Self Driving Vehicles? Wait Til You Hear This Joke!

So yesterday I'm driving down I-87, heading back to the campground I'm staying at, Iroquois Campground in Peru, NY. Now I've used Siri on my iPhone to request navigation with Apple Maps back to this campground several times. At the time I'm about 8 miles from the campground. Here's the conversation........

Brett: "Hey Siri"

Siri: "Yes?"

Brett: "Navigate to Iroquois Campground"

Siri: "I can't find Iroquois Campground"

Brett: "wtf??? "

Brett: "Hey Siri......."

Siri: "Yes........."

Brett: "Navigate to Iroquois Campground"

Siri: "I can't find Iroquois Campground"

Brett: "WITF????"

Brett: "Hey Siri....."

Siri: "Yes?...."

Brett: "Navigate to Iroquois Campground in Peru, NY"

Siri: "Ok, navigating to Iroquois Campground in Peru, NY"

Then she was able to find the place and take me there.

I mean, you've gotta be kidding me???

Apple has $200 Billion in cash and well over 10,000 software engineers and they don't know to look for a place in the area that I've asked them to navigate me to??

I mean, I started with the word "Navigate" and I'm doing 65 mph down the Interstate so ya gotta figure I'm trying to go to a location, right? I'm either going to give you the name of the place, or an address. I obviously didn't give an address, and when she repeated it back she even spelled it properly........"I can't find Iroquois Campground"...............well where the hell were you looking???? Obviously not within an 8 mile range of here!

"Duuuuuh........I didn't think to look for a place in the area with that name. Good idea! Duuuuuuh"

So yeah, the next time you're lying awake worrying about self-driving vehicles, just go to sleep. We're not within a million miles of this happening. What a joke.

How ironic...I "heard" on the local news radio feed that Tesla has the worst safety record (30% higher) than any other car manufacturer. Considering the automated side of their business and how they integrate that into their vehicles, a rather disturbing statistic.

Siri may bit be able to find the place for you, but I'll bet you get served up plenty of ads for camping equipment now lol.

G-Town, is that safety record for the equipment itself, or does it also involve driving skills? If it's the latter, I would not be surprised to learn that Tesla owners tend to be 30% worse than average drivers.

Bud wrote:

Siri may bit be able to find the place for you, but I'll bet you get served up plenty of ads for camping equipment now lol.

G-Town, is that safety record for the equipment itself, or does it also involve driving skills? If it's the latter, I would not be surprised to learn that Tesla owners tend to be 30% worse than average drivers.

Good point Bud...rather tongue-in-cheek, but likely the truth. The safety record is for reported accidents in their factory.

There's a "Tops Friendly Markets" grocery store about 2.5 miles from here. I asked Siri to locate the "closest Tops Friendly Markets"

She found three, and the closest one she found was in Elizabethtown, 27 miles away.

I mean, come on! It's a huge grocery store chain. It's not like I asked her to find my buddy Bubba's 2nd Cousin's portable outhouse. Geez. Even if trucks could drive themselves, which they can't, they wouldn't be able to figure out where they're supposed to be going anyhow.

Here's another great software fail. These are fun. My veterinarian was called "Batavia Animal Hospital" but is now called "Perry Veterinary Clinic" and this happened like a few years ago. Not even sure when. Well it still shows up to this day as Batavia Animal Hospital on Google Maps. That's bad enough, right?

So out of curiosity, to see how long it had been, I punched in "Perry Veterinary Clinic Takes Over Batavia Animal Hospital" into Google News, hoping for an article about it. Here's the first three results:

1) Brock Yates dies; wrote hit film 'The Cannonball Run'

2) How can a NY worker get 3300 OT hours?

3) Snowy owl released in WNY

I mean, I loved Cannonball Run.......who didn't?? But my God, if that's the best Google can do with a simple headline search after 20 years of building algorithms with billions of dollars behind them and well over 10,000 software engineers, mathematicians, and statisticians, then how in the world are we going to get from here to self-driving vehicles?

Be serious.

Actually I just wrote an article on this topic and I'm going to release in today. Gotta wrap up a few loose ends first.

You're absolutely on point Brett. How many new drivers do we tell not to follow the GPS as law but as a guide? Yet in the infinite wisdom of higher profits these company's think they can take out the driver element to the equation.

Just ask any Uber or Lyft driver how they like the company mapping. They are beyond frustrated with it. There's a long way to go on this frontier ladies and gentlemen so I wouldn't start thinking about a career change just yet.

And think of the astronomical resources that have been poured into this stuff already. Think about GPS alone. How many hundreds of thousands of people have worked on this stuff over the years? How many hundreds or thousands of companies have had their hand in it?

And of course how many billions and billions of dollars?

Google and Apple alone have more cash on hand than some small countries. They have tens of thousands of software developers each.

Rand McNally? That's all they've ever done is mapping.

Mapquest, OnStar, Garmin, Magellan, and probably 5,000 small companies we've never heard of.

And where do we stand today? You wouldn't dare follow GPS blindly. You'll eventually wind up at my buddy Bubba's 2nd Cousin's outhouse if you did.

And GPS would be only one very small part of what it would take for self-driving vehicles, and far from the most difficult part. If they can't even figure out how to navigate stationary roads, how are they going to figure out how to navigate dynamic traffic patterns, road conditions, weather systems, pedestrians, accident scenes, and construction zones?

Please.......

You guys are behind the times, time to pick up some tech books.

First Siri isn't a GPS unit designed to navigate vehicles without a driver and GPS alone is not how you navigate a driver less car.

Go try building a robot? It's 2017 you know kits are available for cheep and it's not that hard. IR sensors GPS etc there is a lot that goes into problematically knowing ones position and the obstacles around it. Do you really think they sent that 18 wheeler out in Nevada with Siri at the controls? Or did Tesla just buy a licence for Siri no.

As for google algorithms you do know they work of the meta tags and bots crawling the web and your argument is mute because it comes down to how the site owner set the meta data. You can submit and make a better SEO but that's again on the site owner. Not how google runs the algorithm for search results, there one of the biggest companies out there and you think after this long they still haven't figured out a search engine?

How about filtering your search with maybe adding the keyword movie?

Jan P,...thinks she knows:

You guys are behind the times, time to pick up some tech books.

"Ring-ring...yes good afternoon Mr. Driver Boss...can't make that delivery today cause I need to study-up on Google algorithms so I am no longer behind the times".

Really Jan? I have time for that and building a robot? I'll add that to my to-do list. LOL

I am a truck driver, my days messing with Search Engine Optimization (SEO for the uninformed) are long gone...that ship sailed "without me" once I got my CDL. Thank God.

Not how google runs the algorithm for search results, there one of the biggest companies out there and you think after this long they still haven't figured out a search engine?

Well I had just mentioned that I did a search for "Batavia animal hospital taken over by Perry Veterinary Clinic" and the top three results were:

1) Brock Yates dies; wrote hit film 'The Cannonball Run'

2) How can a NY worker get 3300 OT hours?

3) Snowy owl released in WNY

So you tell me how they're doing.

I just now Googled "How many employees does Google have?" and their answer:

57,100

Q2 2015

So their own search engine gave me their own company's employee statistics from over two years ago. Wow, that's seriously impressive.

So I'm gonna go out on a limb and say no, I don't think Google has quite figured this thing out.

And if you'd like to see some examples of the state of modern robotics, here you go: