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Comment by case0x00 | Hacker News Reader

This article is kind of a wrapper for the linked bloomberg article, which is more interesting IMO.

Driving of cars is a massive cooperative game with high stakes, and autonomous cars essentially need AGI in order to play to a degree that is safer than a human with other humans. Fully autonomous cars would be sick, but IMO you'd need massive infrastructure changes (realistically restricted to cities/urbanized areas) if you want autonomous cars to work with anything less than AGI. Until companies start pursuing that, they are actually unknowingly using all that money to push for AGI and obviously coming up short because they don't even understand what they are trying to do.

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Why should we change city infrastructure to work with less than AGI driven cars? It sounds instead like yes, AV companies are over selling what they can do and they should be restricted to things like highways and the like where the easier, less complex driving environment already exists.

Cities are by far the most complex relative to every other driving environment, in fact there is a good argument that, in cities, cars should be much more restricted because of health effects and traffic deaths, and the less complex areas (highways) are already the bulk of the drudgery in driving, but are much easier to automate, so why not do it for there?

One good reason is to help the AIs make better decisions through greater certainty. For example, if a road sign has machine readable data there is a greater certainty that an AI will interpret it correctly. This could affect safety and ease of implementation.

The question is what value would a city get after, what seems to be, a very expensive process? What value do they get from unlocking semi competent AI cars that's worth the time, effort, and requires dedicated street space and an inconvenience to everyone else who travels a different way? It doesn't seem like it's replacing public transit and if someone needs a private vehicle to go beyond the area that's optimized they'll need a different transportation solution. It seems like a lot of cost for a very small benefit.

A very small benefit for society but potentially a very large benefit for a select few stakeholders.

Musk largely became the richest person on the planet off the back of the promise that nobody else would have decent EV tech (turns out, they do), nobody else would have the battery production capacity (turns out, they do, plus super ironic when Tesla is partnering with Panasonic for battery production), AND the promise of fully self driving cars (which will happen for Tesla immediately after flying cars).

I don't have a good term for this, but it's basically corruption: a few benefit at the cost of everyone else.

It's an enormous benefit to society. A huge number of people are killed or seriously injured in car crashes every year. Plus the quality of life benefits and reduction in property damage.

Yeah, but it has nothing to do with what I'm saying.

What you're referring to doesn't exist. Right now it's vaporware, and for all we know, we could be 1 century away from solving it up to human levels.

> off the back of the promise that nobody else would have decent EV tech (turns out, they do)

That just simply not true. He became one of the richest people in the world when Tesla cracked really high volume productions of EVs at a quite amazing margin. That is what people didn't believe was possible when they did it in 2018.

And at the same time SpaceX, where Musk owns much more stock off, managed to re-usability operational and started to launch Starlink.

> production capacity (turns out, they do, plus super ironic when Tesla is partnering with Panasonic for battery production)

Tesla is by far largest BEV producer in the world so its actually true. And if you think all Tesla does is partnering with Panasonic you have not been paying attention.

Telsa has its own battery production and also is one of the largest costumers of CATL, LG and Panasonic. For quite a while Panasonic and Tesla have co-developed technology that Panasonic can just sell to anybody.

As you can see, Tesla has to be both a producer and a major consumer of most battery companies in the world to achieve the volume they do.

And others can not simply replicate it because the industry is supply constraint.

> I don't have a good term for this, but it's basically corruption

Tesla is the largest BEV producer in the world, and just recently made a larger profit then Ford/GM combined (if I remember correctly). Tesla has industry leading margin and is still the fastest growing car company of any size.

SpaceX is one of the most advanced technology companies in the world and I don't think you will find anybody serious who disagrees with that.

The only argument you have that makes sense is that Musk over-promised Self-Driving. That is certainty true, but I wouldn't call it corruption. And I don't think that today the stock price of Tesla is hugely inflated by this as there is so much pessimism on self-driving.

