A 2030 Self-Driving Car Bet
blog.codinghorror.com
blog.codinghorror.com
But for sure count me with Carmack. My car is already driving me around my western suburban environment without trouble; zero-intervention drives are the rule now, not the exception. And it's been a long, long time since I've had to intervene for anything reasonably interpretable as a "safety" concern (mostly it's about stuff like navigation decisions, or the car is being a jerk at a merge and I don't want to be honked at, or it's being too slow pulling into an intersection and there's a lot of traffic, etc...).
Don't be fooled by the memery regarding Tesla. There are 60k+ FSD beta cars on the roads now, all of them with eager drivers wanting to post interesting failures to youtube. If these things were genuinely having trouble, we'd know.
It's not "done" for sure (in particular a lot of tuning needs to be done still), but it's at an effective level 3 already at least in my areas. And some work with remote recovery interfaces (something that Tesla doesn't seem to be focusing on) would get it to L4 in the kind of constrained environments Waymo and Cruise are operating in reasonably quickly, IMHO.
> The currently enabled features require a fully attentive driver, who has their hands on the wheel and is prepared to take over at any moment.
https://www.tesla.com/support/full-self-driving-subscription...
Hm, I see videos of pretty terrible FSD fails all the time - stuff like the car veering off into the other lane, trying to drive the pillars of bridges, failing to spot pedestrians and other fun things. It's quite impressive that the system is nearly there, but that I suspect this is the famous final 20% which is gonna be a monumental challenge to overcome
The self-driving AI marketers will tell you it's 99% of the way there!
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-17/waymo-s-s...
I'm definitely in the Atwood boat.
You are completely out of touch with reality if you think the people driving "FSD" beta are eagerly trying to show fault. It's precisely the opposite. You think those who get beta are randomly chosen?
>It's at an effective level 3 already at least in my areas.
That's a loooonnng way from an unattended drive across the country.
You own a car and, I bet, a financial stake in Tesla. Am I right?
Certainly not. We qualify with a safety score and wait for a new batch of cars to be added.
I genuinely don't understand the level of vitriol about this product. There are a lot of these cars out there. Given the demographics of this site, surely one of your friends has one already. Call them up and get a ride. See it for yourself.
I mean, everything looks terrible if you only watch greatest hits on youtube. There are literally whole subreddits dedicated to bad human driving, even. Yet... things work out. This is working far more than it's not, is all I'm saying. And the echo chamber effect has IMHO gotten a little out of control.
This isn't a hard technology to find for yourself. Go try it.
I don't rely on anecdata when it comes to public safety and law. Where is the data from Tesla?
The product doesn't exist. It has not been delivered. Tesla has consistently lied about full-self driving.
Here are some lies about full-self driving hardware: https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-now...
Here are some further lies about full-self driving delivery: https://jalopnik.com/elon-musk-promises-full-self-driving-ne...
It takes more than that. Just think, Uber's driver had lidar, safety driver, and still killed a woman. There's _a lot_ going on under the hood that separates the L4 from L2/L3 drivers.
One thing I think Tesla's missing is a repeatable evaluation framework for how their software performs (a.k.a what you need to convince yourself of the safety). As I understand it, they mostly test autonomous software by deploying it in ghost mode (current/future miles) instead of simulating on past miles. A lot of long tail problems (which is what's hard about autonomous driving) are only visible on the order of millions of miles. Some cases you may never encounter at a high enough rate, and you may need to build synthetic data or use other tricks to teach your driver how to act.
Consider construction zones: where are the lanes formed by the cones? Where should I enter, and where should cars come shooting out? Every construction zone is quite nuanced and contextual -- can you prove the autonomous driver can handle situations reasonably? I think Tesla's software isn't close to being able to crack those driving situations. I mean they make basic mistakes with traffic lights still (which are very challenging in and of themselves; how about those lights where there's an arrow? light that is out?)
If you lack infra to save difficult cases and no ability to generate synthetic situations and resimulate, it gets real dicey when you try to draw conclusions about the real-world performance. Their simulation capabilities are also limited by the fact that they only use cameras; depth estimation / object contours are not accurate enough to do the kinds of sims the Cruise and Waymo do.
Without good ground truth it's really hard to do proper safety evaluation. I suspect Tesla would either need a huge breakthrough in vision technology (maybe they can use something like this https://waymo.com/research/block-nerf) or at least map places their cars are driving so they can properly assess rates to give themselves, regulators, and customers confidence that they are safe for L4. Otherwise, their "good performance" will just be a product of survivorship bias, and bad performance will really hurt people (this is kind of happening now).
There are so many assumptions in this space that it's a fool's errand to try to list them.
I think the next paradigm shift will be in the cultural and regulatory perception, not in technology.
I have NO IDEA what that might mean, and I could be completely wrong! I accept that.
I think the technology has to demonstrate what it can do, and society has to come to terms with what the tech can do, and by doing those things we will painfully update our priors. Our existing prior beliefs will not be our new prior beliefs.
