Tragically, Once Again Self-Driving Cars Aren’t August 28, 2021
Posted by Peter Varhol in Machine Learning, Software development, Technology and Culture, travel.Tags: autonomous vehicles
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Two stories crossed my attention today that once again, tragically demonstrate that we are likely decades away from self-driving cars, if at all. The first, and stupidest, was with the largest and most arrogant auto company, Toyota, which for some inconceivable reason decided to test-drive its autonomous buses at the Paralympics. One hit an athlete in a legal crosswalk, injuring him and knocking him out of the Games.
Toyota’s CEO posted an apology on YouTube (not even referring to the athlete’s name, which is simply insulting), which is not so much an apology as a brazen PR stunt. I know people who swear by Toyota cars; I swear at them, and this level of arrogance makes it worse. Make it right with the athlete, which Toyota will not do, lest they damage their brand.
The second is, of course, a Tesla, which advertises a “fully autonomous mode” which is anything but. A driver who admits he was not paying attention, instead watching a movie, hit two police cars with lights flashing on the side of the road, attending to another motorist.
Of course, despite the marketing names Tesla gives its driver-assist technology (and that’s really what it is), they have plenty of caveats in the fine print. Those caveats are to keep it out of legal trouble even though the marketing names strongly suggest otherwise. This was the eleventh police car displaying flashing lights that Teslas have hit. While Tesla may end up being a long term success, it is doing itself no favors in the interim.
So what happened to all of the predictions? This is how Anthony Foxx, former U.S. secretary of transportation, envisioned the future of autonomous vehicles in 2016:
“By 2021, we will see autonomous vehicles in operation across the country in ways that we [only] imagine today. … Families will be able to walk out of their homes and call a vehicle, and that vehicle will take them to work or to school. We’re going to see transit systems sharing services with some of these companies.”
Auto executives were no less effusive. Elon Musk is by far the worst of the group. I strongly believe that these so-called predictions were/are criminally wrong, because they encourage people to misuse today’s technology.
I personally believe that fully autonomous vehicles are at least decades away, and possibly completely infeasible.
Driverless Cars Are Decades Away, If At All May 31, 2021
Posted by Peter Varhol in aviation, Machine Learning, Technology and Culture.Tags: autonomous vehicles, driverless cars, Tesla
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I am not a fan of Elon Musk. While at one level I appreciate his audaciousness, which seems to enable him to accomplish impossible goals through sheer force of will, the arrogance through which that force is delivered tends to cheapen it for me. It is perhaps fortunate that he cares not one whit about what I think.
Nevertheless, one area that we disagree on starkly is the self-driving car. Musk recently released a new version of Autopilot for Tesla, which he is referring to as Vision. He believes that Vision will enable Tesla to achieve full driverless experiences within two years.
Um, no. While Autopilot and Vision might seem a bit like magic, they have serious limitations. And the complexity inherent in fully self-driving cars is far more enormous than we have tackled to date. We tend to liken it to aircraft autopilots, which are charged with mostly maintaining straight and level flight on a given course. Modern autopilots can also successfully land a plane, but that is a well-understood and relatively simple maneuver.
Equating self-driving cars to an autopilot is a bad analogy. Cars travel in three dimensions, with unexpected obstacles and often poor weather. Aircraft have multiple pilots that can take over immediately in case of unexpected events. These pilots are also paying attention to the flight information, rather than sleeping or playing a game.
Effectively, the only way to have one fully self-driving car is to make every car on the highway self-driving. You are not going to stop manual drivers from pulling out in front of you, or cutting you off, or driving more slowly than your self-driving car wants to go. So every single car has to be under positive control. And there may well need to be the equivalent of a staffed control tower to make sure traffic flows smoothly.
So Musk and Tesla will continue releasing incremental upgrades, always claiming that the ultimate breakthrough is only a couple of years away. In reality, it won’t happen during my lifetime.
Will We Have to File a Flight Plan? March 26, 2021
Posted by Peter Varhol in aviation, Machine Learning, Technology and Culture, travel.Tags: autonomous vehicles, Scale AI
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I have been an airplane pilot, although I haven’t commanded an aircraft in years. Depending on where you were going, you could just hop in the plane and go. But if you were flying into controlled airspace, you generally had to file a flight plan, which defined your intentions. Am I flying through, or landing at a controlled airport? What am I proposing as an altitude and course? And, of course, things may adapt based on actual conditions through the controlled airspace.
I am currently watching the Scale AI Transform conference online. A speaker is talking about autonomous vehicles, and about how we (collectively) have spent billions of dollars without yet deploying those vehicles except in very limited tests.
It occurs to me that we may need to file the equivalent of a flight plan in order to get into our car in the future. I wonder if we might have to specify our destination and route that we intended to travel. Today air flight plans are mostly manual, but I will not be surprised if we have to spend some time on the computer in the future just to drive to the supermarket.
Autonomous vehicles represent an exceeding complex technical problem. You need many exacting sensors in the car, real time processing and decision-making in the car, an unambiguous knowledge of road rules, extremely reliable communication between vehicles, and a broker, likely in the cloud, that can manage traffic flow and decisions on a real time basis. Maybe, possibly, we might also have to have the equivalent of a staffed air traffic control to manage traffic.
In most circumstances, it is much more complex than flying an airplane. The pilot is still ultimately in control, and can interact with both human controllers and automated systems to make the best decisions.
When I first started traveling to California, I was nonplussed at the red lights on merging onto freeways. I came to understand that it was about traffic flow, a very primitive method that enabled a slightly better spacing out of cars. While the advantage of autonomous vehicles has the potential to be significant, the sensing, decision-making, and control of autonomous vehicles extend far beyond this.
So I think it’s going to be a while before we get fully autonomous vehicles. We have read stories about how people have accidents because they turn their fate over to self-driving systems. That’s stupid today, and it will likely be a bad choice for years to come.
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