Self-Driving Vehicles
05-31-21, 12:25 AM
#856
Pole Position
It's been over over four years since I started to participate in this thread, and it became somewhat heated. Seems like the autonomous tech has not improved at all during these four years - much like I predicted they picked the low hanging fruit, scammed the investors, and it's now being stalled.
Last edited by swajames; 05-31-21 at 08:08 AM.
06-01-21, 10:42 AM
#857
Slow weekend, nasty weather in NE, so why not resurrect this thread. Seems that many players are abandoning the self driving ship. Tesla just got rid of radars making their primitive self driving tech even more primitive, Lyft abandoned it's self driving tech (sold it to Toyota) after claiming level 5 autonomy by 2021, Waymo CEO stepped down, and Waymo valuation is down by 85% from 2017. Obviously the whole self driving nonsense was always just a meme to cheat investors.
Last edited by BNR34; 06-01-21 at 11:05 AM.
06-06-21, 07:59 PM
#861
https://www.wsj.com/articles/self-dr...865615?mod=mhp
Great article from the WSJ, I specifically would like to underline this quote:
"A recently published paper called “Why AI is Harder Than We Think” sums up the situation nicely. In it, Melanie Mitchell, a computer scientist and professor of complexity at the Santa Fe Institute, notes that as deadlines for the arrival of autonomous vehicles have slipped, people within the industry are redefining the term. Since these vehicles require a geographically constrained test area and ideal weather conditions—not to mention safety drivers or at least remote monitors—makers and supporters of these vehicles have incorporated all of those caveats into their definition of autonomy.Even with all those asterisks, Dr. Mitchell writes, “none of these predictions has come true.”
Basically they know they can't achieve truly autonomous car, so they are just going to molest the term "autonomous car" until investors stop falling for this nonsense and funding dries up.
Great article from the WSJ, I specifically would like to underline this quote:
"A recently published paper called “Why AI is Harder Than We Think” sums up the situation nicely. In it, Melanie Mitchell, a computer scientist and professor of complexity at the Santa Fe Institute, notes that as deadlines for the arrival of autonomous vehicles have slipped, people within the industry are redefining the term. Since these vehicles require a geographically constrained test area and ideal weather conditions—not to mention safety drivers or at least remote monitors—makers and supporters of these vehicles have incorporated all of those caveats into their definition of autonomy.Even with all those asterisks, Dr. Mitchell writes, “none of these predictions has come true.”
Basically they know they can't achieve truly autonomous car, so they are just going to molest the term "autonomous car" until investors stop falling for this nonsense and funding dries up.
06-08-21, 07:49 AM
#863
Lexus Fanatic
iTrader: (20)
Och's gonna like this 
Despite this assessment, Musk continues to push the baseless idea that Tesla’s Full Self Driving feature is on the cusp of turning the company’s cars into fully-autonomous vehicles.
FSD is a powerful driver assistance-feature, but no matter how close we move the goal posts there’s still no indication that Tesla’s any closer to achieving actual full self-driving than any other manufacturer.
GANs are responsible for many of the amazingly human-like feats modern AI is able to accomplish including DeepFakes, This Person Does Not Exist, and many other systems.
The modern rise of deep learning acted as a rising tide that lifted the field of artificial intelligence research and turned Google, Amazon, and Microsoft into AI-first companies almost overnight.
Now, artificial intelligence is slated to be worth nearly a trillion dollars by 2028, according to experts.
But those gains haven’t translated into the level of technomagic that experts such as Ray Kurzweil predicted. AI that works well in the modern world is almost exclusively very narrow, meaning it’s designed to do a very specific thing and nothing else.
When you imagine all the things a human driver has to do – from paying attention to their surroundings to navigating to actually operating the vehicle itself – it quickly becomes a matter of designing either dozens (or hundreds) of interworking narrow AI systems or figuring out how to create a general AI.
This is because general AI is just another way of saying “an AI capable of performing any relative task a human can.” And, so far, the onset of general AI remains far-future technology.
