In 1895 there were two automobiles in the whole state of Ohio...
Due to the lack of cars, as one would imagine, there were no car accidents.
Except once, when these two, aforementioned, automobiles (again, the only two in Ohio) ran into each other!
Currently, there are approximately 36,000 highway deaths per year or about 102 per day. 50% are due to alcohol or some other drug induced impairment.
The first part (Ohio) above may be untrue, but it does make the point, albeit, in a rather circuitous way...if we could snap our fingers and have instantly driverless cars we would take the drunks out of the equation and save over 18,000 lives per year...just doing that would be worth it.
Imagine if it could reduce highway deaths completely....Hmmm.
Best.
P.S. In 2016, 2,433 teens in the United States ages 16–19 were killed and 292,742 were treated in emergency departments for injuries suffered in motor vehicle crashes. That means that six teens ages 16–19 died every day due to motor vehicle crashes and hundreds more were injured.
In 2016, young people ages 15-19 represented 6.5% of the U.S. population. However, they accounted for an estimated $13.6 billion (8.4%) of the total costs of motor vehicle injuries.
In 1895 there were two automobiles in the whole state of Ohio...
Due to the lack of cars, as one would imagine, there were no car accidents.
Except once, when these two, aforementioned, automobiles (again, the only two in Ohio) ran into each other!
Currently, there are approximately 36,000 highway deaths per year or about 102 per day. 50% are due to alcohol or some other drug induced impairment.
The first part (Ohio) above may be untrue, but it does make the point, albeit, in a rather circuitous way...if we could snap our fingers and have instantly driverless cars we would take the drunks out of the equation and save over 18,000 lives per year...just doing that would be worth it.
Imagine if it could reduce highway deaths completely....Hmmm.
Best.
P.S. In 2016, 2,433 teens in the United States ages 16–19 were killed and 292,742 were treated in emergency departments for injuries suffered in motor vehicle crashes. That means that six teens ages 16–19 died every day due to motor vehicle crashes and hundreds more were injured.
In 2016, young people ages 15-19 represented 6.5% of the U.S. population. However, they accounted for an estimated $13.6 billion (8.4%) of the total costs of motor vehicle injuries.
There's no doubt in my mind that insurance companies will more or less force the adoption of autonomous vehicles eventually. The costs to insurers and the cost of lost lives will simply make non-autonomous vehicles unaffordable.
Sorry, but why does the media hang on Wozniak's every word? Why do we care what he thinks? He hasn't been relevant in decades. What has he produced since he left Apple, while living on his AAPL stock? He's never been shown to have even a shred of insight into where things are going, or even a fundamental understand of what makes products and companies successful. He's certainly never under what has made Apple successful.
I agree with you that SW is over-rated, especially on the topic of Apple.
But on this one, I agree with him wholeheartedly. Fully self-driving cars are at least 7-10 years away. They have to first fix insurance/liability issues, and then hundreds (if not thousands) of state and local regulations related to vehicles and vehicle traffic have to be worked on one by one. On top of which, the US Congress will have to pass legislation.
I think it will all ultimately happen, but not before 2025.
Waymo is launching driver-less cabs this December. https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/11/13/waymo-expected-to-launch-paid-driverless-ridehailing-service-in-december I suspect we will see more and more self driving tech over time. It may be 7-10 years before you can go into a dealership and buy a car with no steering wheel, but already we have significant smart technologies in our cars. Self parking has been out for a few years. Lane warnings have been out, even cars that will bring you back into your lane if you ignore the warning. I suspect we will start seeing cars that will drive themselves on the freeway within a year. Tesla has one already but it's only called an assist. I mean a car that you enter the freeway, and pull out a newspaper while it sails along. This is coming only it won't be a massive fireworks in the sky it is here now. It will creep in one feature at a time until cars are autonomous and most people won't even notice. After all who objects to anti-lock breaks? They were the first automotive AI technology. Who objects to cruise controls that maintain a distance from the car ahead of you? That's another one.
As far as regulations needing to be changed. A lot of states and municipalities are doing this now.
