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Cringely Pans Self-Driving Car Hype, Says They're Years Away (cringely.com)
In what may be his final year of technology predictions, columnist Robert X. Cringely argues "I can't say that we're going to see anything beyond more beta tests of self-driving cars in 2019... We simply aren't ready and probably won't be for years to come...."
"The problem isn't with the self-driving cars, it's with the cars that aren't self-driving, cars that are driven by idiots like me." It will eventually happen. Once half the fleet has been replaced with cars that could be self-drivers if we allowed them to be, then there will be a huge financial incentive to get the other half off the street. This will be especially the case if climate change is still accelerating. I'm guessing that most cars from 2020-on could be self-driving with only a software upgrade, which is why Elon Musk is predicting Tesla will have full autonomy by the end of 2019. But notice that Elon isn't predicting Tesla will be allowed to have its cars drive themselves everywhere...
So why is the world talking so much about self-driving cars and full autonomy? Some of it is Tesla hype, some of it is marketing as the car companies try to get us to buy cars that will eventually be self-driving, but probably not until their second owners. And the other reason why we're talking so much about self-driving cars is because Uber is planning to go public later this year...an IPO that will go smoother if the driving public thinks autonomous cars are something that we'll be seeing soon. Uber has a labor problem. If it can spin a story that surly and expensive human drivers are soon to be replaced with electrons, that will be very reassuring to Wall Street. But as I explained, it also isn't true.
The world isn't yet ready -- something Uber and Tesla and all the others will suddenly admit in about a year (post-IPO).
Cringely also argues that the problem isn't just the "millions of drivers who are still controlling their vehicles the old fashion way, which is often in a barely competent fashion..."
"We keep our cars longer because they don't rust and we can't afford to replace them so often. The result is that while we could expect a complete turnover in car technology every decade, now it takes closer to two decades."
"The problem isn't with the self-driving cars, it's with the cars that aren't self-driving, cars that are driven by idiots like me." It will eventually happen. Once half the fleet has been replaced with cars that could be self-drivers if we allowed them to be, then there will be a huge financial incentive to get the other half off the street. This will be especially the case if climate change is still accelerating. I'm guessing that most cars from 2020-on could be self-driving with only a software upgrade, which is why Elon Musk is predicting Tesla will have full autonomy by the end of 2019. But notice that Elon isn't predicting Tesla will be allowed to have its cars drive themselves everywhere...
So why is the world talking so much about self-driving cars and full autonomy? Some of it is Tesla hype, some of it is marketing as the car companies try to get us to buy cars that will eventually be self-driving, but probably not until their second owners. And the other reason why we're talking so much about self-driving cars is because Uber is planning to go public later this year...an IPO that will go smoother if the driving public thinks autonomous cars are something that we'll be seeing soon. Uber has a labor problem. If it can spin a story that surly and expensive human drivers are soon to be replaced with electrons, that will be very reassuring to Wall Street. But as I explained, it also isn't true.
The world isn't yet ready -- something Uber and Tesla and all the others will suddenly admit in about a year (post-IPO).
Cringely also argues that the problem isn't just the "millions of drivers who are still controlling their vehicles the old fashion way, which is often in a barely competent fashion..."
"We keep our cars longer because they don't rust and we can't afford to replace them so often. The result is that while we could expect a complete turnover in car technology every decade, now it takes closer to two decades."
And deterministic systems don't handle chaos very well. Even if all the cars are automated, you have people, dogs, deer running into the street. You have blowout tires. You have road damage, debris, snow. Given that understanding a left-hand exit is problematic today, how does it handle a deer dashing on to the road? Or snow covering all lane markings - and heavy enough to block GPS signals?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
"buy cars that will eventually be self-driving, but probably not until their second owners."
;)
In the future most cars won't have second owners. They will just be tech trash after their initial owner.The tech will be obsolete, no parts available to fix, no right to repair even if one can and want to.
Convenient transportation will just become one of those things only the elites that can afford to have. Everyone else will be required to live with sub standard/inconvenient public/private transportation providers
But I am not worried. I am 63 and I might see a full scale deployment, Maybe!
