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Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

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Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

#341

Post by Noos »

omg_ketchup wrote: post #45
monkmartinez wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you so sure driverless cars will get into less accidents? Furthermore, how is this technology going to be make everything less expensive. Please explain. For the record, I think this technology will make the prices for these vehicles prohibitively expensive for the mass market.

Well for one, you don't need to own your car. You just use it. If you (or anyone you know) owns a traditional automobile, it sits unused for 90% of its life. In a driveway, on the sidewalk, in a parking lot, etc. You pay for 100% of the car, but only use 10% of it. If you could rent it out to others ('the grid') while you're not using it, they would share some of the burden, lessening yours. They make things safer be…

Do people not get that this also shortens the life of the car?

I mean, let's say I use it for a total of 12,000 miles per year. that's 10% of the time. If I rent it out for an additional 50% of the total time, that's going to hit 72k miles in a year! For the average person they are going to have to replace cars ridiculously fast, and increase, not lessen, the burden of car ownership.

Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

#342

Post by zeven7 »

yumraj wrote: post #134
tyingq wrote: post #83

Is 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 reg…

> Is Waymo clear about what the end goal is? IMHO, it may be a little short sighted to look at Waymo and self-driving cars by itself, I believe it fits into the broader DL-AI initiatives within Alphabet as yet another DL-AI application. Whether it becomes an end in itself or simply feeds into other DL-AI initiatives is most likely still undefined.

I think it's safe to assume that, while self-driving tech will have broad-reaching DL-AI applications for Alphabet, there is a plan to directly sell the self-driving tech somehow. Otherwise why create the brand Waymo? If it was simply left as experimental Alphabet/Google research I think you would have a stronger point.

Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

#343

Post by zeven7 »

djsumdog wrote: post #200
zeven7 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Options that Americans would choose to use?

Trains? Trams? Good rail networks in cities would greatly reduce the amount of drunk driving. It's simple tech. It's been around for decades. It works, and Americans block it at every chance because ... I still don't understand why.

Right, I didn't ask if other options existed but if Americans would choose them. You seem to have answered that question.

I think one reason Americans don't is because they like autonomy and comfort and cars are more autonomous and comfortable than other modes of transportation.

Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

#344

Post by jdietrich »

Noos wrote: post #318
smlacy wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument is about the same as "Humans can calculate arithmetic perfectly accurately, why do we need computers to do it for us?" There are a host of obvious reasons why even a "simple" L4 car will beat a human hands down: * Reaction time. * 360 awareness / visibility. * Lack of exaggerated "Human Reflex" to surprising events (i.e. swerving violently to avoid a dog, and hitting other vehicles) * Keeping perfect sp…

The problem though is that humans can adapt, and the AI in general can't. A go AI can play Go perfectly, but if a player overturns a board, it can do nothing to right this situation and resume playing. It's just following a list made for it, albeit a fairly substantial list. The worry is this, the cars will not fail like a human will. It may even be dangerous The car may not even be able to move in certain situations…

>It's just following a list made for it, albeit a fairly substantial list.

You're operating on a completely archaic understanding of AI. Modern systems can and do adapt to situations on-the-fly. What's more, they can adapt on aggregate - the experiences gathered by a single car can be shared to all cars. Very quickly, every car in the fleet will have billions of hours of cumulative driving experience.

The overwhelming majority of motor vehicle accidents aren't weird and unpredictable edge cases. They're tragic but mundane events that result from a handful of root causes - inattention, excess speed, poor judgement and unnecessary risk-taking. "Driver/rider failed to look properly" is the key contributory factor in nearly half of road traffic accidents. Computers utterly dominate humans in this respect. For every accident caused by some bizarre and unpredictable set of circumstances, there are thousands caused by someone doing something obviously stupid.

A computer can be programmed to be ultra-cautious in difficult situations. A computer can maintain 100% vigilance 100% of the time. Humans can't. Self-driving cars will undoubtedly fail in new and unexpected ways, but it's abundantly clear that they'll fail much less often than humans.

Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

#345

Post by Noos »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #330
Noos wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not ransomware i worry about. What about targeting the lidar/radar directly? Some people still have radar/laser jammers, and only ten states ban them. What on earth will your programming do to counter that? Or what if an actor uses something like this: https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/29/now-you-see-me-now-you-don... that confounds the car's sensors. Self-driving cars have a whole spectrum of attack vectors that h…

It is likewise quite easy to throw a rock on the highway from a bridge. What you are really worrying about is new creative ways to kill and destroy. Yes, hostile input will have to be taken into account. Fortunately, this is easily detectable (just look at the logs). And if people die as the result, it will count as murder. Finally, one does not simply jam sensors from across the planet. You need a physical presence…

Self-driving cars can make it easier to do this systemically, and not even purposefully. The jamming sensors I meant that another car passes by with a radar jammer on, for its intended purpose (jamming police radar sensors for speeding) and it hits the self-driving car too.

