I replied that the accuracy is high. It turns out, in retrospect, that accuracy and usefulness are two different things.

In regards to automated driving, achieving better than human isn't all that hard. Heck backup cameras with little "warning zone" lines on them are better than human for the one particular task of backing up. Cruise control systems that maintain distance are better than humans. We are incrementally getting there. The progress is much different than with voice reco.

The problem with voice reco isn't recognition technology, that works fine, it is with having computers understand what the hell to do with the voice. Contrast that to driving, where the end goal is easy to list - Rule 1: Don't hit anything. Rule 2: Get to the destination. (Rule 1 is the hard part, Rule 2 99.9% solved!)

With Voice Reco, we got the transcription part down, but... now what? In the example I gave up above, knowing how to make a reservation is painful thanks to market fragmentation (not everything is an API), and people generally don't go and tag all of their contacts with their relationship status. I happen to have my wife under "wife" and my mother under "mother", that simple step alone gives me much more natural usage of voice input.

Then when I saw "OK Google, directions to my Mother's house", well, that still doesn't work for a thousand little reasons[1], even though each and every word was correctly transcribed. (I get a nice Google search instead!)

The set of situations that can happen while driving is far smaller than the set of interactions that can happen over voice when users expect a natural interface. Yes driving is really complicated, but it is possible to get a group together and after a day or so, brainstorm everything that could happen on the road out to 2 standard deviations of likelihood.

It might take an hour+ just to list all the ways someone might ask for directions.

[1] Mainly because no one programmed it to understand that particular way of making a request. It is annoying because I can ask it for directions to home, and that works fine, so I just figured directions to "Contact Name's House" would also work. Of course if I lived in NYC I'd expect "Contact Name's Apartment" to work!

Sure it is, but it's doing a hell of a lot better than many critics thought ever possible.

>Self-driving cars need to be even better or people will die.

People will always die. Requiring with certainty that self-driving cars will never cause accidents is a purely emotional instinct with no regard for facts or well-being of people. The only thing that self driving cars need to demonstrate is statistically lower deaths or injuries caused per mile (or hour) of driving than the average human would cause. This would mean that adoption of technology would reduce total deaths if substituted for human drivers, which is what actually matters.

I agree completely with this line of thought, but humans aren't wired that way. The rise in ubiquity of machine-learning powered software will improve our lives greatly....and do so mostly behind the scenes while the average person isn't giving it much thought. In fact, unfortunately, eventually and inevitably, even with self-driving cars, people will still find new reason for road rage.

> We can argue all day about why people aren't inspired by self driving cars. In truth, there are probably hundreds of reasons.

There's really just one. People aren't interested in watching machines execute code. For example, would you really want to watch two AI's play LoL, DotA2, or chess against each other. Many kids aren't going to watch. Similarly, I've learned this the hard way. Perhaps 95-98% of users will not care about how you implemented an app even if you revolutionize the field of Algo's and Data Structures. They will just look at it and say, I guess it's pretty fast, but I really like this parallax when you scroll down.

Even though I found it hugely inspirational that we made an object that has now left the solar system (and it was created 40 years ago with all the processing power a modern, ChiFi pedometer), most people are only going to find it inspirational if a human leaves the solar system.

For better or worse, that's what we prioritize.

Huh? They are in production but not yet in production, but they sure are in production? Can I go to the store and buy one? No. So they are still building the things!

> Speech recognition is 100% amazing. The phones never ever hear me wrong any more, not ever, not once. The main problem I have with it is interpretation, which can be shocking, shocking bad.

I simply do not believe your first point, based on my own experience. 100%? Really? Moreover, your second point, that the interpretation is off, is most of the problem. That's where 99% of the work for the foreseeable future will be spent on this problem.

Yes they are. What do you mean, not in production? Maybe there aren't millions of fully autonomous cars on the road today, but there will be soon. They sure are in production. Companies like Tesla are making production hardware self-driving cars right now - full autonomy coming soon, of course.

