I dream with the day that humans riding vehicles will be forbidden by law unless the driver would prove the need for human driving. So many deaths would be avoided.
Let's ban knives. So many deaths would be avoided.
Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders
81–90 of 411 posts
Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
I work on a busy fire engine in the same-ish zipcode. I can tell you that blue hairs cause a lot of accidents when they are in town. Slowwww and clueless... to be fair, there are several demographics that we suspect get into far more accidents than most others. No data however.
I don't know how it is USA, but in Poland the police and insurance companies actually do have real data on who causes the most accidents / the most severe accidents. And the facts are brutal: young inexperienced drivers < 25 years old are responsible for higher number of severe accidents than blue hairs, and this phenomenon is reflected in the insurance price they have to pay.
That's exactly how it is in the US. A number of major car rental companies won't even rent to drivers who are younger than 25 years old.
Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders
#83Is Waymo clear about what the end goal is? I can't tell if they plan to launch an Uber like service, or a direct-to-consumer lease type service, or just to be suppliers (whole vehicles, components like lidar, software) to companies like Uber. Or maybe they are leaving all of that undecided for now?
I'm not sure this rider trial thing strongly signals any of them. You would want real world end-customer experiences regardless, I would think.
Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
The system that killed people didn't represent a point of progress for their self driving tech. They decided to abandon the hardware package it was using. Their current implementation doesn't seem to be learning any higher level behaviors (there's a Youtube video of guy using it in a park where it repeatedly accelerates towards islands in the road and then flails off the road as it goes too fast around the island).
Do you have a link to the video?
Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was only one accident I'm aware of in which the Waymo vehicle was at fault; the vast majority have been humans doing stupid things like rear-ending them at stop lights and t-boning by running a red light. (Disclaimer: I work for an Alphabet company.)
"At fault" is one relevant metric, but not the only one. An autonomous vehicle should at least meet, and ideally surpass, human-driven ones in avoiding accidents for which they're not at fault as well. I'd be curious to know if Waymo vehicles experience more, less, or the same number of not-at-fault accidents per mile driven as human-driven ones.
That's a tricky one. Avoiding an accident for which you are not at fault could easily cause an accident for which you are at fault. Human drivers have a pretty bad record with that particular situation.
Also, there are some network effects at play here, the higher the percentage of self driving cars the more rare that situation should become.
Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders
#86I dream with the day that humans riding vehicles will be forbidden by law unless the driver would prove the need for human driving. So many deaths would be avoided.
Let's ban knives. So many deaths would be avoided.
If there were so many deaths of innocent people with knives involved as there are deaths with cars involved, and if there were a safer alternative to knives, sure.
Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
have you thought the consequences of that? No I'm very serious: we are unable to protect smart TVs. Networked smart cars (because let's be real - Google and co. would want to monetize this with Uber-like services, Ads in cars etc.) are a magnitude more likely to be hacked by both the state actors and rogue individuals (altho I don't see why we make this distinction...both are criminal acts). The worst that can happen…
We are not "unable" to protect smart TVs. If anyone gave a shit those things would be locked down tighter than a bank vault, but we don't, so they aren't. But, as evidenced by terrorism paranoia, people do care about their personal safety--perhaps excessively and irrationally so. Security in a networked self-driving car won't be treated as an afterthought, if nothing else because of the massive legal liability.
I seriously doubt this. People do care if their car gets stolen. Unfortunately most (if not all) built-in electronic systems for protecting modern cars from being stolen are crap and thieves somehow get around them. Many of these systems (e.g. Keeloq) used "roll your own" insecure cryptography based on security by obscurity, despite availability of much stronger algorithms at that time.
Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was only one accident I'm aware of in which the Waymo vehicle was at fault; the vast majority have been humans doing stupid things like rear-ending them at stop lights and t-boning by running a red light. (Disclaimer: I work for an Alphabet company.)
"At fault" is one relevant metric, but not the only one. An autonomous vehicle should at least meet, and ideally surpass, human-driven ones in avoiding accidents for which they're not at fault as well. I'd be curious to know if Waymo vehicles experience more, less, or the same number of not-at-fault accidents per mile driven as human-driven ones.
Tesla have stats saying their autopilot, for all its limitations, is already much safer than a human driver: https://electrek.co/2017/01/19/tesla-crash-rate-autopilot-nh...
Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, because computers never crash right? I think way too many people are viewing self driving vehicles with rose colored glasses. They underestimate the cost and overestimate the utility to the public.
If a computer crashes, you can identify the software or hardware flaw that caused the crash and fix it once and for all. Improving human driving skills collectively is much more difficult. Even if one driver learns from their own mistake, other drivers and the next generation of drivers will still be just as prone as before to make that mistake. Better education can only do so much anyway, since people often don't th…
> If a computer crashes, you can identify the software or hardware flaw that caused the crash and fix it once and for all.
Right. Except that 40 years later computers still crash. The more complex a system the harder it becomes to debug and there is no complex software system without bugs. It's like rocks in a field, you'll never get the last one out even if you think you did.
Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders
#90I find it smart that Waymo waited until the snowbirds left to start this. It will be comical when the blue hairs come back next winter and smoke a few of these self-driving cars.... or vice versa. Obviously I don't want anyone to get hurt, but... it is going to happen.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14193687 and marked it off-topic. Please don't violate the guidelines by calling names like this.