If I could make a $10,000 bet with John Carmack, I'd go the way Atwood has. No way there will be fully self-driving cars by 2030. That's only 8 years away. Fully self-driving cars need one of two things:
A) All cars are self-driving, and are networked, and centrally controlled. No exceptions.
B) The AI is smart enough that we should be worried about the ethical implications.
If an AI can react to terrible human drivers as well as a good human driver can, then I'd invite that AI over for dinner.
Basically, if you can find videos online of Waymo giving up and requesting backup for a situation not severe enough for humans to do the same, then you are not really at level 5 yet. If you cannot rely on the car to handle driving though any circumstance you could reasonably expect your hired chauffeur to handle, well then you are not level 5 yet. Examples of situations where humans give up are hurricanes, and blizzards.
And there are plenty of videos of it stopping for situations where no human would ever be equally confused, plus a good handful of videos of the cars doing absolutely unacceptable things resulting in near misses.
Are you really that confident that by 2030 Waymo's roadside assistance program will be disbanded, or at least reduced to a killswitch, summoning a replacement car and a tow truck (because obviously the car must be broken if assistance was called)? Because if they need more than that, it sure isn't level 5 yet.
IMO, minimum requirement for level 5 driving is merely to match human driver accident rates.
Minimum requirement for nerds, maybe. Minimum requirements for ordinary folks will probably be more along the lines of "will be noticeably better than me on average" and "will not make any given mistake more frequently (or more severely) than I would".
i.e. I expect people a lot of people would want "strictly better than me on practically every axis" as their minimum requirement, not just "on par with me based on the average accident rate". People just aren't going to put up with seeing cars make dumb mistakes that they would never make, even if the accident rate ends up being good on average.
That's not sufficient - nowhere near sufficient. If an AI can react properly when kids are playing in a 5mph zone with cars parked on either side of the street, before their ball bounces into the street. If it can react appropriately to seeing a young kid clearly struggling to ride a bike. If it can understand that the tennisball bouncing across the road will be followed shortly by an enthusiastic dog... et cetera, et cetera.
I don't need an AI to compensate for shitty driving (taking a roundabout the wrong way). I need it to drive so as to protect non-vehicles that it encounters.
The best driver aid systems I've seen are still just well-executed implementations of lane keep/change assist and radar cruise control- technologies that have been available in luxury cars for ~15 years. None of this stuff is actually new technology. It took decades to make existing driver aid technologies reliable and cheap enough to make them available to the average new car buyer. I have no reason to believe it will get easier from here.
I also have no reason to believe that the legal dilemmas behind autonomous driving features will go away. One of two things must happen- in fatal accidents caused by a car operating autonomously:
1. The driver (occupant?) will be liable. OR,
2. The manufacturer will be liable.
Option (1) is unprecedented, morally reprehensible, and would likely be overturned when some manufacturer eventually screws up on a Ford Pinto scale. Option (2) means that autonomous driving features will forever be hampered by the "keep your hands on the wheel!" warning bells that we already deal with today.
> 2. The manufacturer will be liable.
We already have big corporations that will risk huge liabilities for fatal vehicle accidents; they're called insurance companies.
So there's precedent for big corporations risking huge liabilities. Just instead of collecting an annual "insurance premium" they'll be collecting an annual "self-driving service subscription"
Link for curious: https://philosophia.uncg.edu/phi361-matteson/module-1-why-do...
I understand you to mean that there was not a dramatic result; I believe there were results - engineers and managers changed their goals to include more testing of components, IIHS and regulators also added testing. Automakers do respond to forced recalls. Reputational harm taken as seriously as direct fines and punishment.
So as for your offer, its a no thanks and no deal from me.
That said I wish there was a good site that allowed doing bets like this online, where you put the money in up front, and deputize a list of people to be judges to decide the winner. (yes it would typically be shorter term than 8 years, and obviously there would have to be rules for dealing with what happens if the judges aren't all available, incentives to reduce the chance of that happening, and so on)
I imagine anti-gambling laws make it difficult to do such things. But I can wish. It would reduce the number of people making poorly thought out assertions as to the future.
Edit: What I'm getting at is even though it is a friendly bet, they should define the terms of success / failure a little more clearly. Unless there is some governing body that grants L5 status?
L5 = the person asserting that L5 has been achieved is willing to be driven by the vehicle, without access to the controls, through mixed conditions for X hours.L5 = vehicle can achieve similar travel times and destinations to average human driver in mixed conditions.
What if the car "works" under all conditions, but moves extremely slowly, takes huge detours to avoid tricky roads etc. In fact what is stopping this "technically correct" approach: car calls a human driven tow truck, gets hitched and towed to destination?
Decency and reasonableness. Neither John nor Jeff are going to try to lawyer they way out of losing.
If the car moves extremely slowly in a major city, it would get banned after a handful of traffic jams, and so wouldn't be commercially available. And anyways no company would risk the bad PR of launching a car that tops out at below the speed limit.
If the car calls itself a tow truck, it has obviously failed to drive itself.
If the car is programmed to avoid tricky roads, it can't "drive everywhere in all conditions" per SAE.
