll get there.

But 1) that is an estimate of human brain computing power, based on number of neurons and possible connections. We have no idea if that is really a valid unit of computing "power." Do brain only compute things via voltage thresholds across synapses? Then yes, maybe this is an accurate estimate. But there are a whole lot of subcellular signal cascades happening at molecular levels we can't even begin to count and we have no idea whether or not those are also computing something accessible to the rest of the brain. 2) Matching the computing power of a brain doesn't mean you can emulate it. Emulating something requires knowing the target architecture and software. It is possible we can figure out exactly what a brain is doing to an accurate enough level to emulate it by the end of the century, but we certainly don't know how to do that right now, even if we had the computing power. Remote imaging techniques are not nearly good enough (because again, so many of the processes are subcellular) and you can't open up a brain without destroying it. This is actually a much broader problem in biology and we have figured out ways to partially dissect some animals while still keeping them alive long enough to figure out how a system works in vivo, but doing that with a brain is not something we have ever come remotely close to doing and there isn't really any ethical way to even think of how we can try to figure it out.

Yes, and the methodology I've described (whole brain emulation/WBE) is the worst-case, brute-force, but guaranteed approach. The following diagram captures the expected growth rate of computing power, and contrasts it with several thresholds (in blue) for emulation fidelity ultimately required: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_uploading#/media/File:Who...

The human brain works, therefore this technique will work, it's just a matter of having enough computing power.

I will re-iterate though, we are pursuing various alternative pathways to artificial intelligence, and modern machine learning has already demonstrated super-human performance within constrained domains. It's my personal belief that we will achieve human-level general intelligence long before WBE becomes practical.

This sounds bonkers to me. We don't even understand fully what it would take to emulate a brain right now. I don't believe this for one second.

Emulating a brain doesn't necessarily mean you can tell it what to do. After all, you can't always tell humans what to do, and this might somehow be a necessary component of human-level intelligence.

"There are more synapses in each human brain than stars in the known universe". [1]

I don't believe there is anything guaranteed about "whole [human] brain emulation" in this century.

[1] This isn't quite true, because we estimate there are around 10^22 to 10^24 stars in the universe, while estimations for number of synapses range from 10^14 to 10^15.

Would it not be feasible yet for very simple organisms?

It's currently being worked on [1]. It's only recently that we've managed to capture the complete nervous system connectivity of C. Elegans, one of the simplest organisms with a nervous system. [2]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenWorm

[2]https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1352-7

No, it's not remotely true. Roughly equating neurons to petaflops, counting flops, drawing the best fitting straight line, and then announcing a date where the line gets high enough is not a remotely reasonable way to estimate a "worst case guarantee" date.

It's not impossible that some sort of thing would happen, but anyone who tells you that it can't possibly fail to be achieved in the next 80 years is lying, either to your or to themselves.

Please suggest an alternative estimation technique then.

There is a certain # of calculations/s necessary to meaningfully emulate a neuron. We currently have no idea what level of fidelity is required, but we can make guesses for each of the levels of fidelity that might be required.

The estimates that assume the highest (and likely unnecessary) level of fidelity currently top out at 2100.

For the record, I never claimed that failure was impossible, I used the phrase "on track". It's totally possible that there might be some surprise quantum weirdness going on that would be intractable to emulate with classical computers, but we've found no evidence of that to date.

We have no idea what kind of "whole brain emulation" it would take to produce what we understand as intelligence, so all this seems highly speculative.

We know it only takes 20W of power for the real thing to work.

Let that sink in. We know it isn’t impossible to run a general intelligence computer on 20W because every single one of us is living proof that it is possible. There is no reason why something man made shouldn’t be able to do the same thing. How to do that is of course a different matter, but it isn’t speculative that it can be done, it’s a direct consequence of our own existence.

> You can, today, go to Pheonix Arizona, download the Waymo One app, and summon a full self driving vehicle.

Consider Google's (okay, Alphabet's) standards for success though.

My guess is that a metro area with less than 0.5% of the US population does not qualify as a successful product. Maybe as a successful small beta test.

Also, given Arizona's overly cozy relationship with self-driving [1], I would not necessarily trust a program too much on the basis that it's operating there.

-------------------------------------------------------

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/28/uber-ariz...

Can you really? I remember that announcement and there was a lot of fudged language. You have to be a "member of the public service". You can download the app because it's in the app store, which is not the same thing as hailing a driverless vehicle.

It's not clear that member of the general public can actually sign up for it. Has anyone done that and taken a driverless ride in Phoenix? Happy to get more updated info / be corrected.

