Latest / What's Your Problem? / Teaching Cars to Think Like People
Transcript
- 0:15Speaker 1: Pushkin. It seems like we've been hearing for I don't
- 0:22Speaker 1: know ten years now that self driving cars are two
- 0:26Speaker 1: years away. And yes, I know Tesla's are amazing because
- 0:29Speaker 1: Tesla owners keep telling me so. But we are clearly
- 0:33Speaker 1: not yet at that magic transformative moment when cars can
- 0:37Speaker 1: truly drive themselves. We're not yet in a world where
- 0:41Speaker 1: a human driver seems as out of place as a
- 0:44Speaker 1: human elevator operator. So the question for today's show is this,
- 0:49Speaker 1: what is the most important problem that we have to
- 0:52Speaker 1: solve for that to happen. What's it going to take
- 0:55Speaker 1: to get to a world where I'm heading north on
- 0:57Speaker 1: I five and I just climb in the back of
- 1:00Speaker 1: my car and take a nap. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and
- 1:05Speaker 1: this is What's Your Problem, the show where we talk
- 1:07Speaker 1: to entrepreneurs and engineers about the future they're going to
- 1:10Speaker 1: build once they solve a few problems. My guest today
- 1:14Speaker 1: is Aisha Evans, CEO of the autonomous car company Zooks
- 1:18Speaker 1: zoo X. Zooks was acquired by Amazon back in twenty twenty,
- 1:23Speaker 1: and I wanted to talk to Aisha because Zooks is
- 1:25Speaker 1: really all in on this self driving car dream. They're
- 1:29Speaker 1: not going for half measures. They're not going for baby steps.
- 1:32Speaker 1: They're trying to build a truly fully AI take the
- 1:36Speaker 1: wheel self driving car. So I should seem like the
- 1:40Speaker 1: perfect person to talk about the problems engineers are going
- 1:43Speaker 1: to have to solve to build a car that can
- 1:45Speaker 1: truly drive itself. We started our conversation talking about the
- 1:51Speaker 1: self driving car that Zoos is building now, which really
- 1:54Speaker 1: isn't exactly a car. It looks like a toaster on wheels.
- 1:58Speaker 1: It's very boxy. There are sliding doors on either side,
- 2:02Speaker 1: and inside there are two bench seats facing each other,
- 2:06Speaker 1: and that's kind of it. There's no driver seat, there's
- 2:10Speaker 1: no dashboard, there's no steering wheel. If you step into
- 2:15Speaker 1: our vehicle and you think about driving, we consider that
- 2:19Speaker 1: we failed what transporting you no pedals, no steering wheel,
- 2:23Speaker 1: You are not involved in the driving. You're a rider,
- 2:25Speaker 1: and we conceived it for you. There's also no front
- 2:29Speaker 1: or back right, no fully symmetrical. When you think again
- 2:33Speaker 1: about the effectiveness and the efficiency of transportation, especially in
- 2:37Speaker 1: dense urban environment, imagine pulling into a narrow alley and
- 2:41Speaker 1: not having to make a U turn and just flipping
- 2:43Speaker 1: the lights and the vehicle goes into the other direction.
- 2:46Speaker 1: So the thing I like about it, not having a
- 2:48Speaker 1: steering wheel, not having a front or back is just
- 2:51Speaker 1: the way the thing looks. The physical thing itself is
- 2:56Speaker 1: this manifestation of how all in you are. Right. It's
- 3:00Speaker 1: not like, let's take a car and make a robot
- 3:02Speaker 1: drive it. It's what does the world look like? What
- 3:05Speaker 1: does a thing look like if there is no driver? Yes,
- 3:08Speaker 1: if you you know, you become dispassionate no matter what
- 3:12Speaker 1: car you have today, a personal car, and you look
- 3:15Speaker 1: at it purely from an engineering standpoint. It's architected and
- 3:19Speaker 1: designed with the concept of a human driver. Yea. What
- 3:24Speaker 1: we're doing, by the way, is really okay. If AI
- 3:28Speaker 1: is going to be responsible for the driving amongst other
- 3:32Speaker 1: human drivers, how do you architect and design the vehicle
- 3:38Speaker 1: so that AI is the best and safest drival possible.
