Musk Says Drivers May Become Obsolete, Announces Juice-Saving Upgrades 341
Lucas123 (935744) writes During a discussion at a Nvidia conference, Elon Musk predicted that in the future, consumers will not be allowed to drive cars because it will be considered too dangerous. [Note: compare Lyft CEO Logan Green's opposite view] 'You can't have a person driving a two-ton death machine,' he said. Others agree. Thilo Koslowski, a vice president at Gartner, said instead of laws dictating drivers must cede control to their car's computer, we may someday someday just pass signs requiring drivers to activate auto-drive functionality for certain particularly treacherous stretches of roadway. Kowlowski said fully autonomous vehicles won't be ubiquitous for another 10 to 15 years, but the government could spur that on by offering tax incentives as it does today with all-electric vehicles and hybrids. Related news: it may not be fully autonomous driving, but Tesla S drivers are promised an upgrade a few months from now that gives a taste, with the addition of automatic steering features. And though it's perhaps anti-climactic as a solution to "ending range anxiety," Musk also announced today that Teslas will get in the next two weeks a software upgrade that will greatly upgrade the cars' routing software, integrating "near-realtime" lists of available supercharger stations, and keeping drivers apprised of whether one is within range.
The real question in my mind... (Score:2, Insightful)
Is this something people actually want, empty marketing rhetoric, or a frightening imminent example of 'manufactured consent'?
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I think this really is the important question. Tech visionaries often fall into the trap of not figuring what people actually want into their estimates of how quickly and widely a new technology will be adapted. The politicians who make these rules (or appoint the people who do) are in the business of being re-elected. They are going to go with what the majority wants on this issue, and right now, the vast majority or non-techie people are very, very afraid of self-driving technology. Yes, I agree that
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This might be one area where looking at the current behavior of th
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There are still people that own and ride horses, even in suburban and
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Humans are already willing to make the economically inferior choice in that we don't use mass-transit
Only if you don't value your time. I can drive to work in 20 minutes, or I can spend 2 hours on mass transit
One big benefit of self driving cars will be mass transit that actually works. Instead of infrequent big buses, that drive fixed routes, we could have lots of small vans that go point to point.
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The real advantage that I see to self-driving vehicles for commutes is their ability to park off-site or to self-valet after dropping off their occupant(s) at the destination. Free parking is the norm in suburban areas, but in urban areas where one cannot necessarily park close to one's destination anyway, being able to subscribe to one's garage or parking lot and simply let the car go park itself after getting out would be a real time-saver.
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cars might be able to park too close to open doors, meaning more cars could park in a given area
Also, cars could park directly head-to-tail. Then when a car three deep is summoned, it could signal the other two cars to move. The lanes through the lot could also be made much narrower. The capacity of parking lots could easily be doubled, and possibly tripled.
Have you ever taken the bus any distance? (Score:2)
You started talking about efficiency. There are exist much simpler solutions: 1) Take a bus. (one driver drive several passengers)
Clearly time is not a factor in your efficiency calculation
Re:The real question in my mind... (Score:4, Insightful)
Now, layer in the fact that there's a strong culture in the US where driving == freedom, and he still thinks this will be a requirement in any of our lifetimes? For the foreseeable future, it would be political suicide, no matter what the safety statistics say. I'm certainly not holding my breath.
Re:The real question in my mind... (Score:4, Interesting)
I remember how Bill Gates never thought that the Internet would ever take off. Also Edison thought we'd all live in pour-in-place concrete....
Yeah well, I don't think that Bill Gates is a genius. According to this interesting perspective, [lbo-news.com]
What really made him rich was having been in the right place at the right time in 1981 when IBM needed an operating system for its new PC. Gates (with Allen) borrowed heavily, to put it gently, from an existing operating system, Digital Research’s CP/M. (For DR’s version of this history—“Microsoft paid Seattle Software Works for an unauthorized clone of CP/M, and Microsoft licensed this clone to IBM”—see here. A less biased, though still damning, look is here.) In other words, another instance of adopting someone else’s work and taking credit for it—this time with the innovation of litigating aggressively and manipulating markets to defend a monopoly position. Because once it secured that monopoly, Microsoft did everything it could to crush competition.