(And if this seems like a unreasonable amount of suspicion, I invite others to go back and read their press releases from the last 3 or 4 years, and tell me if that gives you an accurate picture of where the service is today)

In that 50 sq mile Chandler area, anyone can download the app and hail a ride. I don’t live in AZ, but I’ve seen several YouTube videos and r/selfdrivingcars posts/comments that can confirm it.

>On the subject of danger. Literally everything we do is dangerous to some degree. Everything. Self-driving does not need to be perfect, but only better than human drivers.

The problem is this statement is written like a technocrat wrote it rather than someone who makes public policy. From an engineering perspective, it’s true that it would only need to be better than a human driver. To be implemented though, it needs approval in the public sphere and not just engineers. This presents a very real publicity problem.

You are correct that everything in life contains risk. Risk is defined as severity x probability. While the severity may be the same, I think humans judge the probability very different between human and autonomous drivers.

I think it’s rooted in the need for humans to understand what’s under the hood (no pun intended) to trust the decision making capability. We already have this with human drivers through the tool of empathy evolved over millions of years. We can reasonably assume we know what humans will do. (Incidentally it’s also why witnessing someone with mental illness puts us on edge). We have no such ability to decipher an autonomous car, especially for the layman. So this distorts the uncertainty in the risk assessment and any accident can disproportionately cause our assumption of risk to elevate.

For me personally, your point really resonates. I trust human drivers in part because our incentives are aligned: neither one of us wants to get into an accident. The incentives of a machine learning model are harder to introspect on, as you point out.

I think there's another issue here, too. It relates to the observation that folks have a fear of flying, but not really a fear of driving, despite driving having about a 1 in 98 chance of killing you over your lifetime, while for aircraft it's more like 1 in 7178 (2008 data from USA Today...hopefully directionally correct). It's been discussed in research extensively[0], and seems to relate to whether or not the person feels they have a sense of personal control. I think your point is well-taken that the technological risks and the publicity challenge are independent barriers to the widespread adoption of AVs.

[0]: https://oxfordre.com/communication/view/10.1093/acrefore/978...

There’s been a few downvoted without elaborating on the disagreement, so I’ll add if you think this is incorrect take some time to think about how well policy and science were received during the pandemic. Policy will never be completely data-driven because humans do no intuitively think on statistical grounds.

Is there any update on how's that truly driverless program going for Waymo?

2100 is almost 80 years from now. Think back to 1940 and how different our world was then. Cars will certainly be automated to some degree. And that will cause a great reduction in the almost 1.35 million people killed globally by motor vehicle accidents.

A US statistic: In 2010, there were an estimated 5,419,000 crashes, 30,296 deadly, killing 32,999, and injuring 2,239,000. It is hard for me to imagine a scenario where automated driving is as unsafe as that.

We will truly look back and think, "Did we really trust others to operate multi ton metal machinery at exceedingly high speeds at each other day after day?"

As a whole this is true and could probably be bested. But it would have to be by many magnitudes of order to have people accept it. There's a feeling that isn't necessarily true that one can control their destiny driving and avoid being a statistic. Now we know that isn't always true as you are at the mercy of many other elements. But if autonomous cars were even 90% less fatalities it would still be hard to get humans to give up control for that. It would have to be on the realm of air travel safety.

> Cars will certainly be automated to some degree. And that will cause a great reduction in the almost 1.35 million people killed globally by motor vehicle accidents.

They already are. I'm talking about full self driving. A car without a steering wheel. Cruise control (arguably the first car automation) has existed since the 1900s. Potentially earlier depending on how you define it.

It really depends on what you mean by "full self driving".

Eg, I wouldn't consider the stuff Tesla is doing as self driving at all. I have significant worry because to reduces attention while still requiring it for safety.

If you're talking "Hail robocab, don't touch a steering wheel, arrive at your destination", then Waymo is already there: https://blog.waymo.com/2020/10/waymo-is-opening-its-fully-dr...

You might mean "does everything everyone uses a vehicle for today", however I feel that's perhaps moving the goalposts to unattainable. Eg, replacing nascar racers with self driving cars would defeat the point of nascar, so that's won't happen. (though it might be an interesting side event.)

Between the two extremes of public pilot in limited area and handling every situation, there's a very large space for tremendous value. Just serving urban areas would significantly reduce the need for vehicles. There are many people who only use public transit, or could if they had more economical ways to handle sporadic trips such as grocery shopping and visiting friends across town.

