0 No Driving Automation

1 Driver Assistance

2 Partial Driving Automation

3 Conditional Driving Automation

4 High Driving Automation

5 Full Driving Automation

From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car#Levels_of_dri...

Levels 2-4 are the death zone (or "deadly valley"). These are the levels at which people will die unnecessarily.

Also, it sure seems like level 5 autonomous driving is just a few steps short of general AI, which is still lightyears away.

This is obvious even now with the Waymo v Uber lawsuit.

Consumers LOVE it. So even having some level of driving assistance will win you more customers.

If you thought about it for like 5 seconds, you just contradicted yourself here.

But your latter point is a good one. Part of what makes Musk effective is, even if he starts with just a half-baked kernel of an idea (usually borrowed from somewhere else), hyping into existence whole new industries (beyond just the companies he controls), which Musk can thus harvest for recruiting and better ideas, which makes those once-silly ideas actually work. That's kind of the opposite of being a dumbass.

Not just government funds, but also car maker funds. I honestly don't understand why all the research in automated driving doesn't focus on making better versions of the driver assists we already have first, instead of shooting for full autonomy, which I honestly believe to be a pipe dream.

Of course many of the advances in researching autonomous driving will trickle down to safety systems for 'normal' cars, so that's a good thing. I just feel like everyone is approaching the problem from the wrong direction, wasting a lot of R&D effort that could have produced much better results much sooner if car companies would start from what we already have and incrementally improve it. You can blame car companies for being slow to adopt many things that could benefit all of us (such as electric drivetrains), but you can hardly deny car safety has already improved tremendously in a relatively short timespan. Whether they were forced by regulation or because they thought making safer cars would be more profitable doesn't really matter.

Here in the United States, such funds are meager and almost non-existent. That is not likely to ever change anytime soon.

Even in the areas where such funds are allocated, most people do not want to take public transit, for a variety of different reasons. If you have the ability to own a car, using it for transportation and other tasks tends to be preferable than other means. You have more flexibility in where you go, when you go, and how fast you'll get there. You are dependent on a system outside of your control, or other people to transport you.

Everybody's jumping in because the prize is ridiculously huge. This justifies jumping in even if you deem your odds < 1 in 100

It is much more comfortable to drive if the car itself keeps the same speed as the car in front of me and follows the road. I also feel a lot safer if my car would automatically brake if I'm distracted and a kid runs out in front of the car.

Note that being in the race just means they have a plan in place. Car makers partner all the time - it is common to see the same car from several different makes with only the logo changed, or an optional engine from someone else.

I expect that in the end there will be about 5 different self driving systems on the road that are shared between different cars. Designing a system is complex and expensive on the one hand; and not a differentiator that customers will pay for on the other hand: so it won't be worth the cost to continue to develop a system if you have it when you can buy from someone else. (though each might customize the UI as the UI is a feature they can sell)

I thought both were already highly automated?

This is a long way off from the world of "Enter the destination from my garage, take a nap, and wake up an hour later at my destination," of "Full Autonomy." There is a distinct inflection point of utility where Autonomous vehicles require you to be paying attention to take over in emergency, and the point at which that is no longer required.

There's a fundamental difference between the two. Airplane autopilots are basically scripted, and operate fully within the parameters set by the pilot. There is almost no intelligence, and very little adaptivity there. The pilot needs to reprogram the autopilot manually when the flight plan changes, for example. Flight conditions can change in many ways that require the autopilot to be reprogrammed, reconfigured, or even switched off. Airplanes have actually crashed more than once because the pilot configured the autopilot incorrectly.

I don't know much about trains, except that fully automating without adapting all the rail infrastructure is more difficult than you would imagine, for example because there is basically no standardization in how semaphores are placed, for example.

That doesn't sound like it's just because "unpopular", in fact, that sounds like a technical reason. It sounds like you're really saying "they are limited, but people are bad too, so it shouldn't matter."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_urban_metro_...

Cars will be automated because cars have to be automated.

These are self interested business people. There are real issues around self driving cars like safety, autonomy, rent seeking, corporate control, individual freedom and surveillance that self interested tunnel vision advocates simply cannot comprehend.

Planes are mostly automated, except for liftoff and landing. They can probably automate those too ... but there's no point. You'll still need a pilot. Would you get into a plane flown entirely by computer with no pilot available to take over?

Trains are entirely automated. At least, the ones where there isn't a union enforcing some form of employment. I've been on a number of trains in airports that don't have any kind of operator.

There was enough pressure to engineer away flight engineers, navigators, and radio operators in cockpits. I wouldn't expect them to pass on potential savings in the low-margin world of airlines.

> "With a net profit margin of just 2.4%, airlines only retain $5.42 per passenger carried," said Tony Tyler CEO of International Air Transport Association (IATA) at the group's 70th AGM in Doha, Qatar.

I suspect they're interested in single-digit cost reductions.

All of that work to support a small rail line? It might never pay off.

2. Why would you need to avoid crossings with roads just because it's autonomous? Trains use signals that only turn green when the section ahead is clear of other trains or vehicles. It's not like train conductors check road crossings by sight to decide whether to drive or brake.

Well, there's ACAS/TCAS (airborne collision avoidance system / traffic collision avoidance system) and certainly we are moving towards ASAS (airborne separation assurance system), based mainly in transponder / ADS-B radio signals. But as others have commented, there are other reasons (psychological, economic, etc.).

