What do you think about Ford announcement, IIUC they're skipping level 3 (semi auto autos) straight to level 4 (wheel-less).
I'm certain that I won't be driving a car ever in 2030
Computer vision actually started out in the 60's because how hard could it be to classify objects in images? Well, decades later and it's still a hugely unsolved problem.
Robotics can be broken into 3 main categories: perception, planning, and controls. Perception is always the weak point. Robots just cannot see and understand their environments like people can. When you put a robot in a dynamic environment, they fail spectacularly. To give some idea of this, look at videos of robots falling down at the DARPA Robotics Challenge - and keep in mind those were made by teams of top roboticists with millions of dollars in a highly constrained environment (it's hard to say that obstacle course was "real").
I really, really doubt it's going to happen in a few years. I would love to be wrong though.
AFAIK Google's cars rely on radar to identify the position of objects, which I would think is vastly easier.
Of course, there's still the interesting challenge of classifying objects into traffic partipicants and obstacles.
When there are billions of $'s to be made. Generally there is way.
I understand from where you are coming. But if the trend grows, and one companies sees the billions coming. Others are forced to innovate. Also a whole new ecosystem is born.
See pre iPhone and post iPhone mobile industry. Sometimes you need one company to do something insane to drive others down the same path.
Wheel less driving, first show me it drives in the pouring rain at night when the roads aren't lit. Show it having the ability to obey posted speed limits, adjust to construction, and the like.
I am still surprised at how much current systems love to tail gate let alone don't suggest obeying posted limits.
The hype right now is so great that even if the reality is amazing it will be disappointing.
For example, a train of self driving trucks can be led by 1 in the front. Yes, I know, REAL trains exist, but they don't go everywhere. A train of self driving trucks could save a lot of money.
If self driving Taxis don't work in the rain, then Uber can just NOT drive them when it is raining! For example, Maybe the penetration rate will be very low in Seattle, but very high in Texas. Disrupting 20% of the Taxi market by eliminating drivers is still a very big deal.
And for trucks, will you let supermarkets go dry once it starts raining? Otherwise you need to keep drivers on retainer. And then you might as well just have them drive for minimum wage.
When it is sunny, the self driving cars are out and about, and the price is low.
When it is raining, the self driving cars stop taking passengers, and the price goes up, with surge pricing, which is handled by human drivers.
You don't keep drivers on retainer. You simply publish the price, and if the drivers like the price, then they can accept the job. If not, then they don't. If there is a shortage, then you use surge pricing until the shortage no longer exists at the given price point.
For trucks and supermarkets, if it is raining then you pay human drivers. If not, then self driving. BAM, labor costs have gone down by 50%.
Think about what you're saying here. If manual driving is still required 60% of the time there will still be mass-unemployment of taxi and truck drivers. These guys are not paid well enough that they can afford half the amount of income that they currently have.
Uber doesn't have any interest in self driving cars succeeding. It's a PR distraction to justify the exploitation of drivers ("you shouldn't complain because you are lucky to have a job at all when self driving cars are coming any day now").
Self driving cars that don't have drivers would completely destroy Uber's actual business model which is based on undercutting current taxi companies by shifting the capital, maintenance and insurance costs onto the drivers.
Now, interpreting the words I say is a different matter, but as far as transcription I'd say we are at basically 100% right now and have been for a while.
Google Voice to Text, from my experiences, is bloody amazing for Chinese. My Chinese is abysmal (think "never gets the tone right") and for short phrases/sentences I've never had Google fail on me. Maybe it fails on larger sentences but it would be difficult for me to believe.
Japanese is another language it does very well in. I can only count on one hand how many times it has made a mistake - and usually repeating myself a tad slower and with less slurring and it will pick it up just fine.
So it might not work for everyone in the world but at some point soon it will properly be there for most national languages.
What? Sometimes I use Google's speech to text and a majority of the time it's a waste of my time. "Food near me" is not "fool's errand" (the irony isn't lost on me) and "gyms nearby" is not "Jim Dougherty", both are search terms I used last night.
Amazon Echo is far from perfect, but it's the perfect example of the rapid improvements in technology + building an interface that "just works"
State of the art offline CNNs have been doing classification quite well recently, arguably better than humans. See the Inception-v3 paper: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1512.00567v3.pdf
Practical, reliable ML stems from enormous data sets. And I can't see a way of obtaining the necessary data volume other than sitting in Level 3 for a product cycle...
It's Level 2 ("adaptive cruise control in combination with lane centering") that's the problem. Therein lies the deadly valley - good enough that the driver can tune out, but not good enough to handle trouble. That's where Tesla is. Level 2 with strongly enforced hands-on-wheel seems to be OK, but don't let the driver take their hands off for long periods.
When they say, A future model will be wheelless. What they're saying is a car in 15-25 years will be wheelless. Which is about on track with the parent poster's time frame.
Most the large Semi-Truck manufacturers seem to be progressing along a similar track. Ford's forecasts of 20 years forward actual sees a complete stop of consumer vehicles moving completely over to driver-less fleet vehicles.