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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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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
In fact he doesn’t care about reposting so much that he Creative Commons licensed his whole comic.
Yeah but the alt-text. Now I have to look up the comic page for it.
Search explainxkcd for the words in the image
So much for "nicer since you don’t have to leave lemmy"
The alt texts are one of the best parts of xkcd
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Today I learned :)
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.
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.
Chonky TL;DR because I was a little annoyed that there wasn't one here -
Certainly no commercial product could ever work at a profit if you needed remote operators anything like that often. As Brooks points out, the term “autonomous” barely applies.
Beyond what Brooks pointed out, the story also notes “Those vehicles were supported by a vast operations staff, with 1.5 workers per vehicle”.
Fitting with this general vibe, a source (that in fairness, I don’t know well) just told me that his impression having visited with them not so long ago was that “they're definitely relying on remote interventions to create an illusion of stronger AI than they really have”.
if Cruise’s vehicles really need an intervention every few miles, and 1.5 external operators for every vehicle, they don’t seem to even be remotely close to what they have been alleging to the public. Shareholders will certainly sue, and if it’s bad as it looks, I doubt that GM will continue the project, which was recently suspended.
As safety expert Missy Cummings said to me this morning, remote operators could well be “the dark secret of ALL self-driving.”
Human lives at are stake.
Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt essentially confirmed that their “driverless” cars need very regular human intervention:
🤣😂
But the average Whitedude Techbro AI company CEO is looking very seriously into the camera and telling me AI is coming for my job next year...
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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Autonomous cars would complete the hellish dependency on cars in many cities.
As a partially sighted person that's unable to legally drive, an autonomous car is an absolute dream to me and would give me a personal freedom many currently take for granted.
In our car dependent society, I understand that. But a lot of us would rather have better public transit so you wouldn't have to have a car to have your freedom.
I definitely understand that perspective and I would never say no to better public transport. However, as someone that has spent their entire life entirely reliant on public transport, I can assure you that even good public transport isn't a solution to all problems.
For example I can't just nip out to a hardware store to pick up some supplies because I fancy doing a bit of DIY, I am reliant on friends or Taxis to carry bulky items. I can't even do a large shop because it's too much to carry, I have to either have it delivered in which case I'm not able to easily see what I am getting - an issue be it fresh produce or just not realising how big a jar of something is, or I am forced to turn one shopping trip into several smaller trips. I certainly can't buy in bulk to save money.
I can't just go somewhere on a whim, I have to plan ahead and make sure I'm able to get any connections or be aware of any disruption.even when public transport is good, it still has issues.
You make great points that sighted people like myself might not ever consider.
IMO there should exist public options to take care of these gaps that you have. Right now I don't think there are really any groups of people who have both the means and the motivation to solve any of these issues. It sucks. I believe these issues are solvable.
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I'm hoping they are sorted by the time I'm 80 and can no longer safely drive myself.
They offer the chance to push the average number of occupants per vehicle below one.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Pleeeeeeeaaaaase be true please please please be true .
Sar please stay on the road
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