In the near future we can expect more of the same. Driver-assistance technology continues to develop at a decent pace and tomorrow’s cars will certainly be safer and more advanced than today’s. But there’s little reason to believe they’ll be driving themselves in the wild any time soon.
We’re likely to see specific areas set aside in major cities across the world and entire highways designated for driverless vehicle technologies in the next few years. But that won’t herald the era of driverless cars.
There’s no sign whatsoever (outside of the aforementioned Tesla gambit) that any vehicle manufacturer is approaching even a five year window towards the development of a consumer production vehicle rated to drive fully-autonomously.
And that’s a good indication that we’re at least a decade or more from seeing a consumer production vehicle made available to individual buyers that doesn’t have a steering wheel or means of manual control.
Driverless cars aren’t necessarily impossible. But there’s more to their development than just clever algorithms, brute-force compute, and computer vision.
According to the experts, it’ll take a different type of AI, a different approach all-together, a massive infrastructure endeavor, or all three to move the field forward.
https://thenextweb.com/news/why-trul...y-never-happen
Why the dream of truly driverless cars is slowly dying
Some experts say it'll be a decade or more, others believe level five autonomy may never happen
Despite this assessment, Musk continues to push the baseless idea that Tesla’s Full Self Driving feature is on the cusp of turning the company’s cars into fully-autonomous vehicles.
FSD is a powerful driver assistance-feature, but no matter how close we move the goal posts there’s still no indication that Tesla’s any closer to achieving actual full self-driving than any other manufacturer.
Why were the old experts so wrong?
In 2014 deep learning saw an explosion in popularity on the back of work from numerous computer scientists including Ian Goodfellow. His work developing and defining the general adversarial network (aka, the GAN, a neural network that helps AI produce outputs by acting as both generator and discriminator) made it seem like nearly any feat of autonomy could be accomplished with algorithms and neural networks.GANs are responsible for many of the amazingly human-like feats modern AI is able to accomplish including DeepFakes, This Person Does Not Exist, and many other systems.
The modern rise of deep learning acted as a rising tide that lifted the field of artificial intelligence research and turned Google, Amazon, and Microsoft into AI-first companies almost overnight.
Now, artificial intelligence is slated to be worth nearly a trillion dollars by 2028, according to experts.
But those gains haven’t translated into the level of technomagic that experts such as Ray Kurzweil predicted. AI that works well in the modern world is almost exclusively very narrow, meaning it’s designed to do a very specific thing and nothing else.
When you imagine all the things a human driver has to do – from paying attention to their surroundings to navigating to actually operating the vehicle itself – it quickly becomes a matter of designing either dozens (or hundreds) of interworking narrow AI systems or figuring out how to create a general AI.
What the future holds
The invention and development of a general AI would likely be a major catalyst for solving driverless cars, but so would three wishes from a genie.This is because general AI is just another way of saying “an AI capable of performing any relative task a human can.” And, so far, the onset of general AI remains far-future technology.
In the near future we can expect more of the same. Driver-assistance technology continues to develop at a decent pace and tomorrow’s cars will certainly be safer and more advanced than today’s. But there’s little reason to believe they’ll be driving themselves in the wild any time soon.
We’re likely to see specific areas set aside in major cities across the world and entire highways designated for driverless vehicle technologies in the next few years. But that won’t herald the era of driverless cars.
There’s no sign whatsoever (outside of the aforementioned Tesla gambit) that any vehicle manufacturer is approaching even a five year window towards the development of a consumer production vehicle rated to drive fully-autonomously.
And that’s a good indication that we’re at least a decade or more from seeing a consumer production vehicle made available to individual buyers that doesn’t have a steering wheel or means of manual control.
Driverless cars aren’t necessarily impossible. But there’s more to their development than just clever algorithms, brute-force compute, and computer vision.
According to the experts, it’ll take a different type of AI, a different approach all-together, a massive infrastructure endeavor, or all three to move the field forward.
https://thenextweb.com/news/why-trul...y-never-happen
06-08-21, 10:21 AM
#864
Lexus Fanatic
^^^^Good article. 
