Autonomous Cars Aren't As Smart as They're Cracked Up To Be (computerworld.com)

Gill Pratt, executive technical adviser at Toyota, offers a note of caution, even as more car companies start putting AI elements into their cars. Speaking in Tokyo at the announcement of a Silicon Valley AI research center that Toyota is to open in early 2016, Pratt pointed out the big shortcoming in an AI system as applied to automobile: Autonomous cars might look great in controlled tests or on pristine highways, "but soon fail when faced with tasks that human drivers find simple." From the article: Drivers, for example, can pretty much get behind the wheel of a car and drive it wherever it may be, he said. Autonomous vehicles use GPS and laser imaging sensors to figure out where they are by matching data against a complex map that goes beyond simple roads and includes details down to lane markings. The cars rely on all that data to drive, so they quickly hit problems in areas that haven't been mapped in advance. ... A truly intelligent self-driving car needs artificial intelligence that can figure out where it is even if it has no map or GPS, and manage to navigate highways and follow routes even if there are diversions or changing in lane markings, he said. I regularly drive a stretch of road that's just a few miles long, but between construction, accidents, poor marking, bicycles, and heavy traffic I'd be nervous about letting an AI system navigate. In what real-world driving scenarios would you most want humans to take over?

Comments

So just have the cars drive where it is easy

[LetterRip]

You don't have to have the car drive everywhere, 95% of the places you drive will probably have all of the factors needed for the car to navigate easily. Just don't have the car drive in areas where it can readily get in trouble.

You don't start teens off in ambiguous hard to drive conditions, but rather low traffic side streets or empty parking lots, etc.

We don't need self driving cars that are perfect from the start, merely good enough to drive us most places most of the time, and do not have accidents in the areas that are suitable for it to drive.

Re:So just have the cars drive where it is easy

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't know where you live, but here they change lanes around, close lanes, and reroute traffic on a nearly daily basis. Its been non-stop doing that for over 10 years straight. If auto driving cars depend on GPS that means I can't use it to just go to work even, not to mention going somewhere else.

What happens when they close part of the city for a parade and a lot of streets are closed? Your car just stops and waits the 4 hours for it to pass before continuing? Sure you could take over, but if your drunk and you do that you committed a DUI, the reason you bought a self driving car to start.

Re:So just have the cars drive where it is easy

[AthanasiusKircher]

You don't start teens off in ambiguous hard to drive conditions, but rather low traffic side streets or empty parking lots, etc.

We don't need self driving cars that are perfect from the start, merely good enough to drive us most places most of the time, and do not have accidents in the areas that are suitable for it to drive.

This might be true if we lived in a "rational" society. We don't. We live in a society whose concerns are driven by media hype. These days, the media seems to be on the side of self-driving vehicles because they seem really cool and awesome as a concept.

But the media is fickle and could change its mind the moment something more sensational happens.

We've already seen issues with idiots using the Tesla "autopilot" feature in ways it wasn't intended, and the company is starting to rein in its use to prevent idiots from using it in cases where it's likely to fail.

The thing most people seem to be forgetting is that most cars are effectively multi-ton projectiles that easily have the potential to kill. And it's not feasible to expect human drivers to take over in a split second to stop an accident when the software fails.

All it takes is one idiot who puts a car into self-driving mode in a place where the software can't handle it yet, and that car inadvertently causes an accident involving a schoolbus and kills a couple kids (or even hits a family traveling in a van on vacation or whatever). Can you imagine the fallout??

It doesn't matter whether a human driver could have avoided the accident or not. The headlines will just read "AI CAR KILLS KIDS." The (probably rich) guy who drove it will be horrified as he gets sued, leading other rich guys to avoid buying the cars. The car company, engineers who designed the software, etc. will also get sued. And heaven help them if they built in some small choice in their software that led the car to drive into the bus rather than effectively "committing suicide" if the collision was avoidable... suddenly all those ethical debates about whether it's okay to kill kids on a bus rather than doing a potentially suicidal maneuver to avoid it will come into play.

By this point, Congress and state leaders will step in and start banning these cars until safety issues can be worked out. Self-driving cars will be set back at least a decade or two as they are subjected to ridiculous regulatory constraints that human drivers would never have to deal with.

