Like the visionary dream of individually routed rail cars, but built bottom-up, with cars/trucks that are perfectly useful in standalone driving on regular roads. And it could scale even closer to rail: perhaps some long-haul connections get metal rails integrated in the floor like tram rails, that some long-haul trucks with a special bogey option could slot in, in the fly? That would be an impressive stunt if performed by humans, but easy for computers. Perhaps some connections add overhead wires? Perhaps some trucks, with the overhead wire pantograph option, add a robotic power handover arm because that's cheaper than wear and tear on two pantographs? Could all start bottom up, with few installations.
Especially in an RV. Enter the interstate, sleep for 8 hours, wake up 600 miles down the road.
That’s the dream!
Cities are by far the most complex relative to every other driving environment, in fact there is a good argument that, in cities, cars should be much more restricted because of health effects and traffic deaths, and the less complex areas (highways) are already the bulk of the drudgery in driving, but are much easier to automate, so why not do it for there?
Musk largely became the richest person on the planet off the back of the promise that nobody else would have decent EV tech (turns out, they do), nobody else would have the battery production capacity (turns out, they do, plus super ironic when Tesla is partnering with Panasonic for battery production), AND the promise of fully self driving cars (which will happen for Tesla immediately after flying cars).
I don't have a good term for this, but it's basically corruption: a few benefit at the cost of everyone else.
What you're referring to doesn't exist. Right now it's vaporware, and for all we know, we could be 1 century away from solving it up to human levels.
That just simply not true. He became one of the richest people in the world when Tesla cracked really high volume productions of EVs at a quite amazing margin. That is what people didn't believe was possible when they did it in 2018.
And at the same time SpaceX, where Musk owns much more stock off, managed to re-usability operational and started to launch Starlink.
> production capacity (turns out, they do, plus super ironic when Tesla is partnering with Panasonic for battery production)
Tesla is by far largest BEV producer in the world so its actually true. And if you think all Tesla does is partnering with Panasonic you have not been paying attention.
Telsa has its own battery production and also is one of the largest costumers of CATL, LG and Panasonic. For quite a while Panasonic and Tesla have co-developed technology that Panasonic can just sell to anybody.
As you can see, Tesla has to be both a producer and a major consumer of most battery companies in the world to achieve the volume they do.
And others can not simply replicate it because the industry is supply constraint.
> I don't have a good term for this, but it's basically corruption
Tesla is the largest BEV producer in the world, and just recently made a larger profit then Ford/GM combined (if I remember correctly). Tesla has industry leading margin and is still the fastest growing car company of any size.
SpaceX is one of the most advanced technology companies in the world and I don't think you will find anybody serious who disagrees with that.
The only argument you have that makes sense is that Musk over-promised Self-Driving. That is certainty true, but I wouldn't call it corruption. And I don't think that today the stock price of Tesla is hugely inflated by this as there is so much pessimism on self-driving.
If Tesla or SpaceX were to disappear tomorrow nobody would experience any existential crisis.
If you disappeared Microsoft, Apple or Amazon or Walmart overnight the whole economy would come to a halt. Same for JPMChase,WellsFargo, BoA etc.
Musk is the first guy to reach the top of the Forbes list while being at the helm of an aspirational company, not one that is structurally important one in the present.
It’s a dangerous precedent, and in fact soon enough it was repeated when bitcoiners and owners of exchanges such as Coinbase and FTX reached the top 10 of the Forbes list.
You're thinking back and white "it's not replacing...". What does that matter? To me what matters is "can we make transport better"
I thought the question was "can we actually make fully autonomous vehicles?" If we have that, the value is pretty obvious.
Less tongue in cheek: I think we should optimize city centers for human scales and activities, rather than sending cars right through them at all. We already sacrifice so much for cars in their current state, if we have to optimize for their mobility even moreso we are going in the wrong direction I feel.
I'm not saying get rid of cars, just keep them out of the cities. Put them on roads, not streets.
Cars where they are still allowed should move significantly slower, on much thinner roads.
Self-Driving will not solve anything for cities. They will solve even less then EVs.
My brother lives in the countryside (somewhere in the EU), and, as a driver, he shares the paved road just outside his house with the village’s cows (including his two cows). I don’t see any non-AGI system being able to negotiate that, as at times is difficult even for me, a reasonably AGI system, to make sense of it all when I encounter a herd of loose cows on the road.
This might be true, if rural areas and densely populated uran areas were the only 2 states, but there's a lot of intermediate density in between
This discussion is so absurd. :)
And this is just a single clip. The huge advantage Tesla has is their massive amount of training data. If it happens in the real world, they probably have a clip of it and can train on it.
That's not a problem when you're transcribing a video, but becomes a matter of life and death when you're driving a car.
The challenges self-driving cars have nothing to do with infrastructure and everything to do with the other moving objects on the road. It's not that the vehicles can't detect the other things on the road. It's that they can't anticipate reliably what they're going to do.
(However you may be correct that we need AGI or something close to it to do autonomous vehicles robustly)
That sounds sustainable and scalable to earth-size, for sure.
https://www.dangerousroads.org/africa/madagascar/3415-route-...
(A colleague is there now.)
This doesn’t scale. This is also how Zoox, Tesla, and Cruise do their demo videos to scam more money out of investors: they collect ultra-HD maps in a very narrow area or a very specific route. Then they drive the route/area about a thousand times, recording each drive. Then they upload the drive with the fewest mistakes to YouTube. Just like me taking a thousand half-court shots with a basketball, hitting one, and then claiming I can do it every try. There, I just gave you the formula to raise $100mm from FOMOing VCs.
