Automation

Don’t expect Level 5 Autonomous cars for decades

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Why I don’t expect fully autonomous city driving in my lifetime (approx 25 years).

Paraphrase: The strange and crazy things that people do. .. a ball bouncing in front of your car, a child falling down, a car running a red light, head-down pedestrian. A level-5 car has to handle all of these cases, reliably.

These situations require 1) a giant set of learning data 2) Very rapid computing 3) Severe braking. Autonomous cars today are very slow + very cautious in order to allow more time for decisions and for braking.

My view:

There is no magic bullet that can solve these 3 problems, except keeping autonomous cars off of city streets. And all 3 get worse in bad weather, including fog much less in snow.

Also, there are lots of behavioral issues, such as “knowing” the behavior of pedestrians in different cities. Uber discovered that frequent braking/accelerating makes riders carsick – so they re-tuned their safety margins, and their car killed a pedestrian.

A counter-argument (partly from Don Norman, jnd1er): Human drivers are not good at these situations either, and occasionally hit people. Therefore, we should not wait for perfection, but instead systems that on balance are better than humans.  As distracted driving gets worse, the tradeoff in favor of autonomous cars will shift.

But there is another approach to distracted driving. Treat it like drunk driving. Make it socially and legally unacceptable. Drunk driving used to be treated like an accident, with very light penalties even in fatal accidents.

Finally, I’m not sure if any amount of real-life driving will be good enough to develop  training datasets for the rarest edge cases. Developers will need supplemental methods to handle them, including simulated accidents and some causal modeling. For example, the probabilities of different events change by location and time of day. Good drivers know this, and adjust. Perhaps cars will need adjustable parameters that shift their algorithm tuning in different circumstances.

Source of the quotation: Experts at the Table: The challenges to build a single chip to handle future autonomous functions of a vehicle span many areas across the design process.

Source: Semiconductor Engineering – Challenges To Building Level 5 Automotive Chips

Tesla employees say Gigafactory problems worse than known

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By now, Tesla’s manufacturing problems are completely  predictable. See my explanation, after the break. At least Wall St. is starting to catch on.
Also in this article: Tesla’s gigafactory for batteries has very similar problems. That  surprises me; I thought they had competent allies helping with batteries.

But one engineer who works there cautioned that the automated lines still can’t run at full capacity. “There’s no redundancy, so when one thing goes wrong, everything shuts down. And what’s really concerning are the quality issues.”

Source: Tesla employees say Gigafactory problems worse than known

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It will be very tricky to test and regulate safety of self-driving cars

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My friend Don Norman wrote an op-ed this weekend calling for an FDA-like testing program before autonomous cars are put on the roads in the US. Clearly, some level of government approval is important. But I see lots of problems with using drug testing (FDA = Food and Drug Administration) as a model.

Here is an excerpt from a recent article about testing problems with Uber cars, which were the ones in the recent fatal accident. After the break, my assessment of how to test such cars before they are allowed on American roads.

Waymo, formerly the self-driving car project of Google, said that in tests on roads in California last year, its cars went an average of nearly 5,600 miles before the driver had to take control from the computer to steer out of trouble. As of March, Uber was struggling to meet its target of 13 miles per “intervention” in Arizona, according to 100 pages of company documents obtained by The New York Times and two people familiar with the company’s operations in the Phoenix area but not permitted to speak publicly about it.Yet Uber’s test drivers were being asked to do more — going on solo runs when they had worked in pairs.And there also was pressure to live up to a goal to offer a driverless car service by the end of the year and to impress top executives.

So Uber car performance was more than 100 times worse than Waymo cars?!

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Recent stories on AI, automation, and the future of work

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Melinda Gates and Fei-Fei Li Want to Liberate AI from “Guys With Hoodies”

Who designs software makes a big difference. And Silicon Valley employees are not a cross-section of anything, except each other. Nor need they be; but some balance is needed to make sure products are designed to help diverse people.

As a technologist, I see how AI and the fourth industrial revolution will impact every aspect of people’s lives. If you look at what AI is doing at amazing tech companies like Microsoft, Google, and other companies, it’s increasingly exciting.

But in the meantime, as an educator, as a woman, as a woman of color, as a mother, I’m increasingly worried. AI is about to make the biggest changes to humanity and we’re missing a whole generation of diverse technologists and leaders.  Source.

For one reason this problem is growing right now, see the next story: oligopoly control of AI applications in our lives.

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Another case of the “Big 5” grabbing new AI-related technology before it becomes public.

Apple acquires AI company Lattice Data, a specialist in unstructured ‘dark data’, for $200M

The strength of this pattern, where the Big 5 (Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook) buy out each novel tech idea and hide it in-house,  as anti-competitive and bad for society as a whole. Apple, because of its level of secrecy, may be worse than some of the others. In a competitive world such purchases would not be a big problem – let the market figure it out. But with the huge cash levels of these companies, which itself indicates monopoly power, they can effectively stifle new ideas that might threaten them in the long run.

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Amazon’s new age grocery likely wasn’t technically possible even five years ago.

How Amazon Go (probably) makes “just walk out” groceries a reality | Ars Technica

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