- 3:43Speaker 1: That's our point of view, and then you work backward
- 3:45Speaker 1: from there. So so how's it going to work? Basically,
- 3:51Speaker 1: you have the app, you say I want to go
- 3:53Speaker 1: from here to there. We come, we pick you up,
- 3:55Speaker 1: you sit down, you buckle up, push start. That's a
- 3:58Speaker 1: safety thing, and then we take you to point B
- 4:02Speaker 1: and your unbuckle, step off, and by that time we
- 4:05Speaker 1: probably already know the other passenger. When can I call
- 4:09Speaker 1: one depends on where you are. So if you're in
- 4:13Speaker 1: Las Vegas fairly soon, much sooner than you think on
- 4:17Speaker 1: the strip, you'll be able to call one. Does that
- 4:19Speaker 1: mean this year? Next year? It won't be this year.
- 4:24Speaker 1: I can tell you what happened by twenty twenty five. Yes,
- 4:29Speaker 1: And once we do that, then we'll go city by city.
- 4:32Speaker 1: We've already been public saying that we'll go Las Vegas
- 4:36Speaker 1: and then San Francisco. Then as we want to move east,
- 4:40Speaker 1: but then as you're moving east you have to handle snow.
- 4:43Speaker 1: And then we want to be global, and as you
- 4:46Speaker 1: go global, you get a whole new set of parameters.
- 4:49Speaker 1: The roundabouts in London come to mind, and so is
- 4:53Speaker 1: the idea that zoos vehicles will be like cabs are. Now,
- 4:58Speaker 1: like I have a car, and then if I'm in
- 5:00Speaker 1: the city and I need to get from one place
- 5:02Speaker 1: to another, maybe I'll take a cab. Is it like that?
- 5:05Speaker 1: It's like that with a little bit deeper philosophy, which is, look,
- 5:10Speaker 1: we know that let's not with the United States, right,
- 5:13Speaker 1: it's around two and a half cars roughly per family.
- 5:17Speaker 1: We're not saying it'll be zero overnight, obviously you have
- 5:19Speaker 1: to be rational, but we can do better than two
- 5:22Speaker 1: and a half cars per family. So let's say we
- 5:25Speaker 1: get to one or one and a half. We feel
- 5:27Speaker 1: that we will have done something after the break. The
- 5:31Speaker 1: technical problems that Zoos and for that matter, all the
- 5:34Speaker 1: other self driving car companies are still trying to fix.
- 5:38Speaker 1: One surprisingly hard one, how to figure out who goes
- 5:41Speaker 1: first when two cars pull up to an intersection at
- 5:44Speaker 1: the same time. I should calls it the UGO I
- 5:47Speaker 1: goo problem. Now let's get back to what's your problem. So, Okay,
- 5:54Speaker 1: the world has been talking about self driving cars for
- 5:57Speaker 1: well over ten years now, and we know that to
- 6:00Speaker 1: get to this self driving car world, there's going to
- 6:02Speaker 1: be regulatory hurdles. There's going to be people worried about safety.
- 6:05Speaker 1: I feel like all of that is pretty familiar by now.
- 6:08Speaker 1: The thing I really wanted to talk with Aisha about
- 6:11Speaker 1: is the technical side. You know, like, what problem exactly
- 6:15Speaker 1: do engineers have to solve to build cars that can
- 6:18Speaker 1: really drive themselves. All of the companies can drive, and
- 6:23Speaker 1: the normal very kind of constrained circumstances, The thing is
- 6:28Speaker 1: all of these scenarios that can pop up, how do
- 6:30Speaker 1: you deal with them? And by the way, how do
- 6:32Speaker 1: you deal with them knowing you have human drivers around you,
- 6:36Speaker 1: they have their own learned behaviors and learned expectations as
- 6:41Speaker 1: to what's going to come from a human driver. And
- 6:43Speaker 1: the etiquette, the etiquette of it too that will not
- 6:47Speaker 1: fully there yet. Tell me about the etiquette, Well, depending
- 6:50Speaker 1: on which parts of the city, like if you're in
- 6:53Speaker 1: more of a neighborhood area versus more of a business area,
- 6:57Speaker 1: the behaviors are slightly different in how you approach things.
