Uber Starts Self Driving Car Pickups In Pittsburgh (techcrunch.com)
The reports were true. Uber on Wednesday announced it a select group of Pittsburgh users will get a surprise the next time they book a cab: the option to ride in a self-driving car. TechCrunch reports: The announcement comes a year-and-a-half after Uber hired dozens of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University's robotics center to develop the technology. Uber gave a few members of the press a sneak peek Tuesday when a fleet of 14 Ford Fusions equipped with radar, cameras and other sensing equipment pulled up to Uber's Advanced Technologies Campus (ATC) northeast of downtown Pittsburgh. During my 45-minute ride across the city, it became clear that this is not a bid at launching the first fully formed autonomous cars. Instead, this is a research exercise. Uber wants to learn and refine how self driving cars act in the real world. That includes how the cars react to passengers -- and how passengers react to them. "How do drivers in cars next to us react to us? How do passengers who get into the backseat who are experiencing our hardware and software fully experience it for the first time, and what does that really mean?" said Raffi Krikorian, director of Uber ATC.When a couple of drivers were asked about Uber's push to get cabs drive themselves, they weren't pleased.
It's good to see more real world testing of these systems in a challenging environment. It will be interesting to see how they handle Pittsburgh's winter. I was hoping that they'd be ready by now, since my kid is about to get a driver's license, but at least I should be able to buy one in 5 or 6 years.
Jobs are miserable and robotic; giving them to robots is a great justice.
Instead, we should pay people to achieve the goals of civilization: maintaining land and buildings, participating in cultural events, having families, curating farms, maybe even maintaining old documents and cumulative knowledge.
The cube-slave period of humanity will be seen as the bleakest, if only by the alien archeologists sifting through our rubble for clues as to how to avoid the potential demise of their own civilization.
Alternative Right.
This blows a HUGE hole in Uber's argument that they aren't a taxi service and shouldn't be regulated as one. They can't argue that self driving cars are independent contractors or that they are merely middlemen facilitating a service with an app.
No, the reports were false, as they said Uber would start at the end of August
"Welcome to Guinea Pig Taxi Co., please buckle up."
Table-ized A.I.
If I were a passenger in a self driving car, I would sit in the back seat and act panicked, banging on the windows with a horrified look on my face while mouthing "help me!", every time we passed another car.
Only a fool would step into one of these things.
Fortunately if there's one thing the world has plenty of, it's fools.
That somewhat depends on who ends up owning the self-driving cars, doesn't it?
I suppose but Uber clearly owns these ones. Frankly I cannot imagine the insurance cost for a driverless car would be tenable for anyone but a large company like Uber any time soon. You raise some reasonable questions but frankly they are moot. If Uber is actually using driverless cars that they own then they are unambiguously a taxi service. Not that there was ever really any doubt about that fact before to anyone with a functioning brain.
Winter is coming and I hope the uber CEO is ready for some trail by prison combat in a FPMITA when the auto drive cars start crashing and killing people.
It won't be long until it's the other way around - only a fool would ride with a human driver.
same CMU that messed up the admissions and now you want to trust your life to there code?
Uber-bot 54321 has filed a lawsuit against Uber-bot 12345 in federal court today. Uber-bot 54321 claims that Uber-bot 12345 failed to yield at the intersection of Beta Drive and Program Lane. It is still unclear if humans will be on the jury as they are becoming less and less reliable in every-day matters of state.
In other news, Uber-bot OS 10 has been released today leading to scattered reports of biological transport vehicles randomly stopping in the middle of transit lanes. AI developers promise a patch is forthcoming.
Chemical batteries are still overheating world wide, leading some in the Matrix Party to call re-ignite calls for the biological battery initiative to be readdressed in Congress. President Siri has not commented on this.
Turning to weather, the Arctic Tundra is expecting another comfortable day, with High's in the mid 80's...
I'd wager the AI drivers will STILL drive better than a majority of the human drivers...
To be fair, only a fool would hop into the back of the average Taxi Cab. But we often don't have much of a choice.
When a couple of drivers were asked about Uber's push to get cabs drive themselves, they weren't pleased.
Displeased, sure - but I hope to hell they weren't surprised. If they were, they haven't been paying attention, and that wouldn't bode well for their passengers.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
This was always the endgame for Uber - drivers are costly and aren't available all the time.
Pretty much everyone knew this, I'm sure even the drivers knew this - if they didn't then more fool them.
