Even After $100 Billion, Self-Driving Cars Are Going Nowhere

Maybe the real problem with the neural net approach, and probably many other AI strategies, is that they only converge on the truth in the limit where every possible input is covered adequately in the training set - including images that are partially covered up - and then how does the AI know which part of the image is covered by something else?

I wonder how they perform on the "prove you aren't a robot" images where you have to click all the squares that contain a bicycle. Some of the squares only show a bit of the object in question, and you are meant to recognise those situations.

David

They beat it just fine. So Google constantly needs to evolve it. (It’s a Google service you can add to your webpages) - I predict that within a few years no image can fool AIs.

https://www.inverse.com/science/captcha-tests-future-ai

Acartürk thinks that CAPTCHAs might become obsolete in the next couple of decades in favor of other authenticating technologies, such as retina scanning and fingerprint

[url=https://www.inverse.com/science/captcha-tests-future-ai][/url]

Ford Is Getting Out Of The Level 4 Self-Driving Car Game

Sam D. Smith

Ford no longer wants to be exempted from safety standards that would have allowed it to test self-driving vehicles on U.S. roads. Had Ford been approved by the NHTSA, the company would have been permitted to test up to 2,500 autonomous vehicles annually.

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GM CEO meets with senators on self-driving cars

David Shepardson

In 2017, the House of Representatives passed by voice vote legislation to speed the adoption of self-driving cars, bar states from setting performance standards and expand the number of vehicles that could be deployed with exemptions, but the bill never passed the U.S. Senate.

Cruise in 2021 urged President Joe Biden to back self-driving car legislation, saying the country risked lagging behind China.

In December, the NHTSA opened a safety probe into the autonomous driving system in vehicles produced by Cruise after reports of two injuries in rear-end crashes. NHTSA said it received notices of incidents in which self-driving Cruise vehicles "may engage in inappropriately hard braking or become immobilized."

They beat it just fine. So Google constantly needs to evolve it. (It’s a Google service you can add to your webpages) - I predict that within a few years no image can fool AIs.

I guess the problem (which you didn't address) is how such a system categorises images that show two or more objects partly occluding each other.

David

Crash Dummies: Why Autonomous Cars Have Slowed to a Stall

by "The Daily Upside"

• In 2021, a New York Times investigation included multiple sources inside Tesla who claimed the route taken by the car had been charted ahead of time, allowing the car to more easily navigate a three-dimensional digital map not featured in the version that would eventually roll out to customers. Sources said the video also edited out a portion of the trip in which the Tesla hit a roadside barrier.
  
• That NYT investigation was seemingly confirmed just this week. On Wednesday, Reuters reported that Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla's director of Autopilot software, testified in a deposition last summer that the video included features that Autopilot didn't include -- little things such as stopping at red lights and accelerating at green lights. Details, details.
  

But with little progress to show, the industry is now experiencing brutal whiplash. Indeed, Musk and his company are far from the only ones struggling to crack the technology even if they continue to make the loudest promises:

• In 2018, analysts estimated Google's Waymo had a market value of $175 billion. But by 2021, the company was completing a $2.25 billion funding round that valued the company at just $30 billion.
  
• Cruise, an autonomous car tech start-up largely owned by General Motors, scored a $30 billion valuation in an investment round in 2021. But when GM bought a portion of the company from SoftBank last year, that valuation had already fallen to just $21 billion.
  
• Aurora Innovation Inc, a start-up co-founded by a former Google autonomous vehicle executive, has seen its market value drop over 85% between 2021 and 2022, and is now valued at less than $3 billion.
  

So what's keeping the industry from achieving top speed? Profits remain elusive and progress is slow. While accidents are inevitable, humans -- with two eyes, quick reaction times, and years of driving intuition -- are quite strong drivers. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, a single fatality occurs only once for every 100 million miles or so driven in the US.

GM CEO meets with senators on self-driving cars

David Shepardson

General Motors (GM.N) CEO Mary Barra met with two key senators on Thursday as the Detroit automaker pushes for legislation to speed deployment of self-driving vehicles on U.S. roads...

GM Recalls 300 Self-Driving Taxis After One Crashes into San Francisco Muni Bus

by "Reuters"

General Motors’ robotaxi unit Cruise LLC is recalling the automated driving software in 300 vehicles after one of its driverless vehicles crashed into the back of a San Francisco bus.

The March 23 collision was the fault of a software error in a Cruise automated vehicle (AV) that inaccurately predicted the movement of an articulated San Francisco Municipal Transit Authority bus, Cruise said on Friday. The crash caused moderate damage to the Cruise but did not result in any injuries.

Dashcam Footage Shows Driverless Cars Clogging San Francisco

Dave Paresh

Driverless cars have completed thousands of journeys in San Francisco—taking people to work, to school, and to and from dates. They have also proven to be a glitchy nuisance, snarling traffic and creeping into hazardous terrain such as construction zones and downed power lines. Autonomous cars in San Francisco made 92 unplanned stops between May and December 2022—88 percent of them on streets with transit service, according to city transportation authorities, who collected the data from social media reports, 911 calls, and other sources, because companies aren’t required to report all the breakdowns.