Yes, it is a bit of stating the obvious that self-driving cars aren't ready for prime time, yet, but assistive technologies are improving rapidly and they do prevent accidents. Roads haven't been built for self-driving cars because they weren't a possibility when these roads were built. I expect that new roads will be built with self-driving cars in mind. I also think that many roads will be improved a bit and certified for self-driving cars. I may not be able to drive from San Jose to downtown LA with my eyes closed, but I would expect to be able to do at least the highway portion of the trip while taking a nap in the near future.
I wouldn't trust an autonomous system on an unpaved and unmarked road or off-road yet, because there are too many decisions to be made which could result in disaster. But on highways and city streets, definitely.
Actually, we've had fully-autonomous, goal-oriented vehicle guidance for off-road situations for decades, now. Check out what Doctor Ernst Dickmanns and his team were doing in the 80s through early 00s.
Sorry, but why does the media hang on Wozniak's every word? Why do we care what he thinks? He hasn't been relevant in decades. What has he produced since he left Apple, while living on his AAPL stock? He's never been shown to have even a shred of insight into where things are going, or even a fundamental understand of what makes products and companies successful. He's certainly never under what has made Apple successful.
I agree with you that SW is over-rated, especially on the topic of Apple.
But on this one, I agree with him wholeheartedly. Fully self-driving cars are at least 7-10 years away. They have to first fix insurance/liability issues, and then hundreds (if not thousands) of state and local regulations related to vehicles and vehicle traffic have to be worked on one by one. On top of which, the US Congress will have to pass legislation.
I think it will all ultimately happen, but not before 2025.
Waymo is launching driver-less cabs this December. https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/11/13/waymo-expected-to-launch-paid-driverless-ridehailing-service-in-december I suspect we will see more and more self driving tech over time. It may be 7-10 years before you can go into a dealership and buy a car with no steering wheel, but already we have significant smart technologies in our cars. Self parking has been out for a few years. Lane warnings have been out, even cars that will bring you back into your lane if you ignore the warning. I suspect we will start seeing cars that will drive themselves on the freeway within a year. Tesla has one already but it's only called an assist. I mean a car that you enter the freeway, and pull out a newspaper while it sails along. This is coming only it won't be a massive fireworks in the sky it is here now. It will creep in one feature at a time until cars are autonomous and most people won't even notice. After all who objects to anti-lock breaks? They were the first automotive AI technology. Who objects to cruise controls that maintain a distance from the car ahead of you? That's another one.
As far as regulations needing to be changed. A lot of states and municipalities are doing this now.
Antilock brakes are an "automated" function, but certainly not "A.I."
Also, autonomous vehicles as we know them today are not examples of "artificial intelligence", they are examples of "machine learning".
A well respected U.K. car test driving magazine website has a video on YouTube (which I cannot seem to track down right now) in which they discovered a glitch in Tesla’s self-driving where when driving on a perfect straight, impeccably marked road with gradual up and down undulations, the car all of a sudden tried to take a diagonal left turn directly into oncoming traffic. It was one of the more dangerous car demos I have ever seen. They told Tesla about it and Tesla said a software update is coming for that “issue”. Tesla drivers are guinea pigs for their platform. None of these feature should be legally allowed on public roads at this point.
I think letting a care drive for you will turn your brain into mush, Driving is problem solving activity, you need to be at you best and be able to solve problems in real time. If you let a car drive you everywhere, it just another sedentary activity which will cause you to decline in your ability to solve problems.
Also, if you think mechanization/automation of the US and shipping manufacturing jobs over seas killed jobs. Making all transportation autonomous will kill more jobs than you could imagine.
How exactly is letting a machine do a menial task like driving for you going to “turn your brain to mush”? Do you have any evidence to support this assertion? What a ridiculous statement.
Also who cares if it kills yet another dangerous job that humans shouldn’t have to do for themselves. That’s the whole point of automating jobs. Insert buggy whip maker joke here.
Yes, it is a bit of stating the obvious that self-driving cars aren't ready for prime time, yet
Not if you've read the previous comments. Woz is correct. He may not be a true visionary, but he worked with one a lot more closely and longer than anybody here, and may have picked up a little something about being realistic.
Jobs, a true visionary, said 'no' a lot more than he said 'yes'.
At some point there may be an SAE or some such standard for what is and isn't autonomous driving. Getting in the back seat of a truly autonomous car and telling it to take you to JFK but stop along the way for breakfast', from the back seat, in traffic, is a lot farther off than most proponents would care to admit.