Waymo has to learn the exact space it's going to drive in ahead of time, and then have high resolution lidar maps generated to assist. It's currently limited to use in grid-like pre-mapped areas like Phoenix AZ. Tesla is building a general learning solution such that you can take the vehicle anywhere, and not have the requirement that the area be pre-mapped or 'learned' by Tesla beforehand. Tesla has orders of magnitude more data and mileage driven than Waymo could possibly ever imagine having. Waymo is not going to scale. CEO departures like this are a big red flag. Pin this comment. Google will shutter Waymo in less than five years.

The problem is, Tesla does not posses magic.

We know (from introspection) how trained skills work. Everyone knows the feeling when that bunch of neurons which you trained to semi-autonomously do something for you (e.g. switch gears, write letters, type words, observing traffic, staying in an imaginary lane etc.) raises their hand so that Daddy AGI (our conscious) can come have a look at that weird situation it doesn't know how to handle.

Tesla can't do that, either, and literally no one on this planet has the faintest idea how to do anything like it.

I think you're highlighting the difference in approach instead of pointing out a fatal flaw in Waymo's strategy.

Tesla is focusing on data because they believe they can machine learn through the problem.

Waymo has a lot of data, but is also focusing on better sensors, augmenting them with maps, and ML perception feeding into more traditional programing doing the actual control and decision making.

It's kind of like Tesla and Waymo are both learning basket ball. Tesla believes that if it just plays a lot of games of basket ball, that is the best strategy. Waymo think that playing some games is good, but it should also do things like practice free throws and weight train.

Also, a few misconceptions:

1. Waymo currently only has public service in Arizona, AFAIK. However they are testing in San Fran, Seattle area, and Michigan. Easiest first doesn't mean later is impossible.

2. pre-mapping is NOT a blocker of automated service. Consider how much effort goes into making each section of road. Driving a car by a few times is a trivial cost in comparison. This is further shown by the fact that Google has been doing street view for well over a decade. Also I'd like to see Tesla demonstrate they can drive with the road covered in snow and still know where they are without a map.

3. CEO departures can be a red flag. They can also be a completely benign changeover, or even green flag that the board identified others would perform better in the CEO position. The leaving announcements are always fluff about spending time with family, so it's really hard to tell what's going on from the outside. If this is followed by more leadership leaving Waymo, then I'd be concerned.

Yeah. Andrej Karpathy said in a recent interview that at this point it's almost completely a data problem, instead of a machine learning research problem. Most of their work is in figuring out the best way to collect and annotate lots of good data. Waymo has a few hundred cars and Tesla has millions, and in this problem space, scale wins over more precise sensors.

Here's the interview: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0IuwH7eTZ3TQBfU8XsMaRr?si=6...

Yep, Waymo approach is brittle

A interesting analogy is the Washington DC Metro, which was automated but now isn't due to a significant accident in 2009 which killed 9 people. That's a train on rails. We have much less tolerance for computers killing people compared to people killing people.

You would think that but then that Uber car ran over a pedestrian in the middle of a typical ultra wide deserted American throughfare with perfect lighting and.. kinda nothing happened? My pulse still rises when I think of that dashcam video they released that predictably shows nothing to blame that lady their negligence killed.

Maybe the common denominator is just cars. The regulators are fully absent - they care about the shape of your headlights, but do they care that SUVs have them mounted at the height of mirrors for every other car? Do they care that cars have absurdly overpowered engines that have no imaginable use? Do they care that trucks have fronts so high it's impossible to see a kid walking on a crosswalk and when you hit it, it's hit head-height and thrown under the wheels?

None of these things would ever fly on a train or airplane.

That incident basically ended Uber ATG. I wouldn’t say that nothing happened.

The DC metro was once automated? Interesting

BART in SF was too.

full self driving would far easier if they weren't all trying to cover all cases at once. I, along with others, have mentioned that a far simpler problem to solve is freeway travel.

HOV and Express lanes make this easy. They have well established markings, limited access, and traffic goes in one direction. So industry and regulators would work together to solve standardization of markings for travel and entry and exiting.

Then you take it to the rest of the interstate system and then to limited access highways. Eventually you get down to the neighborhoods and city driving.

I see real promise in Tesla's beta system which has a few thousand drivers. What it tracks is far more advanced than what my current software does in my 3. They finally went to a persistent model and far better labeling. Now where my car shows cones around a parked vehicle they show the vehicle as well. They show all parked and stationary objects. Something the current software does not always do if at all.