> Speech recognition? Which still seems rather bad to me.

Speech recognition is 100% amazing. The phones never ever hear me wrong any more, not ever, not once. The main problem I have with it is interpretation, which can be shocking, shocking bad. (Ask Google for a joke, it'll tell you one and then prompt to you ask "one more". As soon as you do, it'll say "one more what? I don't understand", which is pretty funny.)

> Is there some big application if ML that I’m missing that is a clear win?

Well yeah. I would say millions. ML has been embedded into the world now and makes nearly every daily interaction with technology better than it was before.

I think we should just "move fast and break things"... make all cars self-drivable via speech recognition. I mean that would would serve to limit car ownership... to those with a death wish.

I don't understand why so many smart "tech people" fall for the hype.

Maybe it is because "machine learning" is just abstract enough that even the most jaded developer thinks they can treat it like a black box where if you pour enough videos, photos and LIDAR readings for training into the top it will somehow spit out a fully autonomous self driving car at the bottom.

I do find it funny though. On the one hand Alexa only manages to turn on the lights successfully 50% of the time yet somehow we will magically have self driving cars capable of safely navigating the roads any day now. I mean for fsck sake, we don't even have a thing that can wash and fold clothes automatically but somehow self driving cars will be on the market any day.

Like, if we cannot even get voice recognition to work right, how on earth will you tell this magical car which street parking spot to take in a busy city? How will you tell it to pull over to pick up a friend? Hell, how will you tell it to go through a drive-through at McDonalds? A touchscreen?

I agree with you 100 percent. DAS (driver assist systems) are getting to be very common. I've worked at a couple companies that produce them, though I did not work on those products. I rode on the highway in a car outfitted with prototype lane keeping, and it was not quite as steady as I'd hoped. They also had an option that would apply a light force to keep you in the lane but could be easily overcome (and I think went away if you used a turn signal). It felt like a sort of speed bump between lanes. It wasn't trying to be a really complex system, and probably has some real world value - in reasonable situations I'd like to be able to use both hands to eat some food from the drive through, while keeping my eyes on things.

I've also seen video (circa 2004) of an autonomous car driving 100kph down a winding dirt road, staying on its side of the road and automatically stopping. But again, the engineers wanted to do so much more with it, but the rational guys in safety would not allow it.

I also competed in the AUVS autonomous ground vehicle competition in 1994. I wrote a lane follower by taking 20-30 lines of pixels off an NTSC frame grabber on an Intel 486. The core algorithm was on the order of 100 LoC, and we took second place. Super simple algorithm, hardly intelligent.

There is a huge difference between a PID controller maintaining position in the lane with radar assisted cruise control, and being a fully autonomous vehicle fit of unaided driving on public roads. There is a whole range of system capabilities, and the public has no idea what's in any given car. Comparing highway fatalities/mile to national statistics covering all roads and conditions is bullshit and a certain company that's recently killed some people knows it.

But hey, we all want to be able to read a book on the road or have truckers take a nap on long hauls, so let's keep deluding ourselves that this stuff will be ready for prime time in the next couple years.

That sounds about right. The ability to read/write/etc. while driving on the highway would actually be a huge win for a lot of people. And, equally important, it seems achievable in, perhaps, a single digit number of years.

But there would need to be an unambiguous mode change from "you can do Facebook now" to "you're driving" with plenty of time to make that shift.

This isn't as sexy as roboUber, shared cars, etc. but I'm inclined to agree that getting the last 10% of the way to unsupervised self-driving in essentially all situations is going to take a very long time.

Weren't we also sure self-driving would get better rapidly?

The good thing is we have comma.ai that works across a wide variety of vehicles.

It has, Google has openly admitted to have driven more than 100k miles fully autonomously. The technology IS here, it's going to be widespread in 15-20 years.