Planes also have a very high safety bar to begin with, which cars do not.

Same thing about trains, there's very little value in doing so, and resistance in the form of unions in some locations. Some trains are fully automated though, here's an article with some more info: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/wnj75z/why-dont-w...

Frankly having some dude from Toyota, who don't seem to be very invested in this space, tell me he doesn't think it's going to work isn't very convincing. Chris Urmson saying it might take up to 30 years is far more convincing: http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self...

But that's 30 years for the entire planet, not until it works at all. WayMo is already letting people ride their cars in Phoenix - presumably one of the places with good weather and easy roads, so I think metro-level deployment in the next 4 years seems about right.

[EDIT]: And on the topic of trains. The MTA in NYC can't even seem to handle basic technical projects, like upgrading signaling infrastructure, or just extending a rail line a few miles without spending billions of dollars, so there's probably a decent chance that some of these are not automated due to sheer incompetence.

[0] http://corporatenews.pressroom.toyota.com/article_display.cf...

> “Historically human beings have shown zero tolerance for injury or death caused by flaws in a machine,” Pratt said. “As wonderful as AI is, AI systems are inevitably flawed… We’re not even close to Level 5. It’ll take many years and many more miles, in simulated and real world testing, to achieve the perfection required for level 5 autonomy.”

I can believe that, but I also disagree that we need to be there for it to be useful. Level 4 is enough for large scale deployments.

I think it's far more likely that there would be a three step process for this technology to be adopted: first it's early adopters and everyone else is like "whoa that's too far" (I think this has already happened), then people start to uneasily use it, and when it's good enough they realize "oh holy crap, the machine can drive while I watch Netflix! this is awesome" and then they'll use it constantly. Soon, it just blends into the background. Maybe it isn't 100% safe, but what is?

I don't think you'll get the truth out of focus groups, either. Try to hold a focus group on self driving car adoption and 99% of the people will tell you "only when it's perfect." Probably if you ask the same focus group if they text/eat/put on makeup and drive, 99% of them would tell you "absolutely not" when I'm sure that 100% of them do. I think that once a somewhat good enough assist gets into peoples hands, it won't stop.

Sure but is this because of capability or number of vehicles?

>at limited times,

Sure, because drivers don't want to work late at night.

>and presumably in limited weather conditions;

Why's that?

>and most importantly that there's still a human driver in the vehicle at all times.

Sure, but this isn't due to capability, but for regulatory reasons. As far as I know, the firefly vehicles (the cute little bubble ones) don't have steering wheels, and were in use 3 years ago. This argument doesn't make sense to me.

Because Phoenix has extremely low precipitation: http://www.usclimatedata.com/climate/phoenix/arizona/united-...

This became painfully obvious with the article floating around where a car misread a stop sign with a small amount of marking as a 45MPH speed limit sign. It's pretty clear that if a car is mistaking a red sign for a white sign, we have a very long time to go before the car can safely drive itself without a human observer to intervene when needed.

When it comes to automated driving, we need to keep our optimism in check and know that it can take decades before we have safe robotic taxis. They may become legal in countries with lower bars for safety before they are legal in the US.

The big problem, I think, will be when the drunks get into accidents because they will turn on autonomous driving, and don't get pulled over. Instead, they won't be sober enough to observe and intervene when the car screws up.

That's what happens when the sign were made for humans. They should start putting QR codes under traffic signs, with the human sign as a fall back or as a second point of reference.

People can be dicks to each other in myriad ways, I don't find these arguments that you could trick self-driving cars super compelling.

You wouldn't remove human sign identification from the algorithm, you just supplement it with the small QR code under the sign.

I think you misread that article.

Someone built their own toy implementation of an CV sign recognizer. Then, with full access to the code, they reverse engineered visual distortions that could seem innocuous to humans but trip up their model.

It's not a real world issue as far as I'm aware (though obviously signs can be misread or missed, but not invisibly vandalized)

a) Humans can be fooled by vandalising a stop sign too. The difference here is that the change is imperceptible to humans... but does this matter?

b) A lot of self-driving work leans heavily on maps which will know to expect a stop sign.

It's pretty clear that if a human can't even pay attention to a light directly pointed at them, we have a very long time to go before humans can safely drive cars without a computer to intervene when needed.

Of course, the road system is designed for humans' foibles, not computers' foibles, and computers will have to deal with that. But the bar is low.

Computers aren't really as consistent as you say, either. Obviously, a deterministic machine will produce the same outputs for the same inputs. But when your inputs are camera data from the real world, you'll never get the same input twice. For example, my car sometimes misreads or fails to read speed limit signs, but it'll usually read the exact same sign perfectly fine the next time I go past.

This is better for the environment, there is a lot of energy lost in a full stop for a stop sign that could be saved: less air pollution/CO2 to deal with.

Similarly, opinions from those heavily invested aren't convincing.

Are there people with credible experience, but without bias either way, that are giving projections on when it might be viable?

e.g. http://searchcio.techtarget.com/blog/TotalCIO/Driverless-car...

"I think that driving exposes fundamental issues in intelligence, fundamental issues in how the brain works. And we might be a very long way away.”

Having listened to Leonard speak, his skepticism seems to mostly be around how you deal with all the things like left hand turns in busy traffic, police waving people around an accident, etc. that happen on a daily basis.