And Edison was rather similar. Edison used brute force discovery to solve the light-bulb filament problem, and used some, shall we say agressive business tactics to protect his business. In order to make people afraid of his competition (alternating current, Westinghouse), he used AC to electrocute animals such as elephants. He successfully campaigned to have AC used to execute death row prisoners (the electric chair). He was, IMHO not a genius.
Elon Musk is, in my opinion, a bona fide genius. With a bachelors degree in physics, he taught himself rocket science, and was the chief designer of an entire rocket, the Falcon I. This rocket managed to put two objects in orbit before being superceded by the Falcon 9. The amount of information he must have learned is astounding. Fluid dynamics, combustion, orbital dynamics and trajectory control, metallurgy, each in and of itself an entire field of study. He also has a solid background in computer science.
So, I will give what Musk says on the future of transport quite a bit of weight. He has earned it.
Re:and what will happen to people automated out of (Score:5, Insightful)
and what will happen to people automated out of a job?
Go back to school and rack up big loans just to be told you are to old for the job?
End having to use the jail / prison for there doctor for the stuff that er will not cover?
Being automated out of a job is inevitable - it's been happening for decades. The REAL problem is twofile: (1) that we are no longer creating new, higher-paying jobs to replace those that were automated away, and (2) that the benefits of increased productivity per worker haven't been shared by the workers for 40 years.
Going back to school under those conditions is insane - why rack up debt to train for a job you'll never get?
Jail is an option some homeless people have been using for years - break a window, wait for the cops, sleep in a not-so-cold jail cell.
No, I don't have any real solutions :-( Sorry.
Re:and what will happen to people automated out of (Score:4, Insightful)
The REAL problem is twofile: (1) that we are no longer creating new, higher-paying jobs to replace those that were automated away, and (2) that the benefits of increased productivity per worker haven't been shared by the workers for 40 years.
The REAL problem is that you can't imagine what you could possibly ever do without a 'job'.
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The REAL problem is twofile: (1) that we are no longer creating new, higher-paying jobs to replace those that were automated away, and (2) that the benefits of increased productivity per worker haven't been shared by the workers for 40 years.
The REAL problem is that you can't imagine what you could possibly ever do without a 'job'.
That's a secondary problem. Most people worry about how they would *survive* without the paycheck that comes from having a job.
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Universal Basic Income, funded by the recognisation that if the only things in the loop are energy and material resources that are rightfully property of everyone on planet earth, and robots manufacturered from said resources, then everyone should get a share.
By all means, have bonuses for those who like to innovate, but Luxury Automated Communism!
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Ah, 'Universal Basic Income', the last gasp of socialism as it fades into irrelevance.
We're looking at a future where you can build anything you want in your parents' basement so long as you have the raw materials to do so. Why would I want the Glorious People's Central Income Committee deciding what I should and shouldn't have?
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At least in the US, we'll see rioting and the very imminent threat of mass scale starvation before anything like UBI comes into play. I think Luddite-style robot smashing and a descent from an automated technological society will happen before our 'betters' part with a shiny penny of their hoard. (In typical idiot revolution fashion, the robots that could provide for us all will be targeted before the robot's masters who are keeping the productivity to themselves.)
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The idea that everyone needs to be working 40 hours a week in our modern, increasingly automated world is absurd. Productivity has done nothing but go up for forty years. Remember the dream of a world where people could pursue hobbies and ha
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I mean I could see an arrangement like they have for nursing where you agree to x years of service in return for having your tuition paid, but paying for job training myself?
That used to be called an indentured servant, and it wasn’t a very good thing if you ended up stuck with an unscrupulous boss.
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and what will happen to people automated out of a job?
They will be paid to throw rocks at windows in order to generate jobs for glaziers.
Or they can spend their time studying economic fallacies [wikipedia.org].
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CALLING THINGS "OBSOLETE" (Score:3)
Is the wealthy "Libertarian" way of dictating social standards.
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Says the guy with his own 4 GHz computer, without the slightest trace of irony.
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Did you know that every elevator once had a elevator operator? Did we have more freedom, somehow, back when this was the case?
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Give me one example of a deer jumping out in front of an elevator. Or a multi-elevator pileup accident. An elevator hitting black ice?
