The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car

The parent's checklist misses a bunch of things. For instance "1) Hookup a computer to the CAN-Bus network of the car". That alone is not trivial. It is trivial if you want to read the car's odometer, but good luck doing more than that. For instance, people are still trying to make sense of the reported battery cell voltages in the Nissan Leaf. All interesting features are not documented and require serious reverse-engineering. "Hooking up to the CAN-Bus" can easily become a task for a whole month, full-time. Not to mention that the most useful features for the self-driving part are probably not accessible by the CAN-Bus - people are still trying to unlock the doors of the aforementioned Nissan Leaf. Steering, acceleration and braking are unlikely to be on the CAN-Bus "2) Attach a bunch of peripherals" is also hand wavy, and same goes for the rest of the post.

It would be like dismissing SpaceX accomplishments by saying: "1) Build rocket frame. 2) build engine 3) Program flight software 4) Fill up the tanks with fuel 5) Push a big red button". The devil is in the details.

With that out of the way: if the events happened as described, this guy should be convicted of reckless "driving". Taking a prototype that had only started working a few hours prior to an actual test run in a freeway with other cars is insane. What about some simpler, more useful and less dangerous goal? Such as a lane-departure warning add-on for cars which lack that capability?

The article title is the worst part though. It's not "clever dude created a self-driving car prototype by himself". It is "Dude is taking on Tesla by himself". Which is bullshit.

EDIT: Fix typo.

I'm painfully aware of this. Ten years ago I ran one of the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge teams. That's about what we produced with less than three full time equivalent people. We didn't have to handle other vehicles, but we did have to handle off-road conditions. Ours didn't make many mistakes, but it was very conservative and kept stopping to rescan its environment with a line-scanning LIDAR on a tilt head.

I'm scared of happy-case automatic driving implementations. Tesla went down that road and had to back up, removing some features. Cruise's PR indicates they were going that way, but they now realize that won't work.

> Not that outlandish for a talented person

What planet are you living on? I don't know what you did today, but I played with some jquery animations. This guy drove around in a self driving car that he built himself. It doesn't solve for edge cases? Neither do 90% of CRUD apps. Holy shit.

Give some credit where credit is due. This is not an ordinary or average outcome.

This is just the start, not the end.

General cynicism isn't really adding much to the conversation in my opinion, since almost everyone here probably knows this already, and too much cynicism can put people off starting projects and people starting projects is something we should cherish.

I do think your point about emergency situations is substantive though. Perhaps he is only planning for self-driving while supervised by humans, but his idea for training as described (become an uber driver) would not at all produce the kind of dataset that would assure me that I would be safe. I think a lot of training with advanced drivers in simulators where you can have crazy life threatening situations would be the absolute minimum. I'd be worried that bad habits picked up on the thousands of uber rides would kick in during an emergency rather than the couple of situations that would be feasible to train on in real life.

What's better about an AI powered by neural nets is that you could train an AI to go offroading.

Get enough data and you've got a model for dealing with a given situation. Google's biggest strides with OCR, Voice recognition, Spam filters and other AI tech early on came from its ability to gather a huge corpus of data.

The real challenge is two fold. Gathering data, and feeding the AI with inputs with data actually matters. This is the secret sauce that Hotz refers to in the article as the information he's not willing to disclose. That information will become commoditized in due time (like low-latency optimization for HFT), but it will take plenty of institutional money & experience (Google, Apple, Tesla, Ford, etc) to get it there.

I could probably do this using ROS, opencv, and pcl. At least on a level where the car could recognize the road well enough to drive on it, but I imagine both my car and his car are nothing that any sane human would want to sit in. That last 20% focusing on safety and edge cases is going to be 100x the work/innovation/testing/staff/code/talent/smarts here.

As a side note, I am intrigued by the idea of a FOSS self-driving car. Its a little worrysome we'll never see the code Tesla, Mercedes, etc are using.

Could you explain on what basis you claim this? Do you have intimate knowledge of his prototype, the amount of work he put in, or the novel ideas that he brought to the project in addition to integrating pre-existing tech?

