Here is what I learned during the Los Angeles Autonomous Vehicle Media Conference Conference

My day at a conference on autonomous vehicles in Los Angeles started in a Uber, man -oriented.

One Wednesday morning, Waymo said it would take at least 15 minutes to hang a car for a five -minute trip to Neuehouse Hollywood, where Ride Ai organized her very first top of autonomous vehicles, featuring some of the main players in the sector.

I was not particularly in a time crisis, but, like most people, I do not call a carpooling driver for half an hour or more before leaving the house to reach the destination.

Output application. Open Uber.

It is fair to say that, at least for the moment, the battle between human pilots and robot drivers is still raging.

Stephen Hayes, Vice -President of Autonomous Operations in Lyft, and Ryan Green, CEO of Gridwise – a platform for carpooling drivers to follow their income – both declared during the conference that the future of the fight against the journey will resemble a hybrid market of human and robot pilots.

Green estimated that this will be the case for at least the next 10 to 15 years.

It can be the prerogative of Hayes and Green to make such a complaint. But this perspective was perfectly logical for me – even as a person who had great experiences in a waymo – and seemed to resonate throughout the summit.

A hybrid future

The CEO of Toyota Research Institute, Gill, Pratt, jumped the event as the first speaker to say that it is a “myth that we need autonomy to help terrible human conduct”.

“Humans are in fact reasonably safe, very good drivers. For each one hundred million miles, there is an accident,” Avinash Balachandran, vice-president of the human interaction conduct division, told me. “Where we really see the value of autonomy, it is this ability to help drivers in situations where they tend to fight.”

For a conference entirely focused on the future of autonomous mobility, I was surprised that some of the best players in the AV field do not throw pink photos or estimates from the moment when robots will take over and our roads in the city.

Tesla, whose CEO has made wild predictions like a million Robotaxis by 2020, was significantly absent from the conference but is still on panel talks.

Instead, votes from various autonomous mobility players, driving holding to OEM software suppliers, talked about the challenges of improving complete autonomous technology and still Fresses commercial opportunities for the human -oriented vehicle segment.

Amnon Shashua, CEO of Mobileye, spoke of the lack of “precision” in the AI, resulting in part from the need to improve the application of redundancies and a lack of data.

In Wayve, an autonomous driving software company based in the United Kingdom, Kity Fischer, commercial and operational vice-president, spoke of the “very large unexploited market” of level two and level three Assisted and autonomous driving systems for mainstream vehicles.

The two levels still need humans behind the wheel, but with variable degrees at the driver’s entry.

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“In the foreseeable future, there will be a very long period when it is a hybrid solution for possession of vehicles intertwined with different levels of autonomy, and these things must all be able to coexist,” said Faisher when I asked her what she thought that the streets of the city will look like decades on the line. “Thus, levels two, three and four must all be able to share a space on the road and operate safely in conjunction.”

Christoph Lütge, economist and ethics expert from AI at the Munich Technical University, told me that in Germany, where Robotaxy only exists for limited tests, level 3 conduct is not yet widely implemented.

“It should have happened already, but it doesn’t really happen,” he said.

Driving the media threshing cycle

This does not want to underestimate the progress of people from San Francisco and other markets first -hand experienced. One of the reasons why everyone gathered in Los Angeles for a conference on autonomous vehicles is undoubtedly because of Waymo.

Like Sophia Tung, a former engineer and now a content creator focused on AV, told me, we have already seen a media threshing cycle of autonomous vehicle – this time is just a little different.

Timothy B. Lee, one of the driving AI moderators who reported on the transport for ARS Technica before launching its substitution, understanding of the AI, indicated the Gartner’s media threshing cycle: technological innovation comes first with the soaked up of what is called the peak “Productivity expectations” Productivity. “”

The peak of inflated expectations occurred around 2016 or ’17, Lee said to me, before an Uber autonomous test vehicle kills a woman in Temple, Arizona, in 2018.

“Then there was a period of three or four years, from 2018 to 2022 approximately, when things went very bad for these companies,” he said. “You have arrested their program, Lyft closed its program. Ford had Argo (AI) who closed. It was a bad time to be in the industry and not as much pleasure in covering. And then, the last two years, I would say that it was on the rise almost since Waymo started to develop in San Francisco.”

Lee’s prognosis is that the great replacement of the human driver will be progressive. Over the next 20 years, city roads will see fewer human drivers before disappearing completely.

For example, he cited the decades that it took before the automatic elevators make the operators of human elevator obsolete.

“There will be a long process,” he said.

My day in Los Angeles ended with another carpool focused on the man, which arrived at the same time that it took goodbye to my friends, put my shoes and get out of their apartment.

The closest waymo was 13 minutes.

Output application. Open Uber.