Waymo to customers: “Completely driverless Waymo cars are on the way” • Hacker News Board

Re: Waymo to customers: “Completely driverless Waymo cars are on the way”

#71

Post by jonplackett » Thu, Oct 10, 2019, 1:02 AM UTC

2bitencryption wrote: post #61

jonplackett wrote: post #42

I have very mixed feelings about autonomous cars. One side of me is so excited about the prospect and finds it all amazing and futuristic. I love reading about how Tesla and Waymo approach it differently. The other side of me is absolutely not ready to trust my life to a machine - even though I know I do that all the time in other ways in modern life. I think it will be people's emotional evaluation that will matter…

every now and then I do something while driving that, IMO, requires "human cognition". Not just image recognition, obstacle avoidance, rule following, etc. Like, I'm cruising along at 45mph and a plastic bag is blown in front of my car. Yes, I see an obstacle and need to make a decision about what to do - but I do this as a human who knows what a plastic bag is, and how it is far safer to drive right over it than sla…

I think that sums it up really well. In those kind of edge cases like the basket ball, if an AI driver didn’t slow down and then killed a kid, we’d all be up in arms about It saying how obvious it was that a kid would run out, and we’d have stopped, and we’d be right.

But at the same time that AI driver will have stopped in time when 10 other kids jumped out without any warning because it has much, much better reflexes.

But it’ll be the first instance that will get all the airtime.

Re: Waymo to customers: “Completely driverless Waymo cars are on the way”

#72

Post by fwip » Thu, Oct 10, 2019, 1:02 AM UTC

2bitencryption wrote: post #61

jonplackett wrote: post #42

I have very mixed feelings about autonomous cars. One side of me is so excited about the prospect and finds it all amazing and futuristic. I love reading about how Tesla and Waymo approach it differently. The other side of me is absolutely not ready to trust my life to a machine - even though I know I do that all the time in other ways in modern life. I think it will be people's emotional evaluation that will matter…

every now and then I do something while driving that, IMO, requires "human cognition". Not just image recognition, obstacle avoidance, rule following, etc. Like, I'm cruising along at 45mph and a plastic bag is blown in front of my car. Yes, I see an obstacle and need to make a decision about what to do - but I do this as a human who knows what a plastic bag is, and how it is far safer to drive right over it than sla…

The driverless cars out there can't even stop for children that are clearly visible. https://www.zdnet.com/google-amp/article/does-your-car-have-...

> Using a child-sized dummy, vehicles only avoid running over the child 11% of the time

They're not safe.

Re: Waymo to customers: “Completely driverless Waymo cars are on the way”

#73

Post by whyaduck » Thu, Oct 10, 2019, 1:04 AM UTC

Judgmentality wrote: post #57

tigershark wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, what? Waymo does also some rides hailed via lyft, or are you saying that you have to apply also in lyft? If this is not a public service with paying customers then I don’t know one... https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2019/06/27/way...

I am unaware of anyone getting picked up in a self-driving car using Lyft (outside of Aptiv in Las Vegas and other testing that has nothing to do with Waymo). Although honestly I wouldn't be surprised if I was wrong on this one, and there have been people that got picked up in a Waymo using Lyft, but a quick search on twitter and google shows up nothing (but I spent less than a minute searching just now and welcome b…

Lyft has been dispatching Waymo self-driving vans (with safety drivers) in Chandler AZ for a while now. I've opted out of Waymo for my occasional rides with Lyft, so I can't say how frequently they show up. But I can say there are lots of the vans running in the service area.

Re: Waymo to customers: “Completely driverless Waymo cars are on the way”

#74

Post by ehsankia » Thu, Oct 10, 2019, 1:08 AM UTC

cookie_monsta wrote: post #70

ehsankia wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except in the previous article, driverless rides were already happening : > since mid-October, the company has been operating its autonomous minivans on public roads in Arizona without a safety driver The difference is that those were without any users inside. This new article is saying that the public offering, with real customers inside, will get rides with no one inside. It is unfortunate that it took 2 years to g…

> It is unfortunate that it took 2 years to get to the point where they felt safe putting people customers in the car Except they're not at that point yet, and even when they are they will still have a Waymo employee on board "initially". I don't think that anybody is accusing anybody of lying, just making the point that predictions of the marketing team aren't really something you would want to set your watch by.

> even when they are they will still have a Waymo employee on board "initially".

I think you're confused. They've been having customer rides with employee in the car for almost a year now. The email sent to customers today is saying that they will soon find rides with no employee inside.

And again, rides without employee inside have been happening also since 2017, just not with customers inside.

Re: Waymo to customers: “Completely driverless Waymo cars are on the way”

#75

Post by Gustomaximus » Thu, Oct 10, 2019, 1:09 AM UTC

Teever wrote: post #41

Gustomaximus wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure there is ~200,000 years of natural selection. That probably 10,000 generations of learning assuming 20 years. But computers can run 10,000 simulations to learn in minutes. And obviously we are not going to create a autonomous driving ability in minutes but we can speed up the learning evolution significantly in machine world vs humans that have 10-50 years per evolutionary learning event. My view is the hard thi…

I think that you overlook the fact that a tremendous amount of evolution went on before humans came onto the scene ~200k years ago.