Do you really think a drunk/sleepy/texting/burger eating/radio adjusting/sneezing/elderly human driver will handle these situations better than a high-speed computer that is never distracted?
And with networked, radar-equiped cars, do you really think there will still be multi-car pileup accidents?
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Give me one example of a deer jumping out in front of an elevator.
Contrived scenarios to demonstrate that there are unsolvable situations are fun but don't prove anything relevant about automatic cars.
Or a multi-elevator pileup accident.
That one seems quite unlikely, given much better reaction times and distance estimations capabilities of computers.
An elevator hitting black ice?
I find it difficult to believe that a car with active sensors wouldn't notice that. In fact, this might be the one case where a computer with proper sensors could be significantly superior to a human driver. You don't have multispectral eyes, but a computer can.
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As a bicyclist I would prefer computer driven cars to not paying attention human driven cars.
Most humans don't seem to grasp that they are using a 1000kg weapon to get around. They call,sms or facebook while they should be driving.
HUH (Score:2)
I thought we'd have flying cars before we'd lose the chance to drive.
All kidding aside, 40 years from now we'll still be driving our own cars because programmers won't be able to help a car decide if it is allowed to avoid a collision that will kill a driver by swerving onto a sidewalk and killing two pedestrians.
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Re:HUH (Score:4, Interesting)
or a mechanical failure on the part of a self driving car but anyway....
The reason we will not have a self driving car is because we do not have the technology to do it to the extent that the manufacture will be willing to except the liability in the event of an accident. Instead we will eventually over time with many upgrades along the way get a very advanced version of cruise control that can be turned off and on shifting the liability back to the driver.
Just like we don't have flying cars because it's not practical from production cost or for the manufacture or owner to take on that liability as a mechanical failure at altitude is immediately a costly accident. This is not the case with the cars we have now mechanical failures although they can don't usually result in an accident.
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It's no more difficult to insure a machine than it is to insure a person. Sure autonomous cars may kill the odd person but so do cars now. When the do the insurance will cover the legal costs. Just like now. It may look right now like th liability moves from the driver to the manufacturer, but that's just a matter of legislation or business model. For sure the cost of that insurance will be passed on. To the car owner in one way or another. There is no hurdle there that need slow the path to autonomous cars
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" a solar flare"
Right. These things are usually put down as "act of god". They happen today too. If you're clutching to the notion of a freak accident to throw out a concept, well I've got stuff to sell you. I hope you're one of these survivalists who is betting it all on the world ending. Real soon now.
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Flying cars would be too dangerous to be allowed into the hands of the likes of us. Ordinary cars are bad enough - but at least they mostly kill people on the street, and are hard to weaponise. A flying car would be basically a piloted missile, ready to hit any building the driver wants. If the engineering problems were solved then the only way most governments would allow a flying car to be sold would be with a piloting computer wrapped in anti-tamper measures - all the driver does is set a destination lan
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Yes, because you wouldn't allow people to fly small airplanes, now would you?
Oh, wait...
What kind of stupid world are we coming to where this nonsense makes any sense to anyone?
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We can allow people to fly small planes because so few of them want to do it.
It would be a nightmare if everybody who currently owns a car had a plane and wanted to fly it in the numbers we see cars on the road.
Effectively, given the requirements for distance before and after each plane, it would be impossible to actually get everyone into the air and flying at the same time.
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Assuming that your human reactions allow you to make that decision in the few seconds before you collide with the obstacle ahead of you, of course.
Renting private chargers (Score:5, Insightful)
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Well, private chargers are generally really slow and usually meant for overnight charging, it's rarely what you want to wait for if you are running out of juice. Here in Norway we already have several vendors that have set up paid fast charging points - not quite as fast as superchargers but 20-50 kW is overkill at home. And you'll still be paying for the same power, just not the premium but if you put any reasonable value on your time it's probably better anyway unless there's something you'd like to spend
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The problem with private chargers is that they are slow. A 7kW charger needs a 60A circuit. In Europe houses usually have a 100A breaker... It's actually an issue for people who want two EVs charging at home at the same time. In a car the size of the Tesla a 7kW charger is a bit slow.
Having said that, there is a scheme called PlugShare that allows EV users to share their home charger and access other's on the same scheme.
