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Musk Says Drivers May Become Obsolete, Announces Juice-Saving Upgrades
Lucas123 (935744) writes During a discussion at a Nvidia conference, Elon Musk predicted that in the future, consumers will not be allowed to drive cars because it will be considered too dangerous. [Note: compare Lyft CEO Logan Green's opposite view] 'You can't have a person driving a two-ton death machine,' he said. Others agree. Thilo Koslowski, a vice president at Gartner, said instead of laws dictating drivers must cede control to their car's computer, we may someday someday just pass signs requiring drivers to activate auto-drive functionality for certain particularly treacherous stretches of roadway. Kowlowski said fully autonomous vehicles won't be ubiquitous for another 10 to 15 years, but the government could spur that on by offering tax incentives as it does today with all-electric vehicles and hybrids. Related news: it may not be fully autonomous driving, but Tesla S drivers are promised an upgrade a few months from now that gives a taste, with the addition of automatic steering features. And though it's perhaps anti-climactic as a solution to "ending range anxiety," Musk also announced today that Teslas will get in the next two weeks a software upgrade that will greatly upgrade the cars' routing software, integrating "near-realtime" lists of available supercharger stations, and keeping drivers apprised of whether one is within range.
They should let owners lend their private chargers for a fee, handled by Tesla. Something like Uber but for charging your car.
wasn't elon just recently warning us against autonomous intelligence?
jalopnik article
'"It's much easier than people think" says Musk, outlining how most of the sensors and systems available right now can handle self-driving duties on the freeway, something Tesla showed off late last year with its AutoPilot features.'
As someone who has spent a career working on safety-critical real-time systems, I can assure you that it's not in any way "much easier than people think". Quite the opposite. Sure, driving a car down a well marked highway on a clear sunny day with little traffic and no system failures is easy. But if you obscure the lane markings in any of a number of ways, add inclement weather, throw out random obstacles, random system failures, etc. the problem gets monumentally harder. Throw in an urban environment with all sorts of other issues just keeps making it harder and harder. And solving all of those problems takes up well over 90% of the effort when designing an autonomous system. Hell, developing something that can recognize the problem in the first place is hard enough. Being able to differentiate between sensor failure and sensors indicating a failure is a non-trivial task. He's full of it if he thinks we're anywhere near having a self driving car that's ready for public consumption.
Sure, there are self driving cars out there on the road. But they have huge engineering and support teams using them as an evaluation platform. And it's good that we have made as much progress as we have. I look forward to seeing the work continue and advance the technology. But it's not an easy task. It's going to take probably decades before we're really ready for a fully autonomous self driving car that's ready for public consumption. We'll probably see some of the technologies work their way into cars between now and then. And that's a good thing too. But it's not going to happen overnight because it's much harder than people think.
when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
Which may very well occur when autonomous vehicles can't decide what they should do and come to a stop, causing others to plow into them.
More likely, just like older folk that insist on hand-writing letters, having a land-line, and banking in person, you will not be forced to give up your driving. Instead, your costs will go up, while other more inexpensive or convenient options will become available for those who don't care to drive to get from A->B.
Feel free to yell at those folks from your porch to stay off your lawn as they blissfully ignore you.
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No because you see, the other autonomous vehicles will stop in time.
As for the manually driven cars plowing into them - well they do that today anyway, don't they?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
and what will happen to people automated out of a job?
Go back to school and rack up big loans just to be told you are to old for the job?
End having to use the jail / prison for there doctor for the stuff that er will not cover?
Being automated out of a job is inevitable - it's been happening for decades. The REAL problem is twofile: (1) that we are no longer creating new, higher-paying jobs to replace those that were automated away, and (2) that the benefits of increased productivity per worker haven't been shared by the workers for 40 years.
Going back to school under those conditions is insane - why rack up debt to train for a job you'll never get?
Jail is an option some homeless people have been using for years - break a window, wait for the cops, sleep in a not-so-cold jail cell.
No, I don't have any real solutions :-( Sorry.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
or a mechanical failure on the part of a self driving car but anyway....