Flying cars. There are flying cars. But we're still not at the 'We have flying cars!' stage. Yet. And probably none of us here will be alive to see the second or even third car be a flying car, for an average middle income family.
The future may be here tomorrow, but things in it are farther away than they may appear.
Where do I begin? First, flying cars [vehicles] exist and have for some time; they’re called airplanes and they nicely represent the shared use case that we’ll see with autonomous vehicles in coming years.
Autonomous cars will, for the vast majority of their users, be shared via ride hailing services. When a car needs no driver, a person needs no car. For monthly costs comparable or less than the costs of operating, maintaining, insuring a single vehicle, one will one day be able to hail whichever type of vehicle is needed on a case by case basis.
As for when, did Woz the visionary speak to how many more turns of Moore’s Law it will take before processing capability of machine learning systems will far surpass the capabilities of humans for discrete tasks like driving? Hint: it’s apparently not even on the Moore’s Law trajectory if you go by the year-over-year improvement in something like Apple’s A12 versus A11 Machine Learning component (from 600 billon to 5 trillion operations per second in one leap).
Driving is an intractable multi-variant problem, but it can be solved. It’s solved by 16 year olds daily as they qualify for their licenses. One of the great advantages of the machine intelligence is that experience can be shared nearly instantly; just blast out a refresh to all vehicles in a fleet and they all benefit from the aggregate hours of experience gained across the entire fleet. Can’t do that with humans. Vehicles piloted by machine intelligence also don’t suffer from the consequences of aging, alcohol and other substances, sleep deprivation, mood, temper, stress, certain types of distraction like exists when eating while driving, applying make-up while driving, texting while driving, interacting with other passengers (kids) while driving, etc.
Woz is no visionary to suggest autonomous driving isn’t ready yet; the subject of the current state of autonomous capability and where the inflection point exists where a mixed fleet of human and autonomous vehicles would be safer than what we have on the roads now is an ongoing conversation and subject of much study. Woz is merely tossing his hat in the shallow end of the pool to mark himself as a visionary among those who don’t really have an idea of what it takes to truly be a visionary. In other words, he impresses those with a lay-person’s comprehension, but he simply annoys the rest of us.
A well respected U.K. car test driving magazine website has a video on YouTube (which I cannot seem to track down right now) in which they discovered a glitch in Tesla’s self-driving where when driving on a perfect straight, impeccably marked road with gradual up and down undulations, the car all of a sudden tried to take a diagonal left turn directly into oncoming traffic. It was one of the more dangerous car demos I have ever seen. They told Tesla about it and Tesla said a software update is coming for that “issue”. Tesla drivers are guinea pigs for their platform. None of these feature should be legally allowed on public roads at this point.
Tesla warns their customers to always keep their hands on the wheel and they now warn drivers if their hands stray from holding the wheel too long. Further, I think the car will pull over to the side of the road if there is no contact with the wheel after a while. They're being more cautious than they were before, but driver responsibility is what it really comes down to.
Woz isn’t always right. And he’s definitely wrong here.
He's not. You are.
He's absolutely right that fully self-driving cars are not ready for prime time. He also brings up a fantastic point, which is that roadway infrastructure hasn't been designed for them and that a pretty significant amount of retro-fitting or redesign would be required before they were.
We already have some elements of self-driving that work well enough, like auto-parallel parking and "sensing the need to brake" and other safety-oriented features, and that's great. But unlike you, Woz has actually tested the full self-driving feature out in a production vehicle -- and found that it makes lots of mistakes. If you have evidence that his own car is lying to him, produce your documentation -- or sit down and shut up.
There's nothing in Woz's comments that suggest companies should stop trying to produce a self-driving car, he's just saying that the early attempts aren't mainstream-level at present -- and as someone who launched another life-changing example of technology that strove for, but wasn't quite, "there yet" when it first shipped, he does in fact know what he's talking about.
I hope other car companies will invite him to compare and contrast Tesla's system to their own systems, to see if there's a marked difference among the various projects. Since one of the main consumer markets for self-driving cars (excluding things like delivery vehicles, or taxis) would be for people who can no longer or never could drive themselves -- having someone who is himself a senior offering his informed commentary on their progress is pretty valuable.