Lets cut the argument very short.

If Tesla or SpaceX were to disappear tomorrow nobody would experience any existential crisis.

If you disappeared Microsoft, Apple or Amazon or Walmart overnight the whole economy would come to a halt. Same for JPMChase,WellsFargo, BoA etc.

Musk is the first guy to reach the top of the Forbes list while being at the helm of an aspirational company, not one that is structurally important one in the present.

It’s a dangerous precedent, and in fact soon enough it was repeated when bitcoiners and owners of exchanges such as Coinbase and FTX reached the top 10 of the Forbes list.

This is an awesome point, you put into words something I couldn't describe very well. A large part of the current economy, in multiple fields, is aspirational, not foundational.

How is my example, street signs, an inconvenience to others or needs dedicated street space? Signs need to be replaced anyway, just add a code at the next replacement.

You're thinking back and white "it's not replacing...". What does that matter? To me what matters is "can we make transport better"

I thought the question was "can we actually make fully autonomous vehicles?" If we have that, the value is pretty obvious.

It seems like it would be cheaper and easier to get rid of cars entirely

But not politically palatable :-)

The environment requires too many constraints, in a city it wouldn’t be unusual for someone to vandalize these road signs.

How well would that work during snow, fog, storms, how resilient would it be to vandalism? Sounds extremely fragile.

If a so-called AI needs help reading a road sign then it stands no chance dealing with the rest of it's surroundings.

Then someone spray paints the sign, a taxi parks in the bike lane just behind a box truck blocking half the entrance to where you're going, meanwhile a cyclist rides the other direction directly toward you because human agents are chaotic and cities are full of them. Oh, a racoon!

Less tongue in cheek: I think we should optimize city centers for human scales and activities, rather than sending cars right through them at all. We already sacrifice so much for cars in their current state, if we have to optimize for their mobility even moreso we are going in the wrong direction I feel.

I'm not saying get rid of cars, just keep them out of the denser parts of cities and the CBD. Put them on roads, not streets.

Cars should just be blocked from cities unless very special situations. Removing cars from cities has huge health and economic benefits. Car free city centers are universally better then car invested cities.

Cars where they are still allowed should move significantly slower, on much thinner roads.

Self-Driving will not solve anything for cities. They will solve even less then EVs.

Not all driving outside city areas happens on the highways.

My brother lives in the countryside (somewhere in the EU), and, as a driver, he shares the paved road just outside his house with the village’s cows (including his two cows). I don’t see any non-AGI system being able to negotiate that, as at times is difficult even for me, a reasonably AGI system, to make sense of it all when I encounter a herd of loose cows on the road.

Sparsely populated rural areas are really the only place where personal autos make sense. Long distance highway travel is better serviced by train. And transportation inside the city is better serviced by literally anything except a car (bikes, e-bikes, subway, trams, scooters, walking).

> Sparsely populated rural areas are really the only place where personal autos make sense

This might be true, if rural areas and densely populated uran areas were the only 2 states, but there's a lot of intermediate density in between

Even cities with decent public transport networks (such as Prague) tend to have a problem with tangential relations. Most lines go from some periphery to the center and to another periphery. If you need to travel between two peripheries, you have to be somewhat lucky to have a line connecting them at your disposal. Going through the center and back to the other periphery is possible, but usually takes too long. (e.g. 1h 30 min instead of 15 minutes by car).

How do you get around the sparsely-populated rural areas at either end of the highway?

Having kids makes car sharing very unattractive. Finding car sharing with enough (and high quality) car seats can be quite challenging. And as much as I like public transport, with kids using the car is often much faster.

Sheep are worse. They run from one side of the road across you to get away from you.

Add to that the vagueness of where the road ends and field/bank begins for many country roads.

You don’t need AGI to do edge detection it’s purely a vision problem

This is also why Tesla switch to using 'drivable area' rather than strict road boundaries.