This is why it's absolutely pointless to even get into the taxi/rideshare business now - there's a few year's left for meat drivers, and after that customers will be saved from human interaction as all the rides drive themselves, and due to not having to pay the meat aspect, the rides will be slightly cheaper - enough to be the obvious choice over the feared-rapey dodgy meat driver anyway :p
I was taught in driver's ed that the two worst drivers on the roads are cops.. and taxi drivers.
Drivers for Uber needn't worry. So-called 'self-driving, autonomous cars' are not going to be allowed on the roads without a fully educated, trained, qualified, tested, and insured human driver at the full set of traditional vehicle controls, not anytime soon, and there is no such thing as human-level 'artificial intelligence', since we only have some half-baked theories as to how some aspects of our own consciousness and cognition work as of yet, let alone being able to write software to duplicate it, and any so-called 'AI' we have right now are, while clever bits of programming that mimick some aspects of human thought and behavior, are a far cry from being equal or better than a human mind. So no worries.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
I thought that self-driving cars still had to have a "driver" in them, ready to take control in the event of of an incident. Are these Uber cars going to come with an Uber "driver", or is the passenger expected to take over when* that incident happens?
What if that passenger does not hold a licence, or is not fit to drive through intoxication? Does the passenger get some sort of discount because they might be expected to step in and do a bit of driving?
* note 'when', not 'if'
RTFA. The passenger will never be expected to take control.
The cars have two Uber engineers in the front seat. The one in the driver's seat has his hands and feet hovering above the steering wheel and pedals, ready to take control as quickly as humanly possible. "Whenever a stopped vehicle blocked an entire lane, he toggled back into manual mode to switch lanes and drive around — an action Uber’s self driving cars will not yet take." The article didn't elaborate, so I'll have to guess that under autonomous control the response to a stopped vehicle blocking an entire lane will be to stop and wait for the stopped vehicle to move on, rather than attempting to change lanes and pass.
Also, from TFA: "You don’t notice how many unexpected incidents occur during a routine drive until you ask a robot to take the wheel." Really? I don't know about you, but I notice a lot of unexpected incidents pretty much every time I get behind the wheel.
This was always the endgame for Uber - drivers are costly and aren't available all the time.
Maybe but Uber's current model does have some huge advantages. 1) The pool of potential drivers is huge - basically anyone who owns a car in theory. 2) Uber doesn't have any capital costs when they use a "ridesharing" model. Buying your own taxis and operating them costs a LOT of money. 3) The economics of driverless taxis are still unclear both from a capital investment and from a legal framework standpoint, not to mention insurance costs. 4) Uber has been able to semi-plausibly deny that they are actually a taxi service and thus exempt from regulation as one. This shoots a car sized whole in that argument.
I'm not arguing for or against Uber using driverless cars but merely pointing out that it isn't all upside to Uber or anyone else.
I love how they call them engineers...
I am guessing that they are the lowest paid "engineers" ever...
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
Pittsburgh resident here, they are going to get some tremendous testing data here right now. The level of construction obstruction is at an all time high this year. If it can negotiate this mess, it can handle most any road I've ever travelled on worldwide.
You don't realize exactly how little you understand of the subject, do you? Read this and this.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Don't forget about student drivers, and distracted drivers, and aggressive drivers, and people the drive too slow, and people that drive to fast, and people that don't use their turn signal, and road ragers, and... everyone, let's just go with everyone.
I guess it depends on what your metric for "worst" is.
I'd wager the AI drivers will STILL drive better than a majority of the human drivers...
And I would wager that no matter what the statistics show, you still won't feel any better about a family member being killed by "autonomous bug #172A"
This is the inherent problem with AI deployment. 40,000 lives are lost every year in the US with human drivers. If that number is reduced by even half, it will be viewed as a resounding success and will be approved by every regulatory agency, with the obvious main difference being bugs and hackers causing deaths on our roadways instead of alcohol or distracted driving today.
What happens when a network attack forces a million AI-controlled vehicles to suddenly act "drunk", injuring or killing countless humans? Will we suddenly (as in overnight) go back to licensing humans to drive cars because NO ONE feels safe to step into an AI car? Bottom line is we need to be very careful in how we embrace this technology. Unfortunately, we've already seen what happens when demand outpaces common sense with IoT "security"...
o Stand by the side of the road
o Wait for a so-called 'driverless car' to approach
o Walk out into the middle of the road holding up a big 'ROAD CLOSED' sign
o LOL
Will work every time.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
If by "not anytime soon" you mean "sometime within the next five years" you're right.