Will this nightmare scenario come true? I'm sure every executive who is betting on self-driving cars hopes to heck it doesn't. And any of them who have any good sense are trying their best to ensure the cars are as nearly "perfect from the start" as they can make them, to avoid this nightmare scenario.

Of course, in additional to living in a society driven by media hysteria, we also live in an economy driven by greed -- so despite safety concerns, I'm also sure that many of these companies are trying to beat their competitors in getting these self-driving systems out.

But your analogy with a "teen driver" doesn't work at all. People who own these cars will use them inappropriately, even if warned not to. And if AI cars kill someone (even if it couldn't be prevented), it's not going to be a teen losing a license or going to prison... it could ruin the whole industry for decades.

Re:So just have the cars drive where it is easy

[TWX]

Don't know where you live, but here they change lanes around, close lanes, and reroute traffic on a nearly daily basis. Its been non-stop doing that for over 10 years straight. If auto driving cars depend on GPS that means I can't use it to just go to work even, not to mention going somewhere else.

What happens when they close part of the city for a parade and a lot of streets are closed? Your car just stops and waits the 4 hours for it to pass before continuing? Sure you could take over, but if your drunk and you do that you committed a DUI, the reason you bought a self driving car to start.

I expect that in addition to cars being able to self-determine routes and find barriers there will need to be intelligent barriers that the cars can detect and follow the instructions of. These kinds of barriers would be used by construction crews, emergency responders, and perhaps even as a function of the four-way hazards when a car is stopped on the side of the road. Call it a more precise means for the autonomous car to determine what it should do or what the expectation is in a complex situation.

Just as an example, in long-term highway construction projects it's not uncommon to take a two-lane-single-direction stretch of Interstate and to route both directions on it, one going the natural way, the other driving what would normally be opposed, while the other two-lane stretch is being worked on. In cases like this there needs to be a way for the construction barriers themselves to notify the vehicles both that something has overridden the expected behavior, and that this particular path is the override. The car will in-turn have to account for this deviation in the path and to know that it's not actually trying to go the wrong-way even though its default programming would say that it is, and it would have to understand that while one lane is now no longer the wrong, way, the other lane still is the wrong way and to not try to use it.

Other construction-related examples include the ability to follow a pilot car and the ability to pay attention to flag-men. The flag-men method is a variation of the one-lane bridge in many cases with the addition of a very spontaneous control (ie, the switch from slow to stop and stop to slow comes without warning from the flag-man himself, so the vehicle must pay attention to the flow of traffic in addition to somehow figuring out the sign or receiving a signal from the sign), and the nature of pilot cars means that there has to be some means for cars to be subordinate to other vehicles, which leads into the next example...

...emergency responders. Cars will need to respect things like fire trucks blocking the road, or police cars blocking the road, or tow-trucks blocking the road, or any other sort of obstruction that will be present for awhile and indicates that it isn't safe to be within a certain area. Cars may also have to react to barriers placed by these responders, and it may make sense for those barriers to have some kind of component that lets them more intelligently broadcast so that the cars don't have to figure out what they are visually. Obviously if the police are attempting to close a stretch of road due to an accident investigation they want to keep cars out of that area so that the evidence is not disturbed. If firefighters are working on a structure fire they need to keep cars out of the immediate staging area and from driving down the road that the firemen may be crossing regularly without notice. They also need to keep a wide berth when a tow truck driver is working with a disabled vehicle, wherever that vehicle is disabled and whatever is wrong (ie, difference between an overturned vehicle on the highway, a stalled vehicle on the highway, and a stalled vehicle on the median or shoulder). These are all complex situations that happen all of the time, and cars need to be able to handle them.

I think the first application for autonomous cars will be open-highway dr

Re:That's nothing

[belthize]

I don't see the issue.

For many scenarios where a human will have to fave that decision the autonomous car never will because it would have chosen option C, avoid situation long before it became an issue. Take the Oklahoma parade a few weeks ago, an autonomous car would not have had to decide should I kill the drunk driver or plow into the parade.

