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Could Cruise be the Theranos of AI? And is there a dark secret at the core of the entire driverless car industry?
(garymarcus.substack.com)
Relevant XKCD:
this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2023
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Technology
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Why not post a link to the actual XKCD comic and give the author the views instead of a random site?
The random site is their lemmy instance's pictrs. Randall doesn't care about reposting, and this is nicer since you don't have to leave lemmy
Aw man I've been making this joke thinking I'm clever for years but I read xkcd pretty frequently. I must have inadvertently stolen the joke from Randall.
There's probably an XKCD about that.
At first I was thinking, a bit of human supervision could not be too bad. And then I got to the part where they said 1.5 workers per vehicle. My maths may be off, but to me that sounds like 0.5 more than is necessary to drive a normal vehicle.
Theranos? Maybe, but at that point, I'd compare it to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk too.
When I worked at Waymo, we had a ratio of about 10 cars to 1 remote human. I dunno if Cruise is being over-protective, if their tech is just that bad that they need more people than cars, or if the number is just incorrect.
Either way, it hardly matters. It's not like these things are commercially available for a long time yet, anyway. In the testing stages - which Cruise 100% is still in - you definitely want a sturdy team of humans capable of intervening for safety reasons.
If the cars are running all day long it might make sense to need another human to pick up later shifts. Still though, that ratio is way too high to be economical.
1.5 operators per vehicle!?
Consider that"dumb" cars are only 1 operator per vehicle. This is somehow reverse-AI
- NYT writes article
- Roboticist tweets about one fact in it
- Substack blogger turns that tweet into a sensational headline
You can just watch the different food chains interacting here from legit media to independent authority to bottom feeding headline-shagger.
4: Insightful comments on Reddit / lemmy tearing apart the sensationalism, but getting buried under lame jokes.
Unfortunately, the substack article seems to be freely accessible, while the NYT isn't. I understand the whole supporting journalists angle, but having to sign up to read stuff so they can more easily correlate what I click on and sell usage pattern data rubs me the wrong way.
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(3 replies)
Headline shagger has me in stitches
Autonomous cars would complete the hellish dependency on cars in many cities.
It could reduce the need for individual cars by increasing car sharing.
That's Car Sharing, not autonomous vehicles, no? Car Sharing is a good thing, definitely, but we really need to get rid of cars. Not completely, but to a point where it's not the default.
With autonomous cars, you don't need a driver to bring it to the next person who needs it. That's a big limitation of current car sharing, it prevents a lot of possible sharing from happening as cars spend 95% of their lifetime parked. Indeed, we need less and smaller cars, and I think autonomous car would help with that by increasing sharing and usage time.
But how would I flex my wealth to the peasants then? /s
Easy, buy a $15,000 dollar bike.
But you can do car sharing with any kind of car. In Germany there are cities that run a rent service for their citizens who only need a car occasionally.
Obviously this only works in the context of a robust public transport infrastructure and in cities built for humans rather than cars, so that the need for a car becomes a rare occurrence.
American cities don't generally fit that description and until they do the type of car they use won't change a thing, because it's not addressing the core problem.
No they wouldn't. Once most cars are robotaxis, there will be drastically less space needed for car parks which will free up huge amounts of space. That can be used for bike lanes, so cycling becomes safer and more convenient. And I don't expect most rides to be single occupancy. People will opt for shared rides if they are substantially cheaper, which would cut the number of vehicles on the road. Autonomous cars are actually the best chance we have right now to escape the car centric hellscapes of our current cities.
And I don't expect most rides to be single occupancy. People will opt for shared rides if they are substantially cheaper,
Bus. That's called a bus. It can also fit more than five people and doesn't use as much energy to transport each person. You just reinvented a shittier bus
Wrong. I invented a better bus. Well, i didn't, none of this is new. A bus that goes straight to your destination with few or no stops. A bus that always tells you exactly when it's going to arrive. A bus that can go to a lot of places a large bus can't. And of course one that's a lot quiet and cleaner. What exactly is your problem with that concept?
Traffic jams and cost. You can't be this stupid, can you? I literally pointed out buses take up less space and use less energy. Why ask your question as if I hadn't pointed out the negatives of your solution compared to buses (or other public transit vehicles).
Also, it's not quiter or cleaner, since more cars = more noise compared to one bus (you can't consider the vehicle without considering it's capacity), and you generate a lot more pollution (rubber tires produce a lot of particles, and you have more vehicles and more tires with taxis). So stop lying.
The reason people in cities with proper transportation don't worry that much about getting a bus directly to their destination is that the network is comprehensive enough to cover all manner of trips, from any one point in the city to another. Same with frequency, if it's arriving in less than 5-10 minutes it doesn't matter when exactly it arrives.
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I firmly believe the solution is autonomous shuttles, not cars. Imagine having bus routes that can dynamically change and adapt to demand. Say we replace every bus with 2 smaller shuttles: during normal service the route could have the same capacity, but if there is an extraordinary event (sports event for example) you could divert them from the low-demand areas to the extraordinary-demand zone.
During lower demand times, you can also have more routes at no extra cost. If you're clever and make an app to call the shuttle (think Uber but through pre-established routes) the demand can be determined in real time to ensure you don't have empty shuttles.
And because they're bigger than passenger cars you're still increasing the ratio of passengers per vehicle, unlike robotaxis which merely replace private cars, with mostly 1- or 2-passenger trips.
Cities that have studied it believe on-demand car service is necessary (but often much more expensive) to reaching 100% transit coverage. But they also said you could reach like 95% with just busses.
They offer the chance to push the average number of occupants per vehicle below one.
They also offer the chance to push it above one. Ride-sharing will be a lot more attractive with autonomous cars.
Why?
I see the more realistic probability of the car picking up and then dropping off a passenger, and then picking up another. I don't think customers would be happy if the car they were riding made their trip longer in order to force them to share the car.
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(1 replies)
Just asking questions title
Yeah the dark "secret" is they have spent $100 billion dollars and these cars still can't do anything useful and relatively safe.
Which is why it's a lot like Theranos; they raised (and burned through) a ton of money trying to build something that would be really useful but was still decades from technological feasibility.
not decades from feasibility. But a physical impossibility. Some of the stuff they were supposed to detect was literally not present in a detectable quantity in the single drop of blood they scanned.
Well I should hope autonomous driving tech people believe they can make it work, despite the incredible expense and waste.
Pleeeeeeeaaaaase be true please please please be true .
Sar please stay on the road
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