Carmack is a genius, and 8 years is a long time. If we look at what cruise is doing in SF, it certainly does not seem impossible.
Personally I'm not sure we will see it but there is nothing that jumps out and says that it is impossible at the same time. 8 years ago I would have said it was a no brainer that we would be there, nowadays not so much. It feels like with a lot of things, the last 10% takes 90% of the time.
I have no candle in the game and am an arm chair speculator at best, but it is fun to wonder.
Let just agree to reconvene on this in 8 years time. It isn't that far away.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNIDcT0Zdj4 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3x3SqeSdrAE
And that actually looks very interesting to me for long drives. I actually care less about handling local driving including urban driving near me. I want the long highway drives to be handled.
Yes, 100% autonomous is another kind of interesting and opens up use cases like dropping me off at the airport. But that seems really hard.
That is to say, you could have L5 in Miami without handling snow, but rain...
Don't forget, for L5 it also needs:
- Do the right thing in construction zones where signs and/or barriers may indicate that following the lines is wrong (including flag-men)
- Detect when an out-of-site emergency vehicle with sirens running may be approaching the next intersection and slow down
- Go 25 "when children are present" and 55 when children are not present (though TBH, humans are mediocre at this, and L5 only requires human-level ability)[1]
To my knowledge, there's nothing in the prototype stage that can handle the above in sunny weather. Going from "No protytpe can do this in sunny weather" to "Commercially available in 8 years" seems unlikely even if we restricted it to "only in areas with no snow"
1: For the non-Californians, I drive by 3 of these on my way to work: https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/what-does-when-ch...
- everything is some shade of white/grey/brown
- snow is incredibly reflective
- winter is cold; sensors are almost certainly affected, dirty, or covered
- pedestrians are bundled up, looking less like people
- road markings are obscured or buried
- signs are dirty
- stopping distances are increased
- speeds must be slower to compensate for lack of traction
- "traction control" only helps when accelerating; stability control and ABS only help so much in snow/ice
"By "major cities" we mean any of the top 10 most populous cities in the United States of America."
Phoenix is in that list.
Atwood's bet is extremely pessimistic, and I don't blame him. I don't even think that weather is the biggest issue to self-driving cars: dealing with roads full of human-driven cars will be harder to handle. It's not that AIs can't learn to aggressively accelerate onto a crowded highway or aggressively turn out of a busy stop sign, it's that the companies running the AIs will be unwilling to accept the legal liability that comes with being responsible for a fleet of aggressive AI drivers.
If you don't want to accept that risk, don't operate a self driving car.
People are required to buy insurance to operate a vehicle. I don't see how why this needs to be any different.
Companies go out of business. How can a defunct company be held legally liable? Companies and employees can easily die over the 20 year lifetime of a car. Liability can only be placed on the operator.
Companies release new models every year. They get safer every year. Older cars will be more expensive to insure. Will a company want pay the ongoing insurance cost of your 20-30 year old self driving vehicle? What if they can't afford to? Will you still be able to use the car you bought despite the company not being able to insure it? or refusing to insure it (and wanting to force you into a new vehicle purchase)?
All these problems magically go away when you make the operator responsible. They are able to make the choice every month whether they want to continue to pay to insure it, and are legally required to have insurance even if they die in the accident.
Some brands will have better safety, and buying insurance for them will be cheaper. Everyone with the same car model will have pretty much the same insurance rate, unless you are negligent when it comes to maintenance.
Insurance companies are more than capable of calculating these costs. Especially over 10-20 year time frames.
If this sounds crazy to you, it's not that much different than buying liability insurance for pets. Owners are legally responsible.
If you don't want to be legally responsible, don't buy a self driving car. Or a dog for that matter.
By NY, do they mean manhattan, new york city or the actual state? Because much of manhattan is gridlike and almost made for self-driving cars. Though the sheer amount of pedestrians, cars and road work could make it especially challenging.
Waymo and Cruise have level 4, since they already have driverless taxis in use. Only in some conditions, true, but in actual use. Waymo just got approval to start charging fares, so they're out of experimental mode.
I think they work in most conditions. How someone can look at Cruise and Waymo already in operation today and think they won't be generally available in 7 years is amazing to me.
I mean there are times when human drivers are insufficient for the conditions.
California is a small part of one country.
All we will get out of self-driving cars is more traffic jams, more consumerism, and less security in our lives because you might be locked out of essential service in case you didn't sign a lisence agreement or made an offensive tweet, or replied to a spammer
Not really, and they aren't level 5. Essentially the bet is that getting to 5 is harder than people think, and getting to commercially available SAE5 is going to take (at least) longer than 7 years. Bear in mind all commercial systems now are level 2 and testing features for 3. Waymo/Cruise are testing 4.
https://media.gm.com/media/us/en/gm/news.detail.html/content...
German source, you will probably find an English one as well - even contains a video: https://www.golem.de/news/s-klasse-mit-level-3-mercedes-darf...
So it took them only 30 years from protoype to product.
[1]: https://www.politico.eu/article/delf-driving-car-born-1986-e...
