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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 stak

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.

oplaadpunt 4y ago
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.
- cinntaile 4y ago
  That's just trying to solve a simpler problem. It wasn't what we were promised!
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - oplaadpunt 4y ago
    I know, I think the promises are unrealistic :) This has always been my own imagined future
    - jamiek88 4y ago
      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!
- _dain_ 4y ago
  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 ...
  - kenjackson 4y ago
    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.
    - rtpg 4y ago
      Car rental services, taxis, buses, bikes, just having the station nearby. There are a billion options beyond “bring your own car”
  - thrwyoilarticle 4y ago
    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.
    - fooker 4y ago
      Highways have that many lanes only near large cities, where rail lines are also fairly parallel if you look at maps.
  - usrusr 4y ago
    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.
amadeuspagel 4y ago
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-10-06/even-after-100-billion-self-driving-cars-are-going-nowhere https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-10-06/even-afte...
noobermin 4y ago
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?
- brutusborn 4y ago
  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.
  - viscanti 4y ago
    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.
    - oblio 4y ago
      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.
rasz 4y ago
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.
- thatguy0900 4y ago
  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
- bj-rn 4y ago
  GT Sophy maybe? https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-outraces-human-champs-at-the-video-game-gran-turismo/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-outraces-human...
  - rasz 4y ago
    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.
spaceman_2020 4y ago
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.
Fricken 4y ago
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)
- andrepd 4y ago
  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.
  - Fricken 4y ago
    Tesla doesn't come anywhere close to having the sensor suite or compute to be taken seriously as a developer of level 4 autonomy.
    - onethought 4y ago
      What sensor suite is that?
      - oliveshell 4y ago
        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.
        onethought 4y ago
        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.
andrepd 4y ago
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.
- almost_usual 4y ago
  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.
  - _0w8t 4y ago
    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.
- gremlinsinc 4y ago
  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.
Tenoke 4y ago
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.
- Kye 4y ago
  Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results.
- thatguy0900 4y ago
  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
- davedx 4y ago
  Beyond questionable. It's anti-intellectual defeatism.
nier 4y ago
Where is this kind-of-a-wrapper-article you write about? What am I missing?
davedx 4y ago
> 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_intelligence 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.
dang 4y ago
We've changed the URL from https://medium.com/@doctorow/100-billion-later-autonomous-vehicles-are-still-a-car-wreck-16fec61c3f2c https://medium.com/@doctorow/100-billion-later-autonomous-ve... to the original source.

oplaadpunt 4y ago

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.

cinntaile 4y ago
That's just trying to solve a simpler problem. It wasn't what we were promised!
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- oplaadpunt 4y ago
  I know, I think the promises are unrealistic :) This has always been my own imagined future
  - jamiek88 4y ago
    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!
_dain_ 4y ago
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 ...
- kenjackson 4y ago
  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.
  - rtpg 4y ago
    Car rental services, taxis, buses, bikes, just having the station nearby. There are a billion options beyond “bring your own car”
- thrwyoilarticle 4y ago
  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.
  - fooker 4y ago
    Highways have that many lanes only near large cities, where rail lines are also fairly parallel if you look at maps.
- usrusr 4y ago
  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.

amadeuspagel 4y ago

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-10-06/even-after-100-billion-self-driving-cars-are-going-nowhere https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-10-06/even-afte...

noobermin 4y ago

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?

brutusborn 4y ago
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.
- viscanti 4y ago
  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.
  - oblio 4y ago
    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.

rasz 4y ago

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.

thatguy0900 4y ago
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
bj-rn 4y ago
GT Sophy maybe? https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-outraces-human-champs-at-the-video-game-gran-turismo/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-outraces-human...
- rasz 4y ago
  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.

spaceman_2020 4y ago

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.

Fricken 4y ago

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)

andrepd 4y ago
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.
- Fricken 4y ago
  Tesla doesn't come anywhere close to having the sensor suite or compute to be taken seriously as a developer of level 4 autonomy.
  - onethought 4y ago
    What sensor suite is that?
    - oliveshell 4y ago
      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.
      - onethought 4y ago
        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.

andrepd 4y ago

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.

almost_usual 4y ago
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.
- _0w8t 4y ago
  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.
gremlinsinc 4y ago
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.

Tenoke 4y ago

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.

Kye 4y ago
Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results.
thatguy0900 4y ago
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
davedx 4y ago
Beyond questionable. It's anti-intellectual defeatism.

nier 4y ago

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

davedx 4y ago

> 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_intelligence 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.

dang 4y ago

We've changed the URL from https://medium.com/@doctorow/100-billion-later-autonomous-vehicles-are-still-a-car-wreck-16fec61c3f2c https://medium.com/@doctorow/100-billion-later-autonomous-ve... to the original source.