I think in this case he's right. Some of the issues we've seen so far is taking command because you think the car is doing something, and you think you know better, but you didn't see what the car did and are the one that caused the wreck.
Also you have a lot of other idiotdvon the road driving that no computer will ever be able to understand and adjust. Roads and parking and so many other things are not some uniformed standard.
Until there's a real AI driving like KITT for example, these are all just dumb computers. I sure as hell don't trust them. But as I get okder, I want a day where I can get around where I want to go with my self driving car even though I'm to old to drive myself anymore for whatever reason. I just think we are far from that point.
I think in this case he's right. Some of the issues we've seen so far is taking command because you think the car is doing something, and you think you know better, but you didn't see what the car did and are the one that caused the wreck.
Also you have a lot of other idiotdvon the road driving that no computer will ever be able to understand and adjust. Roads and parking and so many other things are not some uniformed standard.
Until there's a real AI driving like KITT for example, these are all just dumb computers. I sure as hell don't trust them. But as I get okder, I want a day where I can get around where I want to go with my self driving car even though I'm to old to drive myself anymore for whatever reason. I just think we are far from that point.
Considering we're only about 26 years away from the theoretical Technological Singularity, complex (but "simple" compared to strong A.I.) tasks like autonomy for vehicles should continue to develop much faster than expected.
I don’t care about the level of importance people put on Woz’s claims and ideas.
I DO think that fully autonomous cars are a pathological technology, which is a large step beyond his current statement.
Being pathological hasn’t stopped billions of dollars and decades of time being invested and wasted pursuing other irrational and impractical things, and it won’t stop this pathological pursuit either. Ultimately, time will exhaust the notion, as the fundamental flaws in the concept continue to persist. Or it won’t. There are still people pursuing personal jet packs and flying cars.
From a legal perspective I think states should limit autonomous vehicles to interstate highways for 3-5 years so the manufacturers can gain more real world experience. Interstates are better marked and less variable than off highway roads
My experience driving in Manhattan is that pedestrians are less predictable and more of a challenge to a driver, than are other vehicles.
The complexity of coding millions of lines lines of code is significant. Doing so without error is impossible. I agree with Woz
I think the Woz has an overabundance of skepticism coupled with a high level of risk aversion. This is probably why countries at war build their fighting forces around the young and the reckless rather than the more timid middle aged and elderly, even though a humanity-based cost-benefit analysis would clearly favor sending those who've already enjoyed many decades of productive and enjoyable living to the front lines rather than those who have barely tasted life at all. For all we know, all senior staffed wars could end with both sides simply deciding to sleep-in and save themselves for the 4:00 PM senior dinner discounts at Denny's. Like ... why bother? Let's just have some pie.
In all seriousness, I'd like to see many more semi-autonomous driving applications that employ AI based driver assistance and human-machine collaboration. Yes, there are already things like lane keeping assist and assisted emergency braking but many more possibilities exist such as limiting vehicle speed based on visibility and range of headlights, warning drivers who commit blatantly stupid driving acts (like passing 3 cars and a horse & buggy on a double yellow on a blind hill - see it all the time), deer/wildlife and pedestrian recognition & avoidance, no hands on the wheel detection, trying to pass a stopped school bus, erratic throttle control, etc. Add to this peer-to-peer vehicle interaction, e.g., ice on road ahead, rain/snow/dust storm ahead, stopped traffic ahead, stopped school bus/garbage truck/UPS van range limited beacons, etc. Many of the more challenging adaptive features that are required by totally autonomous vehicles can potentially be characterized and learned by the AI while there is still a human in the loop, although the quality of some of the human drivers may be questionable.
He's a smart guy, but apparently initially bought into the hype (and probably doesn't have much philosophy or philosophy of mind experience). I'm glad to see he's now thinking more clearly and isn't just parroting the industry baloney. We need more people like him to speak up.
... I could add, with 100% certainty, we are not ready to colonize the Moon just yet either. Do I make the front page too?
But, the technology and foundations for that are possible. AI cars rest on technology that may never be ready, or on sci-fi concepts that aren't possible.
Waymo are going to launch their service very soon even though I have very much the same reservations/concerns as he does.
I won't be using one any time soon.