Oh come on, it’s just collision avoidance, you don’t need general AI for that

Collision avoidance that needs object permanence including theory of mind (for cows). How hard could it be?

What? You don't need to model a cow's mind to steer a car around it.

This discussion is so absurd. :)

I gather you haven't encountered loitering cows :-)

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/fRAAf83QzR0

And this is just a single clip. The huge advantage Tesla has is their massive amount of training data. If it happens in the real world, they probably have a clip of it and can train on it.

This bullshit shows up in every HN thread on autonomous vehicles. Really only on HN. It's wrong, uninformed, and won't seem to go away.

The challenges self-driving cars have nothing to do with infrastructure and everything to do with the other moving objects on the road. It's not that the vehicles can't detect the other things on the road. It's that they can't anticipate reliably what they're going to do.

(However you may be correct that we need AGI or something close to it to do autonomous vehicles robustly)

Teslas, despite the ludicrous promises of "full self-driving in 6 months, just you wait", completely choke if there is so much as a traffic cone or a road-work barrier for it go around.

Tesla doesn't come anywhere close to having the sensor suite or compute to be taken seriously as a developer of level 4 autonomy.

What sensor suite is that?

Radar, ultrasonic proximity sensors, and/or LIDAR, presumably.

Tesla has famously removed all radar/ultrasonic sensors from their newer cars in favor of a purely camera-based system.

But they removed them well after they showed they could accurately predict distance with vision.

LiDAR doesn’t make sense as a sensor to me because it only works in good weather. Its Like a car without windscreen wipers.

Appreciate the downvote/disagreement.

But here is Karpathy explaining how vision can be used to measure distance to objects accurately[0]

Here is the fact that LiDAR doesn't work in the rain[1]: "... In heavy rain, for example, the light pulses emitted from the lidar system are partially reflected off of rain droplets which adds noise to the data, called 'echoes'."

Which logically implies you need to revert to vision, as see [0] also for why Radar is unreliable.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6bOwQdCJrc [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidar

How do humans drive without these sensors?

With superior reasoning abilities. Extra sensors generating more data make reasoning simpler.

Except that Radar and LiDAR send false negatives in poor weather/conditions. Making reasoning harder.

Extra sensors also generate a lot of extra complexity in fusing all the sensors into a common consistent view of the world. And if your goal is just 'more data' then you might as well just add more cameras, that's also 'more data'. I guess what you wanted to say way 'diverse data'.

As with everything else there are benefits and costs to those approaches.

Unless… the infrastructure change they propose is removing the “other things on the road”. Sounds brilliant. You could call that system a “rail” road as the cars would be on rails in a manner of speaking

Vancouver's Skytrain has been fully autonomous since, I think, the 1980s.

Object detection is an issue, but it doesn't only apply to "moving" objects. The current state of the art is having trouble differentiating between a "solid" stationary object like a tire or chunk of metal that must be navigated around, and something like an empty plastic bag that can be safely ignored. Regarding infrastructure, AVs also seem to have a lot of trouble with faded lane lines on roads.

If you're relying only on cameras, then yes, that's an issue. Level 4 vehicles can locate themselves without the need for lines on the road. Everything has been carefully mapped out ahead of time.

>Everything has been carefully mapped out ahead of time.

That sounds sustainable and scalable to earth-size, for sure.

Earth size? When was the last time you drove in Madagascar? Most driven miles are the same commute in the same city 10 times a week.

I wonder if you know what some of the roads in Madagascar are like, or just picked a country.

https://www.dangerousroads.org/africa/madagascar/3415-route-...

(A colleague is there now.)

People in Madagascar would answer differently.

People in Madagascar depend on 4x4 monsters. Yet manufacturers still sell RWD coupes. It's worthwhile without them as a target market.