This is happening, and it's happening quickly. The AIs that exist now are already better than average human drivers. They will quickly improve to the point that they're better than any human driver. A driving AI doesn't have to be better than a human at everything, it just has to be better than a human at driving. And that's rapidly becoming a solved problem.
It's the chess situation all over again. Lots of people denied that computers would ever be able to beat a grandmaster right up until the point where it happened.
Worst was defined as (in my words) "drivers that feel that due to their postilion of authority and familiarity with the roads, they can all but throw the rules of the road out the window and drive fast, forget the turn signal, tailgate, and drive like it's a full on game of Mario-Kart."
What do you expect to happen? What would be different with a human driver?
If you think the driver won't call the cops on you, maybe you should consider that the passengers will.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
They detect obstacles in the middle of the road, regardless of their ability to comprehend signs.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
you better be nice and leave a good tip. If you haven't seen the movie, these cabs are programmed to run you down if you leave the cab with a snide remark.
mfwright@batnet.com
You don't realize exactly how little you understand the subject either. All your comments are totally empty and you make absolutely no point.
The improvement of AI technology over the last two-three years made AI better than humans in many fields. Go game is one thing. Driving is another. AI is better at driving as human already, because sight is now as good as human (even better when you add a radar) and reaction time is 100 times lower. Insurance companies won't have a problem, because better driver means less accidents. As of laws ... it seems some states are OK with it.
So please stop trolling and bring real arguments.
self driving cars can hide under an system of subcontractors to get out of liability / dump it on some small business unit that has no funds to payout damages in a big crash and no rights to any software / code / logs / etc and in a court case.
court discovery for source code / logs may hit an wall of NDA's / EULA's / etc With an big list of subcontracted firms that all say we are only X and we do not own / run any car service.
...being raped by a self-driving car.
Requiem for the American Dream
Will they be able to handle a "Pittsburgh Left Turn" or will these cars be waiting in the hills to turn left forever?
self driving cars can hide under an system of subcontractors to get out of liability / dump it on some small business unit that has no funds to payout damages in a big crash and no rights to any software / code / logs / etc and in a court case.
A properly motivated judge can bust through that nonsense in no time. There is a well established principle of beneficial ownership and related laws that put the responsibility exactly where it belongs.
I would love to see an autopilot car in NASCAR.
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Instead, this is a research exercise. Uber wants to learn and refine how self driving cars act in the real world. That includes how the cars react to passengers -- and how passengers react to them. "How do drivers in cars next to us react to us? How do passengers who get into the backseat who are experiencing our hardware and software fully experience it for the first time, and what does that really mean?" said Raffi Krikorian, director of Uber ATC.
From an actual customare review later this year:
Well the autonomous driver is pretty bad at giving people the traditional driving hand gestures, but actually quite good at recieving them. I wasn't sure how safe I was or who was actually driving with one guy huddled over the controls like a nervous wreck, but it did seem like whoever was driving was just learning the rules of the road so that, at least, felt familiar.
They detect obstacles in the middle of the road, regardless of their ability to comprehend signs.
One tesla owner who was watching Harry Potter on a portable DVD player instead of hovering over the controls is no longer around to disagree.
Are you kidding? A single death will be heralded as the end of the world. All too many journalists play on people's inherent fears. "10 drunks killed themselves last month" has zero resonance because we know humans, we know drunks, we know they do stupid things when they're drunk. We've heard it happening from the day we're born till the day we die. Case closed. But a robotic car? I mean, what's a robotic car all about? How does it work? Will it just randomly run off the road or into other vehicles? Should I trust it to drive without killing me? So many pain points to poke. Give it a couple decades before the knee-jerk fear is assuaged not by facts, but by familiarity.
Crime stats much lower than a couple decades ago, but turn on your TV and see the FUD that keep suburban housewives up at night and her husband's hand on that rifle...
Bye!
chess has fixed rules and paths cars do not
“Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?” -- George Carlin
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
what about criminal cases with crashes? that don't go to an civil court?
They test these things near the area where I work. Saw it take a wrong turn at my work's parking log. Was able to make a 3-point turn, presumably on its own. If you are going to teach a car to drive itself, Pittsburgh is a good choice. If you can drive here you can drive anywhere in the US.