From what I can understand, your argument seems to be "lets see if I can guess what he did". If you're an authority in this field, then your guess could be very accurate I suppose.

I would be very surprised if you got deep reinforcement learning to perform well on a self-driving task, even on a highway. If you did, well, your faculty position at Stanford is waiting for you.

Small personal example: my family lives out in the suburbs. My dad works in a neighboring city. His commute is about a half hour, 20 minutes of which is a straight shot on a major highway. I'm sure he'd be willing to pay a few hundred to reclaim that 20 minutes each way to read a book/the newspaper, check his email, browse the internet, etc.

It'd also be good for road trips.

Take the case of the Wright Brothers who faced two well funded adversaries. Samuel Pierpont Langley had a chair at Harvard, worked at the Smithsonian and had among others funding him $50K from the US War Department. Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, was an avid aviation enthusiast and an already wealthy man. One of Bell's assistants was Glenn Curtiss who went on to found his own plane company.

Who would bet on two bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio? No one, yet they were the first to fly.

The first popular microcomputer would surely come from IBM or HP yet it didn't. Two guys in a Cupertino garage built it and neither of them was a college graduate.

This guy may fail but I am not going to bet against him. In fact I hope they televise the race between the Comma and the Tesla. I'll bring the popcorn.

Learning for the AI does not have to be from real world experiences only. Simulated/controlled emergency situations would help as well! Further even if the 2K lines of code stretches a bit more to deal with unknown situations that isn't so bad either

Here has been dedicated on making maps at a quality level that is needed for automous cars. A few issues with the data that is available currently is that the data isn't very detailed, and you're at the mercy of volunteers (tiger(old), openmaps data), or for a company that's main focus isn't maps. (Google)

http://360.here.com/2015/06/02/take-create-autonomous-cars/

What if you could simulate these conditions in a safe/controlled environment, and remove the driver from harm via remote control? Maybe build a virtual world that simulates the inputs as best as possible. That would be the cheap way, although you may lose fidelity.

If you had enough money you could build a simulated town/city, similar to a movie set, that throws all possible dangerous scenarios at you and operate the car remotely through these scenarios.

I think it's likely that much more of self-driving car development is smoke and mirrors than people realize. Best case scenarios are promoted as examples of how innovative a company is. Great PR, not necessarily a practical result.

Naivety is a very good thing at times.

I've seen average people achieve incredible things, and not because what they did was incredible... but just because they started work on things that no-one else thought they could complete. Some way into it, when enough progress has been made, people have rushed to give support because "halfway there but badly done" is a hell of a lot better than "not even started yet".

I also realize this kid probably won't end up making a huge dent in the universe.... but.... statistically speaking, there should be several "Leonardo da Vinci"- level humans alive right now. Why not this kid?

I kind of took that to be like how Musk talks about needing to know first principles. In the article you can see that he was humble about what he thought he knew, took jobs here and there and eventually confirmed that he was at the cutting edge, that he knew 'everything there is to know' about this special area.

That's when he realized that he was qualified to try this. IMO, anyway ;)

If only he knew about the Dunning Kruger effect...

Mobileye is doing something interesting by curating the reliable parts of the dataset (e.g. they have curated databases of traffic signs for each region) -- again not something you could do own your own, and seemingly archaic (hence GeoHot's criticism), but if you can afford it can speed up the training significantly.

Tesla is a massive resource here because they already have a huge fleet of internet connected cars proving enough data to fill the aforementioned training set in a matter of days or months: let's estimate their fleet at 40,000 cars -- then they could fill that minimum dataset in less than a day, and in a month they might have a 100x safety margin. Of course, there's a big technical problem of relaying all that video (maybe they just relay prediction failures), but the data is there.

Another fundamental problem with exclusively hands-off training (and little optimal control theory, etc) is picking up bad habits from drivers -- even the best algorithms will have a hard time and be only about as good as a good driver in each scenario, in the best case -- since the training data is acting as a ground truth.

He starts the video by giving credit to other people involved in the project.

