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Comment by axguscbklp | Hacker News Reader

>I thought fully autonomous driving was meant to be done by now?

Musk was bullshitting when he made that prediction. Maybe he did it because he had bought his own bullshit. Personally I think what's more likely is that he was cynically conning people.

In reality, I think no-one is anywhere close to fully self driving cars. I would be surprised if we saw fully self driving cars any time in the next 50 years.

The whole field of fully self driving cars has been astonishingly full of empty hype, for some reason often believed by otherwise quite smart people.

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> for some reason often believed by otherwise quite smart people

I don't understand why so many smart "tech people" fall for the hype.

Maybe it is because "machine learning" is just abstract enough that even the most jaded developer thinks they can treat it like a black box where if you pour enough videos, photos and LIDAR readings for training into the top it will somehow spit out a fully autonomous self driving car at the bottom.

I do find it funny though. On the one hand Alexa only manages to turn on the lights successfully 50% of the time yet somehow we will magically have self driving cars capable of safely navigating the roads any day now. I mean for fsck sake, we don't even have a thing that can wash and fold clothes automatically but somehow self driving cars will be on the market any day.

Like, if we cannot even get voice recognition to work right, how on earth will you tell this magical car which street parking spot to take in a busy city? How will you tell it to pull over to pick up a friend? Hell, how will you tell it to go through a drive-through at McDonalds? A touchscreen?

The way you suggest the future of automotive transport rests on a fast food chain drive through suggests a kind of astroturfing social media advert. If burgers were that important, the burger company would partner with the self driving car company and find a way.

None of those things are physically complex - the car will be able to see or lidar if a space is big enough for it to park in, pulling over to pick up a friend is no different to pulling over to let you out at your destination, and a drive-through is moving forwards slowly and steering a bit like all low speed driving is. None of them require the dexterity of folding soft wet fabric, and the market for $30,000+ vehicles is much larger than the market for $30,000+ washing machines.

One simple answer is: you don't. Self-driving car owned by <car company. takes you from A to B and you get out. You don't choose the parking spot anymore than you chose the lane or the highway exit, you don't pick up a friend they take their own separate ride, and you don't use the drive through, you use <car company>'s food delivery service.

> None of those things are physically complex

I don't care about how physically complex something is. You didn't tell me how I'd tell the self driving car which spot to park in or which person on the corner is my friend. If you think this detail is minor, trivial or doesn't matter.... you are sadly mistaken.

> If burgers were that important, the burger company would partner with the self driving car company and find a way.

So you are telling me your $70,000 self driving car can't take me through one of the hundreds of thousands of drive thru's out there? That sounds pretty shitty.

> You don't choose the parking spot anymore than you chose the lane or the highway exit

You are telling me that this self-driving taxi will just stop at whatever place it feels like? How will I tell it precisely where to let me out? Remember it is pouring down rain / I am physically disabled and cannot walk very far / I am not entirely sure where I need to be dropped off until I get there.

So seriously, how will I command this self-driving car? Nobody seems to be able to answer this or even thought about it in any amount of detail at all. Probably because we are so far away from an actual self driving car that a realistic answer doesn't really matter at all.

And that is the problem with self-driving hype. Every time you ask about a specific detail it gets hand waved away as not important or some kind of edge case that doesn't matter. Guess what... edge cases matter. Your edge case is my important case. You add up all these edge cases that "don't matter" and you've excluded almost your entire market.

> I don't understand why so many smart "tech people" fall for the hype.

Maybe it's just that some of these "tech people" are not that smart at all?

> And that is the problem with self-driving hype. Every time you ask about a specific detail it gets hand waved away as not important or some kind of edge case that doesn't matter.

I think you are you spot-on with that analysis. Way too much hand-waving going on.

But that is a constant problem in tech, the entire area is susceptible to hypes and fads, with hands waving and waving at record speed. Like I said, maybe it's just not all geniuses and such...

> > I don't understand why so many smart "tech people" fall for the hype. Maybe it's just that some of these "tech people" are not that smart at all?

The crux of the problem is you have people who although may well be cabable of driving to work--they are by no means cabable of understanding driving at its essence. They will never, not ever; be able to create a car that can also interact with human drivers because they don't understand driving. Period... end of story.