A lot of the current driving issues do suck, but they still will suck with self-driving cars, as any computerized system has its own vulnerabilities. It's just they might be systemic and affect a lot more people in ways they can't compensate for.

Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

#346

Post by monkmartinez »

mythbuster2001 wrote: post #335
JDulin wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51qqzFE0rsw

This is not rain. This is a drizzle on a very well maintained, center divided freeway, where the radar and ultrasonic sensor has a very nice reference (divider). Also with cars tracked in front. Example of (non-autonomous) driving in a real rain here for reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3xKT98a3og

How about a haboob near phoenix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vQMuwRjI6s

Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

#347

Post by churn1 »

Pigo wrote: post #53

After seeing the movie Logan, I was curious if the movie was taking a jab at the autonomous vehicle trend by portraying them as a danger to ma & pa drivers on the highway. It showed a crowded highway full of shipping containers pushing a truck hauling horses off the road. It seems the message was not that the technology can't be courteous, but that once it's accepted, corporations will abuse the roads to help their b…

While that came about as a form of corporate abuse, the scene in the movie was less about corporations abusing public roads to improve bottom line, and more about a specific corporation trying to kill a specific farmer to take his land!

Source: http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/movie_script.php?mov...

CTRL+F for "So they were on highways today on those trucks"

The whole scene is about Big Corn trying to take a specific plot of land whose owner would not sell.

In that situation, it's less about the dangers of autonomous vehicles, and more about corporations are willing to murder others. The next scene involves guns and fighting.

Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

#348

Post by joshuamorton »

monkmartinez wrote: post #334
joshuamorton wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The price dropped from something ridiculous (~100K) to something manageable for a luxury car (~10K), and certainly reasonable as a cost offset by multiple consumers (like in a rideshare environment).

It doesn't matter. As we have learned with the John Deere tractor situation is that we will lose even more control. Think buying and maintaining a car is expensive now? Wait until you literally can't drive it without paying for a software update. I'm sorry, but I don't see anything cool in this other than a quick nap sometimes on a long road trip. Everything else quickly approaches pain in the ass levels to the point…

So your argument went from "its economically infeasible" to "I don't like it!"?

Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

#349

Post by ceejayoz »

michael_storm wrote: post #268
smlacy wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument is about the same as "Humans can calculate arithmetic perfectly accurately, why do we need computers to do it for us?" There are a host of obvious reasons why even a "simple" L4 car will beat a human hands down: * Reaction time. * 360 awareness / visibility. * Lack of exaggerated "Human Reflex" to surprising events (i.e. swerving violently to avoid a dog, and hitting other vehicles) * Keeping perfect sp…

There are a host of obvious reasons why even a "simple" human will beat an L4 car hands-down: * Lack of software bugs due to careless programming. * Millions of years of brain evolution allows adapting to unforeseen circumstances. * Vastly decreased likelihood of being tricked by vandals exploiting flaws in recognition algorithms. * Inability to be hacked en masse and driven into each other/houses/pedestrians. * Much…

Google "optical illusions" for plenty of human software bugs.

What in the last few millions of years caused humans to evolve to steer metal objects at 60mph?

Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

#350

Post by maverick_iceman »

Noos wrote: post #318
smlacy wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument is about the same as "Humans can calculate arithmetic perfectly accurately, why do we need computers to do it for us?" There are a host of obvious reasons why even a "simple" L4 car will beat a human hands down: * Reaction time. * 360 awareness / visibility. * Lack of exaggerated "Human Reflex" to surprising events (i.e. swerving violently to avoid a dog, and hitting other vehicles) * Keeping perfect sp…

The problem though is that humans can adapt, and the AI in general can't. A go AI can play Go perfectly, but if a player overturns a board, it can do nothing to right this situation and resume playing. It's just following a list made for it, albeit a fairly substantial list. The worry is this, the cars will not fail like a human will. It may even be dangerous The car may not even be able to move in certain situations…

This is not true. DeepMind has built AI that can understand the rules of the game just by looking at the screen and then play it perfectly.
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