Before automobiles it was normal for people to walk in the middle of the street, but we adapted (some would argue this was a bad thing ofc).

I don't think it's a prerequisite for autonomous systems to be the same as humans, the benefit is just too large for us to wait.

To give an example, my friend has to memorize the required speeds for each different section and turn in every train he runs, and has to manually adjust the train's speed accordingly.

Literally all of that can and should be done automatically, but the industry hasn't caught up with what is technologically possible.

The white glove pointing is all about being on time, it is a discipline and hitting those exactly on time arrival-departures comes down to train drivers knowing what speed they are doing without looking at instruments, which are covered during training.

Maybe the Danes have their own variation of this obsessive stop-watch training. A system that works efficiently does not have to be computerised, fantastic teamwork and dedicated professionalism can suffice.

In other endeavours, we still have not fully automated coffee, instead of a perfectly adequate beverage from a machine some prefer a human operator to operate the machine as if it was some rocket-surgery skill/craft. I don't think train operation is like that, a faux professionalism, maybe programming is nearer the mark, some programmers use a text editor which is ridiculous when they could use an IDE. Furthermore some programmers roll their own code rather than just re-use some existing module.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_Metro

Actual aircraft can be fully automated for landing at least. In the US Army, I flew the Shadow 200 TUAV and it had a thing called the T.A.L.S. (Tactical Automated Landing System)[1] which does exactly what you'd assume it does by the acronymn. It is a monopulse radar tracking system on the ground with a transponder on the plane. You fly the UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) into a small area at one end of the runway and click the "Land AV" button (A.V. == Aerial Vehicle) and the landing is 100% hands off. You have the option to cancel the landing if wind or the parameters are off down to 10ft, but below that it is land or crash trying!

For trains, the safest ones are automated, but Unions (in the US at least) prevent most of the autonomous technology from being deployed. Where I live, in Chicago, we had a train conductor fall asleep and the train went up the escalator and crashed into the turnstiles at terminal 2 of Ohare[2]. A computer would have prevented this from happening as a computer would neither have been speeding or sleeping. In that incident, the automated breaking systems had never been tested and in fact were configured / setup wrong, so they both failed. This has been rectified since and additional barriers have been constructed. That being said, there are lots of fully automated trains[3], you just might be unaware of them.

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAI_RQ-7_Shadow#Design

    [2] http://www.chicagotribune.com/g00/news/ct-ohare-blue-line-crash-ntsb-report-met-20150326-story.html?i10c.referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F

    [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_urban_metro_subway_systems#Grade_of_Automation_4_Systems

There's no autopilot which could have successfully landed an Airbus A320 in the Hudson River.

These edge-cases are uninteresting IMO.

You can argue that autonomous flight doesn't yet have Nine Nines. I would probably agree. But "Miracle on the Hudson" was just that, and extremely rare situations should not be a standard-bearer for allowing autonomous flight. In the same way that suicidal/homicidal humans shouldn't be the standard-bearer for allowing human flight.

On the contrary, these edge cases are by far the most interesting thing. Not just tabloid-interesting, but in terms of generating usable data.

1. Pilot sets takeoff conditions (throttles, flaps)

2. Pilot signals deck crew

3. Catapult accelerates the plane off the deck

4. The plane's fly by wire control system pitches the plane for optimal Angle of Attack for the wings (IIRC - 8.1* without flaps).

Once the aggressive acceleration of the catapult is complete, the pilot takes control again and begins flying - this is less than 1 second after catapult release.

Here's an example catapult launch from a USN F-18 pilot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nj9D1Ls-_JM

If you look at the stick directly in between the pilot's legs, you'll see him put his right hand on it at ~4.5 seconds. His left hand is on the throttles.

That’s about the most reckless and grotesque characterization of an airline pilot’s job I’ve ever heard. To say that a 787, or any other airliner, can fly “unaided” and that pilots are on hand to “babysit the autopilot” isn’t just hyperbole or a poetic stretch of the facts. It isn’t just a little bit false. And that a highly respected technology magazine wouldn’t know better, and would allow such a statement to be published, shows you just how pervasive this mythology is. Similarly, in an article in the New York Times not long ago, you would have read how Boeing pilots spend “just seven minutes” piloting their planes during a typical flight. Airbus pilots, the story continued, spend even less time at the controls.

Confident assertions like these appear in the media all the time, to the point where they’re taken for granted. Reporters, most of whom have limited background knowledge of the topic, have a bad habit of taking at face value the claims of researchers and academics who, valuable as their work may be, often have little sense of the day-to-day operational realities of commercial flying. Cue yet another aeronautics professor or university scientist who will blithely assert that yes, without a doubt, a pilotless future is just around the corner. Consequently, travelers have come to have a vastly exaggerated sense of the capabilities of present-day cockpit technology, and they greatly misunderstand how pilots interface with that technology.

I’d like to see a remotely operated plane perform a high-speed takeoff abort after an engine failure, followed by a brake fire and the evacuation of 250 passengers. I would like to see one troubleshoot a pneumatic problem requiring a diversion over mountainous terrain. I’d like to see it thread through a storm front over the middle of the ocean. The idea of trying to handle any one of these, from a room thousands of miles away, is about the scariest thing I can hardly imagine. Hell, even the simple things. Flying is very organic — complex, fluid, always changing — and decision-making is constant and critical. On any given flight, there are innumerable contingencies, large and small, requiring the attention and visceral appraisal of the crew.