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They should let owners lend their private chargers for a fee, handled by Tesla. Something like Uber but for charging your car.
Well, there's PlugShare [plugshare.com] which pretty much does that, although I don't think people typically charge a fee; rather they do it pro bono on the assumption that when they need a recharge someone else will do the same for them.
Quick someone give Musk a Crystal ball (Score:3)
Auto-drive on treacherous sections? (Score:2)
So on the sections of road I'm going to be most terrified to navigate I should secede control to the computer? In principal, this makes sense, but in reality this is a pee-your-pants moment that even adrenaline junkies will probably say no thanks to.
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The self driving and flying car have been a decade away for the last four decades so I wouldn't worry about it. Although I imagine more assisted driving features will become available notification of objects in blind spots, backing camera, proximity alerts, and maybe even a cruise control that can maintain a lane and match trafic speed.
Why not word it as... (Score:2)
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You can have my steering wheel. . . (Score:2)
when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
Which may very well occur when autonomous vehicles can't decide what they should do and come to a stop, causing others to plow into them.
Re:You can have my steering wheel. . . (Score:5, Interesting)
when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
Which may very well occur when autonomous vehicles can't decide what they should do and come to a stop, causing others to plow into them.
More likely, just like older folk that insist on hand-writing letters, having a land-line, and banking in person, you will not be forced to give up your driving. Instead, your costs will go up, while other more inexpensive or convenient options will become available for those who don't care to drive to get from A->B.
Feel free to yell at those folks from your porch to stay off your lawn as they blissfully ignore you.
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If you keep your distance that won't be a problem. A properly designed autonomous vehicle will do that by default.
Re:You can have my steering wheel. . . (Score:5, Informative)
No because you see, the other autonomous vehicles will stop in time.
As for the manually driven cars plowing into them - well they do that today anyway, don't they?
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A vehicle stopping never causes others to plow into it. Bad drivers plow into stopping cars because they are driving badly. That's why if you hit a car from behind, you're at fault.
You've never run into a whiplash scam, have you?
Before I left the UK, I'd see a news story every few months about someone who'd been pulling in front of other cars and slamming on their brakes to cause a collision so they could make fraudulent insurance claims.
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In my neck of the woods, making a lane change, and slamming the brakes is considered "unsafe lane change" and is a moving violation. It happened to me, and the other driver was cited for that among other charges. That and I am (was??) a good driver, and almost missed him completely. The skid marks on the road, showing me maintaining control of my car, was enough for the police to rule right there that I was not at fault.
my car my rules (Score:3)
And so it begins (Score:3)
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Waring against AI.... (Score:5, Insightful)
wasn't elon just recently warning us against autonomous intelligence?
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Look how the powerful record and media companies reacted (and continue to react) to file sharing. Look how a chess champion reacts to being beaten by a computer.
I think that the powerful don't want something more powerful than them and the smart don't want something smarter than them.
But
what about cruising and necking in the car? (Score:2)
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More time to make out in the backseat while the car drives itself?
From another article... (Score:5, Insightful)
jalopnik article [jalopnik.com]
'"It's much easier than people think" says Musk, outlining how most of the sensors and systems available right now can handle self-driving duties on the freeway, something Tesla showed off late last year with its AutoPilot features.'
As someone who has spent a career working on safety-critical real-time systems, I can assure you that it's not in any way "much easier than people think". Quite the opposite. Sure, driving a car down a well marked highway on a clear sunny day with little traffic and no system failures is easy. But if you obscure the lane markings in any of a number of ways, add inclement weather, throw out random obstacles, random system failures, etc. the problem gets monumentally harder. Throw in an urban environment with all sorts of other issues just keeps making it harder and harder. And solving all of those problems takes up well over 90% of the effort when designing an autonomous system. Hell, developing something that can recognize the problem in the first place is hard enough. Being able to differentiate between sensor failure and sensors indicating a failure is a non-trivial task. He's full of it if he thinks we're anywhere near having a self driving car that's ready for public consumption.
Sure, there are self driving cars out there on the road. But they have huge engineering and support teams using them as an evaluation platform. And it's good that we have made as much progress as we have. I look forward to seeing the work continue and advance the technology. But it's not an easy task. It's going to take probably decades before we're really ready for a fully autonomous self driving car that's ready for public consumption. We'll probably see some of the technologies work their way into cars between now and then. And that's a good thing too. But it's not going to happen overnight because it's much harder than people think.