However, i live on a one lane dead-end street with parking on both sides and no turn-around bulb. Would be hilarious trying to see it navigate that disaster.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
I need a number and street.
I always take special notice when someone driving the same car as me is on the road.
You can imagine my surprise when a grey haired old lady gunned it at an intersection in her Acura RSX. It was the coolest thing I have ever seen.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Do keep in mind that the self driving cars have cameras in all directions. They will be aware that you are following it around. If you cut one off and cause an accident.... well... I bet that self driving equipment will be pretty expensive for you to replace.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
They'll be playing chess?
(i always see these Eastern European/Russian cab drivers playing chess on the trunk/hood of their cabs while waiting for fares by the Beverly Center in LA. I hear it's not an uncommon thing.)
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
I'd rather see it in F1. NASCAR is boring.
What you don't seem to understand is that it's already there, on public roads now.
It's not decades away. It's already happening.
And it's less than a decade from being a product that you can go buy.
People were scared when elevators stopped having operators too. Sure, elevators are an easy problem, cars are a hard problem.
But when AIs have already driven millions of miles on public roads in traffic, you can't claim that it isn't going to happen without sounding like a crazy person.
And you can't claim that it won't be allowed to happen for decades when it's already being allowed without sounding a bit deranged.
Agreed. Not much of challenge.
Turn left.
Turn left.
Turn left.
Turn left...
A bit more seriously, it would be interesting to see something like this with NASCAR. It'd be like Deep Blue versus Gary Kasparov, except for rednecks.
The improvement of AI technology over the last two-three years made AI better than humans in many fields.
Driving wasn't solved by the improvements over the last two-three years. The big breakthrough was one of the DARPA competitions about a decade ago. Since then there have been many refinements, but the core of the developments happened there.
Teslas are not self driving. The person watching Harry Potter was committing the same error as the RV riders of urban legend who turned on the cruise control on the Interstate and then went into the back to relax.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
F1 averages 45 overtakes per race, NASCAR averages 27 lead changes per race and over 1,000 overtakes per race.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
I've been driving for 17 years. If I took all the data from 100 cars run over a year, that's 5 times more experience than me with all kinds of situations. Company analyzes the new data, figures out what updates are needed, and pushes them all out. Imagine 1,000 cars. 10,000. You just can't compete in terms of knowledge.
I'm waiting to see a self driving car navigate across Boston during a nor'easter while avoiding all the road cones and lawn chairs strewn around the street. Not to mention navigating around plows, traffic cops, potholes, double-parked cars, dealing with disabled street lights, no visible road markings, pedestrians walking down the middle of the street due to inaccessible sidewalks, and the occasional parade of wild turkeys. All of which I've seen on my daily commute.
It's nice that someone is finally running a test in a location with weather. So far it seems like most of these vehicles are just designed for puttering around southern California or the Nevada desert.
not anytime soon,
I give it about two years or thereabouts. Once there's enough data (say, a couple million hours of operation) to demonstrate that they're safer than most human drivers, the enabling legislation will follow. There's no technical argument against it, just knee-jerking emotion like you're showing here.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I would love to see an autopilot car in NASCAR.
I would expect an autopilot car to win in NASCAR. It's a far simpler navigation problem than driving on public roads, and winning drivers on the track are those who are most able to stay right at the very limits of the car's performance without blowing tires or engines.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
highways speeds,
Which, given the speed of computing these days, might as well be standing still.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
..and when Uber shows the court that they've seen your car following theirs looking for such opportunities, they get your case thrown out.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
They have very little data less-than-optimal driving conditions, thus far. It's cool that they're finally gather data somewhere other than California - somewhere that gets weather. Two years sounds optimistic.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Are you kidding? A single death will be heralded as the end of the world.
And yet it wasn't the end of the world when a Tesla on "autopilot" did it. It wasn't even a financial apocalypse for Tesla. Not even close.
Crime stats much lower than a couple decades ago, but turn on your TV and see the FUD that keep suburban housewives up at night and her husband's hand on that rifle...
If you think crime is in the decline, you're looking at the wrong crime. This isn't 1950 anymore. We live in an electronic world now, with an online society (to include controlling your AI car), and we've proven year after year that an online society is a hacked society because when it comes to the products we rely on every day, revenue trumps security every fucking time.
And no, we won't learn. Not with IoT. Not even with AI. Not until an event large enough (read: millions of lives) occurs.