[1] http://www.askthepilot.com/questionanswers/automation-myths/

Factually, autopilots are what actually fly the overwhelming flight hours in commercial aviation. The pilot takes off, gets to altitude, sets the heading with the assistance of tech like a VOR[1], sets the autopilot, and then just scans the instrument panels for the duration of the flight. They then take over for the approach and landing. I strongly doubt any commercial pilot would disagree with this (I've got several in my family, but am not one myself). The fact is that the number one cause of aircraft crashes is pilot error. So for the 1-5% where a human would indeed prevent a crash as mentioned in your article, over 50% [2] of the fatal crashes are in fact due to human error.

Regarding the last paragraph, I was the pilot on a mission over the Sinjar Mountain[3] range and had my altimeter go haywire and think I was at 20,000ft AGL (above ground level) when I was in fact more like 7500ft AGL. The troubleshooting for a remote plane is exactly the same as any IFR (instrument flight rating aka you can't see outside of the cockpit due to weather) rated plane when you have zero visibility. You trust your instincts and the sensors / instruments. I knew the altimeter was totally full of lies as the plane started descending below the tops of the mountains thereby killing my signal. So I set the camera to "nose" which means straight forward and when I regained communications, I managed to switch it to manual roll ("roll knobs as they call it") and did a turn left as hard as feasible to miss the tip of one of the mountains. Totally ignoring the altimeter, I flew it home with the aid of the camera to gauge rough altitude and safely landed the plane. Do they crash occasionally? Sure. However, none of these were designed with safety critical autopilot and that could certainly be developed with today's software and hardware. That pilot is arguing "computers can't replace me!!!", but in reality if they did, the majority of the crashes[1] that are fatal would not happen in the first place.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHF_omnidirectional_range

[1] http://www.planecrashinfo.com/cause.htm

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinjar_Mountains

Also, if I recall correctly, he said in certain conditions it's against regulations for a pilot to be manually controlling the aircraft, such as landings in high winds.

The other part sounds improbable - quite the opposite, a pilot always needs to be able to take over in case the automatic systems fail.

"land totally on its own" suggests autonomy. In reality it's a three part certification: pilot, plane (autopilot), and runway. There is only one zero visibility landing system, and that's the ILS CAT IIIc.[1] If there's no ground capability for the runway (does not exist or is down for maintenance) then the plane can't do a CAT IIIc landing.

In practice there is no such thing as landing without an explicit clearance to land. Clearance is given by ATC to the pilot via AM radio. The autopilot has no language listening or speaking skills at all. Numerous clearance modifications happen during a flight, given verbally.[2]

The plane also doesn't taxi itself into position, and it doesn't retract or subsequently deploy landing gear. Many tasks aren't available to the autopilot, nor are many transitions between tasks.

About the last statement, FAR 91.3(a) The pilot in command of an aircraft is directly responsible for, and is the final authority as to, the operation of that aircraft. You could construe FAR 91.13(a)No person may operate an aircraft in a careless or reckless manner so as to endanger the life or property of another. as requiring the pilot to use automation if the aircraft manufacturer requires it in certain situations. Otherwise, no, and I have only ever heard of autopilots needing to be disabled in high wind situations.

[1] Example instrument approach procedure. Scroll to the bottom and you'll see it explicitly requires ground navaids and a certified crew. http://155.178.201.160/d-tpp/1709/09077I35RC2_3.PDF

[2] Example STAR which most airports don't have, but when they do you'll even see these are really just designed to allow ATC to "plug in" a smaller subset of data like an altitude or speed, without having to recite the entire arrival instructions. Can it be automated? No, because the variables are delivered by voice. The STAR is useless without the variables, and variables are useless without the STAR. http://155.178.201.160/d-tpp/1709/09077POWDR.PDF

First, they have few human-error crashes; they're both significantly safer than automobiles, so unless automation can do better-than-human disaster recovery (not likely yet) there's minimal safety advantage. You have to outperform well-trained humans instead of random people to save lives.

Second, they don't take much time per traveller to operate. Both often have 100+ passengers per operator, making it relatively cheap to employ skilled human labor. Cars average around 2:1, so there's a lot more time being wasted per passenger-hour.

Third, cars have highly flexible usage. Planes and trains are generally moving people or cargo to approximate destinations, and travel to places design to store them. Cars spend lots of time arriving in storage-free areas - what if your car dropped you off at work and drove to a garage outside the city? And they do lots of last-mile transit - what if your car could go pick up your groceries or dry-cleaning without you?

Broadly, I think there's way more safety and financial incentive for 100% driverless operation of cars than any other mode of travel.

  Unions.

So, if it costs a billion dollars to make a good AI driver, then if you put it in a million cars then it's costs 1000 dollars each and you could eliminate lots of jobs where the main cost is the human (delivery, taxi) so providing a ready sales avenue for your self-driving car (or tech). If you put it in trains then you can maybe drive thousands of trains, and the human is a relatively low cost element of a train service so there's less room to expand.

I don't know if this is true, or even if the logic I outlined above pencils out with real data but it probably contributes in some way.

https://jonathannen.com/captain-ai.html

Denver International Airport has 10 runways. Only three have ILS CAT IIIc approaches, and that is the only instrument approach procedure that permits full autoland in zero visibility. So you're saying it's completely OK to have 1/3 utilization of the airport's runways for automated landings.