Just within the US the lane markings, signage, and even signaling, is not consistent from state to state. Worse the rules for what is an acceptable lane is not consistent either. So the first step there is to standardize it all across the nation.

Tesla is 100% going to win in this space. And as Musk and Karpathy have said, the general solution will be in place and work nearly everywhere, but a long tail of edge scenarios will have to be ironed out over time. This is nascent, world changing technology solving hard problems.

As a M3 owner you get to see the feature set growing over time, but the zero-to-one moment is when that FSD is finally rolled out in 9.x

I can't wait. It's going to be amazing.

The advancements in AI tend to happen in intermittent large leaps, but people tend to make linear projections based on the most recent leap. That’s why there’s always a big hype cycle followed by disillusionment and some sort of AI winter. I personally think 2100 is extremely pessimistic, but all those projections of full self-driving by 2025 were certainly even more extreme in their optimism.

Does anyone else think that may be full autonomous flying of aircraft will be easier to make practical than driving of automobiles?

I thought this was obvious. The complexity that cars deal with during travel is many orders of magnitude higher than the complexity aircraft deal with, and cars actually have an effect on the complexity of the environment they travel in, unlike aircraft. For the most part, aircraft one have ONE object that they have to avoid hitting, and it's the size of a planet, and engages in zero direction changes. Aircraft are simple.

Yes. It’s a much more regulated industry that already has mandatory equipment that helps solve the problem (e.g., transponders), there’s often more time to perceive and mitigate a risk (outside of takeoff and landing), less variable environments etc

The upside is much smaller though. There are lot more drivers than pilots, and crashes are so less common.

> Is there an example of anything that's completely automated that's dangerous?

Monorail trains (like at the airport)

Combine Harvesters

Airplane Autopilot/autoland

Elevators

Literally any operational (and unattended) machine in a modern factory

Factory automation usually has fail-stop behaviour (in process automation like chemical plants, things get more interesting).

And resumption of operation after an emergency stop happens only after a human check and intentional operator acknowledge.

So you're technically right, but the circumstances are vastly different. Nobody will buy a car that does a full emergency brake whenever a leaf falls off a tree. The environment is so much more difficult on the street than in a factory.

There’s a decent amount of factory automation that is essentially fully autonomous with the exception of a “big red emergency shutdown” button for a human to press if all the other safeties fail. Many operate without continuous oversight and in the cases where a human is positioned to watch its usually for economic reasons rather than safety (e.g., to stop the operation if there is a quality issue that will render the product unusable)

Edit: downvoting is fine but please at least add to the discussion by stating why you disagree. I’m speaking only from my personal experience working in factory automation and realize there’s probably a lot of differing experience

My understanding is that with factory automation usually it's designed to the human is not in danger (usually they aren't even present at all). Are there factories that exist that are automated in a way where the human is exposed to a potentially lethal injury?

>Are there factories that exist that are automated in a way where the human is exposed to a potentially lethal injury?

Yes, but probably to a lesser extent than driving a car. Everything has sensors that are meant to identify a risk to a human and stop whatever operation poses that risk.

E.g., there may be robots picking thousands of pounds of parts and driving them around a facility but they stop if they sense a human a their path. Same for welding, stamping, etc. All those operations can injure or kill but unlike vehicles they can rely on the mitigation of “stop and wait”. It’s a much easier problem than self-driving

> I must be the only one who thinks full self driving will not happen before year 2100.

Nope. Me as well. I think self driving is AGI-complete, and we are as far from AGI now as when we were living in caves, banging rocks together.

I wonder if perhaps we can't get self driving cars, but maybe we can can't self driving train carts and move completely away from cars?

This is basically where we will end up when the tech industry gets its head out of the clouds.

The carpool lanes will be converted to rail tracks. You can pay extra for a rail-compatible car if you want and sleep during your commute.

As implausible as it sounds this is still way more likely than driverless wheeled vehicles becoming both safe and useful.

self driving light rail would be interesting

I don't know about 2100 but I've made some bets that self driving cars won't be available in the next 5 years.. 2 years ago.

The metric to beat isn't "is self driving dangerous, yes or no?"

The metric to beat is "is self driving on average substantially safer than human driving?". Once you beat that metric, it would be insane not to allow self driving. This won't take 100 years.

How many of these completely automated things have lots of humans interacting and are outside an closed area?

Even for airplanes and trains, we still have pilots and humans behind the controller with 100% attention.

There's plenty of examples of driverless trains throughout the world.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_train_system...

Fair enough. Thanks for correcting me.

But i stand corrected. Guided tracks is hardly a good comparison for this.