But lets pretend that the car has to decide and chooses poorly and wipes out 10 people in a crowd including little kids. How is that a problem if across the set of all autonomous cars 100 such occurrences were avoided. Choices should be made on relative merits, X is better than Y. Not X is perfect or X is imperfect.

Are you trolling or just boring?

[drinkypoo]

People keep saying this, but the truth is that the car is going to [be programmed to] follow the law. That means it's going to approach intersections at safe speeds, and it's going to avoid hitting pedestrians in crosswalks but will simply murderize them even if there's ten of them in your lane, and a cancer-ridden octagenarian driving a yugo in the other lane — even if the car has enough sensors to smell cancer, it's still going to run right into those pedestrians like you've gone bowling rather than deviate from the marked lane. It's going to make a good-faith best effort to stop. But remember, it's not going to go around a blind curve at a speed at which it can't stop if there's an obstacle. It's simply going to decelerate for the curve, and then accelerate again on the other side. If someone is in the road, it won't hit them, because it's not driving for fun. It's driving to minimize risk.

Re:Are you trolling or just boring?

[kheldan]

Sure. But is it going to slow down or come screeching to a halt when some dumb cat or dog runs out into the road, and cause the vehicle behind it to rear-end it, or is it going to know that while squishing Fluffy is sad and regrettable, it's preferable to causing an accident in which property will be damaged, and more to the point, where human beings might be injured or killed? It won't, because it won't differentiate between a cat, a dog, a squirrel, or a human child, or some kids' balloon that drifts on the breeze from his birthday party into the roadway. Please don't talk about how this won't be a problem because all cars will be autonomous cars and never operated by a human being because that's about as likely to happen in our lifetime as practical and widespread use of fusion reactors to supply electricity is likely to happen in our lifetime. Also there will always be bicyclists and motorcycles, and you can't make those 'autonomous' so there's always going to be other variables in the traffic equation that you can't control and can't accurately predict the behavior of, and before you say it, claiming that we'll outlaw those things is at best unrealistic. Also, I don't want to live in a world where you can't 'drive for fun', and I know I'm far from being alone in that sentiment. Honestly, the whole 'autonomous car' thing is so completely overblown that I don't know how anyone can take it seriously anymore. It's just not going to happen anywhere near like some people think it's going to happen, and I don't understand why some people can't see that.

Re:Are you trolling or just boring?

[drinkypoo]

Sure. But is it going to slow down or come screeching to a halt when some dumb cat or dog runs out into the road, and cause the vehicle behind it to rear-end it,

No, because rear-endings are caused by insufficient following distance.

It won't, because it won't differentiate between a cat, a dog, a squirrel, or a human child, or some kids' balloon that drifts on the breeze from his birthday party into the roadway.

They're going to see that stuff before it even enters the roadway, so they don't have to hit it to begin with. In situations where the sides of the roadway are obscured, the vehicles will simply reduce their speed — the same thing a human driver should be doing.

Also there will always be bicyclists

In California, we're already required to stay three feet away from them at all times. That helps account for their inherent variability. A self-driving car won't get pissed off when it gets held up by some cyclist who won't pull over to permit passing, as the law demands.

and motorcycles,

Not only can you reasonably make a self-driving motorcycle eventually, but they'll eventually be prohibited from lane splitting anywhere, which will make them easier to predict.

Also, I don't want to live in a world where you can't 'drive for fun',

Support your local racing organization.

Re:Are you trolling or just boring?

[stoatwblr]

"But is it going to slow down or come screeching to a halt when some dumb cat or dog runs out into the road, and cause the vehicle behind it to rear-end it,"

That kind of thing would be a rare event if the tailgating driver was criminally charged - as he/she should be.

There's a reason for safe following distance laws and what you've described is an argument in favour of more AI in charge of cars, not less.

Re:That's nothing

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

The issue is, human drivers have a strong instinct of self-preservation. Someone who has to decide between the parade and the tree in a split second will probably avoid the tree out of sheer instinct.

Now then, you might think the cool-headed computerized car will make the right decision and kill its occupant. But I can just imagine the following court case: "Your honor, my father's car killed him wilfully. I therefore sue Toyota/BMW/Honda/Google for murder, and for 100 kajillion dollars in damage".