Level 3 would be nice, but it very much depends on how many seconds of warning it gives when it wants to disengage.
I think self-driving technology is probably in the same boat. It’s amazing what it can do, and it is definitely useful today in many contexts. But it will be a long time before it is able to achieve parity with human drivers in the enormous number of different contexts that humans are able to handle with relative ease.
For any engineers working on self-driving cars, though, I hope you prove me wrong! I would love it if my next car came with a level 5 self-driving option.
With self driving, things like Teslas can drive from A to B but are a bit rubbish and need interventions to avoid crashing but I think you'll find the level of that keeps increasing year on year till one day they get safer than human.
Edit: Or to put it more accurately, enable Jeff to declare victory even if he loses.
Is there any indication self driving cars can handle these scenarios?
This was in the summer, but it was a poorly marked lane shift situation.
Humans only have two eyes that can only look in one direction at a time, and we achieve L5. Yes, we get into crashes, but because humans do stupid things like text while driving, drive hyper-aggressively, drive drunk, or do simply careless things like change lanes without even looking first, none of which are mistakes a computer would make.
Doesn't this inevitably mean that the hardware isn't capable too with extra steps? Like in 20 years with tens of millions more lines of code, we're going to need more hardware resources to run it (in particular at near real-time) than the hardware would provide today.
I agree with you, to be clear. I am just pointing out that 20 years worth of software is going to be a monster to run at the timings that will be required. So we could hit a hardware limitation between then and now on top of the hard software problems that must be solved.
> Humans only have two eyes that can only look in one direction at a time, and we achieve L5.
Humans use parallax to perceive depth via the overlap of both eyes, which as far as I know isn't used by automated vehicles for reasons unknown (patents?). Automated vehicles using visible light cameras are mapping the world in 2D, humans perceive the world in limited 3D.
Tesla does estimate depth using structure from motion (and probably other cues). They call it virtual LIDAR in presentations.
Most automated vehicles companies using visible light cameras have them pointed straight forward, that isn't therefore using parallax like a human does.
I have no idea how close we are to level 5, but I suspect the challenge is closer to “invent a new algorithm that works fine with less data” than it is to “make new hardware”.
Did they mean the ability to take a ride between two arbitrary points in major cities with no limitations on time of day and weather instead?
I suspect it is just easier to define a "win" that way. L5 on a test track or L5 on a quiet freeway are very different challenges than what most people think of when they think of L5: Driving in downtown [major city] without intervention.
L5 driving downtown for an entire day with zero interventions, in a consumer vehicle, is really the gold standard for this tech. You nail that, you're done it.
Given that this is what normal people think of when they think “self driving car”, I’d say that’s exactly what they were going for.
Seems like there are still a number of issues but it's promising and as open to the public as Uber/Lyft (if your trip is in that area).
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/08/heres-what-it-was-like-to-ri...
No marks and no hard surface: Much more challenging.
Can someone school me on how a level 5 system might work in a snow storm on icy roads at highway speeds in 2030?
I am genuinely curious to what technology, based on my assumption it grew out of today's tech, a car would need to have onboard to safely operate at L5 under all conditions.
I'm with Jeff, self driving cars have been just a few years away for well over a decade now. I think it's one of those cases where the last 10% of the problem takes 90% of the effort. If we built cities and the road infrastructure around self driving capability that might work, but currently cities aren't built that way and that wouldn't meet the definition of Level 5 anyway.
I think that's a fallacy. We allow humans to injure and kill each other in "accidents" with limited liability because we are human; I can't be expected to 100% reliably decide in a fraction of a second what to do when a car cuts me off, so if I hit it, or avoid it and hit another vehicle or pedestrian, I don't go to jail.
But a computer can be expected to make that decision fast enough; if it can't, it's because the designers or programmers made errors that the manufacturer missed because they rationally calculated they were not worth catching or fixing.
There's some level of safe driving it's unreasonable to expect from self-driving cars – but it's not the same level as humans.
I don't think this expectation is reasonable. It makes sense only if you conceive of humans as flawed computers. But certainly it is an expectation people have, including a large segment (if not majority) of HN readers, and this expectation is absolutely slowing development and adoption of the technology.
From a practical/logical sense this is true, but I'm not sure it would work out that way. People would never accept FSD cars with accident/injury rates comparable with humans. FSD would have to be at least 10x better than human drivers, maybe more. Psychologically we are much more risk averse to when not in control. It's why people are afraid of elevators but not stairs, despite a 50x difference in safety.
Historically computers go from "barely able to do X", to "better than any human could ever be" very quickly. I'm with Carmack on this bet.
And it may very well be right; most people way overestimate how good they are at driving in very adverse conditions.
We already have things like this “what if I had a beer and need to drive mom to the hospital” say those with a enforced breathalyzer.
They are hoping to be 2x or 3x as good, and the amount of lives saved by that should be enough to influence lawmakers and the public.
Cities have fast roads too.
