Self-Driving Cars

Uber is much worse - at least with cars. Ars Technica(The Computer Science department at Uni had a DEC 20 - I used it quite a bit)

I simply still agree with you when we talked about this earlier: I don't think a goal of time for going to Level 5 is reasonable.
I think the goal should be "meeting some threshold of reduced problems over time."
There's nothing wrong with getting to such a goal as-fast-as-possible... but the goal for moving to fully automatic vehicles should be measured in "safer than human drivers by x amount" terms... not "within x years" terms.

Some disruptive technologies have tipping points built into the adoption process. Once that point is reached, however slowly, things suddenly go very, very quickly.
I've driven all 3 of the Tesla models and after my Audi my next car will not be a gas burning dinosaur. What it will be and when is still to be decided. If battery costs continue as they have then the tipping point for EVs will be 3 to 5 yrs out. Only a minority of people will want anything else after that.With autonomy of cars I think the tipping point will be when your insurance to drive without the "AI" on will be too expensive. This will go from not an issue to a deciding factor all of a sudden. When will that be? I'd guess 2 to 4 years. It won't be that we will have level 4 or 5 capabilities necessarily. It will just be that driving without the car helping out will be expensive, then too expensive and then prohibited.As hinted at by Tesla's numbers (and though biased they may know more than anyone - they have 1/4 of a million devices gathering statistics out there) there may be enough to change insurance within the next few months even.

In the winter of early 1968 my sophomore high school class bussed into New York City to see 2001: A Space Odyssey in Cinerama, a surround screen and surround sound experience. The shuttle approach to the space station to the music of Straus's Blue Danube was spectacular and unforgettable: I was so stunned I bought the movie soundtrack (though I had no record player) and bought and learned the piano music to the Blue Danube.The movie's visionaries conceived of a shuttle vehicle nearly identical to the eventual space shuttle not launched until 14 years later, but we've never seen anything like the space station, not in the year 2001 and not now and not for the foreseeable future. When I was at Carnegie Mellon in the mid-1970's there was a project called Hearsay whose goal was to understand human speech. While I was there they mastered the small chess vocabulary, as in "Pawn to queen four" and "Bishop takes knight." Project leads spoke of the promise of speech recognition, saying it was already on the horizon, just a few more years. Now, forty years later we're just getting there. And that's just speech recognition - speech comprehension is a much bigger task.I played around with Apple's speech recognition using Swift while I was writing the RideGuru app (see Calling All Rideshare Fans), and it was really good at recognizing addresses like "95 East Main Street, Springfield, Massachusetts," but really bad at addresses with place names with odd spellings and/or silent letters, so I left speech recognition out of the app.But playing with Siri just now I can see that Apple's speech recognition is still pretty powerful. You might imagine that "17 Gloucester Road, Worcester, Massachusetts" would give it trouble because Gloucester is pronounced "Gloster" and Worcester is pronounced "Wooster", but Siri has no trouble with it ("Hey Siri, show 17 Gloucester Road, Worcester, Massachusetts").But try, "Hey Siri, show 17 Cowesett Road, Warwick, RI" and it will get it wrong time after time no matter how carefully you pronounce "Cowesett." If you've got Android give it a try and see if it does any better. We've got an Alexa Dot that we use a little, and it is much smarter than Siri at answering questions, for one example, "How many Jews were killed during World War II?" But I don't know if it's also better at speech recognition. Give me that old time religion (meaning assembler code).--Percy

A human would get that wrong every time too - unless they came from there.All Siri has to do is what a human would do and ask to spell it. Simples :-)

If you want a really good laugh, check out some of the viral videos of people from Scotland trying to use voice recognition. Like so:Makes me wonder how they pronounce 'Brexit'.

Imagine using two Siris to do the negotiations.