One such court case - especially in the US - will do enormous damage to the entire industry, and might kill it off entirely. And no, the argument that autonomous car create fewer accidents overall won't fly, because somebody's property isn't supposed to kill its owner on purpose. You can bet emotions will run high, and emotions aren't good for rational debates.

Not to mention of course, people will have second thoughts about buying a vehicle that they know can decide to put them in danger for the greater good.

"It has to be perfect before it'll work"

[paradxum]

"A truly intelligent self-driving car needs artificial intelligence that can figure out where it is even if it has no map or GPS, and manage to navigate highways and follow routes even if there are diversions or changing in lane markings, he said." - from tfa

Frakly this is BS... I drive a large portion of my day for work (not a trucker, IT guy going to clients.) I run into "diversions or chaning in lane markings" and have to stop and think about what to do at times too! Why should an AI have to understand the intentions of a road worker/civil engineer better than we do before it can be accepted as intelligent?

" that can figure out where it is even if it has no map or GPS" ... OK, I'm going to drop you off in the middle of Kentucky mountain area with no GPS and no map, leave you stranded with noone to talk to and you should just magically know where you are.... sorry but NO. Unless I had been there before (i.e. prior knowledge or.... mapping) I will have no clue where I am and will have to basically start driving in one direction (which these cars can do) until I figure out where I am.

I know the media hype's this up, but he's going the other way and just being all doom and gloom.

Re:"It has to be perfect before it'll work"

[Gaygirlie]

Frakly this is BS... I drive a large portion of my day for work (not a trucker, IT guy going to clients.) I run into "diversions or chaning in lane markings" and have to stop and think about what to do at times too! Why should an AI have to understand the intentions of a road worker/civil engineer better than we do before it can be accepted as intelligent?

I'm not seeing anyone in TFA saying it'd have to be better at it than us, just that it'd have to be able to do it at all would be a good start. As things stand autonomous cars are not anywhere near of being capable of doing that on their own.

I will have no clue where I am and will have to basically start driving in one direction (which these cars can do) until I figure out where I am.

No, they can't. That's the whole point here: as long as they rely on GPS and very detailed mappings for navigation they won't be able to do that -- they need to know where they are to be able to start driving at all. The author wasn't saying the car should be able to magically instantly know where it is even when no mappings or GPS was available, just that the car should still be able to try and figure it out -- quite possibly doing the exact thing you suggested and trying to find a roadsign or two. The issue here is that these cars won't know even how to get off the god damn parking lot without GPS and mappings, let alone going out and figuring their own surroundings on their own without some very extensive AI.

Toyota getting left behind

[monkeyxpress]

Translation: Toyota is woefully behind in autonomous car development, and rather worried about it.

The FUD begins.

Re:Toyota getting left behind

[Chuq]

Yep. It's hard to take someone seriously when they are the executive technical adviser of a company that is pushing hydrogen cars over battery electric.

Re:Toyota getting left behind

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Yep. It's hard to take someone seriously when they are the executive technical adviser of a company that is pushing hydrogen cars over battery electric.

Hydrogen cars? What could possib- *KABOOM* (debris and body parts rain down)

Re:Toyota getting left behind

[RR]

Forget autonomous car development, Toyota is woefully behind in computer-controlled car development. Random relevant article: Toyota's killer firmware: Bad design and its consequences.

we automate routine tasks

[NostalgiaForInfinity]

The cars rely on all that data to drive, so they quickly hit problems in areas that haven't been mapped in advance.

I don't see that as a problem. If it works on most of the roads people drive every day, that's good enough. As with all automation, we automate routine tasks and let humans do the rest.

A truly intelligent self-driving car needs

But we don't need "truly intelligent self-driving cars" for self-driving cars to be very useful any more than we need "truly intelligent factory robots" for factory automation to be very useful.

I regularly drive a stretch of road that's just a few miles long, but between construction, accidents, poor marking, bicycles, and heavy traffic I'd be nervous about letting an AI system navigate.

Well, then don't. In fact, your AI driver would probably simply avoid that route altogether precisely for those reasons and still get you to your destination safely and efficiently. Nobody says that an automated driver needs to take the same route as you do; after all, bikes, motorcycles, buses and light rail probably don't either.