A comment which is nothing but posturing. Why would you expect everybody discussing self-driving cars, in every situation to, be a genius, and to be using their maximum effort even on trivia questions about what UI you would use to tell a car that doesn't exist yet how to drive to McDonalds, under the questionable assumptions that a) it must work exactly the same way as a traditional car and you won't accept otherwise, and b) there will be only one self-driving car full stop, so there will be one answer and it must be perfect for every possible use case first time?

Honestly, I think I'm fine piloting a Tesla through a drive-through if it means I can eat on the road. I'll take 80% of possible performance / [aptitude?] now (heck, even 50-60%, as long as it's safe enough) versus 100% of possible scenarios being covered at some far-off point, especia)y if my enjoying 50-60% of capability actively gets the remaining % closer.

Too bad you are judgment impaired cause you are drunk. Always remember, you have to assume people in these self driving cars are drunk / high.

Always remember, you have to shift the goalposts every time someone answers, so you can claim they didn't answer.

That's the easiest problem to solve... if the car is capable of driving itself then you have both hands free to operate your phone or a touchscreen.

You can enter the location to stop at, and in this imaginary world where the car is capable of driving safely, then it should also be able to find the nearest safe location to stop at.

The actual part where the car is able to drive itself is clearly nothing but unfounded hype though.

I did answer. Quite possibly you won't have control. Your entire complaint is a "you can't precisely manage memory in a garbage collected language? Then nobody will use them." style complaint. And that's demonstrated wrong by history over and over - take people's choice away and do it for them, people like it.

Self-driving car, is the hard bit. "Who will design the smartphone app which lets me tap "go to the nearest mcdonalds drive thru"?" is the easy bit. Almost anyone on any $5/hour microconsulting web developer site could do that bit.

"Oh but who would buy an iPhone if it can't let me control the filesystem? You can't answer, nobody can tell me, it's impossible, the tech can't exist, everybody is stupid" - nope, it sold by the hundreds of millions.

Where will it stop? It will stop wherever there is a space. Maybe you can mash your finger on your app for "closest space right now" or maybe you'll get bored of doing that because it already does "closest available space to the chosen destination" because that makes sense.

"One disabled person will get wet in the rain so the tech can't exist" - most tech ignores disabled people completely, and sells in large numbers.

"I can't voice control tell it to go through a drive through so nobody will use it" - if it matters that much to people in general, mctakeout will partner with car company, let you drive up in your fancy car, and they will walk the food out to you. I'm more worried that the cars will come with a "take me to the nearest McDonalds" physical dashboard button, than that no cars have any way to instruct them to go anywhere off-route ever.

"your $70,000 self driving car" - I don't think most self-driving cars will be owned by individuals, but what does price have to do with it? People buy supercars which can't drive through narrow, bumpy, steep, city areas, there is a market for them. Why do you think there will be only a single self-driving car design which has a binary appeal to everybody or nobody, and therefore must be a single answer to how you will control it, and that there's no room for iteration so it must be conclusively decided and locked in several years before any such car even exists or its capabilities are understood and settled?

"So seriously, how will I command this self-driving car?" - so, seriously, driving two tons of machine around a busy unpredictable space is something you're fine with, but having some buttons is what you think the impossibly dealbreaker is? Touchscreens are an appalling human interface, and having almost every control in a touchscreen hasn't stopped Tesla customers.

"Nobody seems to be able to answer this or even thought about it in any amount of detail at all. Probably because we are so far away from an actual self driving car that a realistic answer doesn't really matter at all." - Yes, good point. Nobody has settled on the trivia, because the trivia is not a dealbreaker compared to whether the car can exist at all. It's like you're obsessing over what font the Dragon space capsule will use on its readout displays, and saying that human spaceflight is all hype because "nobody has thought about it in detail".

But no, surely everyone involved is just stupid for not prioritising shovelling burgers into your face over getting you from A to B without killing you or anyone around you.

"Every time you ask about a specific detail it gets hand waved away as not important" - you asked about details, I gave plausible answers (you won't have the level of control you demand) - you completely ignored my answers because you don't want that (you can't answer! ya boo sucks you can't answer!) and then whine that nobody will give you answers.

