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Waymo’s Backseat Drivers: Confidential Data Reveals Self-Driving Taxi Hurdles

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Re: Waymo’s Backseat Drivers: Confidential Data Reveals Self-Driving Taxi Hurdles

#161

Post by ghaff »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #133
nishantvyas wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. It’s amazing, how much forgiving we can be for human errors ( accidents every year) but absolutely not for machine/autonomous vehicles, even when, statistically speaking, machines may make better decision much faster(or at-least no worse than human judgement)... I guess feeling/perception of being in control is more important to us... Other interesting observation I find in every autonomous vehicle discussio…

> I’ll be really happy and relaxed if my car can mostly (70-80%) drive it self to daily commute or next trip to LA; There's a caveat here that this 70-80% must be contiguous and the car must be superhuman-level reliable in that segment. Otherwise, the "additional pair of eyes and hands" significantly increase the danger. If your car suddenly decides that it can't handle something and asks you to take over in the last…

My assumption is that you get to this for some subset of highways in some subset of weather conditions with some special rules in place (maybe mandatory maintenance schedules?).

Which is actually a big win as long highways drives are boring and probably have a decent chunk of more serious accidents.

It doesn't give you the robo-taxi use cases that are what a lot of urbanites care about the most. But it would be a nice safety and comfort add-on for how a lot of people spend many hours of their weeks.

Re: Waymo’s Backseat Drivers: Confidential Data Reveals Self-Driving Taxi Hurdles

#162

Post by vonmoltke »

vasilipupkin wrote: post #138
masonic wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fleet of 10,000 vehicles might need only 100-200 remote operators It won't scale in a predictable way. Let's say there's a major event in NYC (natural disaster or unnatural). You may suddenly need 700 operators at the same time just to deal with NYC and environs.

Let’s say there is an event in NYC. Within milliseconds of the event, all the robot cars can be notified and their human drivers can take over, only the cars immediately in the vicinity of the event need robot operators. It’s not straightforward, but it can be done.

Thus requiring the car to always have a licensed driver in the driver's seat. Basically, exactly what we have now with the safety drivers.

Re: Waymo’s Backseat Drivers: Confidential Data Reveals Self-Driving Taxi Hurdles

#163

Post by falcolas »

zodiac wrote: post #160
pnutjam wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true, the roads are for the use and benefit of citizens.

How about tax-paying non-citizen residents, tourists etc?

They pay for their road use through gasoline and sales taxes.

Re: Waymo’s Backseat Drivers: Confidential Data Reveals Self-Driving Taxi Hurdles

#164

Post by falcolas »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #148
Barrin92 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human drivers know what to look out for in other human drivers, we don't know what to look out for in autonomous vehicles. If those vehicles perform particularly badly under some conditions that are not obvious the public would benefit from having transparent insight into how the cars function, so they can be appropriately alert. A research experiment that exposes the public to additional risk should be performed wit…

Human drivers have their own low-hanging fruit that can be pointed at for accident reduction. Tired, impaired, distracted driving are horribly commonplace. Its a low bar, for automated cars to be better than human drivers. Sure they'll have their 'blind spots'. That's no condemnation of the whole industry. Because what we have now is not very good at all (fallible humans, all different). And when automated drivers ha…

It’s a low bar for automated cars to be better than tired, impaired or distracted drivers. It’s a very high bar to be better than all drivers.

Even tired, impaired, or distracted drivers still behave in semi-predictable fashions - they tend to overreact.

Re: Waymo’s Backseat Drivers: Confidential Data Reveals Self-Driving Taxi Hurdles

#165

Post by ghaff »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #59
ttul wrote: post #4

The slow progress is not an indictment of self driving. This is one of the toughest engineering challenges ever mounted by humanity.

My peeve is not the slow progress: My peeve with self-driving companies, Waymo and Tesla alike, is their constant misrepresentation of their capabilities and their timelines for the benefit of stock value and public opinion. The technology doesn't really work, and Google's marketing for the past five years has claimed regulations were the only thing holding them back.

In all fairness, it seems as if a lot of the companies and individuals on Team Right-around-the-Corner have really backed off in the past year or so. I'm not sure how much of this is the deflating of unrealistic expectations and how much is just a tacit agreement to stop trying to top each other given how many hurdles remain.