Re:That's OK, I only care about bar crawls

[sumdumass]

The problem with taxis (if there actually are any running that late in your area- mine there aren't) is that if you didn't start off intending to drink, it costs double because you have to retrieve your car. Of course it could be double anyways because you have to get to the bar in the first place.

It would be so much easier to just program the destination in before having a drink (say on way home from work or something) and then just push some buttons to get home. The vast majority of my drinking away from home is spur of the moment where i got invited from somewhere else or work was such a bitch i need to unwind a bit before going home.

So they aren't as smart as they're supposed to be.

[hey!]

Well, neither are human drivers.

Last quarter mile navigation

[sjbe]

The biggest problems aren't actually going to be point to point navigation or even obstacle avoidance, though those aren't trivial. Navigation when you know the destinations is a solved problem and we've got a pretty good idea how to handle obstacle avoidance and terrain following though there is progress to be made

Possibly the hardest problem to solve it you want completely autonomous cars will be navigation in the last quarter mile and for destinations where you aren't actually sure exactly where you are going. This is a human interface problem and those are always challenging. In those circumstances it is REALLY hard to instruct a computer efficiently without actually taking the controls yourself. For example how do you explain to the computer that you want the parking space 3 places over but you want to back in? Or that you don't want to block in the car so park next to it on the lawn? Sounds easy but it really isn't - not yet anyway. Humans can do it mostly competently but we don't have any computer that is anywhere close to human level processing of verbal commands. Stuff like parking lots will be surprisingly hard to automate in a way that will be pleasing to most people. There are solutions but they are going to take a long time and require a lot of infrastructure. Probably several decades away at minimum. Sort of how we had autopilot for planes many year before we had the ability to do autonomous takeoffs and landings. (and the aviation problem is arguably easier as it has fewer variables)

I think we will see semi-autonomous systems relatively soon particularly for stuff like highway driving. But I think there is going to remain driver controls for quite some time because steering into that parking space or instructing the car to back up to the front door is actually pretty hard to do well. What will happen is that you'll program in your destination, the car will take you close to where you want to go and then you'll probably drive the last little bit yourself in a lot of cases. I think this piece of navigation will be solved last if at all.

Re: That's OK, I only care about bar crawls

[t1oracle]

Cheaper? An AI doesn't need a salary, or a medallion, and it's insurance will be cheaper. If taxis were cheap, most of us wouldn't have cars.

In other news, Toyota researcher finds...

[BenJeremy]

Toyota researcher finds autonomous driving technology is hard to do, beyond the autonomous accelerator pedal.

On a side note, this stuff has been worked on for ages. I worked with a company in 2000, doing image recognition for lane departure warning systems and other subsystems that are currently in use today. The technology is there, but not all companies are happy that many of those technologies are tied to patents and would rather be able to use in-house sources. Developing those sources now is a bit late in the game.

In 5 years, comments like Pratt's will be completely laughable. The only reason he's taken remotely serious now is because it isn't ubiquitous yet. Consumers do not have serious experience with autonomous driving, so his FUD is accepted at face value. In reality, he's just faced with a tremendous uphill battle to catch his company up in the game, and it's overwhelmed Toyota, to the point they are sowing caution to the masses, mostly in the hopes to catch a breather in the court of public opinion.

Three anecdotes.

[vtcodger]

Just a few of the many things I've encountered in 60 years of driving that are going to be a problem for computers.

1. GPS? My wife and I bought a new GPS on sale at a local mall a few years ago. First thing we did when we got in the car was to program the thing to take us home. We hit GO. It thought a while and then told us that home was 2700 odd miles away and that the trip might take a while. Guess what? GPSen don't work in parking garages. It apparently thought it was still in Sunnyvale where last it was turned off, and it was contemplating a trip across the continent.

2. A couple of days ago I was using that same GPS to navigate through a rural area in Vermont. Seeking the shortest route, it put me on a (dirt) road that ran about a half mile, turned a corner, and ended in someone's barn. Care to try your hand at a program to recognize and deal with that situation?

3. Many years ago while traveling up the (dirt) road to an obscure National Monument out West, I came around a corner and found myself in a large herd of sheep. Couldn't see the road. Or the ditches. Or anything but sheep. What now Kit?