"You add up all these edge cases that "don't matter" and you've excluded almost your entire market." - I am still boggled that you are putting "can drive through a drive thru" as if that was a thing people actually do enough to influence their choice of car purchase. Can commute to work? Is affordable? Is safe? Is reliable? Has reasonable maintenance and insurance costs? Is big enough for all the people? Can carry enough luggage? Looks OK? All way more important after the dominating "can actually self drive".

As to "tech people" falling for the hype, it all depends which particular hype but:

"surprised if we saw fully self driving cars any time in the next 50 years."

a couple of years after there have been self driving cars driving around Arizona https://youtu.be/aaOB-ErYq6Y?t=93 reminds me of quotes like

"The aeroplane will never fly." — Lord Haldane, 1907

a while after the Wright brothers had done many flights. You could argue both the Wright brothers planes and the Arizona Waymos were a bit rubbish but these things tend to improve rapidly.

Rather expensive self-driving cars, with safety drivers have been driving around a very small part of Arizona, right?

That's not really that close to an affordable self-driving car that I can take overnight door to door from the bay area to the Los Angeles area while I sleep.

That may not be 50 years away, but it sure doesn't seem any nearer than 20 years. Progress towards something usable has been pretty slow, and the edge cases are going to be tricky.

A percentage of the trips have been without security driver for several months. As for affordable they are comparable to Uber and lyft and you can actually get a Waymo trip using the lyft app, so that seems pretty affordable to me.

If you click the video link it's one driving without a safety driver.

> How will you tell it to pull over to pick up a friend?

You can’t imagine a way to do this, therefore it’s impossible?

This has been my take too. The whole hackathon and hiring effort screams to me of "we have finally concluded that a LIDAR-less implementation is impossible within our lifetimes. We hope one of you has at least a Hail Mary that we can burn money on so we can at least pretend that it may still be done. Anything to keep us from having to refund millions, dealing with a huge class action, seeing the stock halve, and Elon having to admit that he's something of a charlatan."

And that's just on the decision to not use LIDAR because "it's dumb", not the whole concept of self-driving as it has been marketed being decades away.

Tesla lawyers are good as their engineers. They know how to make you think they are selling self driving cars without actually saying it.

Another commenter here said that Tesla has been selling "fully self driving" as an option since years ago.

I think 50 years is being overly pessimistic. Self-driving in temperate climates is probably pretty close (<10 years). Waymo has pilot programs currently underway in California and Arizona[1][2].

[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/16/waymos-robotaxi-pilot-surp...

[2]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/10/20907901/waymo-driverles...

The thing is, I see no way to have full self driving without AGI. And I don't think humanity is anywhere close to developing AGI. Without AGI you can have level 4++ self driving, maybe, but not level 5.

How much difference does 4++ vs 5 make for the predicted consequences of self-driving cars though? That's the important thing.

I would say that I would feel comfortable falling asleep in a 5 while it is driving nontrivial distance and/or road conditions, but I would not feel comfortable doing so in a 4++.

Why? Plain old 4 is supposed to be the "safe to sleep" level.

How often do you have drives when you need to fall asleep though?

> The thing is, I see no way to have full self driving without AGI.

Why? AGI seems like a significantly harder problem than self driving cars (itself a hard problem admittedly).

What I personally think will happen is we'll meet somewhere in the middle: we can redesign roads/cars to make solving the problem of self driving easier.

Because of all the edge cases that humans can handle a good amount of the time because we have a lot of intelligence compared to any computer.

But I agree with you that if we meet in the middle, that could actually work well.

No Elon constantly buys his own bullshit. This has been true for years and years and years long before he became famous from Tesla. His bullshit does eventually become true though, unless it's canceled entirely. It just never happens when he says it will happen.

Publicly bullshitting (without explicitly stating as such) about your companies capabilities while CEO of a publicly traded company is a potentially huge issue with the SEC.

I don't understand why "otherwise smart people" feel the need to diminish the potential and successes of ML. When chess was basically solved, it was dismissed brute force, with a sarcastic challenge to do Go, and we now the fate of that challenge.

There used to be, on slashdot and I believe in the early days of HN, this running complaint of the new-at-the-time CSI-style shows, specifically the "enhance" trope: "you can't reconstruct a license plate from a bad frame in a video. That information is just lost. It's not there anymore", they would say, usually with all the aura of letting you in on a secret only a very smart mind could gleam, although there were five others in the same thread making this point.