Oh and, those three runways? 34L, 34R, 35R. They all point north. So you can't do auto landings to the east, west, or south. Due to wind direction, your planes won't be able to land on quite a few days out of the year, at all. And in fact the wind could shift while a flight is enroute and now where does it go? All of a sudden the required alternate may be insufficient because a simple wind shift, rather than a change in visibility, becomes the new metric for whether a plane can land or not, and whether the alternate is legal.

This is one logical flaw. There are thousands of these. Totally surmountable, with metric tons of money. But you said no investments necessary.

Some investment will certainly be needed. ADS-B is only beginning to be rolled out, and it will be essential for pilotless planes. But the technical issues for automating planes are mostly solved. Aircraft automation is an engineering problem; not a research problem. The investments still needed are engineering investments.

In contrast, getting to Level 5 automation in cars is very much still a research problem, and as such, orders of magnitude greater resources of money and time will be required to solve it.

It sounds like you think most commercial aviation flights in the U.S. autoland. Almost none of them do. Most flights are landed by pilots. Some portion of the approach is done by autopilot but the landing is done by a pilot. Many airports in the country have mandatory noise abatement. Are you aware that ILS approaches are incompatible with noise abatement? These approaches and landings are hand flown in visual conditions. So your plane can't just use instrument landings designed for bad weather flying. You have to R&D a whole new approach to landing method that's noise abatement compatible, to be able to have pilotless planes doing autolandings. Unsolved problem. Seems significant research related to me, not merely an engineering problem.

Why will it take orders of magnitude greater resources and time to solve the auto driving problem, and yet all such research problems for auto flying are solved? What data do you have that causes you to conclude that one is solved and the other is far from solved? What's the difference in cognition and judgement requirements between the two? What's the relevance of experience? Why do you suppose there are so much more substantial knowledge and experience requirements in pilot certification than driver licensing? Why does it take so long to learn how to become an airline transport pilot? Why have gradations of certification? If it's so much simpler of a system to automate as you state, then it should be a simpler system for a human to learn and just plug into, than learning to drive. But it's the exact opposite, it's much more complex than driving, despite automation.

And yet you're saying no, it's simpler and solved, to just replace all of that cognition and judgement with computers and automation. No more research required, just go built it, according to you. Strikes me as a lot of hubris.

Additionally, air traffic controllers are part of this cognitive and judging process of making planes move around. They train for years as well. But despite every flight requiring two human brains in flight, and part of a human brain involved on the ground, you're claiming that driving cars is more cognitively complicated to automate. Why? What's the basis? A single person does this in a car, and they almost always can multitask totally unrelated things like listening to music, or conversing with passengers.

CAT III landings do not incluce runway egress. Unsolved problem to do without a pilot. Sounds like massive R&D is needed, not just engineering or it'd already be automated.

Autopilots don't do turbulence or icing conditions well. They're disabled in severe cases, and such conditions aren't always predictable or even known until the moment they're encountered. Sounds like an R&D problem, not just an engineering problem. Landing on ice, snow, and heavy rain? Pilots do that by hand, not autopilots. AGain, more R&D needed, not just engineering. For reasons unknown you want us to believe that for planes these are solved problems, or easily solved problems, while identical situations for autonomous cars are still difficult unsolved problems. Why? Sounds like you don't know what you're talking about.

The term autopilot is idiotic. The most sophisticated autopilot follows a defined path, the path is defined by a pilot. It effectively maintains altitude, heading, and speed. That's it. There is no code that enables the autopilot to think like a pilot and redefine the path, which happens in all flights. Clearance changes are common place for many reasons. So you need to design a pilotless version of the current ATC to pilot to autopilot carrier pigeon system. Is it an engineering problem? Or a research problem? Seems like both to me because there's no plan for it right now, no design.

Why is ADS-B essential? It's merely scaled out secondary radar. It solves a very vertical problem. It doesn't have sufficient precision to help with landing. It says nothing about how to utilize this information. Humans do that. Seems to me it's a research problem to create an AI that replaces the evaluation and judgement of a pilot, not just engineering.

sigh

Gusty takeoffs and landings? Autopilots don't do that right now. Sounds like a research problem, not an engineering one.

Emergency procedures? This is 100% the domain of human pilots right now. Code that for the pilotless aircraft. Seems R&D related, not merely an engineering task.

The autopilot needs to meet the functional equivalent of competency for the applicable parts of pilot certification in FAR 61. It needs to be able to conform with all or at least some substantial subset of aviation regulations FAR 91, 135, and 121 as right now a huge amount of this conformance is done by pilots. Otherwise, you're redesigning the entire aviation system from the ground up. Either way this sounds to me like a massive research problem, not just an engineering problem.

This list goes on and I pretty much think you're an idiot, not because you're ignorant, but because you're ignorant, deny it, and then handwave bullshit that all the seriousl research problems are solved and all that remains is building things. It's just - it's really stupid and condescending.

I've been on an automated city train as well, I believe in China.

The space shuttle's only system that absolutely required human intervention was the landing gears, and that was to ensure that humans were always necessarily in the loop. That doesn't mean that the shuttle wasn't _MOSTLY_ automated.

>If those checkpoints were automated

If there were unicorns...

>the plane could indeed fly and land on its own.

No, and its annoying that you're asserting things you clearly don't understand.