I worked for DEC but knew people from DG and Prime - all their company headquarters were in the Boston suburbs. When I joined DEC in 1977 Ed de Castro's (DG's founder) departure was still a recent memory. The story as I heard it was that around the mid-1960's DEC started two competing projects to design the PDP-8 successor. The project team that designed the PDP-11 was selected, and the project team that designed the Nova, led by Ed de Castro, went off and founded DG. DEC would have done well to do whatever it took to retain Ed de Castro, because DG was a tough competitor and a thorn in DEC's side for years.If you still remember DG's Nova and SuperNova machines fondly and haven't yet read Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine then it is well worth reading. I met a couple of the principles, but it was years ago and I no longer remember their names. The one name I do remember from the book is Tom West, the project lead. The character I best remember, even though he played a minor role, was the technician who would destroy tools once he felt they were "used up." The vignet I best remember was when one of the hardware designers (salaried, i.e., no overtime) found a technican's (hourly, i.e., overtime) paystub in a wastebasket and discovered the technician was making more than he did (remember paper paychecks?).--Percy

I think the crash avoidance systems are much better than people. And on a calm clear day on a smooth road with lines that aren't worn away and no construction, then current autonomous capabilities should outperform a human driver.What often happens with new technologies is that high initial expectations decline and existing capabilities improve. At some point diminishing expectations meet improving capabilities, and then the new technology takes off.But take the simple case of a policeman with his hand up indicating stop. It will be a long time before autonomous vehicles recognize this situation, and without that capability these cars should not be permitted on the road without a backup driver. Google claims to have solved this problem, but I don't believe them. I don't believe Tesla's stats, either.Today me and another car yielded to each other. The driver in the other car signaled me to go and we make eye contact, so I went. I think it will be a long while before LIDAR plus cameras can handle that.Two cars pull up at the same time at a 4-way stop at right angles to each other. The car to the right doesn't go (doesn't matter why). What does the car to the left do?Four cars pull up to a 4-way stop at the same time. Reminds me of the joke about the donkey midway between two haystacks. It's the vehicular equivalent of a deadly embrace, or, since it's all just software, it *is* the deadly embrace. This one has simple solutions, I just mentioned it because it seems humorous.--Percy

Any person in the road would cause the car to stop - I would hope.But you are imagining a the world as it is now, not how it would be. The first cars in this country had to be led by a chap with a red flag, that didn't last long. Barriers to the inevitable are pushed aside or worked around.

It is interesting to see you guys talking about self driving cars and the rules of the road changing on a scale less than 5 years. Other than riding in a Tesla a couple years ago, I don't know anything about this technology.This spring I bought the first new car since 1977. Mine doesn't have a nav system but they do make them for my model. The do not make an electric version.If the change in infrastructure to accommodate electric self drivers does indeed happen on these short timescales it will force the poor to lose their access to personal transportation.

I think it may do the opposite. It should make public transport cheaper and more reliable. But more importantly it removes the requirement to own a car or even rent one. Once cars are self-drive you can just order one for your journey and wave bye-bye to it when it drops you off.Imagine all those empty parking lots. - all that new space.

Yeah, but computers need to get rebooted every so often. They go crazy every now and then. My state-of-the art cellphone needs to get rebooted every now and then. It just stops ringing, then I know it's time for a reboot. Same with my computer and satellite phone and satellite-tv decoder. They just start going crazy sometimes. Hope it doesn't happen in any self driven car I'm a passenger in...

It will. Hopefully not you, but people are going to get hurt, people are going to die, from these things. Tort and insurance legislation will be used to absorb that risk temporarily while the smart guys figure out how to make these things safer.

You're absolutely right - people are going to die because of software bugs and glitches, hardware failures, unanticipated situations, etc. But car accidents should decline, and the severity of the car accidents that do happen should also decline. The death and injury rate should decline precipitously. We currently have around 35,000 vehicular related deaths per year, and that should drop below 10,000, probably way below 10,000.But how are people going to feel about that, about the possibility of dying because of some car failure instead of their own mistake? The people penalized the most will be those who today are the most safe and careful drivers: those who don't tailgate, always look both ways, drive at reasonable speeds, etc. Their chances of vehicular death will decline, too, but not as much as your more, uh, enthusiastic drivers.But whether we're talking about safe or enthusiastic drivers, how will they feel about having their degree of safety taken out of their hands?--Percy