The records obtained by WIRED are more focused. They follow a previously unreported directive to staff of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency handed down last October to improve record keeping of incidents involving autonomous vehicles. Muni, as the agency is known, standardized the term “driverless car” when staff report “near-misses, collisions or other incidents resulting in transit delay,” according to the directive. Agency logs show 12 “driverless” reports from September 2022 through March 8, 2023, though Muni video was provided for only eight of these cases. Overall, the incidents resulted in at least 83 minutes of direct delays for Muni riders, records show. 

That data likely doesn’t reflect the true scale of the problem. Muni staff don’t follow every directive to the letter, and a single delay can slow other lines, worsening the blow. Buses and trains cannot weave around blockages as easily as pedestrians, other motorists, and cyclists, saddling transit-dependent travelers with some of the biggest headaches caused by errant driverless cars, according to transit advocates.

Dashcam Footage Shows Driverless Cars Clogging San Francisco

S.F. residents baffled after 5 driverless Waymo cars block residential intersection

Five self-driving vehicles stopped early Tuesday morning in the middle of a residential street in San Francisco’s Balboa Terrace neighborhood, clogging a right lane of San Aleso Avenue down to the crosswalk, with one car straddling the center lane.

The jam, which occurred shortly before 6 a.m., was the latest traffic disruption by robotaxis that are now ubiquitous in city streets, baffling motorists who flashed headlights and gingerly squeezed around the boxy white fleet, which according to one resident bore the teal logo of Waymo, a Mountain View company that began as Google’s self-driving car project.

Safety groups oppose roadside warning exemption for driverless trucks

John Gallagher

Waymo and Aurora petitioned the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration in January for the five-year exemption that would allow all highly automated (Level 4 and Level 5) trucks — not just those developed by Waymo and Aurora — to replace ground-based emergency triangles and flares that warn motorists of a stopped truck with cab-mounted electric lights instead. They also requested that the lights be exempt from a requirement that they be steady-burning.

Safety advocates argue, however, that because the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has yet to issue performance standards for trucks equipped with automated driving systems (ADS), FMCSA in effect would be allowing highly automated trucks to be tested on the roads without having in place performance standards, permitting or reporting requirements.

“Approving this exemption request would be reckless, short-sighted, and short-circuit any deliberate effort by DOT, FMCSA, and NHTSA to act in concert to issue informed rules, regulations, guidance, reporting and performance testing necessary to consider the potential safe deployment of driverless trucks in interstate commerce,” stated Zach Cahalan, executive director of the Truck Safety Coalition (TSC), in comments filed Monday in response to the petition.

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Opinion: People Are Waking up to the Perils of Modern Automotive Features

Matt Posky

There are already numerous studies supporting the assertion that touchscreen-based interfaces require significantly more attention from drivers than old-fashioned buttons and knobs. While some of this can be remedied by a smartly designed operating system that minimizes menu screens, automakers are betting big drivers utilize embedded applications in a manner that would allow them to profit in a manner similar to tech companies.

While it’s often easier to sync your phone to a vehicle, it doesn’t allow the company you purchased the vehicle to maximize its data harvesting capabilities. It also lets you circumvent their operating system to a large degree and any apps that might be tied to commerce, which is why automakers are now trying to sweeten the pot. The ultimate goal is to basically convert your vehicle into something that can sweep up just as much information about you as your smartphone — if not more.

Go check out these video clips of driverless cars blocking buses and trains in San Francisco

Britney Nyugen

• Dashcam footage obtained by WIRED shows driverless cars in San Francisco blocking buses and trains.
  
• One clip shows a light-rail train almost hitting an autonomous car that stopped on its tracks.
  
• Records obtained by WIRED show reported incidents led to overall delays of 83 minutes for riders.
  

In one video, a light-rail train carrying San Francisco Giants fans hit its brakes before almost colliding with a driverless car operated by GM's Cruise. Footage also shows passengers on the light-rail being thrown as the light-rail, which was going 7 mph, stopped, Wired reports.

Cruise and Waymo Self-Driving Taxis Are Terrorizing Transit Operators

Lauren Leffer

The true number of incidents and delayed minutes may be much higher, the report noted. Between May and December 2022, driverless cars in San Francisco reportedly made 92 unplanned stops, more than 80 of which were along roads that serve as transit routes.

In one video obtained by Wired, a Waymo car stops in the middle of a street on March 5. The AV is facing a public bus with its dashcam recording. The bus has nowhere to go. The Waymo vehicle stays where it is, stopped between parked cars, until finally one of the company’s human, roadside assistance crew members arrived. “This one not smart yet. Not smart. Not good,” the bus driver reportedly said over their radio to Muni management.

Since last summer, actual accidents involving Cruise and Waymo vehicles seem to have been rare, but there’ve been multiple incidents of the cars behaving erratically and clogging up streets. And the companies have done their best to obscure the true toll of their tech. Waymo successfully sued to be able to keep hiding its autonomous vehicle safety and crash data.

edit: On that last bit ->

Court Lets Waymo Keep Its Secrets

Waymo, for its part, believed in fully redacting just about every part of the application—including the DMV’s own questions, arguing that they could tip off the company’s many, many competitors in the area about the secret sauce underlying its cars. Whoever made that initial records request responded by immediately challenging Waymo’s redactions. Honestly, it’s hard to blame them: These redacted bits contained details about potential injuries and other issues that have happened on behalf of Waymo’s driverless tech, which sounds a lot less like trade secrets, and a lot more like... some dirty laundry that Waymo doesn’t want aired.