Hopefully people like Steve can bring people to their senses before going ahead with this foolishness. People are going to die needlessly. But it's $$$ (not safety) driving this, so they won't let clear-thought stand in their way.
georgie01 said: ... With our culture’s obsession with feeling like we’re so smart and feeling so proud of ourselves (even though it’s just a tiny fraction of us who actually make AI things), we forget that the human brain is extremely sophisticated. Just because we can’t do math as quickly as a computer doesn’t mean AI can do a better job than us, or that we even understand the capabilities of the brain to such a degree that we can replace the extent of processing necessary to have confidence in AI’s judgement.
There is no judgement, nor is it acting like our mind. That's the sci-fi version of AI. What it is doing is adding to an elaborate knowledge base that will continue to index more and more situations... except that what is being indexed here is insanely massive. The scope of the job is being grossly underestimated. Yes, sensors will get better, and computers will get faster. But that does little to advance AI in a way many imagine. It won't just get magically better because it has more speed/capacity/detail.
SpamSandwich said: Please. There is a very large population of drivers in the US (Baby Boomers) who are not getting any younger and they, possibly more than any other segment of the population, want and need this kind of service.
Wanting doesn't make it so. But, yes, that and commercial interests are what is pushing this blindly forward at an alarming pace.
I'll bet that when cars get more autonomous ....it will soon develop into everyone will be required to either own an autonomous vehicle or ride in autonomous busses.
That's really the only way I can see it kind of working. All AI (which makes the AI a bit irrelevant) vehicles networked together and working together with an extremely well-mapped world. But, even then, unless we re-do our entire infrastructure, it still has to deal with weather, pedestrians, cyclists, animals, etc. But AI-only vehicles at least solves the vehicle-vehicle interaction.
christopher126 said: Currently, there are approximately 36,000 highway deaths per year or about 102 per day. 50% are due to alcohol or some other drug induced impairment.
It's about 1 fatality per 100M miles driven. In that regard, I don't think all AI vehicles combined have booked enough miles for their even to be 1 death, and there have already been a few.
If we were really serious about improving safety, we'd do something about that impairment thing... or even give some reasonable driver training. This isn't about safety, though. That's just the sales-pitch.
DAalseth said: After all who objects to anti-lock breaks? They were the first automotive AI technology. Who objects to cruise controls that maintain a distance from the car ahead of you? That's another one.
There's nothing AI about either of those.
SpamSandwich said: Also, autonomous vehicles as we know them today are not examples of "artificial intelligence", they are examples of "machine learning".
Good point. That's a better way to talk about it... how hard it is to solve the machine learning challenge faced here. AI starts people thinking about sci-fi and terminator and 'self-aware' or systems that actually think, etc.
radarthekat said: As for when, did Woz the visionary speak to how many more turns of Moore’s Law it will take before processing capability of machine learning systems will far surpass the capabilities of humans for discrete tasks like driving?
Moore's Law has nothing to do with this. It's a quantitative problem, not a quantitative one.
...
GM already has a 2019 model with ZERO CONTROLS....no steering wheel or pedals........
No. They don't.
They've made press releases saying they PLAN to... but they don't yet... and likely won't.
No doubt. I think, was it Nissan made a bunch of futuristic videos too. But, I can make futuristic videos, as well. That doesn't mean I have a clue about how to actually do what is in the videos. It's marketing BS.
From a legal perspective I think states should limit autonomous vehicles to interstate highways for 3-5 years so the manufacturers can gain more real world experience.
I don't think they should be allowed on public streets/roads at all. If they can't drive 20 mph, why let them go 60mph?
Comments
Due to the lack of cars, as one would imagine, there were no car accidents.
Except once, when these two, aforementioned, automobiles (again, the only two in Ohio) ran into each other!
Currently, there are approximately 36,000 highway deaths per year or about 102 per day. 50% are due to alcohol or some other drug induced impairment.
The first part (Ohio) above may be untrue, but it does make the point, albeit, in a rather circuitous way...if we could snap our fingers and have instantly driverless cars we would take the drunks out of the equation and save over 18,000 lives per year...just doing that would be worth it.
Imagine if it could reduce highway deaths completely....Hmmm.
Best.
P.S. In 2016, 2,433 teens in the United States ages 16–19 were killed and 292,742 were treated in emergency departments for injuries suffered in motor vehicle crashes. That means that six teens ages 16–19 died every day due to motor vehicle crashes and hundreds more were injured.