Goddamnit.. It is not 'here, now'. What we have 'now' is research vehicles that have to have two engineers/scientists/whatever riding in the thing, hovering over the standard automobile controls in case it fucks up. What we have 'now' is something that can't handle driving on the freeway. What we have 'now' is not available for sale to the public. What we have 'now' is not in any way shape or form ready to be called a 'product', it is just 'research and development'. It is NOT going to be ready in 'FIVE YEARS'. At best in 'FIVE YEARS' we'll have some fancy cruise control that will still mean you have to have a drivers license and can pass all the required tests. You and people like you just bought into the hype and have no idea what you're talking about!
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
We are still being shown how to use seatbelts on airlines. I can only imagine what we will have to listen to before the car starts to move when they become truly autonomous. There might be a five-minute safety brief before you three-minute Uber ride.
o Stand by the side of the road
o Wait for a so-called 'driverless car' to approach
o Walk out into the middle of the road holding up a big 'ROAD CLOSED' sign
o LOL
Will work every time.
Just put a traffic cone in front of it and walk away.
Now the passenger could get out and remove the traffic cone, but then the car would probably just take off without them, because it is not like they have any real intelligence.
It won't be long until...
Yeah but how long? A week? A year? 10 years?
The AIs that exist now are already better than average human drivers.
By what measurement?
What about NDA's / EULA's??
What about them? They don't have any weight against a judge ordering the information they are protecting to be produced.
In a jury trail can they say one of people on the jury works for an competing companies and we can't let them have the code?
Easily shown to be a lie in most cases and even if true jurors can be dismissed if they have a conflict of interest. Furthermore the judge can review and potential evidence and decide whether or not it should make it into the trial.
"Fancy cruise control" as you call it is already a product, is already in shipping cars, and you can buy it today. It's not five years away. Some currently available mass production cars already have the ability to maintain their lane, change lanes when directed, and maintain speed and distance in traffic. It's not just research and development, it's for sale.
What's going to be here in five years is a product that will take you from point A to point B without you doing anything but telling it where you want to be. Those points will likely not initially be any point in the country, but they will likely be any point within a city that's accessible by city street. Successful research and development leads to products, and by every reasonable measure, the current research and development is very successful, since they're already putting those research and development cars on the public streets.
And since you mention freeways, driving on the freeway is actually the easy part. City streets are a much harder problem, but they're a problem that's also nearly solved.
Please explain why you think I don't know what I'm talking about. Do you think the technology demonstrations have all been faked? Do you have some sort of insider knowledge about it not working that contradicts all the information that's been published about how well these systems work now?
You're declaring it "hype" when anybody paying attention can see it's happening. So please, if you've got something useful to add, do so.
Humans handle snow well? Clearly you haven't been on the road when it snows.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
while avoiding all the road cones and lawn chairs strewn around the street.
I drive a 4wd Tundra, I'd just run them over as it is their problem it is in the street, not mine.
As far as snow navigation, you do realize that most human drivers don't do very good in snow, don't you?
I live in Maryland, every snow storm I drive past about 1 car/mile that is in the ditch while driving on cleared highways, you can't tell me that a computer will do worse at this than most humans.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Accidents/fatal accidents per mile.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Accidents/fatal accidents per mile of an extremely limited sample (ie less than 0.00001%) of driveable areas.
FTFY.
If you want an apples to apples comparison, then get back to me when the robots are exposed to exactly all the same environments and conditions as the humans.
You have to start somewhere.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
The AIs that exist now are already better than average human drivers.
Better?
Google's car can't currently do these very simple tasks:
1- drive in pouring rain.
2- drive when it's snowing.
3- drive on unmarked or unpaved roads,
4- drive on roads where markings faded away.(where I live that describe more than 50% of the roads).
5- drive on roads where stop signs, intersections, speed limits and all other information hasn't been recorded before in it's database (it can't read any road signs). Causing trouble when those signs are changed and the database hasn't been updated.
6- drive in contruction zones, where there are temporary rerouting.
7- follow hand signs from a police officer or a construction worker.
8- find a space or even navigate in a parking.
9- anticipate any other driver's or pedestrian behavior (it can't look you in the eye and understand if you've seen it or not).
And you tell me that it's currently BETTER than humans at driving? Yes it's better at certain things, but way worse or even incapable of coping with a lot of other things that are trivial to an average human driver.
Try it! Library of Babel
Of course, but it doesn't mean you can throw around claims like they "are already better", when clearly they aren't