As I mention elsewhere, the only technology we currently have for precision instrument landings in zero weather visibility (the only 100% autoland) is the ILS CAT IIIc approach. The overwhelming majority of airports in the country do not have that infrastructure, nor do most airplanes.

I'm a pilot, you clearly aren't. There are numerous other factors here, but just the fact you can't land wherever you want, at most airports with most aircraft, is enough to prove your assertion false.

Driver salary is 26% of the cost of trucking.

Driver salary is 52% of the cost of a taxi.

Those numbers are in the single digits for aircraft and trains.

We could replace pilots and train operators, technologically speaking. But the incentives are not (yet) large enough to overcome the regulatory and cultural barriers. We'd rather have that extra order of magnitude of safety, because it costs so little compared to other expenses.

The cost/benefit calculation for drivers is fundamentally different.

On top of that, the space and interfaces for the driver is a substantial part of the cost and weight of the vehicle itself.

If you drop the utilization, the cost of the driver as a percentage probably goes up a bit. But here's the thing about those numbers.

Yes, driver salary is a big chunk of taxi cost but flip things around. It's only about half the cost. In other words, there's this widespread assumption that autonomy totally changes the nature of automobiles and automobile ownership even though it only cuts the cost in half.

Ask yourself. If you own a car today, would getting a 50% discount on taxi rides completely change your behavior. Maybe it would for some at the margins but only at the margins.

IMO the killer app is in freight anyways.

Look longer term.

Parking spaces in cities cost ~30k. (And in some cities, a lot more than that). Included with a house, they are still part of the price (no free lunch).

Over a 30 year mortgage, that is 1k a year.

In California, car insurance is almost 2k a year. (Oddly enough, 1.1k in New York State!)

So 3k a year just to have the privilege of driving a car.

Apparently an average new car now days cost 31k. (Which seems insane to me, but that is what people are buying).

Being generous and rounding down a bit, that is another 5k a year.

So now 8k a year, before gas, before maintenance, before any warranty problems, before screws in tires, etc.

If mass transit can replace commuting to work, then weekend outings with automated taxis become very doable. If you give $5 per ride (on par with UberPool, though I realize that isn't profitable), it is 1600 rides a year to break even with owning a car. (Though ownership goes down after the car is paid off, 600 rides a year to break even!)

2) Especially since amortization cost is also reduced, you might as well electrify the vehicle (this requires some sort of robot arm for fast charging, but I suppose you could pay someone like $0.50 per cycle to plug and unplug a bunch of vehicles in the interim). That reduces fuel costs by a factor of 2 and maintenance costs even more.

3) No driver means room for more people or ability to shrink the car, reducing all the above costs.

So you've now reduced all the other costs by a factor of 2. That means your overall costs are now reduced by 75% or more. Yeah, that's starting to look pretty attractive.

Man sure would be cool if any concept car ever presented were actually released. They do look fancy and futuristic.

That car had nothing but positive reviews from all corners of the internet. I am surprised Cadillac canceled its production and thought of making a coups instead of a convertible.

Not many are, but some are occasionally. I personally own one of the few existing Isuzu VehiCROSS vehicles. It started out as a concept car in the 1990s, then went into production virtually unchanged (only a tad under 6000 were ever made).

This reality seems like it may pose a problem though, as some people's business models and valuations depend on this article being wrong.

The thing is, we don't need full level 5 to get useful stuff out of this line of tech development. But in terms of the futurist vision of driverless cars everywhere, fleets of cars replacing private ownership, etc -- hard to see that happening. If the tech takes more than 10 years to develop, it's very likely something else will develop in the meantime which will essentially invalidate all of those earlier visions, as the world will have gone in a different direction in the meantime.

Just this week, I missed one of those variables and cost myself $500 in damage. This is something a backup camera and automated system can and already does easily help with, and is a major efficacy leap. Small steps like this can really add up.

What I would like to see next is a system that alerts the driver when the light in front of them turns green. I feel like I lose 5-10 minutes a week sitting behind people who are checking their phones unaware the light has changed.

I wish I could upvote this idea straight into the car manufacturers inboxes. Nothing more frustrating than having to sit through multiple light cycles cause the dipshit in front of you is taking a nap, conveniently waking up with enough time to get themselves through the light but not any of the people behind them.

A quick blip on a set of train horns can quickly change that behavior.

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/240264-hands-audis-excit...

We'll continue to benefit at each level: speed match, safe-distance maintenance, emergency brake, lane follow - there are already people alive who would be dead without them - you can find them in 5 seconds on youtube. The fact that articles have to keep trotting out same sad story of the bloke who drove into a truck while watching movies when he should have been driving tells you a lot about how safe these systems actually are - if there were dozens of counter examples, we wouldn't be hearing from the head of Toyota's RI, we'd be drowning in dashcam snuff films.

All that said, yes, I agree it's obvious that level 5 is a different beast to all of the 'easy stuff' that we have now: classic case of where the edge cases cover more area than the core of the domain does.

Please tell this to city governors who are so keen at throwing money to stupid start-ups peddling this nonsense at the expensive of other things, like proven public transport, for example.

Stuff like this being "patently obvious" to you should be an impetus to get the word out, because those for whom is isn't are the ones making dangerously imprudent policy decisions.

Again, not to invalidate the use of level 4 automation and such, but ya'll need to crush this fantasy of level 5 in 2 years, for all our sakes.

