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Comment by frgtpsswrdlame | Hacker News Reader

In a community with so many members that pride themselves on contrarian views, why is this view on autonomous vehicles and more broadly, incredibly powerful AI that is just around the corner so broadly accepted?

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A number of us live in Silicon Valley or work daily with AI. These aren't science fiction technologies for us: they're, real, tangible cars that you see daily on the roads, or software libraries that you can download and use yourself. I can understand why they'd seem like fantasy if you live in some far-off place, but when you're stuck behind a self-driving car going 25 mph on El Camino, there's pretty concrete evidence that self-driving cars are here.

I do think that AI and particularly deep learning are overhyped. It is a big deal, but it's not as big a deal as many people make it out to be. It's much like the Internet in 1998; it works, you can use it now, and you know that it's going to drastically increase the reach of computing power, but people are talking like that's all going to happen in 1-2 years when really it'll be 2-3 decades.

I guess my concern isn't that these are "science fiction technologies" but that they're rather simple. AI has a history of over-promising and under-delivering and even if a few "self-driving" cars have made it on the road, how long until people begin trying to use them in scenarios they're not really ready for? All of that progress can disappear overnight if there are a few bad accidents.

I guess when I look around, I don't see a comparison between AI now and the Internet then, I see a comparison between AI now and AI then (70's).

AI has this effect where whenever an approach starts working, it ceases to be AI:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect

It's worth remembering that many of the actual technologies developed in 1970s AI - A*, beam search, pattern matching, constraint solving, rules engines - are now basic CS algorithms that most programmers are just expected to know, and they have continued applicability to a wide variety of domains. We just don't call them "AI" anymore, because the technology has been commoditized enough that they are "business rules", or "single-player games", or "layout engines", or other examples of the actual problem domain that's solved.

Ditto 1990s AI - fuzzy logic, SVMs, Bayesian networks, collaborative filtering, perceptrons. It just got good enough that it became the standard way you solve a certain class of problems with computers, and now it's called "fraud detection", "Zestimates (tm)", "recommendation engines", "stream ranking", and so on.

Deep learning is the same. The hype cycle will eventually bust, because all hype cycles eventually bust. But in the meantime, it has opened up whole classes of problems in computer vision, speech recognition, recommendation, machine translation, and several other domains that were not amenable to computerized treatment before.

I guess that's sort of my point though isn't it? A, SVMs, etc. aren't really called AI because they're not. Because AI carries a connotation and once you understand A it's obvious that it's not really AI. Won't the same be true of today's neural networks? Granted they've been given a name which should add some longevity but when a layperson thinks "AI" they think a robot which acts like a human, they think AGI. If someone had an AI algorithm which could start to demonstrate more AGI leanings I bet the AI effect wouldn't apply.

When cars came out they killed quite a number of people in accidents and mechanical failures. They were just so much better than horses we kept on improving them.

That's how I see AI. People will surely get injures and even die in Accidents. We are a humanist society where human life is valued above everything else, so I'm very optimistic that AI will get better and give their humans more divine powers and longer life over time.

Even assuming your conservative adoption/relevance curve of the technology itself, I don't think we need too many more incremental steps before society has to stand up and take notice of an unemployment problem that can't keep up. AI / automation might not turn our day to day lives into the Jetsons in 5 years, but if it gives us 25%+ real unemployment we're still going to be in for a ride.

Traffic in the US also seems vastly easier than in other parts of the world, mostly because roads are wider. When i see the some of the chaos in cities like Paris, Barcelona, Rome and the narrow roads in many places, i can only come to the conclusion that it will take a long time before an AI will be able to handle that. Highway/intercity traffic sure, that should be solved in a few years, but the rest will take some time. Even in Germany we have lots of backroads on the countryside that are so narrow (and have no markings), that you have to go off the street with half of the car if someone is coming from the other direction.

Not sure about AI since I am still skeptical about "incredibly powerful" AI around the corner. AI is definitely going to have a big impact in the not too distance future but my sense is that the AI need not be all that powerful, it just needs to be capable of eliminating human input.