In 2016, young people ages 15-19 represented 6.5% of the U.S. population. However, they accounted for an estimated $13.6 billion (8.4%) of the total costs of motor vehicle injuries.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/11/13/waymo-expected-to-launch-paid-driverless-ridehailing-service-in-december
I suspect we will see more and more self driving tech over time. It may be 7-10 years before you can go into a dealership and buy a car with no steering wheel, but already we have significant smart technologies in our cars. Self parking has been out for a few years. Lane warnings have been out, even cars that will bring you back into your lane if you ignore the warning. I suspect we will start seeing cars that will drive themselves on the freeway within a year. Tesla has one already but it's only called an assist. I mean a car that you enter the freeway, and pull out a newspaper while it sails along. This is coming only it won't be a massive fireworks in the sky it is here now. It will creep in one feature at a time until cars are autonomous and most people won't even notice. After all who objects to anti-lock breaks? They were the first automotive AI technology. Who objects to cruise controls that maintain a distance from the car ahead of you? That's another one.
As far as regulations needing to be changed. A lot of states and municipalities are doing this now.
Also, autonomous vehicles as we know them today are not examples of "artificial intelligence", they are examples of "machine learning".
Also who cares if it kills yet another dangerous job that humans shouldn’t have to do for themselves. That’s the whole point of automating jobs. Insert buggy whip maker joke here.
Autonomous cars will, for the vast majority of their users, be shared via ride hailing services. When a car needs no driver, a person needs no car. For monthly costs comparable or less than the costs of operating, maintaining, insuring a single vehicle, one will one day be able to hail whichever type of vehicle is needed on a case by case basis.
As for when, did Woz the visionary speak to how many more turns of Moore’s Law it will take before processing capability of machine learning systems will far surpass the capabilities of humans for discrete tasks like driving? Hint: it’s apparently not even on the Moore’s Law trajectory if you go by the year-over-year improvement in something like Apple’s A12 versus A11 Machine Learning component (from 600 billon to 5 trillion operations per second in one leap).
Driving is an intractable multi-variant problem, but it can be solved. It’s solved by 16 year olds daily as they qualify for their licenses. One of the great advantages of the machine intelligence is that experience can be shared nearly instantly; just blast out a refresh to all vehicles in a fleet and they all benefit from the aggregate hours of experience gained across the entire fleet. Can’t do that with humans. Vehicles piloted by machine intelligence also don’t suffer from the consequences of aging, alcohol and other substances, sleep deprivation, mood, temper, stress, certain types of distraction like exists when eating while driving, applying make-up while driving, texting while driving, interacting with other passengers (kids) while driving, etc.
Woz is no visionary to suggest autonomous driving isn’t ready yet; the subject of the current state of autonomous capability and where the inflection point exists where a mixed fleet of human and autonomous vehicles would be safer than what we have on the roads now is an ongoing conversation and subject of much study. Woz is merely tossing his hat in the shallow end of the pool to mark himself as a visionary among those who don’t really have an idea of what it takes to truly be a visionary. In other words, he impresses those with a lay-person’s comprehension, but he simply annoys the rest of us.
He's absolutely right that fully self-driving cars are not ready for prime time. He also brings up a fantastic point, which is that roadway infrastructure hasn't been designed for them and that a pretty significant amount of retro-fitting or redesign would be required before they were.
We already have some elements of self-driving that work well enough, like auto-parallel parking and "sensing the need to brake" and other safety-oriented features, and that's great. But unlike you, Woz has actually tested the full self-driving feature out in a production vehicle -- and found that it makes lots of mistakes. If you have evidence that his own car is lying to him, produce your documentation -- or sit down and shut up.
There's nothing in Woz's comments that suggest companies should stop trying to produce a self-driving car, he's just saying that the early attempts aren't mainstream-level at present -- and as someone who launched another life-changing example of technology that strove for, but wasn't quite, "there yet" when it first shipped, he does in fact know what he's talking about.
I hope other car companies will invite him to compare and contrast Tesla's system to their own systems, to see if there's a marked difference among the various projects. Since one of the main consumer markets for self-driving cars (excluding things like delivery vehicles, or taxis) would be for people who can no longer or never could drive themselves -- having someone who is himself a senior offering his informed commentary on their progress is pretty valuable.