And this is why god invented short-selling. If startups were openly traded instead of privately funded, I think we'd see a lot of technologists setting up massive bets against "full automation" and "solve everything with AI" projects.

It's not easy to get people (especially politicians) to listen to bad news, no matter how loudly you shout it. But in a lot of markets, downward pressure comes from the ability of cynics to enter the market and get payouts from guessing (or knowing) that some promise is impossible.

In the meantime, I suppose we'll all keep yelling. But when trigger-happy investors and unaccountable state funding are shaping the market, I'm not sure how much good it'll do.

Yes and no. In any given Tesla article here you can also read many people claiming that "it's basically a solved problem and Tesla and Uber will be fully automated in just a couple of years", too.

If a car can drive in any environment and react to any circumstances surely said AI could also do anything else, no?

EDIT: Thanks for the responses everyone. Though, to clarify, when I think of "full autonomous" driving, I'm thinking of a car that can go from A to B regardless of the context. Meaning, if some of it is offroad it'll handle that, if there's traffic that'll be handled. If there's something wrong with itself, aka the car, it'll be introspective and call for assistance, sending its location, etc. Not just following marks on a road and pulling over and giving up if it can't get there.

Also, I do not think a "fully intelligent AI" can necessarily solve any problem, but is capable of learning such that it could. I the purposes of a discussion I'd equate it to maybe a 5 year old.

Problems in AI can very easily turn into a black hole of money and data. I hope the large number of AI startups appreciate this.

AI is kind of a silly term, imo.

"I am driving at 45mph at [GPS Coordinates] [UTC Timestamp]".

"I'm braking [GPS Coordinates] [UTC Timestamp]".

Driving is quite a bit short of "same intelligence as humans"

But for the most part, if there is low visibility and pedestrian proximity, 30 MPH is too fast. The streets here don't have much obstructing visibility other than parked cars, there are good sidewalks set well back from the streets and the speed limit is still 25 MPH.

The driver is found at fault for that death if they were not driving legally. Otherwise, and very often times regardless, the whole thing is written off as a tragic accident (millions happen every year, just in the USA), and the insurance people do their thing.

Ethical dilemmas are a non-problem for self-driving cars.

You are off by two orders of magnitude. It was 35,000 two years ago.

Still a lot of people, but not millions.

Put in context, it's around one death per 100 million miles driven.

Thanks.

1) such a situation happening is extremely rare (more so in the classic example of the trolley problem)

and

2) regardless of its possibility, if we are able to reduce the number of fatal and injurious accidents caused by automobiles by half, in the United States alone, such tragedies should not stop us from doing so

For some reason, people always let the impossible attainment of perfection be the enemy of good enough (as the old saying goes).

We will never get a perfect system. We don't have a perfect system right now. What we can get (indeed, I'd argue we're already there in the case of self-driving vehicles) is close enough that the difference is fairly negligible. That is, such systems can be made vastly better than the average human driver, and generally will come close or exceed that of professional drivers.

We are arguing that we'd rather have a professional taxi driver at the wheel of a vehicle transporting us, who is 98% competent at his job (that's being generous, actually), rather than a machine which is 99.95% competent doing the same job (note that neither percentage is based in reality - I pulled both from my nether regions for this example - but they probably aren't too far off the mark, either - well, again, I'm being generous with the taxi driver).

It's a purely irrational and emotional response not based on actual statistics and knowledge about accident rates. We'd rather continue letting drivers get in accidents, injuring or killing themselves and others, at a very high daily rate, than implement a technology which would rapidly make that number drop to very low levels over time.

Part of it I think is that we want to be able to blame somebody. We can't blame a machine, for some reason, or its manufacturer - especially in the heat of the moment (provided we survive). We can instead blame ourselves, or more generally "the other guy" for being a bad driver. We have this innate problem with being able to say both "I don't know" and "bad things can happen for not any good reason", and instead must find something or someone to blame, and if it isn't ourselves, even better (hence a lot of religious expression not based on reality).

There is so much benefit this technology can bring, even today. I don't personally think it is ready for consumer adoption quite yet, but I can see it being ready in less than 10 years, maybe less than 5. The problem for its adoption is that we'll likely never be ready, even if it attained a five 9's level of reliability, simply because if it failed, we'd have no one to blame but ourselves for trusting in it. For some reason, that simply will not do. We'd rather continue with the status-quo and continue to rack up the injuries and death, because at least then, we can blame the other guy instead of ourselves.

Animals are very good at responding to specific situations with fixed action patterns.

Humans are very good at adapting to new situations by training new action patterns.

Self driving cars tread far more in the territory of machine learning than AI. AI involves ML, but ML doesn't necessarily involve proper AI. ML is essentially creating a framework of existing data that the computer can apply to similar situations. This is why you hear terminology like "training a dataset" in ML -- you are just telling it to act upon new situations in as similar of a capacity as possible to previous situations.

AI to me is a very different thing, in that it doesn't require structured inputs and outputs. Even as chaotic as autonomous driving is, it's still a structured system that takes inputs about road rules and surrounding objects and aligns the car with an outcome where it follows road rules and doesn't hit anything.

True AI is a machine that can reason for itself in unstructured situations, which would likely involve ML that is very good at making inferences about how existing data applies to tangentially related situations. I'm sure at some point there will be a distinction between AI that aims to create outcomes as similar as possible to human decision making (perhaps it could be trained by you to make decisions the way you would), and AI that aims to emulate human thought process literally down to the neurotransmitter level.

