Thank you. This is a pet peeve of mine. Self driving cars do not exist, at all, yet, nor does anything that's really all that close but if you point that out on HN you'll be met with breathless disagreement.
Even more relevant, there's literally nothing in the historical record to suggest that the real breakthroughs when they come will come from a company like Uber.
Edit: Figures from 2015 indicate human interventions to prevent an accident were about once per 74,000 miles or maybe slightly worse than humans but not that much. http://www.roboticstrends.com/article/google_self_driving_ca...
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/05/all-th...
The key to Google's success has been that these cars aren't forced to process an entire scene from scratch. Instead, their teams travel and map each road that the car will travel. And these are not any old maps. They are not even the rich, road-logic-filled maps of consumer-grade Google Maps.
They're probably best thought of as ultra-precise digitizations of the physical world, all the way down to tiny details like the position and height of every single curb. A normal digital map would show a road intersection; these maps would have a precision measured in inches.
The devil is truly in the details. You're covering 99.5% of all driving situations with 99.9% reliability? Well, then the remaining bit is going to be pretty devilishly hard! What do you do about cars that are stuck stationary on the the side of a bit of shoulder-less road? Here's what a human being does: They "sense" that something is up on the road ahead because the traffic patterns are different. They observe what the drivers ahead are doing, then start exercising caution concerning what's going on at the side of the road, maybe even to the point of hugging the other side of the lane out of caution.
Are "driverless" cars doing this now? No. Are you going to have to develop human-equivalent AI to do that? No. But is taking things like this into account going to take a lot? Damn straight!
Why not? The team at Uber that is working on this is largely comprised of researchers from Carnegie Mellon and former members of Google's driverless car team. Historical record suggests otherwise...
I mean they are competing against Apple and BMW, among many others, presumably, who have actually made a car, computer, or transportation device that worked.
That notwithstanding, the burden of proof is in the other direction.
Remember, a company is merely comprised of the people within it. If Uber has people that have joined from the kinds of companies that you mentioned, it becomes more and more indistinguishable from them.
Not really. Software companies are like that. They are the exception to the general rule that companies are composed of people plus things like factories, equipment, patents, trade secrets, inventory, real estate, global supply chains, and dealer networks for service and support.
Making cars, even regular ones, is hard and Uber has never really done anything like it.
No they haven't.
I know this because there aren't any cars in the world that can self-drive.
But if you define what Tesla already has in production as a self-driving car, then you would be wrong.
Brace yourselves. AI Winter Is Coming.
Indeed. The unpredictable behavior of humans occupying the same environment is key. Remove this element and things get simpler (though not simple. And v2v comms might be required.)
I suspect highways are the road infrastructure most akin to a closed track. Which is why the Otto acquisition is so interesting.