2020?... perhaps.
2021?... more likely.
Of course they have test-mules in this configuration, but that's not the same as claiming they "already have a 2019 model...".
Also you have a lot of other idiotdvon the road driving that no computer will ever be able to understand and adjust. Roads and parking and so many other things are not some uniformed standard.
Until there's a real AI driving like KITT for example, these are all just dumb computers. I sure as hell don't trust them. But as I get okder, I want a day where I can get around where I want to go with my self driving car even though I'm to old to drive myself anymore for whatever reason. I just think we are far from that point.
I DO think that fully autonomous cars are a pathological technology, which is a large step beyond his current statement.
Being pathological hasn’t stopped billions of dollars and decades of time being invested and wasted pursuing other irrational and impractical things, and it won’t stop this pathological pursuit either. Ultimately, time will exhaust the notion, as the fundamental flaws in the concept continue to persist. Or it won’t. There are still people pursuing personal jet packs and flying cars.
My experience driving in Manhattan is that pedestrians are less predictable and more of a challenge to a driver, than are other vehicles.
The complexity of coding millions of lines lines of code is significant. Doing so without error is impossible. I agree with Woz
http://www.thedrive.com/tech/24677/how-the-media-gets-tesla-wrong-the-david-pogue-edition
Way too much hype of "autonomous" modes that aren't close to being "fully autonomous".
In all seriousness, I'd like to see many more semi-autonomous driving applications that employ AI based driver assistance and human-machine collaboration. Yes, there are already things like lane keeping assist and assisted emergency braking but many more possibilities exist such as limiting vehicle speed based on visibility and range of headlights, warning drivers who commit blatantly stupid driving acts (like passing 3 cars and a horse & buggy on a double yellow on a blind hill - see it all the time), deer/wildlife and pedestrian recognition & avoidance, no hands on the wheel detection, trying to pass a stopped school bus, erratic throttle control, etc. Add to this peer-to-peer vehicle interaction, e.g., ice on road ahead, rain/snow/dust storm ahead, stopped traffic ahead, stopped school bus/garbage truck/UPS van range limited beacons, etc. Many of the more challenging adaptive features that are required by totally autonomous vehicles can potentially be characterized and learned by the AI while there is still a human in the loop, although the quality of some of the human drivers may be questionable.
But, the technology and foundations for that are possible. AI cars rest on technology that may never be ready, or on sci-fi concepts that aren't possible.
Hopefully people like Steve can bring people to their senses before going ahead with this foolishness. People are going to die needlessly. But it's $$$ (not safety) driving this, so they won't let clear-thought stand in their way.
There is no judgement, nor is it acting like our mind. That's the sci-fi version of AI. What it is doing is adding to an elaborate knowledge base that will continue to index more and more situations... except that what is being indexed here is insanely massive. The scope of the job is being grossly underestimated. Yes, sensors will get better, and computers will get faster. But that does little to advance AI in a way many imagine. It won't just get magically better because it has more speed/capacity/detail.
Wanting doesn't make it so. But, yes, that and commercial interests are what is pushing this blindly forward at an alarming pace.
That's really the only way I can see it kind of working. All AI (which makes the AI a bit irrelevant) vehicles networked together and working together with an extremely well-mapped world. But, even then, unless we re-do our entire infrastructure, it still has to deal with weather, pedestrians, cyclists, animals, etc. But AI-only vehicles at least solves the vehicle-vehicle interaction.
If we were really serious about improving safety, we'd do something about that impairment thing... or even give some reasonable driver training. This isn't about safety, though. That's just the sales-pitch.
There's nothing AI about either of those.
Good point. That's a better way to talk about it... how hard it is to solve the machine learning challenge faced here. AI starts people thinking about sci-fi and terminator and 'self-aware' or systems that actually think, etc.
Moore's Law has nothing to do with this. It's a quantitative problem, not a quantitative one.
No doubt. I think, was it Nissan made a bunch of futuristic videos too. But, I can make futuristic videos, as well. That doesn't mean I have a clue about how to actually do what is in the videos. It's marketing BS.
I don't think they should be allowed on public streets/roads at all. If they can't drive 20 mph, why let them go 60mph?
In other words, he's far more wise than most of the commenters in this thread, and like 3/4 of the tech industry.