Self driving cars are a hard problem, a very hard problem. So is CAPTCHA and machines are still not that great at solving them.

The problem space of autonomus vehicles is a large one, and even with how many mistakes human drivers make, I still don't think we're anywhere near the tech to make safe autonomous driving vehicles. We're at a minimum, 15 years off.

I want you to think about all the technology we use every day. Our phones, desktops, laptops, are full of bugs. Hell I found bugs in the ticketing system I buy metro cards from the other day. We see display kiosk crash all the time.

A Tesla car with lane assistance (please stop calling it auto-pilot) recently drove a car into barrier. Another kept driving for hours without hands on the wheel (fixed in an update. Was that driver passed out? No way to know.)

Now you might say, this is different. The engineers working on self-driving tech are at the level of the ones that build bridges, or make pacemaker software (which by the way, some were found to have a bluetooth vulnerability recently) or plane avionics.

Maybe, but Uber certainly isn't. They're a culture of scum shit shop. This isn't a small thing here. It's a huge, huge problem space that no one completely understands yet. Why are there not any self-driving cars on the streets of NYC or Chicago? Because it's difficult, and dangerous and if there were, people would be dead right now.

For all the money we're investing in self driving cars, we could build tech that already works. Singapore and London both have fully autonomous trains; some that arrive at 30 second intervals and carry millions of people a day. America needs to get its normal infrastructure back before we go down this fantasy world of self driving cars.

I wrote more about this a while back:

https://penguindreams.org/blog/self-driving-cars-will-not-so...

This assumes that the self driving tech will continue to increase in competence and will at some point surpass humans. I somehow find that extremely optimistic, bordering in on being naive.

Consider something like OCR or object recognition alone, where similar tech is applied. Even with decades of research behind it, it really cannot come any where close to a human in terms of reliability. I am talking about stuff that can be trained endlessly with any sort of risk. Still it does not show an ever increasing capability.

Now, machine learning and AI is only part of the picture. The other part is the sensors. This again is not anywhere near the sensors a human is equipped with.

From what we have seen in the tech industry in recent years is that trust in a tech by the people, even intelligent ones such as people who are investing in it, is not based on logic (Theranos, uBeam etc). I think such a climate is exactly what is enabling tests such as these. But unlike others, these tests are actually putting unsuspecting lives on line. And that should not be allowed..

The current road infrastructure (markings, signs) has been designed for humans. Once it has been modernized to better aid the self-driving systems, we don't probably need "perfect" AI.

IF you really want to solve that, that’s an urban design problem that doesn’t take AI at all; it isn’t solved because there is insufficient desire to solve it, not because of technology. But as far as AI-use-in-cars goes…

> This seems like a useful and achievable goal that would save money and lives. I’ve never understood why full self-driving was the problem most people chose to solve instead.

In the space of auto safety technology it’s not. Driver assistance short of full self-driving is much more widely deployed, and continuously improving, by far more automakers than FSD. Full self-driving gets the media attention because its dramatic and showy.

We could have them now if we equipped all vehicles and pedestrians using roads with simple device to broadcast position, velocity, and planned route.

Human swarm behavior is terrible (that's your rush hour traffic for you). And computers are very very reliable. The only question is whether they can be programmed in a way to handle enough edge cases to be feasible.

I'm with you in thinking that for the next 20 years we'll see a lot of automation on high ways but not in cities. On the highways there's very much less variability, and less erratic human driving. For me that's already 99% of what I would buy a self driving car for. I'm happy driving short trips through the city. I hate driving home for 2-3h and not being able to do anything else.

Wow. We've been trying to nail "simple" things like street light timing algorithms for years and all of a sudden, self-driving cars are being prototyped and promised for sale soon. I feel like this is popping out of nowhere, even though self-driving cars are the type of things fantasized about in science fiction from the 20th century. I even thought "I, Robot" was presumptuous to depict automated cars being the majority in 2030. And yet here we are...