Not that cars a few decades from now won't be able to deal with thousands of situations like that. But it'll take a while I think.

Answer

[Anonymous Coward]

So nobody is answering the last question in the post - about when would you want to take over. I say never. The whole point of a self driving car is so that I don't have to watch the road, don't have to pay attention, and can sleep, read, or work while the device drives me like a taxi would. If it can't do that, it is less than worthless. Less than worthless because why would I want to pay for a fancy AI in my car if I have to keep my hands free, near the wheel, and my eyes on the road? I do that NOW. If I have to pay attention and be ready to take over then the thing is just a toy and they can keep it. Once it can actually drive me without using my eyes, ears, hands, and brain as a backup then I might want one.

Whats this guys definiton of real world?

[Dereck1701]

"Autonomous cars might look great in controlled tests or on pristine highways"

Hasn't Google been testing out their cars in the real world? And if the wiki article is right they've driven over a million miles and only had 14 minor traffic accidents, none of which were the fault of the autonomous system (at least according to Google). If that is true and if my math is correct that puts their accidents per mile ratio at about 1 / 71,400. Again if my math is correct your average human vehicle experiences accidents at a rate of 1 / 66,700. Suggesting Googles autonomous vehicle is safer. Admittedly there are probably limitations, letting one drive in torrential rain or snow/ice covered roads may result in far less advantageous statistics, the roads do have to be pre-mapped and there are almost certainly situations they can't handle. But most of those situations go for any vehicle/driver, I've driven in a variety of terrible weather and I've never been in an accident that was my fault, I have siblings who have been in a half dozen accidents most of which were in good weather. Most humans generally do well when encountering road work areas, I've seen others driving in oncoming lanes because they failed to notice the gigantic signs pointing them somewhere else. Some people are going to be safer drivers than these autonomous vehicles, some people should be encouraged to let the vehicle drive instead.

Re:That's OK, I only care about bar crawls

[TWX]

I also don't like to play grabby-squeezy in a taxi, that's disgusting on multiple levels.

At least with an autonomous car you'll have no one there to disgust...

Re:Snow, ice, etc.

[unencode200x]

This. I was driving someone's new Ford Explorer and turned on the lane keep assist or whatever it was called. It would keep us in the lane but it did so by sort of jerking back and forth. I thought to myself that if there was ice on the roads we'd be screwed.

Re:That's nothing

[Dutch Gun]

decide between plowing into a crowd of people to protect the driver, and smashing into a tree to protect the crowd of people

People hold up ridiculous scenarios like this as some sort of hypothetical metric, but how well would a human do with an insane choice like this, presumably with only a split second to make the decision? Not very well, I'd imagine. Don't put AI up against ridiculous situations. Put them up against realistic obstacles, which we might actually have a chance of seeing in our lifetimes. Road construction. Temporary obstacles with police directing traffic. Blizzards. Temporarily flooded road. Parking lots or garages.

There's also this false dicotomy presented, wherein some people seem to think that unless an AI can can handle ALL situations possible, it can't possibly work. I'll tell you what will happen in many situations. The AI will come to a controlled stop and tell the human "Hey, I don't know what's happening. Take over the wheel, please." That seems perfectly reasonable for crazy scenarios that only rarely occur.

The answer to what would likely happen, by the way, is that the AI in the car would have long ago started braking, so as to avoid the problem in the first place.

Re: That's nothing

[unencode200x]

Have you seen iRobot where the robot choses to save Will Smith (the police officer) instead of the little girl because the robot calculates the little girl's probability of survival was lower? I thought that was an interesting take on decisions like this.

Re:That's nothing

[Dutch Gun]

No, the correct decision of an car's AI is to always prioritize the life and safety of it's occupant. And you can bet that's what every vehicle will be programmed to do. People on the outside can take care of themselves.

Note that this doesn't mean speeding recklessly and then plowing into a crowd to save the driver. That only occurs because of previously made poor choices. Obstacles don't magically teleport in front of cars. It only appears that way to human drivers because we have a bad habit of not paying attention. Computers don't have that little flaw, and so will be braking the car before the human occupant even realizes there's a potential situation ahead.