> humans struggle with those sorts of extreme conditions too
People drive in a wide range of weathers. If you need to check the weather in a major city every day to see if your will drive itself, your car is not self driving (IMO). If that weather happens more than 5-10% of days every year, that’s not an “extreme condition”.
A car should be able to see better than a human in those conditions, and at an appropriate speed it could be reasonably safe. It probably won't go at the speed limit, but a human can't safely drive at the speed limit either.
In a snow storm on icy roads it’s safe to assume the speeds would be as slow as safety dictates, just as the speeds should also be for humans in the same conditions.
Also, computerized traction control is amazing, especially with electric drive and no transmission lag. When driven by a human it’s not infallible, but if the car doesn’t have the flawed yet behaviors that humans sometimes have, it could be pretty competent. They’ll have to get it to the point of being able to do without lane lines too of course.
Level 5 implies "all conditions" so it follows an autonomous system should be able to safely operate along side human drivers. If a level 5 system cant keep up it would become a major hazard to non autonomous vehicles.
But, what you describe does not meet the basic criteria for doing it safely.
Regularly flowing at highway speeds in those conditions does not imply doing it safely, as much as you and those drivers might like it to.
We read about pileups from time to time and the consequences of these are not trivial.
Regarding the bet I wouldn’t bet against John Carmack (although I’d love to see human on Mars :) ).
For this bet cars can deal with unusual circumstances in all sorts of suboptimal but harmless ways. Pulling over, stopping, going very slowly and cautiously is all allowed. You’ll still get to your destination safely.
I’m with Carmack on this one.
Not according to the law though. If these "L5 cars" are obstructing traffic on the regular there's going to be a big problem. And generally, this wouldn't be L5 driving.
And yet I don’t trust that we’ll be there by 2030 either.
> For this bet cars can deal with unusual circumstances in all sorts of suboptimal but harmless ways.
Stopping or slowing down isn’t always a “safe state”. Stopping in some situations (like on a highway) is the opposite of harmless.
For instance, if you could make a highly aerodynamic truck with huge, beefy tires and put it in a tunnel with very little atmospheric drag you could potentially go up to around 300 miles an hour. If you layer the infrastructure with sensors, the car itself doesn't need to be self-driving it simply needs to communicate with the sensors and stay in it's 'track'. No human would be able to drive within such tolorances, but a program can do that quite easily. All this can be done with current technology.
AKA the cryber truck and the boring company.
It has the potential to extract a massive amount of value out of other parts of the chain as well. Aside from software(which in my opinion is just stealing existing value from everyone else) pretty much everything else is minuscule growth. What is the next leap in maintaining growth of the economy? Extract the value out of these blue collar jobs(trucking, taxi driving, other logistics).
Combine this with the rise of simpler designs in EVs + less car ownership you also can bring in mechanics and repair into your value chain and extract that value as well.
I don't see that. Cars are not just transport. They are fashion statements. They are virtue signaling. They are portable storage lockers. I just don't see everyone who owns a car now giving all that up just because the car can drive itself. The traffic/congestion implications of "car on demand" are also staggering, basically doubling the number of trips made as each car delivers itself empty to the next customer. And further reducing the cost of car ownership will only pull more people away from mass transportation/biking/walking.
Flip it around the other way - if you had a L5 car at your fingertips, would you give it up so that you could make a fashion statement, virtue signal, or have a portable storage locker?
Not all car drivers' total cost of car ownership works out less than the Uber fares for the rides they take either....
And as far as “doubling trips”, the car won’t have to drive far to find its next pickup and it may not have to do empty pickups at all with the equivalent of Lyft Line.
If we don’t need parking lots and spaces we can use that real estate for more mass transit.
Also there are numerous other complications that get glossed over. How many L5 cars are going to be available in my area on a popular holiday travel weekend that have a roof rack for kayaks and a 7 pin trailer connector and electric brake controller for my camper? Not to mention giving up the other customizations I enjoy with my current vehicle - removed rear seats for more space/less weight, dash cam, winter tires, etc.
I suspect if self driving comes to fruition it will be a mixture for many people. I can definitely see our 2 car household just owning one car that fits our niche use cases, and then one on-demand cars for daily work trips and filling in the gaps.
Weekend reservations. Just like people do with kayaks today.
> Not to mention giving up the other customizations I enjoy with my current vehicle - removed rear seats for more space/less weight, dash cam, winter tires, etc.
None of this is necessary with robotaxis. You have way more flexibility in terms of space. You won’t need a dashcam. Weight and tires won’t make a difference to the rider.
And you are far too dismissive of the customization/equipment/storage aspect. For just one example, there are vast numbers of parents who have child seats, strollers, diapers, wipes, etc stored in their cars. You can be sure they have no interest in hauling all that stuff around during their shopping or whatever because the robotaxi is off getting another customer.
Environmentalism seems to be "cool af",to the point where not owning a car is virtue signalling.
Yes there will be massive traffic implications. This is probably something that will have to be addressed when it happens. If there are dedicated self driving car lanes, can the cars communicate with each other to help reduce traffic? At the very least pollution will be significantly reduced from today's smog filled cities like LA thanks to the transition to EVs(I don't expect this revolution to occur before the transition to EVs).