Today we have superresolution algorithms that can reconstruct license plates from low-res images. Turns out the information wasn't really lost, at least not in the sense applicable to the situation (i. e. you are allowed to train on other data).

Many tech people dismiss such progress as "just statistics", but I haven't seen much of an attempt to find a definition of intelligence that is meaningful different from "just statistics". In fact I doubt it's possible within the realm of science, i. e. without resorting to mind-body dualism.

As to driverless cars: they exist, right now. Google does thousands of miles without any need of human intervention. Yes, maybe it doesn't yet work well enough in a hailstorm. But predicting that these problems will endure for 50 years plus, against a combination of restricting these cars to certain situations, improving the models, and/or improving maps, seems at least as overconfident in your ability to make predictions as those made by self-driving optimists.

They exist now as what amounts to fancy amusement park rides. Wake me up when I can get sloppy drunk and catch one home. Only I was drunk and didn’t provide the exactly correct drop off address and need to somehow communicate to the robo-Uber where exactly it should drop me off... (how will I do that, by the way? talk to it? What if it doesn’t understand my accent?)

Also, I’m at a wedding and the pickup is in a grass field in front of the venue. Can’t pick me up on pavement... it’s a two lane road 50mph road with no shoulder to pull over in. Also the entrance to the venue is a poorly marked dirt road. Also, the “pin” I told the robo-Uber to pick me up at has it at the street ‘cause that is the address.

I’ll wait for the robo-Uber to call me on how the hell it should pull into the lot. I did mention cell sucks here, so hope you’ve got that all offline, right?

And I fully expect my use case to be waved away as “edge case” and “doesn’t matter”. Except it does. Every trip that isn’t a pre-planned, set route amusement park ride is an edge case. Until you can meet my use case, a common one for an Uber driver, self driving cars are empty hype.

> Until you can meet my use case, a common one for an Uber driver, self driving cars are empty hype.

For you. The semi-autonomy we have now- not "this vehicle will get me from point A to point B without need for intervention- but "this vehicle can take out some amount of the area between points A and B" is incredibly useful. I don't know how hard it is for you to keep going straight while fumbling about with a hamburger- I'm not that great at it- but if I can get a bot to help me steer in a relatively straight path and keep me in my lane while I take my jacket off because I'm beginning to sweat, send a message or place a call (having something make that easier is also useful), fire at an armed robber, or let me give more attention to a child who needs it, I will be safer.

Nice for you until the “self driving” car gets into an accident and kills the other driver. You don’t get 50% attention with driving. It’s either 100% or 0%. Anything other than that will put everybody else on the road at risk.

If you are driving around in your Tesla using its adaptive cruise control and not paying attention to your driving... I can only hope the accident you will eventually cause hurts nobody but yourself.

I have easily driven 12,000 miles under autopilot and regularly do the kind of tasks the parent described.

Maybe I will have an accident and comments like this one will age poorly. Or maybe we will find that the scary technology wasn't as scary as first thought.

Your phone knows where your home is.

What if the human doesn't understand your accent!

> Every trip that isn’t a pre-planned, set route amusement park ride is an edge case.

That is not even remotely true.

And you could have a fleet that's 80% or 90% robot. It's not hard. $5 discount if your end points aren't all wonky and robot-confusing.

> When chess was basically solved, it was dismissed brute force

Deep blue was brute force. There are different ways to solve a problem, and only some of them are impressive in certain ways, even if they're impressive in other ways.

> Today we have superresolution algorithms that can reconstruct license plates from low-res images.

You need to take another look at CSI. You can reconstruct a little bit, usually with the help of multiple frames or exact font data. You can't do this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_8ZH1Ggjk0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uoM5kfZIQ0

> Many tech people dismiss such progress as "just statistics", but I haven't seen much of an attempt to find a definition of intelligence that is meaningful different from "just statistics". In fact I doubt it's possible within the realm of science, i. e. without resorting to mind-body dualism.

That's about as useful as saying everything is 'just chemistry'. It's true but not helpful. And the same way that your brain and a science fair volcano are both just chemistry, demonstrating a simple reaction isn't impressive.

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