Well, it's been mostly done once with Google maps and street view. Presumably once it was done once and in use cities would have a vested interest in keeping it updated themselves. Judging by how many large potholes stick around for years near me I wouldn't keep my hopes up about it being well maintained though

> Everything has been carefully mapped out ahead of time

This doesn’t scale. This is also how Zoox, Tesla, and Cruise do their demo videos to scam more money out of investors: they collect ultra-HD maps in a very narrow area or a very specific route. Then they drive the route/area about a thousand times, recording each drive. Then they upload the drive with the fewest mistakes to YouTube. Just like me taking a thousand half-court shots with a basketball, hitting one, and then claiming I can do it every try. There, I just gave you the formula to raise $100mm from FOMOing VCs.

There’s also no such thing as a Level 4 Autonomous vehicle. It doesn’t exist.

Many of the original Google self-driving car project members came over directly from Google Street view, which has since scaled all over the world. Autonomous vehicles have big scaling issues, but it's not the maps holding them back.

Street view is not an ultra-HD map for autonomous driving. Cruise isn’t using street view, or anything so primitive and easy to collect in comparison, to navigate SF. And it doesn’t scale in and of itself without being backed by a search ads monopoly that prints money at will.

Telsa doesn't have such ultra-HD maps at all. They build some maps for some simulations and training but the car does not locate itself in such maps when driving.

> Then they drive the route/area about a thousand times, recording each drive. Then they upload the drive with the fewest mistakes to YouTube

This is certainty not what Tesla does, from Tesla vehicles you will find literally 1000s of videos uploaded by Testers on every possible routes.

And Tesla has also never relied on VC funding for any of its self-driving tech.

> Telsa doesn't have such ultra-HD maps at all. They build some maps for some simulations and training but the car does not locate itself in such maps when driving.

They do have such maps, but only for the routes of their demo videos. That’s the entire accusation — it’s a Fugazi. A man behind a curtain. A mechanical Turk. Fake.

This video was posted 3 years ago: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tlThdr3O5Qo

I have never seen a Tesla perform as well as the one in that video in ANY user video. I drove a Model 3 with FSD for 4 months and it never came close to performing that well. Not even close. They either recorded a special map for that scam video, drove the route a thousand times and took the best recording, or both.

> This is certainty not what Tesla does, from Tesla vehicles you will find literally 1000s of videos uploaded by Testers on every possible routes

In the real videos, the cars fail to navigate simple scenarios constantly. You can’t even watch the videos without cringing at the constant mistakes and dangerous maneuvers. For Pete’s sake, just search “Tesla phantom braking” on YouTube and behold.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Zu18KYAhSzo

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9iGWDdnoONE&t=50

> And Tesla has also never relied on VC funding for any of its self-driving tech.

No, just unsophisticated customers paying $12k for vaporware and massive government subsidies. So sorry — they’re not scamming VCs. Just real customers and the taxpayers.

This pretty much. You've got to be able to rapidly identify everything you see and predict what it's reasonably likely to do, which sounds like an AGI-scale problem.

I recently drove a rented Tesla 3. On a highway in Norway it failed to detect speed limit signs in like 25% of cases. And if the speed limit sign was a temporary one due to road repairs it failed with those like 50% of times.

And this is with stationary objects designed to be seen and easily grasped by humans.

Signs are nice but the simplest way to know the speed is to store it in a database and look it up from position.

In fact roads should have barcoded position markers everywhere. That way you could navigate without gps and all road signs could become virtual. Just download a road marker update.

That's not really how speed limits work though. People take their cues from road design and conditions, not what the speed limit actually is. Virtually changing speed limits is dangerous because it causes you to think you are altering the behaviour of traffic without actually doing so.

https://youtu.be/bglWCuCMSWc?t=280 goes into detail on this

We could put GPS beacons on all pedestrians.

The sarcasm tags are missing.

Teslas do not read speed limit signs or basically any signs other than stop signs, including not reading “Do Not Enter” street signs. It is using the wrong speed limit because their maps do not list the correct speed limit.