> we still have pilots and humans behind the controller with 100% attention.

That really isn't true. Pilots, in particular, have huge challenges in keeping attention up between take off and landing. Likewise for trains, it turns out if you don't require humans to do anything but watch...it is much harder than if they were actually doing the flying/driving themselves.

The airforce is moving to unpiloted drones, though there is someone at a center to intervene as needed. It is only a matter of time before they decide that cargo can be moved in this way (think: fedex).

We don't have fully automated planes because they're already safe enough and the economics aren't there.

The probability of crashing with a plane is extremely low, even factoring in the higher risk of takeoffs and landings. The entire process is coordinated with Air Traffic Control.

Since planes are so safe already and pilots are relatively inexpensive, there's no strong financial incentive to fully automate planes.

Planes are also substantially regulated. I mean if there was a Vehicular Traffic Control on every intersection the same way there's Air Traffic Control we probably wouldn't have any accidents now, negating the main purported benefit of self driving to begin with.

Disagree on the economics. Pilots cost significant money and since the airline industry runs on low margins this can be a huge plus.

But the main reason we won't see planes without pilots is political and related to trust. I think for the same reasons we are less likely to see truly driverless cars.

> Is there an example of anything that's completely automated that's dangerous?

Flying an airplane. They put pilots in there to make people comfortable, but if need be, a modern passenger plane can fly itself, including take off and landing.

Driving a subway. BART in San Francisco launched as self driving in the 60s. It freaked people out so much that they put a human in front. But if you sit up there you'll see the human doesn't do much. They press a button to close the doors, but that could easily be automated.

Also, I took a ride in a self driving car in SF a few years ago. It had a safety driver, but he didn't do anything (he grabbed the wheel once, but then they looked at the data and found the car was about to do the right thing anyway). It handled things like cars going the wrong way, double parked trucks, trash bags in the street, jaywalkers, etc.

I think there's a crucial issue with sensoring. Companies are tackling the problem mainly using sensors that are contained within the car. Even with LIDAR (and not just cameras) it is very hard to "sense" the full scene[1].

What if our roads were built to communicate with the cars? What if there were only AVs on the street and they communicated with each other? What if every bicycle, school backpack, shopping cart did so too, identifying itself in the process?

I think the problem of self-driving is harder right now in the transitional period in which they have to coexist with human drivers and essentially trying to "emulate" how a human driver gathers information (not really, but you get my meaning)

I'm not sure it won't take decades, but I feel like there will be a magical few-months period in which we go from "can it be done?" to "oh, ok,we got it"

[1] shoot, I lost the reference. But Cruise apparently assumes "use whatever is available until it works, we'll make it cost-effective later"

Oh definitely, I've been convinced sensors distributed in the environment are the only way forward for FSD with current tech since about 2017. Do a test run with a dedicated road/lane for a while, gather data, improve the system and then gradually roll it out elsewhere.

It's clearer and clearer that self contained 'autopilot' units are going to keep failing in scenarios involving unpredictable people & situations. They don't have enough data and never will (without AGI, anyway). So we need to spoon feed them that data by tagging everything & everyone around them.

That's a really good idea. You probably wouldn't need too many sensors either. Now that I think about it, a few strategically placed cameras around blind conrners woul be pretty useful for human drivers too!

Then we can just build trains instead. Perfectly automated today.

No, the physics of that don't work at all. Trains for example cannot handle gradients that cars manage with ease.

Not true. Not every train uses steel wheels, you know.

> What if every bicycle, school backpack, shopping cart did so too, identifying itself in the process?

That sounds like a nazi-state dream - easily track every backpack, car, bicycle, etc...

no thank you

Waymo is full self driving, not partial

Waymo is little more than a Jurassic Park jeep ride. Only works on the tracks. Take a Waymo vehicle anywhere their engineering staff hasn't spent countless hours driving around back and forth with those ridiculous spinning lidar sensors and roof rack full of who-knows-what and see what's left of their 'self driving'.

I’m very skeptical about achieving FSD in the next few years, but I don’t think your giving them enough credit. Even if you’re limiting yourself to a known city, you still have to deal with human drivers and pedestrians doing weird shit all the time. That’s no small feat, even though it’s far from the ultimate goal of being able to pass out drunk in the back of the car while it gets you home safely.

So a 50 square mile city with live traffic, pedestrians and objects is a "little more than a Jurassic Park jeep ride"?

What are you going to say when they go to SF next? Just another Jurassic Park ride?

*Waymo is trying to develop full self driving, not partial