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

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

#111

Post by Dylan16807 »

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…

Even if the car occasionally stops for plastic bags, the self-driving is still a massive improvement in the experience I have.

For children you might preemptively slow down, but a properly designed system can brake a whole lot faster. Should be fine.

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

#112

Post by Causality1 »

esoterica wrote: post #103
Causality1 wrote: post #95

Nowadays I hope it takes a very long time. As Elon Musk pointed out, once cars can independently generate income as autonomous taxis, there's no reason to sell them to the public at all. Self-driving cars isn't the death of personal driving because they'll be too convenient; it's the death of personal driving because we won't be able to buy a car at a reasonable margin over manufacturing costs.

Why would companies not sell autonomous cars if customers exist who are willing to pay a reasonable margin over manufacturing costs? The fact that autonomous taxis are viable doesn’t preclude personal car ownership.

Because they would make far more money adding the car to their own fleet. Why sell a car for $40,000 when it could generate $300,000 in revenue over a decade? Tesla has already said they'll stop selling to the public after they have autonomous driving completely safe and working.

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

#113

Post by beerandt »

jonplackett wrote: post #89
beerandt wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe semantics, but the biggest problem isn't necessarily trusting the machine to do what's expected. The problem is the machine being able to predict what pedestrians and other drivers are going to do. This isn't just a problem for driverless cars, it's become a real problem for people, too. The rules of the road are there for a reason, people! When you wave someone into traffic, or have your emergency flashers on…

Or it might go the other way and driverless cars will be push-overs on the road and brake for everyone all the time. There’s a lot of decisions to be made about how they should react to that kind of stuff. Tesla’s last automation talk was interesting about that - they’re basically training the cars to act like a human driver would, looking for tiny signals that might warn of unexpected behaviour.

Good point.

And it could have both problems. There's no reason I can think of to assume mutual exclusion.

>act like a human driver

Anything AI making this or a similar claim is automatically suspect to me.

>looking for tiny signals that might warn of unexpected behaviour

I suppose this is progress, except that it sort of implies that the AI wasn't already doing that. Which to me says the programmers are still having to anticipate too many possible scenarios.

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

#114

Post by colorincorrect »

I know this is a big task, but could someone give/link me an overview of the state of self-driving cars and the issues they currently face? I know its a hard problem but very bright minds have been doing this for a while, so I'd like to know what is the issue, since we've been told for a very long time that the technology is right on the horizon.

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

#115

Post by rayiner »

mgalgs wrote: post #93
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…

> Not just image recognition, obstacle avoidance, rule following, etc. I would argue that the examples you gave are just image recognition, etc. What is your brain doing if not image recognition and obstacle avoidance? We're not there with today's technology but eventually our machines will perform better at those uniquely human tasks you mentioned. After all, we humans and our cognition is just the output of these g…

> I would argue that the examples you gave are just image recognition, etc. What is your brain doing if not image recognition and obstacle avoidance

Planning, anticipation, reading body language, etc? Is that person looking like he’s going to jaywalk? That’s not image recognition. Yes, once he steps into the road the self driving car will respond quicker. But the human driver might already be slowing down and watching for hints of initiating movement. Image recognition is just one tiny piece of it.

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

#116

Post by xxxtentachyon »

whyaduck wrote: post #73
Judgmentality wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why did you opt out?

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

#117

Post by mlindner »

carlivar wrote: post #33
xvector wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While Tesla is far behind Waymo and probably never will catch up, especially because of CAPTCHA, I think your description is unduly harsh. Autopilot works much better than every other TACC out there and is the best thing on the market you can get.

Since it lets you fall asleep as long as your hand (or something) is on the wheel, I'm not sure it's the best thing you can get. Cadillac SuperCruise seems better from a driver awareness standpoint, given that this is "predictable abuse" otherwise.

It doesn't let you fall asleep. It needs force on the wheel to prevent disabling itself, and just a weight attached isn't enough. It needs a change in force.

Honestly, if your only critiques are based on hearsay then maybe you shouldn't critique.

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

#118

Post by rayiner »

jonplackett wrote: post #89
beerandt wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe semantics, but the biggest problem isn't necessarily trusting the machine to do what's expected. The problem is the machine being able to predict what pedestrians and other drivers are going to do. This isn't just a problem for driverless cars, it's become a real problem for people, too. The rules of the road are there for a reason, people! When you wave someone into traffic, or have your emergency flashers on…

Or it might go the other way and driverless cars will be push-overs on the road and brake for everyone all the time. There’s a lot of decisions to be made about how they should react to that kind of stuff. Tesla’s last automation talk was interesting about that - they’re basically training the cars to act like a human driver would, looking for tiny signals that might warn of unexpected behaviour.

Tesla still reliably runs into stationary objects and fails to brake for (dummy) children, so take all that with a grain of salt.

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

#119

Post by rayiner »

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.

That’s a straw man. Humans routinely drive in inclement weather. In Atlanta during the summer I85 will maintain 50 mph in rain so hard that you can’t see the lines on the road. Expecting self driving cars to handle those conditions isn’t setting a higher standard.

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

#120

Post by shiftpgdn »

rayiner wrote: post #119
panarky wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s a straw man. Humans routinely drive in inclement weather. In Atlanta during the summer I85 will maintain 50 mph in rain so hard that you can’t see the lines on the road. Expecting self driving cars to handle those conditions isn’t setting a higher standard.

This may be a contribution to the number of fatalities and major injuries as a result of auto accidents.

I think the future of self driving vehicles will just be inclement weather delays like we have with flying.

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