Car manufacturers are not exactly strangers to litigation. The notion that any single court case will doom an industry is overstating things, I believe.

The point of self-driving cars....

[mark-t]

.... is not to literally drive the car, it is to prevent accidents.

Any autonomy that an automobile might appear to exhibit should be seen as a side effect of that goal, and not a direct manifestation of intent.

Stop saying "Artificial Intellgence"

[mbeckman]

The first step to an intelligent debate on autonomous cars is to eliminate the phrase "artificial intelligence" from the discussion. Autonomous cars are just that: cars that navigate roads without human intervention. They are not intelligent, artificially or otherwise, anymore then a 1940s autopilot in a Beechcraft D-18 is.

"Autonomous" is the perfect adjective, because these cars are automatons, not conscious, thinking beings. Because we have only the foggiest definition of "intelligence", we are in no position to create an artificial one. If someday we do have that knowledge, what will we call artificial intelligence when we actually make one? That'll be a problem if we sully the term today with myth and superstition.

Re: That's OK, I only care about bar crawls

[mysidia]

As customer of a Taxi, you don't have to pay any of those things, only a miniscule portion of them.

The AI is more expensive, because all new cars are super-expensive, and you have to add Research and Development costs, "brand premium", And "coolness premium" the manufacturers will charge b/c the thing can drive itself.

If instead of buying a $12,000 used car that meets all your needs, you spend $60,000 on a brand new car-that-can-drive itself and lasts 10 years, plus a $50 monthly service fee for the cloud maps service, then you're paying approximately $5000 extra a year for self-driving capabilities.

That would buy you 333 $15 taxi rides.

Anyways, based on that, unless you spend more than $5000 a year on the Taxi, then it just isn't a worthwhile economic proposition.

Also, the self-driving cars are probably going to be introduced at about the $120,000 price point, not the $60,000 price point.

Then you'll also spend an extra $10,000 in vehicle loan interest per year to get the self-driving feature.

Turning Test

[kheldan]

We can't even, after decades of trying, create an 'artificial intelligence' that can pass the Turing Test, and that's just text on a screen. What makes any of you so sure that 'autonomous cars' were ever so close to being a reality? Even then, as I've said in the past and will keep saying, there's always going to be a full set of manual controls, by law, and you'll always still be required, by law, to be fully educated, trained, tested, licensed, and insured in order to be behind the wheel of any vehicle, regardless of any so-called 'self-driving' feature it might have, because when all it said and done, when human safety and lives are at stake, a human being must be the final 'backup system'. Furthermore since we all know that any skill that isn't used often tends to atrophy, you'll likely be required to be re-tested by the government more often than you are right now, to ensure that you're still competent to be operating a motor vehicle. So get over it: You're still going to be driving yourselves around for a good long time to come, probably the rest of your lives, or at least until you're too old to be a competent operator of a motor vehicle.

Now, then, for all of you with all your complaints about 'other drivers' being so bad: Hush up already, you're probably at least as bad as the ones you're complaining about. That being said, what we need to do in this country is to improve driver training and education, and tighten up testing procedures and frequency to improve the overall competence of drivers on the roads, and exclude the ones who can't (or won't) show an acceptable and consistent level of competence. This should include tougher and longer-lasting penalties for individuals convicted of DUI. Furthermore any use of any kind of any mobile wireless device while driving should be strictly prohibited and punished severely; I think a six-month suspension of driving privilege with a hefty fine should be sufficient.

Meanwhile, auto industry, please do continue to develop and produce collision-avoidance systems that warn the driver when they're screwing up.

Re:Turning Test

[Mantrid42]

We can't even, after decades of trying, create an 'artificial intelligence' that can pass the Turing Test, and that's just text on a screen. What makes any of you so sure that 'autonomous cars' were ever so close to being a reality?

Because those are two wildly different problems?

A human-driven taxi is better right now.

[fyngyrz]

The "AI" we're talking about presently and in the near future is mostly "A" and almost no "I" at all.

The kind of thing marketroids and the naive are calling AI today, including the tech that's beginning to show up in vehicles, is so one-dimensional in its "intelligence" as to be on about the same level as a toaster that "knows" not to burn my toast, or a chess playing program that can kick my ass at chess. The toaster "AI" couldn't control a robot vacuum cleaner, and the chess "AI" can't even play checkers, much less deal with anything further out of it's 1D "I" zone of competence, including not burn my toast.