Self driving cars on the other hand are right in front of our eyes, we have seen them driving around and are rapidly advancing in terms of their level of autonomy...in terms of timeline for widespread adoption, I'll look at utility. The utility of self-driving cars is just too great for them not to quickly replace manual cars once the technology is fully ready. I can't imagine too many people would want to be stuck fiddling with their cars in long commutes when they could be reading, watching TV or taking a nap...just as smart phones dominate now because of their utility, self-driving cars are likely to unfold the same way.

>Self driving cars on the other hand are right in front of our eyes, we have seen them driving around and are rapidly advancing in terms of their level of autonomy

There's basically no evidence for this though. Sure Tesla can show me a 3 min video of a car driving in perfect weather on perfect, straight, wide roads but I don't see self-driving cars "in front of my eyes" at all. We don't have any safety data that is directly comparable to human driving, we have several accidents already, etc.

>when they could be reading, watching TV or taking a nap...

I agree that when/if we make it to that level of autonomy we'll have turned the corner on adoption and it will explode. But I'm not sure that even the most optimistic of self-driving companies would say that we are anywhere close to that.

You'd have to wonder though if this is perhaps scoffing at the notion of an airline industry at the time the Wright brothers are showing off their first aircraft.

Getting from "man powered craft that can stay in the air for 30 seconds and a hundred odd metres" to "jetting millions of people around the world every day" requires a leap of imagination, but unequivocally it was possible, and happened.

... Over decades.

Like the uncanny valley, the edge cases for self-driving cars will take more work than the rest of the effort combined... by at least an order of magnitude.

There is far more money in automating long-distance trucking. My bet is the first real use of self-driving "cars" will be for trucks. The human driver can sleep, eat a meal, etc but will remain on-board for safety's sake and dealing with unanticipated edge cases (e.g. the AI wakes up the driver when it runs into a traffic jam due to an accident. The AI can probably recognize cop cars, flares, etc but won't be able to navigate the scene of the accident while responding to instructions from police officers)

The next small step will be "follower" trucks. The lead truck has a human driver same as before, but one or two AI-driven trucks follow. They do their best to track the human driver's response to unexpected situations. Worst-case, they pull over and flag the human driver who pulls over and uses a VR rig to pilot them past the problem.

Meanwhile the application of "self-driving" technology to cars over the next 10 years will be to avoid accidents, not to actually be self-driving.

Will we have fully autonomous vehicles within 50 years? Almost certainly. Will we have them in the next 5? Almost certainly not.

Self driving haul trucks are already at work at a few open pit mine sites around the world. These are vehicles driving relatively short, prescribed routes, with well defined patterns. The few articles I've read seem to indicate they're operating just fine, although I'd be interested to learn more. If the cost savings are there, I'd bet the entire mining industry will move in that direction rather quickly.

http://www.riotinto.com/ourcommitment/spotlight-18130_18328....

You overestimate how good humans are at driving.

I'd argue that the shit self driving cars we have right now are ALREADY statistically safer than humans.

You don't have to be perfect. Just better than an average driver. And average drivers are drunk, sleep deprived, and texting. That is a very low bar to pass.

To sell you need the car to be a better driver than the customer thinks they are which is a higher bar since most drivers think they are better than average.

Doubt it.

Even if they were much more dangerous, there is still a huge market. Safely, is arguably pretty low on the list of things that consumers care about.

The problem with self driving cars right now is purely political.

But even that isn't insurmountable. All you have to do is release in a low government regulation red state, like Arizona.

And then the rest of the country will follow, once everyone in Arizona starts using them and realize how awesome they are.

I think you underestimate the effects of weather, amount of poorly lined roads out there, etc.

Maybe on highways in good weather conditions we are close, but the chaos of cities like Paris, Madrid, Rome with their narrow roads and millions of edge case situations will be a tough problems for self driving AIs.

Who pride themselves on contrarian views? That looks like a rather foolish kind of goal.

Well researched, fundamented, empirically valid views are worth pursuing, and if those happen to lead into contrarian, ok, nothing wrong with that, but pursuing it? No way.

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