In Norway you are not getting Tesla FSD.

This reminds me of something the Rocket League devs said. Something to the effect that bots wouldn't be effective at the game because it's too challenging.

This is -not- my line of work, so I have no idea if that's true. But if it is, I don't see how we could have perfectly safe self driving vehicles.

This is where I see the problem being with autonomous vehicles, too. They can only react to other vehicles, they can't predict them.

Humans are good at predicting.

You don't consciously know you've seen the guy a couple of cars in front checking his mirror and his shoulder but you're hanging back because you just know he's going to pull out any second. The guy that's wavering a bit in the middle lane is about to dash across to the far lane of the sliproad that's coming up, clipping the zebra stripes a bit, because he's concentrating on the sat nav not the road, but you just know - out of all the other drivers in your space at the moment - that red Ford is the one that's going to do something boneheaded.

Autonomous Vehicles won't be able to do that, probably not ever.

Cars are bad. Electric cars are a bit better than ICE cars, and self-driving cars might one day be better than human-driven cars. But they're still terrible: they're still big, inefficient, polluting, loud, dangerous, and take up precious space. Cars are completely unsuited to cities, and cities which are designed around cars are terrible.

This to say: the future is having cars removed from cities entirely. Focusing on self-driving technology, or on electric cars as if they're going to "save the planet", is entirely the wrong direction imo.

This is the logical answer but companies need to profit off something and EVs are what “save the world” right now.

Everyone is committed to being green as long as their lifestyle isn’t inconvenienced and they have the funds to buy the green equivalent technology.

EV promotes energy independence of a country. In the worst case they can use electricity from coal that is widely available on this planet. And as long as the coal plant is modern they still will generate less CO2 than petrol-based cars.

Personally, I think while probably too futuristic large drones that are autonomous and deliver people would be safer. Its arguably easier to avoid objects when you can dodge in 360 degrees of direction.

It's also easier to avoid pedestrians as most can't fly.

It also could save on gas and energy as you can go directly as a bird flies to your destination instead of taking 20 minutes it takes 3.

Of course this would be a huge infrastructure ordeal as well probably and require a damn good system as you don't want vehicles landing on houses all over the place, but it'd be amazing for people with long commutes.

You could probably have airbuses that pick up like 30 people say in a small town and fly them to the city to be delivered individually by smaller vehicles locally. What took 45 minutes, now maybe takes 15.

These would be better if maybe electric with gas as an emergency backup system, and then just have good batteries and solar power fuel most trips.

>the future is having cars removed from cities entirely.

Sounds somewhat authoritarian to impose your idea of the 'future' to inconvenience a large number of people.

If you live in an American suburb you're swimming in that sort of authoritarianism.

I live in a small American suburb, have lived in large cities, and travel to Europe, NYC, LA, SF on the regular. And I wouldn’t trade my car and the ability to drive somewhere for anything in the world.

There are a lot of great things about cities but you are dependent on other people for everything in your life, and it can go sideways incredibly fast. I.e the energy situation in Europe, or with COVID-19. Personally I don’t know how it’s not obvious to the millions of people who live in places like that.

> you are dependent on other people for everything in your life

This is everywhere true past, present and future. I would argue your small suburb gives you an illusion that isn't true.

No-one cares about cities.

Los Angeles has already been built, however.

Make the boardwalk wider (so you can have fun things like restaurants on the boardwalk), add 2 direction bike lanes on both side and have thin single direction car lane in the middle.

I always imagined the future of self driving cars wouldn't lie in cities (except maybe some main ringroads or arterial roalds) but in highways. Just tell the computer to go to highway X exit Y, and from there the driver can drive the last few miles. Basically geofencing known 'sane' locations, which cuts down on the boring bits of driving significantly.

That's just trying to solve a simpler problem. It wasn't what we were promised!

I know, I think the promises are unrealistic :) This has always been my own imagined future

I’d be very happy with that.