There's a good reason began on closed courses, imagine a kernel panic locking the car on a busy freeway...

The article does a good job of explaining the inherent danger someone (and those around him) faces when attempting something like this. The point is that he's attempting to push the boundaries and not asking for permission -- generally the conditions required to innovate. Maybe that should be celebrated before you bust out the "b-b-but it's dangerous!"

Didn't the opposite happen? Suddenly artisans were out of business as nobody wanted beautiful hand-made luggage, or whatever, that would last decades, but instead we'd get some engineers and maybe consults an old-school luggage guy, get some specs, and toss that data into cheap mass production and be done with it. Sure they're uglier and last only a few years, but they're cheap and plentiful. Now those artisans had to close their shops and either go work in the factory or retrain for something else.

The I.R. was great for making things fast and cheap, but it was pretty much a full frontal attack on "maker" culture that has only rebounded in certain areas fairly recently, namely computers, because you can own the "means of production" trivially, namely a computer with a compiler.

I see AI going the same way. It'll be shoddy, cost jobs, and work "just good enough." The question is is "just good enough" appropriate for 5,000lbs death machines speeding at 75mph? Think of all very serious development protocols and standards aerospace and NASA use. And that's for machines that will never have to worry about poorly painted/paved roads, kids running into the street, snow covering everything, etc. I think the AI-guided future will be far off and hit a lot of practical limits quickly and the bullish attitude behind AI is more than a little unjustifiable.

1) Historically technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed. http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/aug/17/technology-c... One BIG difference, technology till now has been designed to aid humans, not replace them. But I think that technology will shift a lot of jobs in another sector but will not bring the sum of human brains needed to run it to 0.

2) Society will not be so nice to organisations taking away ALL its jobs. There will be a huge friction from society when they loose out ALL their jobs at this scale, it could vary from small riots to some new age guerrilla warfare. It will be interesting to see how politicians will react when they loose their jobs to computers though.

We will become the children of our new AI parents. We are building our future caretakers.

I'm sure he has a good handle on the tech running the car, he's at least looked at licensing it to test on the freeway (learning from the backlash on the Jeep Hack), and he had tested the car extensively before inviting a reporter with children to test it at 70mph on the freeway.

If you include these details and less of the sassy dialogue and flourishes of panache [1], you get a less interesting article.

Bloomberg goes for sexy. Take their reporting with a grain of salt. It's more art than facts-based.

[1] At one point, the virtual-reality company Oculus Rift failed to man its booth at a job fair, and Hotz took it over, posing as a recruiter and collecting résumés from his fellow students. None of this was enough to keep him interested. “I did two semesters [at CMU] and got a 4.0 in their hardest classes,” he says. “I met master’s students who were miserable and grinding away so that they might one day earn a bit more at Google. I was shocked at what I saw and what colleges have become. The smartest people I knew were in high school, and I was so let down by the people in college.”

Good luck to him understanding how to fix corner cases: he's built a black box.

It is my belief that this self-driving car project is really a kind of first for Hotz. He's famous for finding and exploiting the error-modes in what other people built; now he's actually building something. Methinks he's about to learn a lot about himself and the nature of the world. He's clearly extremely smart, so I'm actually rather excited for him!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car#Legislation

And I think you missed the part where he wants to drive for Uber, so he's also endangering the passengers in his car. (!)

The other side of the coin of his "technology outgrew slavery, and thus we got rid of it", is that if tomorrow's technology demands some moral monstrosity, to "work better", we can't but bend over and accept it.

Neither human struggles (from the civil war to MLK and Rosa Parks), nor desires and leadership come into any of this, neither is "working better" (towards what? for what purpose? etc) defined.

When did he do that?

Are you in for living in the woods and preying for food when humanity becomes a society of degenerate VR junkies?

Also, a book with the same name

When you spend all your time at a prompt you don't really care about unity vs cinnamon vs anything else.

Debian is stable and has fantastic package management, and Ubuntu builds on that with a vibrant community and wide support. For these users, Ubuntu 'just works' and lets them get on with what they want to do. It's about as simple as that.