And I am a target audience, but one thing I know, it will be more expensive and much less convenient than having your own vehicle. And it will not happen in the next 5 years, except maybe small test runs in a few urban areas.
Just my 2 cents
My car is 21 years old, still under 100K miles and runs great. There are a lot of older cars out there. The rich tend to forget that most people aren't on 3 year leases.
The only way I can see every car on the road being self-driving before 2050 is if the tech to retrofit an existing car with self-driving features gets so cheap that it can be subsidized for the poor. If it costs say $500, then some equivalent of the cash for clunkers program could pay people to go self-driving. If we can't cheaply retrofit existing vehicles, then we're going to have to wait at least 30 years.
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Have gnu, will travel.
Those three are: 1) Legal Liability. 2) Fear of the new, and 3) AI not correctly predicting human stupidity.
Issue 1 is a political lobby away from being removed. Some company, like Tesla, develops the technology and pays a political lobby to get Congress to allow the company to self insure all the vehicles they sell - either in the new market or the 2nd hand market - if Tesla sells the used car. Boom, that issue vanishes.
Issue 2 is irrelevant. The first AI vehicles will be commercial vehicles, not cars. Long Haul trucking, Garbage Trucks, Public Buses, will be the innovators. Their companies will all pay attention to long term cost - including the cost to hire drivers, and ignore the human fear. Or they will be beaten in the market by companies that do.
Issue 3 is the only problem without an obvious solution, but technology is ALREADY better than a human in almost everything except this issue. The benefits of slower driving and fewer stupid human first hand drivers already outweigh the lessened ability to predict what a stupid human in the other car will do.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Or some large Western Chinese city, or Japan maybe. What Cringely doesn't appear to consider is that the USA will not be the market that does it first. It used to be that you couldn't introduce a new scheme unless USA the "world's biggest market" adapts first. That's kinda 1990s. He's not using metric.
Gently reply
And deterministic systems don't handle chaos very well.
That is why we hadn't been close to getting anything like a self driving car until the re-emergence of practical neural networks.
Neural networks are up to the task because they are fusing info from dozens of sensors and models to determine every second where the car should be moved. The people working on self driving car tech today are building systems can handle any surprise because fundamentally the car is going to try (A) not to hit anything, and (B) go somewhere else if it has to override some laws of the road to do so, in an emergency.
It can basically make a car do anything within the ream of physical ability which is way, way better than 99% of human drivers can do.
how does it handle a deer dashing on to the road?
About a billion times better than a human can, that's for sure. It can see in infra-red, radar and sonar - in 360 degrees, not just straight ahead. It can react and brake quicker. It can steer off the road almost a billion times better than any human would, since it would also be continually considering that semi truck behind you that you totally forgot about when you saw the deer and that cannot possibly avoid hitting you if you stay where you are...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Cars are the absolute reverse of Sam Vines boot theory. The more you pay for a car, the more it's going to cost you every year to maintain it. If you buy a cheap car you tend to find it's cheap to maintain -- because it doesn't have all the fancy parts like power windows or self-driving to break, and because parts are easier and cheaper to find. Manual transmissions are the cheapest of all to buy and maintain, of course.
Personally, knowing I drove about 5K mi/yr, I spent $4000 on 10 year old (at the time) Ford Escort that had 45K miles on it with the knowledge that it should last me 10-20 more years. Your ideal option may vary.
Most things don't obey boot theory. Cheap stuff can actually last ages, if you take care of it. Cheap PCs can last decades, a cheap flip phone can last decades. Even cheap boots can probably be repaired to last quite a while -- I've made $10 walmart shoes last quite a few years with shoe goo.
The way in which being poor is expensive is almost entirely debt. If you're low income but have savings (like me), you're okay -- if you're higher income without savings, your money is going to burn from the loans you take out.
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Or at least the huge numbers we have today. Everyone knows at least one person who has died in a car accident and three times that many people who have been seriously hurt. We accept this stupidly high number of deaths and injuries because we don't see an easy way out. Worse, in most countries we put most of the expense of the accident on the victim for rehab and loss of enjoyment of life. To do otherwise would make insurance rates affordable. As soon as a couple of percent of the cars on the road are self driving cars with better driving records than the average public driver that attitude will change. It won't take long after that until human driven cars are banned.