The reason we will not have a self driving car is because we do not have the technology to do it to the extent that the manufacture will be willing to except the liability in the event of an accident. Instead we will eventually over time with many upgrades along the way get a very advanced version of cruise control that can be turned off and on shifting the liability back to the driver.
Just like we don't have flying cars because it's not practical from production cost or for the manufacture or owner to take on that liability as a mechanical failure at altitude is immediately a costly accident. This is not the case with the cars we have now mechanical failures although they can don't usually result in an accident.
... that work on the new holy grail, autonomous vehicles. Somehow, the level of confidence in this new technology seems to be inversely proportional to the distance to the nitty-gritty details of actually doing this. Can someone please tell me, exactly, how this is supposed to be done? Without using the phrase "how hard can it be".
Let's take the simplest of all the detection problems. How many lines of code does it take to reliably and safely detect the lane markings of a road? Nobody knows, because nobody has done it yet. Yes, there are prototypes that can handle some sub sets of all cases. The best I've seen handles 90% of the cases. That takes 1 MSLOC and still counting. How expensive will the last 10% be? How many hours of recorded video data does it take to verify the last 10%? The last 1%? The 90% takes a room full of TB harddisks and thousands of units parallel verification.
But yeah, how hard can it be to make a fully autonomous vehicle? I'll bet we'll have the fusion, flying car and AI analog: constantly 30 years in the future with winters interspearsed.
The REAL problem is twofile: (1) that we are no longer creating new, higher-paying jobs to replace those that were automated away, and (2) that the benefits of increased productivity per worker haven't been shared by the workers for 40 years.
The REAL problem is that you can't imagine what you could possibly ever do without a 'job'.
Not only that, requirements in the auto industry move slowly. Airbags were patented in the 1950's, saw use in production vehicles in the 1970's, but were not mandated in the USA until a law was passed in 1991....which didn't take effect until 1998. Seat belts have a similar history. And these are things without the moral implications of programming a car to potentially choose *which* imminent accident to avoid. 40+ years to go from concept to federal mandate. Testing has started, but we are still very much in the conceptual phase of self-driving cars.
Now, layer in the fact that there's a strong culture in the US where driving == freedom, and he still thinks this will be a requirement in any of our lifetimes? For the foreseeable future, it would be political suicide, no matter what the safety statistics say. I'm certainly not holding my breath.
I remember how Bill Gates never thought that the Internet would ever take off. Also Edison thought we'd all live in pour-in-place concrete....
Yeah well, I don't think that Bill Gates is a genius. According to this interesting perspective,
What really made him rich was having been in the right place at the right time in 1981 when IBM needed an operating system for its new PC. Gates (with Allen) borrowed heavily, to put it gently, from an existing operating system, Digital Research’s CP/M. (For DR’s version of this history—“Microsoft paid Seattle Software Works for an unauthorized clone of CP/M, and Microsoft licensed this clone to IBM”—see here. A less biased, though still damning, look is here.) In other words, another instance of adopting someone else’s work and taking credit for it—this time with the innovation of litigating aggressively and manipulating markets to defend a monopoly position. Because once it secured that monopoly, Microsoft did everything it could to crush competition.
And Edison was rather similar. Edison used brute force discovery to solve the light-bulb filament problem, and used some, shall we say agressive business tactics to protect his business. In order to make people afraid of his competition (alternating current, Westinghouse), he used AC to electrocute animals such as elephants. He successfully campaigned to have AC used to execute death row prisoners (the electric chair). He was, IMHO not a genius.
Elon Musk is, in my opinion, a bona fide genius. With a bachelors degree in physics, he taught himself rocket science, and was the chief designer of an entire rocket, the Falcon I. This rocket managed to put two objects in orbit before being superceded by the Falcon 9. The amount of information he must have learned is astounding. Fluid dynamics, combustion, orbital dynamics and trajectory control, metallurgy, each in and of itself an entire field of study. He also has a solid background in computer science.
So, I will give what Musk says on the future of transport quite a bit of weight. He has earned it.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)