I was waiting for that :). Let's put it out at billions of generations for pre-human evolution.

Point stands. I computer will do millions of simulations in a day. And be done across a population far greater than historic evolution.

Doesn't take long to get billions of learning events. On top of which evolution pre-intelligence (as a very loose term) was somewhat random, where our systems are starting from a much more evolved position that does take advantage of existing evolution as much as humans do.

Re: Waymo to customers: “Completely driverless Waymo cars are on the way”

#76

Post by anchpop » Thu, Oct 10, 2019, 1:10 AM UTC

majormajor wrote: post #68

triceratops wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, even if autonomous vehicles are on average exactly as safe as human drivers, they're still worth the effort. Here are some reasons: 1. They're cheaper. This sounds crude, until you realize that this makes things like buses and shared rides far more viable. Meaning millions of people have a better commute and collectively save many lifetimes worth of time. It can also mean less air pollution, due to less traffic…

> 1. They're cheaper. This sounds crude, until you realize that this makes things like buses and shared rides far more viable. Meaning millions of people have a better commute and collectively save many lifetimes worth of time. It can also mean less air pollution, due to less traffic congestion (this only applies if congestion pricing is done), which will also save lives. IMO autonomous vehicles are just going to fur…

Sure, but but buses would be cheaper to run if they didn't need a driver. My university runs a bus that you have to call and it drives directly to you and picks you up, I could imagine something like that being more common (for public transit)

Re: Waymo to customers: “Completely driverless Waymo cars are on the way”

#77

Post by Nition » Thu, Oct 10, 2019, 1:11 AM UTC

panarky wrote: post #12

dev_dull wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the 80/20 principle says it's going to be a long, long time before level 5 autonomy is reached. That's 100% in all conditions. In fact, I would say it's more theory than attainable. There's a reason they're testing in Phoenix. It has almost no Inclement weather. Throw a little snow, mud, or sleet in there and it gets hairy fast. Level 2 is basically the 20% of effort in 80/20. It's exponential effort from then on out…

We shouldn't set a dramatically higher safety standard for autonomous drivers than human drivers. When autonomous drivers have the same or fewer injuries per billion miles driven as human drivers, then for all practical purposes it doesn't matter if it's level 4 or level 5.

I bet most people think they're a better-than-average driver though. So if the cars are only a little better than the average person, you'll still have everyone assuming it's less safe for them.

Re: Waymo to customers: “Completely driverless Waymo cars are on the way”

#78

Post by jonplackett » Thu, Oct 10, 2019, 1:11 AM UTC

dsaavy wrote: post #66

jonplackett wrote: post #42

I have very mixed feelings about autonomous cars. One side of me is so excited about the prospect and finds it all amazing and futuristic. I love reading about how Tesla and Waymo approach it differently. The other side of me is absolutely not ready to trust my life to a machine - even though I know I do that all the time in other ways in modern life. I think it will be people's emotional evaluation that will matter…

What you describe feels similar in certain ways to insulin pumps. They’ve definitely helped people live longer and healthier lives but still have cause injuries that otherwise wouldn’t have happened with human administered injections. https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.4915491

Really interesting comparison, thanks.

Re: Waymo to customers: “Completely driverless Waymo cars are on the way”

#79

Post by jonplackett » Thu, Oct 10, 2019, 1:12 AM UTC

fwip wrote: post #72

2bitencryption wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

every now and then I do something while driving that, IMO, requires "human cognition". Not just image recognition, obstacle avoidance, rule following, etc. Like, I'm cruising along at 45mph and a plastic bag is blown in front of my car. Yes, I see an obstacle and need to make a decision about what to do - but I do this as a human who knows what a plastic bag is, and how it is far safer to drive right over it than sla…

The driverless cars out there can't even stop for children that are clearly visible. https://www.zdnet.com/google-amp/article/does-your-car-have-... > Using a child-sized dummy, vehicles only avoid running over the child 11% of the time They're not safe.

This is just for automated braking, not autonomous cars.

Not the same thing at all.

Re: Waymo to customers: “Completely driverless Waymo cars are on the way”

#80

Post by cookie_monsta » Thu, Oct 10, 2019, 1:15 AM UTC

ehsankia wrote: post #74

cookie_monsta wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is unfortunate that it took 2 years to get to the point where they felt safe putting people customers in the car Except they're not at that point yet, and even when they are they will still have a Waymo employee on board "initially". I don't think that anybody is accusing anybody of lying, just making the point that predictions of the marketing team aren't really something you would want to set your watch by.

> even when they are they will still have a Waymo employee on board "initially". I think you're confused. They've been having customer rides with employee in the car for almost a year now. The email sent to customers today is saying that they will soon find rides with no employee inside. And again, rides without employee inside have been happening also since 2017, just not with customers inside.

Maybe I am confused. I'm just going on what Waymo says.

The point is that "soon" is meaningless in this context and Waymo very clearly states that "a Waymo employee would likely be present in the vehicle initially."