Tells it like it was (and is). Those who said, years ago, that true driverless vehicles were either a pipe dream or much more difficult to achieve than what the likes of Musk and other so-called "Experts" were telling us are being proved correct. We were accused of "rocking" a boat that, later, started springing some pretty serious leaks on its own. 
Tells it like it was (and is). Those who said, years ago, that true driverless vehicles were either a pipe dream or much more difficult to achieve than what the likes of Musk and other so-called "Experts" were telling us are being proved correct. We were accused of "rocking" a boat that, later, started springing some pretty serious leaks on its own.
06-08-21, 10:50 AM
#865
It was always obvious to anyone with even the smallest amount of common sense that self driving cars are a crock of BS, but I'm sure proponents of self driving cars are going to redefine the term. Sometime in the future there are going to be somewhat autonomous vehicles that operate in certain conditions, at certain locations, with a bunch of restrictions and special provisions, but there will never a truly self driving car that can operate 100% autonomously within existing infrastructure.
07-03-21, 09:40 PM
#866
Looks like Elon got hit with reality, lol.
Elon Musk
@elonmusk
Haha, FSD 9 beta is shipping soon, I swear! Generalized self-driving is a hard problem, as it requires solving a large part of real-world AI. Didn’t expect it to be so hard, but the difficulty is obvious in retrospect. Nothing has more degrees of freedom than reality.
Elon Musk
@elonmusk
Haha, FSD 9 beta is shipping soon, I swear! Generalized self-driving is a hard problem, as it requires solving a large part of real-world AI. Didn’t expect it to be so hard, but the difficulty is obvious in retrospect. Nothing has more degrees of freedom than reality.
07-04-21, 10:08 AM
#868
Lexus Fanatic
I never thought full self driving was possible or was going to happen for a very long time if ever, I did not understand why some seemed so gun ho about it and like it was going to happen soon. Our roads, highways, streets are simply not designed for it nor are these systems able to deal with all the obstacles and issues of everyday driving, snow, heavy rain, unexpected things in the road. The only way it would work is to redesign all of our roads to fully suit the systems, put sensors in them everywhere for the systems to read which would cost trillions and even then these systems would still likely have issues/malfunctions which will likely lead to serious accidents, death. Unless you are fully eliminating all accidents I don't really see the point in spending all that money, so people can bury their noses in their phones and yap on social media even more then they normally do? I think it will mainly be limited for a while to a more smart cruise control on highways, it will brake to avoid hitting cars, maintain a certain distance, follow the lines(hopefully they are clear), use some gps info to also track and the driver will likely still have to steer every once in a while to make sure they are paying attention, not sleeping, etc in case of a emergency. I just would not trust these self driving vehicles, they will screw up just like everything humans make and that is bad news in 4000lb vehicles traveling on highways/roads.
07-04-21, 10:56 AM
#869
Lexus Fanatic
^^^^As usual. UDel is right on the money. Despite some progress, trustworthy self-driving vehicles are still pretty much a Pie-in-the-Sky concept, I don't think we will see truly dependable ones in my lifetime.....or, maybe even in the lifetimes of some of you younger members here.
Despite some progress, trustworthy self-driving vehicles are still pretty much a Pie-in-the-Sky concept, I don't think we will see truly dependable ones in my lifetime.....or, maybe even in the lifetimes of some of you younger members here.
07-04-21, 01:06 PM
#870
Lexus Fanatic
iTrader: (20)
Looks like Elon got hit with reality, lol.
Elon Musk:
Haha, FSD 9 beta is shipping soon, I swear! Generalized self-driving is a hard problem, as it requires solving a large part of real-world AI. Didn’t expect it to be so hard, but the difficulty is obvious in retrospect. Nothing has more degrees of freedom than reality.
Elon Musk:
Haha, FSD 9 beta is shipping soon, I swear! Generalized self-driving is a hard problem, as it requires solving a large part of real-world AI. Didn’t expect it to be so hard, but the difficulty is obvious in retrospect. Nothing has more degrees of freedom than reality.
of course, many tesla enthusiasts are likely to be very forgiving, so maybe that will never happen