Especially in an RV. Enter the interstate, sleep for 8 hours, wake up 600 miles down the road.

That’s the dream!

And then in those safe geofenced locations we could put down metal guide rails so that navigation is easier. And then use metal wheels with flanges to reduce rolling resistance. And then hook many cars together into one long vehicle. And ...

That would be great. But the minute I have to get out of my car to get in another vehicle to then get in another car at my “destination” then you’ve lost me.

Car rental services, taxis, buses, bikes, just having the station nearby. There are a billion options beyond “bring your own car”

I'd be impressed a train service that had 8 parallel lines plus dedicated lines at each station so that it was economical for 1-5 people to alight directly at their destination.

Highways have that many lanes only near large cities, where rail lines are also fairly parallel if you look at maps.

That could be more than just a joke though: special lanes for computerized slipstream driving could make cars and trucks approach railroad efficiency. A "driver agent" posts its itinerary to the routing network, finds peers going the same direction at roughly the same time, accelerates/decelerates to find them and hook (contactlessly) into the moving paceline, at a position that fits the vehicle's frontal area (you wouldn't want small cars breaking the slipstream between trucks). The routing network bills some of the slipstream savings on behalf of the vehicle(s) in less favorable positions at the front.

Like the visionary dream of individually routed rail cars, but built bottom-up, with cars/trucks that are perfectly useful in standalone driving on regular roads. And it could scale even closer to rail: perhaps some long-haul connections get metal rails integrated in the floor like tram rails, that some long-haul trucks with a special bogey option could slot in, in the fly? That would be an impressive stunt if performed by humans, but easy for computers. Perhaps some connections add overhead wires? Perhaps some trucks, with the overhead wire pantograph option, add a robotic power handover arm because that's cheaper than wear and tear on two pantographs? Could all start bottom up, with few installations.

Are there even any racing/sim games with solved driving AI? All the ones I can think of cheat, replay hardcoded paths, and/or are terrible. And thats with perfect information about the world and other cars.

Those games ai systems get substantially less budget and time than the automakers. There's also been a lot of talks about players not really having fun with ai that is too good, the players will always assume the ai is cheating whenever it out maneuvers them if you make it too well done

GT Sophy maybe? https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-outraces-human...

Afaik the goal was perfect laps to beat humans. I could never find information of what happens when it has to account for other drivers.

Practically all the AI-assisted automation systems I'm familiar with, whether its identifying objects in an image or parsing documents, have the same problem. They work for 90-95% of problems but get trumped up by edge cases and a human has to intervene.

That's not a problem when you're transcribing a video, but becomes a matter of life and death when you're driving a car.

> autonomous cars essentially need AGI in order to play to a degree that is safer than a human with other humans.

This is really an astonishingly large claim without any evidence.

I question if you understand what AGI actually is? It's not "AI that can solve game theory" or "AI that can play cooperative games" - conventional video game AI's do this all the time in a myriad of permutations.

For others agreeing autonomous driving needs "AGI", first read what it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligenc...

Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the ability of an intelligent agent to understand or learn *any intellectual task that a human being can*.

It's a very difficult engineering problem but we don't need AGI to solve it.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-10-06/even-afte...

Where is this kind-of-a-wrapper-article you write about? What am I missing?

Statements about X specialized task requiring AGI are questionable now, just like they were questionable when they were said about Chess, Go and Video Games.

Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results.

Show me a chess engine that can deal with a chess peice that has been mangled so you can only tell what it is with context clues. Also a plastic bag occasionally obscures one of the other pieces. There's also construction on one side of the board every few turns that it has to route around using lanes that arnt normally legal. It has to do this while a drunk human is also moving the pieces, sometimes in ways that arnt legal, and if it takes too long it can hit a wall and die

Beyond questionable. It's anti-intellectual defeatism.

We've changed the URL from https://medium.com/@doctorow/100-billion-later-autonomous-ve... to the original source.

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