- 7:00Speaker 1: So for example, we call it Ugo I goo. The
- 7:04Speaker 1: ugo igo is a little bit more assertive on the
- 7:06Speaker 1: business side of things versus in a place where that's
- 7:09Speaker 1: a little bit more residential. So all that is again
- 7:13Speaker 1: the long tale of scenarios that we have to deal
- 7:16Speaker 1: with and be ready for. The you go, I go
- 7:19Speaker 1: is a really interesting one because that's not about the
- 7:23Speaker 1: formal like rules of the road, right, that is very
- 7:27Speaker 1: much a cultural thing that's gonna even vary from town
- 7:31Speaker 1: to town. Right. I've lived different places and you go,
- 7:34Speaker 1: I go. It's totally different in you know, Brooklyn than
- 7:37Speaker 1: it is in Bozeman, Montana, So like, how's an AI
- 7:41Speaker 1: going to figure that out? This is where training is
- 7:44Speaker 1: important because before it'll be a long, long, long, long
- 7:48Speaker 1: time where you just deploy what we call generic AI,
- 7:52Speaker 1: which is you come in for the first time, you
- 7:54Speaker 1: drop in and boom, you know how to do it.
- 7:56Speaker 1: So a lot of a lot of what we do
- 7:59Speaker 1: is learn and train, and that's why you know it's
- 8:01Speaker 1: called deep learning for example. And so we do it
- 8:04Speaker 1: enough times enough forms that the stack knows what to
- 8:09Speaker 1: look for to make the call. And we have those
- 8:11Speaker 1: examples today. For example, how we drive in San Francisco
- 8:15Speaker 1: versus how we drive in the campus were on today,
- 8:18Speaker 1: it's totally different. We're a lot more assertive in San
- 8:22Speaker 1: Francisco because that's what's expected. The buffers are smaller because
- 8:27Speaker 1: that's also what's expected than we do on the campus.
- 8:31Speaker 1: So all that is built into the stack, both with
- 8:33Speaker 1: control logic as well as with algorithms logic based on
- 8:38Speaker 1: our training models. So I'm trying to sort of boil
- 8:42Speaker 1: down what you're saying. I mean, it's interesting, like on
- 8:44Speaker 1: a certain level, you're saying you've solved the kind of
- 8:47Speaker 1: big macro technical problems for computers to drive cars basically,
- 8:53Speaker 1: But you're also saying there are a million edge cases
- 8:57Speaker 1: double parked cars and bikes doing weird things, and who knows,
- 9:02Speaker 1: people are weird, The world is weird, and those you
- 9:06Speaker 1: haven't solved exactly. You're just saying you just have to
- 9:09Speaker 1: practice more to get it. You just have to do
- 9:12Speaker 1: it like that. Why am I unsatisfied by that answer?
- 9:15Speaker 1: Because it's to be fair, you have to practice. But
- 9:19Speaker 1: practice is a feedback loop of doing yeah, finding errors
- 9:25Speaker 1: and figuring out how to deal with the errors, doing
- 9:28Speaker 1: it again. So it's a continuous feedback loop of that,
- 9:31Speaker 1: and that is what is left to solve. Can you
- 9:34Speaker 1: give me an example of a version of that loop
- 9:36Speaker 1: you've just completed where you found an error and then
- 9:39Speaker 1: fixed it. What's an example of that? Yeah, this one
- 9:42Speaker 1: is very personal. My first Zooks ride ever, So that's
- 9:48Speaker 1: three and a half years ago. When the vehicle saw
- 9:51Speaker 1: a double parked vehicle in front of it, but there
- 9:56Speaker 1: was it's a single lane and so you have basically
- 9:59Speaker 1: a double yellow line. The vehicle says, oh, the rule
- 10:03Speaker 1: says through the AI stack that I cannot cross a
- 10:07Speaker 1: double yellow line. Right, We would actually stop, disengage and
- 10:12Speaker 1: do it manually and go around it. But over time
- 10:16Speaker 1: we've now learned through all of the dpvs we've seen,
- 10:19Speaker 1: and so there are many times now when the app
- 10:23Speaker 1: is a vehicle, ye sorry, when when there's a double
- 10:28Speaker 1: park vehicle in front of the vehicle. Now the vehicle
- 10:32Speaker 1: is able to look through the sense of pod, look
- 10:34Speaker 1: at oncoming traffic, look at everything else, speeds and feeds
- 10:39Speaker 1: and everything else around it, and many times now it
- 10:42Speaker 1: is able to just smoothly like a human would do,
- 10:46Speaker 1: make the decision itself. That's a good one because there's
- 10:48Speaker 1: a clear rule you can't cross a double yellow line.
