Comment by chubot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chubot | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for the great writeup. It sounds like you took a responsible, valuable, and even economically viable approach, but the market doesn't want to hear it.

I wonder when the market will start listening to people who actually WORK on the problem.

> which means that no one should be betting a business on safe AI decision makers. The current companies who are will continue to drain momentum over the next two years

Sounds about right.

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Here's me over 2 years ago simply quoting people who worked close to the problem:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16353541

Here's my negative scenario: self-driving is "AI-complete"; you can't really hit all the edge cases without solving AI in general, which is more than 30 years away (Kurzweil is the wild optimist and predicts 2045).

You CAN use self-driving in limited circumstances, but those limitations are precisely the ones that make driving yourself around more attractive. The expense doesn't go down as quickly as anticipated because of this. They are a niche technology for DECADES.

This looks about right, and I'm not claiming to be prescient, just basically saying what Chris Urmson and Bill Gurley already said years ago. It's weird to me that there's still so much money chasing this pipe dream.

It was a sign when Google spun out Waymo. If they really believed in the product, it would be called something like "Google Self-Driving Cars", not "Waymo".

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edit: it's easy to be negative, so on the positive (and contrarian) side, I believe rideshare is undervalued, and has a long way to go. I bought both Uber and Lyft stock at $16 yesterday (they may go down again, but ping me in 2 years). This comment in this thread is a nice take and makes me even more optimistic:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22631151

I still think that AI shuttles and buses driving predetermined routes and schedules would be tremendously useful. Especially if they could operate continuously 24/7. And that should be possible, with maybe tele-operators dialing in to override the edge cases or sending dispatch crews to takeover for any issues that come up.

This is true, but essentially every transit system in the world (minus Hong Kong and Singapore's) operates at a loss. Maybe you can save money vis a vis unionized drivers, but I'm not wildly optimistic.

To my knowledge, Singapore's SBS Transit loses money on their transportation business, but makes it up with their construction projects.

This is untrue. Tokyo Metro is one of the largest systems by ridership in the world, and operates at a profit. It does have sizable capital investments that take years to pay down.

This also completely ignores the halo effects of these systems that vastly increase the economic output of the region. This is why it is often logical for the state to pay for the system, since the costs are centralized and the profits are distributed.

How's Lyft Shuttle doing? (genuine question, I don't know)

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/06/lyft-reinvents-the-b...

The point is that we already have self-driving vehicles. You press a button on your phone and somebody drives you around. Whether it's a premium ride, a shared ride, or a bus is an orthogonal issue to whether the driver is human, which is a matter of cost.

The fact that it's a cost issue makes it look even worse and further out for driverless.

If there is demand for a shuttle along predetermined routes, it would already exist with a driver, and that's what Lyft Shuttle is if I understand correctly. I haven't seen it in SF or heard of anyone using it. It's definitely possible that they could figure out the product and it will become popular, but that has little to do with self-driving.

> The fact that it's a cost issue makes it look even worse and further out for driverless.

I see it the other way, they slot immediately and easily into already existing businesses and if the only difference is cost consumers are likely to swap over.

Unless they ride on purpose built/adapted roads I doubt it'll happen in any realistic time.

> Here's my negative scenario: self-driving is "AI-complete"; you can't really hit all the edge cases without solving AI in general, which is more than 30 years away (Kurzweil is the wild optimist and predicts 2045)

If you are correct about that, isn’t it strange that we would give birth to a intelligence and immediately assign it the job of Taxi Driver? Surely it would be an ethical minefield?

This looks about right, and I'm not claiming to be prescient, just basically saying what Chris Urmson and Bill Gurley already said years ago.

I'm curious what specific statements by Chris Urmson you are referring to. When he was in charge at Waymo in 2015, they announced that their solution is good enough to drive a blind man around town. And this was before they acknowledged they're using teleop.

The links to the articles are in the 2018 comment I linked.

The Urmson one is from March 18, 2016 talking about a 5-30 year time frame, and the Gurley one is from April 2017 talking about a 25 year time frame.

Without any more context, "drive a blind man around town" has about 3 decades of wiggle room in it... If you look at Waymo's recent blog posts, they have similar words that sound good but leave wiggle room, and they've been doing that forever.

And reading back over those articles, they hit it right on the head:

Over the next five years, hundreds of companies will claim to have successful self-driving cars, Gurley said. But he said he’s reading between the lines of press releases, which often tout tests in very controlled environments that do not totally reflect the real world.

“The part we haven’t figured out yet, the last 3 percent, which is snow, rain, all the really, really hard stuff — it really is hard,” Gurley said. “They have done all the easy stuff.”

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Urmsson was trying to having it both ways, but if you read between the lines it's obvious what he was saying:

Urmson put it this way in his speech. "How quickly can we get this into people's hands? If you read the papers, you see maybe it's three years, maybe it's thirty years. And I am here to tell you that honestly, it's a bit of both."

He went on to say, "this technology is almost certainly going to come out incrementally. We imagine we are going to find places where the weather is good, where the roads are easy to drive — the technology might come there first. And then once we have confidence with that, we will move to more challenging locations."

In an interview, a Google spokesman agreed that Urmson was describing some aspects of the project differently than the company had in the past. "Yes, there was some new stuff in there," the spokesman said. "That was obviously the intention of the speech: To say some new things."

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That was OVER FOUR years ago. People didn't get the message and kept pouring money into it. Prediction: if we get economically viable level 4+ self driving in the next 10 years on a $1B+ dollar scale, it will come by way of a breakthrough, not by an extension of existing tech. That is, by throwing out tens of millions of lines of code that's been written and billions of dollars in hardware that's been designed and manufactured, and taking a different approach.

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