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He's been a successful entrepreneur, no doubt. But he really doesn't have the background in actually building safety-critical systems to fully understand the complexity of the problem. Sorry but I'm going to go with actual engineers who have done the actual work instead of the flashy business guy with no real experience actually building it.
That being said, I'm 100% in favor of him putting resources into developing the technology. It's good that he has many engineers working on the problem because the lo
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Remember it doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be better than the bottom 50% of drivers. The bar here is not high. How do the bottom 50% of drivers handle random system failures? Say ice on the road. If he doesn't implement 'panic' as an option, its probably already above a good chunk of those folks, judging by accident rates in winter storms.
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Remember it doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be better than the bottom 50% of drivers.
That's great for the bottom 50% of drivers. No so great for those of us who've been driving for decades and never caused an accident.
Why would I want to travel in a self-driving car that drives worse than I do?
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Remember it doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be better than the bottom 50% of drivers.
That's great for the bottom 50% of drivers. No so great for those of us who've been driving for decades and never caused an accident.
Why would I want to travel in a self-driving car that drives worse than I do?
I and 80% of the other drivers on the road agree completely.
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Yeah, I added that thought in the follow up to the first response to my comment. If we can get fewer accidents per mile driven than we get now, it's a win. The more we reduce accidents the better. Which is why it's good to see accident reducing technology showing up in cars long before the cars actually drive themselves. And even if that's all we ever really get out of the effort to have self driving cars, we're still better off
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Musk's secret with Autopilot is that it doesn't cope with difficult conditions, it hands back to the human driver. If there is snow on the road and it can't see the markings it won't engage, simple as that. When he says it could do 90% of a long journey he doesn't mention the caveat that it can only do so in good conditions on good roads.
It's still a useful feature, but Musk does tend to exaggerate. He said you could own a Model S for $500 a month, but when you look at it that includes savings on fuel and m
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If it happens like the evolution of safety in aircraft systems, you'll see horrendous crashes that kill people being the impetus behind recalls and safety upgrades. There's simply too many permutations for anyone to accurately predict a complete set of potential hazards, much less find a way to get a computer to identify them all and come up with a strategy to deal with them. There will be some combination of issues that causes a crash where people die and everyone who has ever worked on autonomous cars w
Robert A. Heinlein (Score:3, Interesting)
He wrote about teens jumping in front of convoys of automated big rigs a long time ago, out of sheer boredom and an innate desire to cause chaos. Even in Methuselah's Children the long lived had methods of switching off auto drive to avoid being tracked everywhere at all times. It has been pointed out previously what about people on farms driving completely off the grid, not to mention the totally unresolved issue of whose at fault when my auto drive car is involved in an accident, or the choice HAS to be made between saving MY life, the driver or some stranger on the side of the road who wants to commit suicide by being run over...
Self-driving cars are nice and all... (Score:3)
.
Show me a self-driving car that could navigate the snow-choked roads of Boston this winter.
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Now, you might have to clean your sensors before you head out, but you have to scrape your windshield anyway.
Before you head out?
You do realise that most of the crap on your sensors gets there while you're driving, right? So you'll get half-way there and the car will say 'oh crap, I can't see, I CAN'T SEE! I'M GOING BLIND!' and you'll have to get out in the middle of the road and clean them so it can finish the journey?
Try driving in the snow belt in a car with a rear-view camera, and you'll have a better idea of just how little time you can drive around without having to clean all those fancy sensors.
Soon 'mere humans' won't be allowed to do anything (Score:3)
The thing is, governments see us only as tools to keep the economy going, the economy and creating jobs are far more important than getting people to extract enjoyment out of their lives so it is in their interest to keep us as dependent on the economy as possible and since in the West we don't manufacture much anymore it also means coaxing people to use as many services as possible
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I'm going to extract a shitton of enjoyment out of going to sleep in my pod in Denver and waking up at the beach in San Diego!