Sounds about right. The same stuff market bubbles are made of!

California is on the verge of approving new regulations that allow automated cars on public roads with no humans in the vehicle, and as soon as that happens, things are going to move faster than the people who believe 10-years-late Toyota think.

I can't help but think about speech recognition 20 years ago. Many of the hot software packages claimed something like 96% accuracy, and that sounded great on paper. People thought intelligent voice-computer interfaces were just around the corner, yet here we are in 2017, and Siri/Alexa/Cortana are barely becoming usable (but still frustratingly lacking in many situations).

Someone is going to be the first in self driving cars. Uber has a tremendous demand for them. It would be stupid to not at least be trying to be the first one on the scene.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jun/17/uber-drivers...

You seemed to imply that this is a new phenomenon that isn't yet legitimized. It's been around for a long time. It was and continues to be a problem, but Uber is just a microcosm of it.

That being said, Toyota's (and Subaru's) approach is the smart way forward - add sensors and capabilities that augment the human, but leave the human always responsible and in control. In order for a crash to happen, the human AND the machine BOTH have to miss it.

Once the machine is good enough (and we figure out what "good enough" means), then it can take over driving. But not before.

Also, interesting fact: Subaru is achieving these impressive stats using stereo vision, not lidar.

> “Historically human beings have shown zero tolerance for injury or death caused by flaws in a machine,”

It doesn't matter if it's objectively safer; people have no issue doing dangerous things so long as they can maintain the illusion of control.

In terms of cars: Streets where built for people or animals walking on them and cars quickly started killing large numbers of people. The response was not to make cars safer by say physically limiting them to 10 MPH, but to remove people from streets.

A fairly high fraction of early aviators where killed, that did little to slow adoption of aircraft.

Astronaut deaths where sadly common, but also expected and did little to slow progress.

Umm, reasonably sure that implementing a legal speed limit was an initial response, in the UK at least. It took a number of years (and likely a lot of propaganda, though I haven't looked that closely into it and history is, of course, written by the victors) to allow motorcars to use roads at anything close to a reasonable speed.

Check wikipedia out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limit#History

Watch this and suddenly those mentioned speed limits are completely reasonable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=954L9MpfCEo

Note, 10MPH would allow for 2-3x the speed of a horse over long distances. So, in this alternate history cars would still have been very useful.

Thus you get jaywalking as a crime, and justified many deaths as people breaking the law instead of the naritive that cars are insanely dangerous and should be banned. In theory cars could have been banned, but in practice their advocates had little trouble changing perceptions.

If a pedestrian starts to cross the road, they have right of way. I've been on roads in some city centres where vehicles have to be very, very careful as there's a road through a pedestrianised area and people are rather bold crossing the road. If the vehicle was to cause injury, the driver would likely be liable.

No, it's literal control. They'd rather operate a vehicle in a way that's statistically less effective (where effective is defined by a collection of algorithms, we all know how perfect algorithmic generated routes are) than lose that control for a small benefit. Control itself is worth something to people.

Autonomous driving is difficult primarily because of a changing world and low tolerance for mistakes. The state space of situations you're trying to map is just large. It will take time. But it's not even close to impossible.

Audio recognition is difficult for a different reason: language is difficult to disambiguate without context. So today the limits of our audio recognition bump up against knowing the context of words you're saying. It used to be the case that audio recognition had fundamental difficulties e.g at word boundaries but those challenges are mostly solved. Some of these challenges might not be solved without improvements in areas outside of the raw listening part of ASR.

> That being said, Toyota's (and Subaru's) approach is the smart way forward - add sensors and capabilities that augment the human, but leave the human always responsible and in control. In order for a crash to happen, the human AND the machine BOTH have to miss it.

This is your opinion. Folks at some other companies (e.g waymo) don't think this makes you safer. Human attention might not work the way you think it does.

Voice recognition is getting just barely tolerable. If you have tried to do something important using voice recognition you'd probably go bat shit crazy after a while. If it had the potential to kill people no sane human would allow it.

That is why I think self-driving cars and voice recognition are not comparable problems.

> Voice recognition also has a lot less market demand than self driving cars.

Just to expand on your point, today's 'self driving car' technology we may equal to where 'voice recognition technology' was 20 years ago. But 20 years ago, there is no incentive for industry to invest say $100 Billion in 'voice recognition technology', the benefits did not warrant such a huge investment. Where as'self driving car' technology there is potential to reap benefits that is why industry today investing $100 Billion ( all combined investments from all players )

> Technology can be invented that is decades ahead of other fields if enough money is invested.

> That is why I think self-driving cars and voice recognition are not comparable problems.

The huge economic value the can be created with perfected 'self driving car' is in the order of hundreds of Billions of dollars per year world wide combined . Here is an example scenario

In 2025 'self driving Electric Autonomous fleet' vehicles by Uber, Googles of the world offer 'miles plan' ( like our 2005 mobile monthly plan N minutes/month ) that is like 1000 miles per month you can hail any time for a monthly price of $300/month . This is huge economic value for at least 50% of USA drivers and people will embrace it.

Typical USA drivers total cost of ownership of CAR today is in the range of $400 to $600 per month ( CAR price + Repairs costs + car Insurance + gasoline cost) . This is with out counting 1.5 hours/day you have pay attention to drive, the time that can be used for other thing with autonomous fleet