Finally, in regards to public transportation: it is already a failure in the US outside a few cities. It is a lost cause in a society that focuses on individualism vs collectivism. In terms of walking/biking, I can see improved access to these services. Can you imagine how a car that never gets tired/drunk will reduce accident and subsequently insurance rates? If the cards are played right, there is an opportunity for a massive transformation of how bicyclists and public walkers are treated in relation to cars.
Sure none of those are as cool as the JohnnyCab but they already exist so require no R&D.
I don't think I'm exaggerating, either. In a city plan like that one, any public transit route is going to, even at optimal configuration, have simultaneously too many stops and too little:
* Too many stops, because the train or bus spends more time stopped than it spends moving, so rides across the city take forever.
* Too few stops, because you still have to walk a mile to actually get where you're going.
Fixing this requires a walkable city, which can be summarized as "don't spend half the land area on parking and stroads."
Lots of people -- including me -- don't believe that it's possible without significant technological advances that look to be extraordinarily expensive. ie open R&D problems.
I will say that if anyone can do this, it will be Waymo/Google. Unlike Tesla, it's not a fraud.
That said, it's notable they're doing this in Arizona. Limited rain, no snow, clear weather all the time.
none of that value accrues to the people who make self-driving cars though (or their investors). It's not like if waymo gets rid of your car for you, they get your parking spot or garage.
It's a huge social benefit but investors are looking for return-on-investment, not making a multibillion loss to improve society.
In this case: the value is captured by the car rental company (which will likely be the car manufacturers themselves). Part of the value comes from the rent that the parking space would have extracted.
>It's a huge social benefit but investors are looking for return-on-investment, not making a multibillion loss to improve society.
Its hard to predict how much value they can gain unless we have more information but I'd imagine if the majority of cars become on demand, then there has to be at least a few billions of dollars in potential value.
In regards to if people will actually take up rental: Since everyone else is moving to a rental model today(streaming services vs owning, cell phone "refresh" contracts, potential apple offering a monthly subscription that always gets you a new phone, car companies offering all included monthly car subscription) by the time this thing rolls out it is plausible that there will be high uptake on a rental model.
This is what is driving the valuation of all these FAANG companies. They are just vacuuming up all the existing value from the rest of the country/world.
I don't know.
ha ha your phrasing is funny. It is more like "sudden unexpected reassignment of ownership of capital".
>and that makes it less likely and not more likely that such an endeavor will be funded (for political reasons).
Yes the powers that be are finally starting to slowly turn against the software people. You see Europe getting tired of them losing every last bit of the little value chain they have left. Meanwhile in the US, elites are getting tired of software empowering people other than themselves and are starting to make moves to try and put the genie back in the bottle. We saw all these tech CEOs being brought up in congress but all that it showed is that they still don't fully get how they have been robbed yet, just that they know that they have been robbed. If they manage to stop the software industry (a big doubt) yes I can see them putting a stop to self driving tech(although China seems determined to steam ahead no matter what). If they do manage to stop self driving that means they have also managed to kill a lot of the software industry as well and with that one of the last few paths to a solid comfortable middle/upper middle class life in this world.
>Unlike say nuclear fusion (safe and practically unlimited energy at an order of magnitude previously unseen is worth the spend and most countries would bite I think), is self-driving worth hundreds of billions in expenditure?
Now you are pulling an exact number out of thin air. Will it really be hundreds of billions in cost? When you talk about "hundreds of billions" you are talking about a noticeable chunk of the US's GDP and the complete GDP of most countries.
Since when has software or even advanced AI research ever cost that much to develop? Don't get me wrong: I believe it will be in the billions or even tens of billions over many years, but this is a cost that that can be absorbed by the companies/government entities that are pursuing this and even tens of billions can be justified by the potential gains.
Correct me If I am wrong but getting to the point where humans are completely unnecessary is still a research problem. We need more research and more breakthroughs which costs a lot of money and is non-linear (you are not guaranteed results). It could very easily take 100B to get to a point where a car can ferry people anywhere they want with zero human assistance (no service personnel to guide out of traps etc).
>Since when has software or even advanced AI research ever cost that much to develop?
Since now? If software is eating the world, you should expect software research to also eat up a lot of money. As the low hanging fruit is picked, further gains are going to cost a lot more.
No actual sharing: At rush hour, I and most of the people around me will need a car to get to/from work. Therefore the rental fleet will have to be large enough to meet this peak demand, and effectively there will have to be a car in the fleet allocated to me (to get me to and from work). So (amortized over time) I will have to compensate the company for the cost of the car, plus the cost of bringing it to me every day, plus overhead, plus profit.
Reduced convenience: A car may not be available immediately when I need/want it. I have to either risk not having a car for some important event or plan in advance and book what I need. The car I'm allocated on any given day may be too small to meet my needs. I have to wait for the car to arrive, can't store my stuff in it, have to take time to install/uninstall car seats, get charged a fee if I leave my empty soda can in it.