In order for a vehicle to be able to "know where it is" and "know what to do about it", it will have to be more than one dimensional; it will have to be able to read signs, it will have to know destinations as things other than map references and paths other than mapped roads (parking lots, unmarked roads, etc.), it will have to make decisions based on extremely vague inputs and be able to do things such as ask for, and locate sources for, directions and understand them in pretty much whatever form they are provided. It will have to deal with the various situations that come up when the maps don't match the roads, too. Judging by my GPS, that's a lot more common than one might otherwise assume. It changes over time in random, unpredictable ways, too.

A general intelligence system designed for service (by which I mean to imply not conscious... otherwise we're talking about slavery, and we should know better than that by now) is not that close as yet. Frankly -- and I'm speaking with my AI researcher hat on now -- I think we'll get to a conscious general purpose intelligence well before we get to an unconscious one. We have a great deal of experience with imparting information to consciousnesses and we have considerable information available to us about what comprises one in our study of the human brain, whereas we have almost none about building a general purpose non-conscious intelligence, other than stacking multiple one-dimensional intelligences one upon another, which approach is approximately equivalent to solving the problem of multiplying by a million by adding one to an initial value of zero a million times. In other words, it'll eventually get the answer, but it's not in any way efficient.

As far as AI goes, all we really have right now is AI research, and various (not insignificant) benefits from the various tech insights and advances that fall out of that process. We don't have AI at all, at least not in the sense that is even slightly worthy of the term. The way AI is being used today, you'd want to be very careful telling your kid they were "intelligent", because they're likely to take away the idea that you think you just told them they're about as bright as the toaster. Not to mention the fact that when an actual AI is finally brought to light, we're not going to have anything useful left to call it. At that point, "AI" would be an insult. Not a great way to start a conversation with a new entity, IMHO.

The whole "it's AI!" meme reminds me strongly of the whole "3D TV" debacle. Again, marketroids and the ignorant built and propagated that appellation as a supposedly appropriate designation for fixed-viewpoint stereo vision, where fixed-viewpoint stereo vision is constrained, even by a relatively coarse and generous measure using whole-number degrees, to about 2 and 1/64800D or 2.000015432...D, whichever notation you prefer, leaving the viewer with something that in very few ways indeed resembles an actual 3D perception. When trying to describe actual 3D imaging, one is left with no accurate terminology. Unlike AI, we even actually have some low-performance versions of real 3D imaging now, so the linguistic problem is already on the roost, so to speak.

Sure, language evolves, that's a legitimate and real thing, but language also devolves, and that's what we're seeing in both these cases. I'm going with it, but I'm going kicking and screaming about the word-crap the marketroids are leaving on my lawn. Goddamn kids and their unleashed word-mutts. Where'd I leave my shotgun, anyway?

dee du dee du doo de doo, dum dee dum dee dum ...

[Hognoxious]

I don't want to live in a world where you can't 'drive for fun', and I know I'm far from being alone in that sentiment.

Do you have an uncle with a country place that no one knows about? Perhaps a former farm?

Re: That's OK, I only care about bar crawls

[Maxo-Texas]

Even a tiny taxi ride in my town is at least $40.

And you may have to wait up to an hour for a taxi.

And when you really need them most (like after new year's eve), it could be four or more hours.

And one reason uber sprang up besides cost is that taxi's just don't like to go to low density or "bad" areas. They'd prefer to have a fare back as well.

Taxi's (and public transportation) make more sense in New York City and similar locations perhaps. When the city is more flat than vertical, Taxi's (and public transportation) make less sense.

Owning a vehicle is expensive. It's an extra cost in flat cities. People who don't have a car do get extra spending money. But in areas where you must drive 30+ miles every day, taxi's are not an effective option (and neither is public transportation).

I think what the parent poster needs is less of a street legal car and more of an automated bicycle type vehicle that could get him home drunk in an hour or less while he's plastered.

Re:Nope

[Maxo-Texas]

The important thing is not to loose your cool when playing fast and lose with grammar on the internet.