- 10:51Speaker 1: We all learn that. But yeah, we also all know
- 10:53Speaker 1: if you're driving along and somebody's double parked in front
- 10:55Speaker 1: of you, got to swerve over and nobody's coming the
- 10:58Speaker 1: other way, like you're allowed to do that exactly. So
- 11:00Speaker 1: how does an AI figure out when it's okay to
- 11:03Speaker 1: do that? So we through again the algorithms, through a
- 11:07Speaker 1: lot of training, meaning all the scenarios. If it's seen
- 11:11Speaker 1: over and over again, it's able to say, okay, I looked.
- 11:15Speaker 1: And this is where again the placement of the center
- 11:17Speaker 1: architecture is very important because in our vehicle. Since it's
- 11:20Speaker 1: every top four corner and you have a two hundred
- 11:23Speaker 1: and seventy degree view, it's able to basically say, hey,
- 11:26Speaker 1: I'm looking in front of me. I have plenty of space.
- 11:28Speaker 1: There's no car coming on the oncoming lane, and I
- 11:31Speaker 1: see that I have space. Also in front of the
- 11:34Speaker 1: double park vehicle, there are no pedestrian, there's no bike
- 11:38Speaker 1: coming up. Oh yeah, I can do this. It goes ahead.
- 11:41Speaker 1: So you're telling me, basically, like the AI, the machine,
- 11:44Speaker 1: the vehicle already knows how to drive. It just needs
- 11:46Speaker 1: to practice, just needs to practice for millions of hours.
- 11:50Speaker 1: It's funny you should say this. I have a sixteen
- 11:52Speaker 1: year old daughter, so she started the journey of driving,
- 11:55Speaker 1: and you know, at first we were just within a
- 11:58Speaker 1: mile of the house in the neighborhood, then maybe some
- 12:02Speaker 1: areas where they are stop signs, and now we're up
- 12:05Speaker 1: to a sort of the supermarket, and very soon we'll
- 12:08Speaker 1: be up to going to school. It is the case
- 12:11Speaker 1: that human beings can learn to drive pretty well in
- 12:16Speaker 1: like what forty hours or so, and computers clearly cannot. Right.
- 12:24Speaker 1: And I used to think people were bad drivers, right,
- 12:29Speaker 1: Like it seems obvious to me frankly, that people are
- 12:32Speaker 1: bad drivers, right. You know, we look at our phones
- 12:35Speaker 1: while we're driving. We overrate our driving abilities. We have
- 12:38Speaker 1: literal blind spots. On the other hand, zooks, vehicles can
- 12:43Speaker 1: see way better than people can see all the way
- 12:45Speaker 1: around in three hundred and sixty degrees. They have like
- 12:48Speaker 1: the smartest people in the world trying to teach them
- 12:51Speaker 1: how to drive. They have millions of hours of practicing,
- 12:54Speaker 1: and still they're worse than human drivers. So, like, I
- 12:58Speaker 1: don't know how to parse that, right, Like, are people
- 13:01Speaker 1: actually way better drivers than I thought? Well, so I
- 13:05Speaker 1: think that we conflate a lot of things when we
- 13:08Speaker 1: talk about driving. So let's go back to my daughter.