IMO, for a regular car user (i.e. someone who currently uses a car for multiple trips per day) moving to an on-demand model will be at least as expensive as and less convenient than owning a car. There might be exceptions in very dense urban environments where parking is very expensive, but those places usually have a good public transit alternative.
I think most people will carpool to work in self driving vans. It'll be so much cheaper than having your own car.
EDIT: ah, perhaps Carmack knows better and is simply willing to write off $10K for the lulz (from the TFA): I'd like to thank John for suggesting this friendly wager as a fun way to generate STEM publicity.
Looking at a busy street makes me almost certain, that true self driving cars will be too expensive to develop.
However, if we accept random deaths caused by autonomous vehicles, there is a chance.
But everyone wants guarantees that cannot be given.
the key part of the bet is the "in major cities". you may have complications on some road without much data, but major cities will be tested to the inch multiple times by then.
of course waymo has huge sensors but 8 years to shrink those doesn't seem impossible.
> Waymo has a staff of fleet operators that oversees the cars and provides guidance—such as confirming that the car has chosen a safe route through a construction zone (Waymo says that its remote operators never drive the cars directly).
As someone who doesn't live in a city with Waymo, do they have backup drivers?
If they do, hopefully they are paying attention and not watching Hulu.
- Heavy snow falling at night on an unplowed, narrow road with ill-defined shoulders. The falling snow ruins visibility, and the smooth, white, unplowed surface of the road makes it super hard to identify where the pavement actually ends.
- In traffic on a busy highway in snow. Berms of slush make sudden movements very dangerous, and there is lots of unpredictable behavior from other cars nearby. Often there are cars/trucks nearby getting stuck, sliding off the road or spinning out. Going slowly enough for conditions might mean others start passing you dangerously. Other times taking a more aggressive approach is required if cars around are going too slowly and don't have the momentum to avoid getting stuck on hills.
In either of those cases I'd likely decide just to not make a trip at all if I knew in advance what it would be like, but sometimes you get caught or otherwise simply have to push through. I guess that's an interesting question: at what point does the car tell you it's too dangerous to go or keep going? Hopefully not while on a back road in the middle of nowhere at the beginning of a two day blizzard.
Yeah, but you're going to be making exponentially more money in the markets you have already entered. Investors will be able to do the math rather than envision dreams. If the math adds up, they will be willing to deploy a truly staggering amount of capital to secure the growth.
Also, we are presuming that this will always be a one-sided affair, and that self-driving cars will always have to adapt to roads and not vice versa. I'm almost certain that once self driving cars become a thing somewhere, they will be so desired by everyone else that people will become willing to clean up messy infrastructure elsewhere that would otherwise preclude their deployment.
And, as experienced in similar issues with uptime guarantees, the costs are quite different.
But so is the technology used! You don’t just scale-up a single MySQL server for all of Twitter.
I feel this is what should be happening, but our economy and our culture prefer Lone Ranger style innovation.
I ask because I think that there are useful points short of "never makes a mistake."
The alternative to self-driving cars isn't perfection. It is humans, humans who not only vary in their peak performance, but in their context-specific performance. A car that drove better than me when I'm tired is a good thing for everyone.
There's lot of talk about liability, but it seems both wrong and incomplete.
One incompleteness comes up with an "accident" happens that a less-than-perfect self-driving system would have avoided. The legal system might not be willing to penalize in that situation now, but the upcoming Breathalyzer mandate is moving us that direction.
One wrong focuses on "will the author of the self-driving system be held liable?" I think that the liability will go to the driver/owner, as today. If it's better than me and my insurance company is willing to insure me, then why wouldn't my insurance company be willing to insure my use of a self-driving system?
I’m not sure private ownership of L5 would ever even be necessary.
If I live on the outskirts of a city I don’t want to wait an hour for a robo taxi that might smell like vomit to arrive and overcharge me because it’s “high demand time”.
Of course if it is successful it won’t take an hour because there will be far more and I would expect different price points for different levels of service. I don’t check into a Marriott expecting it to smell like vomit but at Motel 6 it wouldn’t surprise me.
To be clear, I think this is one scenario of many possibilities.
Another option is a personalize self driving AI model per driver. I.e. most driving occur in repeated manner (same time and same routes), so training a self driving models for each driver routes, might solve most of the issues (I.e. let each driver train his/her car model).
However, Tesla business model rely on a driverless taxi which suppose to support all routes in all times.
There already are in Phoenix and Arizona.
>There will be self driving cars on special self driving lanes.
This doesn’t solve any hard problems for AVs. Rules around the self driving lanes would be violated by pedestrians and human-operated vehicles, and the car would need to react to that appropriately. Would also prevent last-mile trips, which sort of eleminates the whole point of AVs.
So the problem with AV is not the AV but the HV. If AV cannot communicate with other AV, or at least trust that other cars will not behave irrationally, they will never be able to self drive.
With mixed AV/HV those hard problems cannot be solved.
Note that this true for any kind of robot.
Look at amazon warehouse robots, they are operational in their own part of the warehouse, while humans are operational in other parts. This is one of the reason that we do not have home robots.