Are you sure? (Score:3)
That's dangerous talk from someone who has built his car business on a reputation for performance and quality... when cars drive themselves, they won't need to be fast, or good looking, because nobody will be looking. They could look like the Oscar Meyer Wiener Mobile and nobody would notice.
Oh well. Fun is always short lived.
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Fast means different things to different people though... I'm all for fast self driving cars that get me to remote places while I nap... but white-nuckle driving fast is only enjoyable to the person who's hands are on the wheel. When that goes away, many enthusiasts will go away also. A 100hp car is as fast as a 1000hp car when you're talking about getting between cities in the western US. The 0-60 numbers are part of why I love Tesla (I'll never afford one BTW). But without that... I'm way more likely t
I'm one of those engineers... (Score:5, Insightful)
... that work on the new holy grail, autonomous vehicles. Somehow, the level of confidence in this new technology seems to be inversely proportional to the distance to the nitty-gritty details of actually doing this. Can someone please tell me, exactly, how this is supposed to be done? Without using the phrase "how hard can it be".
Let's take the simplest of all the detection problems. How many lines of code does it take to reliably and safely detect the lane markings of a road? Nobody knows, because nobody has done it yet. Yes, there are prototypes that can handle some sub sets of all cases. The best I've seen handles 90% of the cases. That takes 1 MSLOC and still counting. How expensive will the last 10% be? How many hours of recorded video data does it take to verify the last 10%? The last 1%? The 90% takes a room full of TB harddisks and thousands of units parallel verification.
But yeah, how hard can it be to make a fully autonomous vehicle? I'll bet we'll have the fusion, flying car and AI analog: constantly 30 years in the future with winters interspearsed.
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Can someone please tell me, exactly, how this is supposed to be done?
It's pointless, anyway. Half the year, you can't see the lane markings here because they're covered in snow. The other half, you can't see them because they've been scraped off by snow ploughs. Maybe for two days a year you can see them, because they just got repainted before the snow started again.
Any system that relies on seeing lane markings is doomed, unless it's restricted to open highways in good weather.
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Without using the phrase "how hard can it be".
We prefer the term AI Complete [wikipedia.org].
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Yep, it's really hard. That's why you develop a system that doesn't need to detect 100% of the lane markings. If you can optically detect 30-40% of them, and add that data to lidar mapped concrete patterns, medians, satellite imagery, gps, and other data sources, the software can accurately construct the proper path to follow. It's like a circle, you don't need to see the whole thing to draw a copy, you only need three points from it.
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we havnt even fixed the train crash issues yet... and how hard could that be :) :)
perhaps we should start with fixed lane issues like planes, trains and then perhaps automobiles
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we havnt even fixed the train crash issues yet... and how hard could that be :)
Not that hard. Automatic train operation [wikipedia.org] is a solved problem; a properly installed, modern ATO system is safer than the best human driver, better at following time tables, and even has significantly lower energy consumption. In fact, many ATO mass transit lines cannot be run manually (without cutting down on the number of departures); human drivers are not able to keep up with the amount of traffic managed by the ATO.
An ATO will not stop the train if there's an unregistered person or vehicle on the tracks (
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Seriously? It's called OCR. That's being done for things way harder than lines on the road. To the point that the Teslas today will display what the speed is on the road that they read from the sign off towards the side.
As others pointed out, you don't just use one signaller. You use multiple ones, chained. The odds that all are wrong in the same exact way will be much, much less than 10%.
Furthermore, you don't need to be perfect to improve road safety. You just need to improve on the average driver. Which
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How many lines of code does it take to reliably and safely detect the lane markings of a road?
As you are from this area, I'm sure you already know what I'm about to say, but maybe you have an answer:
The goal is not 100% detection rate. The goal is a detection rate that is equal to or better than that of most human drivers. I've driven roads where the line markings were so difficult to see (maybe just in the particular conditions of that day) that it was more a matter of guessing than actual detection.
So what is the detection rate of human drivers? Probably much lower than intuition would make us thi
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"strong incentives" rather than requirement (Score:2)
Like much cheaper insurance.
"Activate auto-drive" ... (Score:2)
My 35 year old car just looked back at me and said, "Dude! What?"
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my old cavalier would sometimes turn on by itself... but i think that was a feature test for the GM ignition rollout.
How much would a driverless cab fare cost? (Score:2)
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