- 13:11Speaker 1: I don't think I dispute a little bit that my
- 13:14Speaker 1: child started learning to drive at sixteen. She started learning
- 13:19Speaker 1: to drive the first day she was in a car, Yeah,
- 13:22Speaker 1: or maybe even the first day she was alive. That's
- 13:25Speaker 1: my seeing physics and seeing the world and understanding people.
- 13:30Speaker 1: I mean, that's maybe the most interesting thing for me
- 13:33Speaker 1: in this conversation, right, is like the hard part in
- 13:36Speaker 1: teaching computers to drive is teaching them to figure out
- 13:39Speaker 1: people exactly. And ecosystems that are built around and four people.
- 13:45Speaker 1: That in a way is the ultimate problem you're trying
- 13:47Speaker 1: to solve, right, Like try and teach a computer to
- 13:50Speaker 1: think like a person. That's exactly right. And I think
- 13:54Speaker 1: when I put my firstborn in the car seat coming
- 13:58Speaker 1: home from the hospital, she was already starting to learn huh,
- 14:02Speaker 1: say more. You know you're in a car, you know
- 14:05Speaker 1: it's moving, you know there's a driver, your parents, you're
- 14:09Speaker 1: looking around you. You're already starting to your internal algorithms
- 14:13Speaker 1: are already starting to learn and take inputs. You know
- 14:16Speaker 1: that you need to stop at a light before you're
- 14:18Speaker 1: an actual driver, right, and then all of the weirdness
- 14:22Speaker 1: of like if somebody is nodding, or if somebody's pointing,
- 14:24Speaker 1: or if somebody's waving, and the different things a wave
- 14:27Speaker 1: can mean, Like there can be like the nice guy point,
- 14:29Speaker 1: like hey, nice job, or like the angry point, like
- 14:32Speaker 1: what are you doing when you're driving? Certainly in the city,
- 14:35Speaker 1: you need to know what those different things mean. That
- 14:38Speaker 1: is exactly right, and that is the essence of the
- 14:42Speaker 1: problem that is left to solve. And how do you
- 14:45Speaker 1: solve it? Practice train in code, figuring out to figure
- 14:52Speaker 1: out a way to give the computers as many inputs
- 14:57Speaker 1: as possible, teaching it how to make decisions, and very important,
- 15:02Speaker 1: making sure that you teach the computer to know what
- 15:05Speaker 1: it is it doesn't know, so that when it doesn't
- 15:08Speaker 1: know something, it tells us or it shows us. So
- 15:12Speaker 1: then we can sit down and say, Okay, that's a problem.
- 15:14Speaker 1: How do we get around that? How do we solve
- 15:17Speaker 1: for that? That's really interesting. Fundamentally, this is a discussion
- 15:22Speaker 1: about risk, right. I mean, what you're saying is Zoo's
- 15:25Speaker 1: vehicles can basically drive themselves now, but not safely enough.
- 15:30Speaker 1: That's exactly right, And so I mean one question is
- 15:36Speaker 1: how safe are they going to have to be? Right?
- 15:38Speaker 1: I imagine as good as human drivers is not good enough.
- 15:43Speaker 1: This is clearly a super high stakes, literally a life
- 15:46Speaker 1: and death question. No system is infinitely safe. How good
- 15:52Speaker 1: is good enough? We have to do way, way, way
- 15:56Speaker 1: better than humans today, both on the crashes and on
- 16:01Speaker 1: the number of miles driven per incident, basically and twice
- 16:08Speaker 1: twice as good. That's like, how much how goodes it
- 16:11Speaker 1: have to be? Like in a purely rational world, a
- 16:14Speaker 1: little bit better would be good enough. Right. Human beings
- 16:16Speaker 1: are not just purely irrational. They are very rational, but
- 16:19Speaker 1: they are not purely irrational, and so again I don't.
- 16:22Speaker 1: None of us in the industry have given our metrics,
- 16:25Speaker 1: so I'm not going to be the first one to
- 16:26Speaker 1: do that. There's a reason we haven't. But we have
- 16:29Speaker 1: to be much safer than humans. This is not a
- 16:32Speaker 1: be as safe as the type situation a little bit better.