There’s also no such thing as a Level 4 Autonomous vehicle. It doesn’t exist.
> Then they drive the route/area about a thousand times, recording each drive. Then they upload the drive with the fewest mistakes to YouTube
This is certainty not what Tesla does, from Tesla vehicles you will find literally 1000s of videos uploaded by Testers on every possible routes.
And Tesla has also never relied on VC funding for any of its self-driving tech.
They do have such maps, but only for the routes of their demo videos. That’s the entire accusation — it’s a Fugazi. A man behind a curtain. A mechanical Turk. Fake.
This video was posted 3 years ago: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tlThdr3O5Qo
I have never seen a Tesla perform as well as the one in that video in ANY user video. I drove a Model 3 with FSD for 4 months and it never came close to performing that well. Not even close. They either recorded a special map for that scam video, drove the route a thousand times and took the best recording, or both.
> This is certainty not what Tesla does, from Tesla vehicles you will find literally 1000s of videos uploaded by Testers on every possible routes
In the real videos, the cars fail to navigate simple scenarios constantly. You can’t even watch the videos without cringing at the constant mistakes and dangerous maneuvers. For Pete’s sake, just search “Tesla phantom braking” on YouTube and behold.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Zu18KYAhSzo
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9iGWDdnoONE&t=50
> And Tesla has also never relied on VC funding for any of its self-driving tech.
No, just unsophisticated customers paying $12k for vaporware and massive government subsidies. So sorry — they’re not scamming VCs. Just real customers and the taxpayers.
Tesla has famously removed all radar/ultrasonic sensors from their newer cars in favor of a purely camera-based system.
LiDAR doesn’t make sense as a sensor to me because it only works in good weather. Its Like a car without windscreen wipers.
But here is Karpathy explaining how vision can be used to measure distance to objects accurately[0]
Here is the fact that LiDAR doesn't work in the rain[1]: "... In heavy rain, for example, the light pulses emitted from the lidar system are partially reflected off of rain droplets which adds noise to the data, called 'echoes'."
Which logically implies you need to revert to vision, as see [0] also for why Radar is unreliable.
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6bOwQdCJrc [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidar
As with everything else there are benefits and costs to those approaches.
And this is with stationary objects designed to be seen and easily grasped by humans.
In fact roads should have barcoded position markers everywhere. That way you could navigate without gps and all road signs could become virtual. Just download a road marker update.
https://youtu.be/bglWCuCMSWc?t=280 goes into detail on this
This is -not- my line of work, so I have no idea if that's true. But if it is, I don't see how we could have perfectly safe self driving vehicles.
Humans are good at predicting.
You don't consciously know you've seen the guy a couple of cars in front checking his mirror and his shoulder but you're hanging back because you just know he's going to pull out any second. The guy that's wavering a bit in the middle lane is about to dash across to the far lane of the sliproad that's coming up, clipping the zebra stripes a bit, because he's concentrating on the sat nav not the road, but you just know - out of all the other drivers in your space at the moment - that red Ford is the one that's going to do something boneheaded.
Autonomous Vehicles won't be able to do that, probably not ever.
This to say: the future is having cars removed from cities entirely. Focusing on self-driving technology, or on electric cars as if they're going to "save the planet", is entirely the wrong direction imo.
Everyone is committed to being green as long as their lifestyle isn’t inconvenienced and they have the funds to buy the green equivalent technology.
It's also easier to avoid pedestrians as most can't fly.
It also could save on gas and energy as you can go directly as a bird flies to your destination instead of taking 20 minutes it takes 3.
Of course this would be a huge infrastructure ordeal as well probably and require a damn good system as you don't want vehicles landing on houses all over the place, but it'd be amazing for people with long commutes.
You could probably have airbuses that pick up like 30 people say in a small town and fly them to the city to be delivered individually by smaller vehicles locally. What took 45 minutes, now maybe takes 15.
These would be better if maybe electric with gas as an emergency backup system, and then just have good batteries and solar power fuel most trips.
Sounds somewhat authoritarian to impose your idea of the 'future' to inconvenience a large number of people.
There are a lot of great things about cities but you are dependent on other people for everything in your life, and it can go sideways incredibly fast. I.e the energy situation in Europe, or with COVID-19. Personally I don’t know how it’s not obvious to the millions of people who live in places like that.
This is everywhere true past, present and future. I would argue your small suburb gives you an illusion that isn't true.
This is really an astonishingly large claim without any evidence.
I question if you understand what AGI actually is? It's not "AI that can solve game theory" or "AI that can play cooperative games" - conventional video game AI's do this all the time in a myriad of permutations.
For others agreeing autonomous driving needs "AGI", first read what it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligenc...
Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the ability of an intelligent agent to understand or learn *any intellectual task that a human being can*.
It's a very difficult engineering problem but we don't need AGI to solve it.
Driving of cars is a massive cooperative game with high stakes, and autonomous cars essentially need AGI in order to play to a degree that is safer than a human with other humans. Fully autonomous cars would be sick, but IMO you'd need massive infrastructure changes (realistically restricted to cities/urbanized areas) if you want autonomous cars to work with anything less than AGI. Until companies start pursuing that, they are actually unknowingly using all that money to push for AGI and obviously coming up short because they don't even understand what they are trying to do.