Re: Waymo’s Backseat Drivers: Confidential Data Reveals Self-Driving Taxi Hurdles

#166

Post by deminature »

scarmig wrote: post #37

What's HN's stance on publishers posting links directly to HN? To be clear, this isn't meant as a blast against The Information or ballmers_peak; they're transparent about their affiliation and that this is an article white listed for readers referred by Hacker News. It's also a totally appropriate article for HN. That said, I kind of wish there was some in-line indicator of a motivated submission source. I guess a d…

The Information is some of the highest quality and well-researched tech journalism out there. They frequently break stories months in advance of other publications, and are one of the few tech outlets that actually warrant having a paywall, and are not just rehashes of press releases. I personally have no issue with publication staff posting content.

Re: Waymo’s Backseat Drivers: Confidential Data Reveals Self-Driving Taxi Hurdles

#167

Post by ghaff »

vonmoltke wrote: post #162
vasilipupkin wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s say there is an event in NYC. Within milliseconds of the event, all the robot cars can be notified and their human drivers can take over, only the cars immediately in the vicinity of the event need robot operators. It’s not straightforward, but it can be done.

Thus requiring the car to always have a licensed driver in the driver's seat. Basically, exactly what we have now with the safety drivers.

Even if you assume requiring human takeover to be a relatively uncommon event (whatever that means), as soon as you posit it as something that will be needed from time to time, you've significantly constrained the car's usage models. You now must have a licensed, unimpaired driver in the car at all times. Even if they don't have to be paying attention, this means no empty cars, no unaccompanied children, no "driving" home from the night out, etc.

Re: Waymo’s Backseat Drivers: Confidential Data Reveals Self-Driving Taxi Hurdles

#168

Post by GVIrish »

falcor84 wrote: post #69
zdragnar wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So far, nobody seems to have full self driving without "safety drivers". A common saying around here is that we have two seasons: winter and (road) construction. Construction zones have pretty much every obstacle to automated driving you can think of: * painted lanes that don't correlate to the temporary lanes marked by cones * lanes that don't correspond to pre-programmed maps / gps * irregular and unpredictable v…

>Oh, and said protocol has to be hack-proof so trouble-makers can't start convincing cars that they're in the middle of a construction zone and force them out of their lanes on normal roads. Why would it be easier for trouble-makers to fool autonomous cars? As a human driver, I'd be fooled by pretty much any road marking or guy in an orange vest.

> Why would it be easier for trouble-makers to fool autonomous cars? As a human driver, I'd be fooled by pretty much any road marking or guy in an orange vest.

Imagine someone hacking the 'construction zone protocol' and spoofing thousands of cars into thinking they're in a construction zone at once. You'd be hard pressed to fool thousands of geographically separated human drivers at the same time.

Re: Waymo’s Backseat Drivers: Confidential Data Reveals Self-Driving Taxi Hurdles

#169

Post by dmix »

falcolas wrote: post #164
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human drivers have their own low-hanging fruit that can be pointed at for accident reduction. Tired, impaired, distracted driving are horribly commonplace. Its a low bar, for automated cars to be better than human drivers. Sure they'll have their 'blind spots'. That's no condemnation of the whole industry. Because what we have now is not very good at all (fallible humans, all different). And when automated drivers ha…

It’s a low bar for automated cars to be better than tired, impaired or distracted drivers. It’s a very high bar to be better than all drivers. Even tired, impaired, or distracted drivers still behave in semi-predictable fashions - they tend to overreact.

That's why these vehicles have both a backup driver and workers monitoring remotely from the office...

No one is saying entirely driverless vehicles are ready yet. Even some of the earlier hawks who claimed next year have backtracked.

Nothing wrong with that, all software deadlines are usually 1.5-2x longer than initial optimistic estimates.

Re: Waymo’s Backseat Drivers: Confidential Data Reveals Self-Driving Taxi Hurdles

#170

Post by dkarl »

calcifer wrote: post #112
jessriedel wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That phrase is just thrown in there to stoke the reader and create a story out of nothing. It indicates a lack of journalistic integrity.

> It indicates a lack of journalistic integrity. Or, the author is suggesting that public resources should be used for public, not private benefit?

Would you nationalize businesses that involved movement of people or goods, or would you privatize the roads and sidewalks? Otherwise I'm having a hard time imagining how goods would be delivered to stores, how raw materials would be delivered to factories, how bands would get to their paid gigs, and how I would get to work in the morning.
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