- 16:34Speaker 1: I would not consider that to be a responsible thing
- 16:37Speaker 1: to do. In a minute, in the Lightning round, I
- 16:40Speaker 1: should tells us where of all the places she's lived,
- 16:43Speaker 1: human drivers are the worst. Also one domain where AI
- 16:47Speaker 1: will never be better than humans. Okay, let's get back
- 16:55Speaker 1: to the show. We're going to close with the Lightning round.
- 16:58Speaker 1: So I love this. I love the conversation. I love
- 17:01Speaker 1: talking about big, complicated technical things. But I also love
- 17:05Speaker 1: asking lots of questions really fast at the end of
- 17:09Speaker 1: an interview. Are you ready? I am. What is the
- 17:14Speaker 1: one piece of advice you'd give to somebody who is
- 17:16Speaker 1: trying to solve a hard problem? Break it down. What's
- 17:20Speaker 1: the biggest misconception people have about self driving cars? That
- 17:24Speaker 1: cameras only, that cameras are enough? That's the tesla you Yes,
- 17:32Speaker 1: what driving advice have you given your sixteen year old
- 17:34Speaker 1: daughter who is learning to drive. Relax and pay attention.
- 17:39Speaker 1: What is one domain where AI will never be better
- 17:43Speaker 1: than humans? And don't say love understanding the soul of
- 17:48Speaker 1: a human empathy, empathy. Of all the places you've lived,
- 17:54Speaker 1: where were the drivers the worst? You're gonna get me
- 17:57Speaker 1: in trouble? Israel was pretty tough driving environment standpoint. I
- 18:02Speaker 1: love the country. I would live there again. Driving there
- 18:05Speaker 1: is pretty tough. Interesting in terms of like norms and I, Oh,
- 18:09Speaker 1: you go, right, it's basically I go, I go pretty much.
- 18:13Speaker 1: So where have AI engineers underrated humans self driving? And
- 18:19Speaker 1: where have AI engineers overrated humans? What are humans worse at? Oh?
- 18:23Speaker 1: We cannot process what I call linear known processing where
- 18:26Speaker 1: the rules are clear, the algorithm is clear, we will
- 18:31Speaker 1: never beat the machine. Yeah, so we're terrible at chess,
- 18:36Speaker 1: but actually pretty good at driving. That's exactly right. Well,
- 18:40Speaker 1: this was delightful. Thank you for your time. I really
- 18:43Speaker 1: enjoyed it too. Thank you. I have to thank you
- 18:45Speaker 1: for something that nobody has done, and I do a
- 18:48Speaker 1: lot of these over the years. You pushed me to roots,
- 18:52Speaker 1: to the root of and to finding a way to
- 18:56Speaker 1: decipher the essence of self driving and why it's hard,
- 18:59Speaker 1: and I really appreciate it. I learned something today. Aisha
- 19:04Speaker 1: Evans is the CEO of Zoos. Today's show was produced
- 19:08Speaker 1: by Edith Russelo. It was edited by Kate Parkinson Morgan
- 19:12Speaker 1: and Robert Smith, and it was engineered by Amanda kay Wong.
- 19:15Speaker 1: Theme music by Luis Gara. Our development team is Lee,
- 19:17Speaker 1: Tom Mulad and Justine Lang. A huge team of people
- 19:20Speaker 1: makes What's Your Problem possible. That team includes, but is
- 19:24Speaker 1: not limited to, Jacob Weisberg, Na Lobel, Heather Fame, John Schnars,
- 19:28Speaker 1: Kerry Brodie, Carli mcgleory, Christina Sullivan, Jason Gambrel, Grant Hayes,
- 19:32Speaker 1: Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor, Morgan Ratner, Nicole Morano, Mary Beth Smith,
- 19:36Speaker 1: Royston Breserve, Maya Kanig, Daniella Lakhan, Kazia Tan and David Blefer.
- 19:40Speaker 1: What's Your Problem is a co production of Pushkin Industries
- 19:43Speaker 1: and iHeartMedia. To find more Pushkin podcast listen on the
- 19:46Speaker 1: iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or where Effort. I'm Jacob Boldstein
- 19:51Speaker 1: and I'll be back next week with another episode of
- 19:53Speaker 1: What's Your Problem