Remote driving where a single driver controls a few cars, possibly by people from emerging countries, will solve this problem, will be quite cheap, and will always add an extra safety element.
Given that, i don't think the last 5% will be an obstacle for the technology making it.
Sure, 95% automation w/ remote drivers can work most of the time. If there's an obstacle blocking the road an automated car can stop for a remote driver to carefully pass by. But it would be a huge liability in any situation where "stop & wait for a remote driver" isn't a safe option.
I do think there will be a significant market for this kind of thing, but it will be more of a premium subscription for L4 vehicles, mostly sold to older folks & less confident drivers. Using it to approximate L5 directly seems dubious
Curious why OP thinks this (in particular for VR computing).
Available for a middle-class person in 2030? No.
The goal is a highly flexible, reactive, all-electric public transit network where vehicles of varying sizes get routed exactly where they need to be.
If your life would be dependant on your mobile phone never crashing, never running into a bug- would you use one? I would have died twice in the last 6 weeks if that would be the case.
The software stack in this case is at least two orders of magnitude more complex than an ECU and ABS controller, though.
It's true, most humans aren't always L5. That's not a bug.
In an ideal world i imagine most things would either be in walking distance, or walk to a train/bus and then walk to your destination. Subways and bus-only lanes cost a lot upfront but pay off in the long run. Unfortunately most subways are underfunded, overwhelmed, and falling apart because they were mad decades ago and not maintained well.
Rally is the pinnacle of motorsports - tarmac, gravel, snow, forests, thin roads, hairpins, jumps, livestock, the full gamut of constantly changing conditions at high rates of speed. When a SCC can master that without some guidance system that turns it into a glorified slot car, I'll acknowledge that SCC tech is officially better than human drivers.
Until that point, a well-trained human managing the strategy of driving with the computer handling the tactics (execution of strategic intent) will always be the optimal combination.
That's a lot more driving edge cases to eliminate than "works surprisingly well", but the problem isn't difficult driving, the problem is essentially bug free software and perfect exception handling.
I'd rate the probability of software surpassing us at going really fast without worrying about g-forces or the possibility of the terrain flipping them quite a bit higher than that tbh.
For me, that means there are only three years left to have something like that on a prototype level.
American drives 3T miles each year. There are 6M accidents each year. That comes out to be 1 accident per 0.5M miles. Waymo's disenagement rate was 1 per 12K miles.
While disengagement and accidents are not the same, one can argue that for acceptable L5 self-driving, driver is not expected to be engaged and therefore we need these rates to be same.
If Waymo continues to improve disengagement rate by 50% each year, it would still take at least 10 years before it becomes acceptable. So assuming funding keeps pouring, advancements continues, L5 self-driving can be expected around 2032. Carmack might lose just by couple of years.
* Waymo's driver is implausibly safe, never having any situations that cause disengagement except that other people hit it (resulting in an accident per your statistics)
* Now we're expecting Waymo to press on after a road accident, because hey, I'm just a little dinged, lets get this passenger to their destination? That sounds both more dangerous (what if there is undiagnosed damage) and potentially illegal (doesn't the US have "must report" laws?)
One disengagement per 12k miles seems comparable to public transport. Once a week I'd get on the train, it goes to Town uneventfully and back again, but twice in five years it didn't. Once it was stuck behind a train that hit a person (most likely a suicide) so we sat in the half-dark for almost an hour (recovering even a body, much less an injured person requires the electricity is turned off, and the train wants to reserve its battery power for emergencies) and once there was some kind of actual fault. I was in no danger either time but obviously my journey was much delayed, that seems comparable to a disengagement.
In a lot of cases a human can remotely diagnose the problem and either tell the Waymo everything is fine now (e.g. the fire truck parked at an angle across the highway has moved, simply drive around it now) or correct its understanding (e.g. that does look like a school bus stopped in a residential area, but it is actually an advertisement for an upcoming Speed prequel, so, it's fine to just drive past it) and then your journey continues, interrupted but no worse than that. Maybe you get a refund from Waymo.
Officer with a whistle in an intersection, manually directing traffic through the intersecting and around a crash.
You still need the exact same sort of comprehensive testing infrastructure, policies, procedures. You've perhaps marginally reduced your overall bug count at the cost of everything that comes from switching to a new language. Doesn't seem like a particularly great decision.
Can Carmack toss in a free Quest 2? It looks like the last time he tried VR was back in 2015. The state of the art is a lot better now.
That's the beauty of it :)
To Downvoters: I'm sure you all know what happens when you don't archive the tweets or one (or both of them) get their accounts and tweets deleted?
Not even if the AI is less imperfect than humans? In America last year, 46,000 died from road traffic incidents, almost all of which were humans not being perfect.
It just also sounds like you’re making the perfect the enemy of the good by holding AI to a higher standard than humans.
Now, years late Google outsourced it to Waymo and said it will takes much more years.
Funfact: It will take much more longer than any of the IT people think. Because many of the IT people have noe glue about OT and Safety.