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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”

#131

Post by rayiner »

shiftpgdn wrote: post #120
rayiner wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Self driving cars that can't operate in heavy snow or rain will be totally useless.

One of the lessons of engineering history that self-driving car proponents fail to grasp is that promising technology often fails to get traction because it can't close the final 5%. Supersonic aircraft, for example, have effectively been derailed by people on the ground near airports complaining about sonic booms. VTOL aircraft never replaced aircraft because of control problems. Flying wing aircraft never became popular for similar reasons.

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

#132

Post by MisterTea »

pjdemers wrote: post #84

This afternoon I was driving up Alma in Palo Alto, near the Embarcadero underpass. There was a Waymo test van behind me, and another two cars in front of me. My thought was: "look at me, actually driving my car, like a sucker".

At least you're not monetizing yourself with big brother google tracking all of your driving data in order to better serve you ads.

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

#133

Post by gpm »

scottlocklin wrote: post #97
ehsankia wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Except they all have remote control "employee inside." https://www.wired.com/story/designated-driver-teleoperations...

How many cars can one employee be "inside of"? If that number is an order of magnitude higher than 1 the cost of these employees is probably relatively negligible.

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

#134

Post by rayiner »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #128
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…

How many parks in the USA have speed zones around them that aren’t restricted to 15-25mph? It is stupid easy to slow down for a kid chase ball scenario when you are already going slow anyways, the only reason it is such a problem at all is because human drivers prefer speeding so much.

Tons of them? I don't think any of the parks around here in exurban maryland have any sort of special speed zone. My 100+ year old neighborhood doesn't even have its layout mapped correctly in Google Maps. (The road names in the app don't match the street signs and the wayfinding doesn't realize that the road in front of my house is segmented with barriers so you can't drive all the way down it.)

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

#135

Post by mgalgs »

rayiner wrote: post #115
mgalgs wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 watchin…

> That’s not image recognition.

How do you do it? Telepathically? You're still just receiving visual input and processing it.

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

#136

Post by beerandt »

foota wrote: post #110
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…

I actually think driverless cars will do better here. They will likely be able to recognize cars deviating from their current path in O(hundreds of milliseconds) and avoid a collision, whereas if a car from the opposite direction lane starts drifting into mine seconds before we hit there's little I can do.

I mentioned this elsewhere, but I'll elaborate- I don't think the detection or reaction time is the problem, it's the concept of useful recognition (and prediction). Is that first movement/deviation (that an AI car can certainly measure sooner than I can see) going to be a swerve within their lane or is the car going to come all the way over? It's not the watching for the trigger, but the intuition of what the trigger is, well, triggering.

Humans have an uncanny ability in predicting the overall movement before any perceivable deviation. Of course I'm not saying it's magic; there's obviously some kind of signal to our subconscious that we're able to process and make useful. Perhaps AI can pick up on some of that.

But it's not necessarily the "first movement" of the swerve that is most useful. And the "signal" that humans pick up on may not even be something externally measurable by the car. Like knowing of a particular interstate exit that drivers always seem to almost miss, but swerve across lanes to catch at the last second.

There are also signals that are externally measurable, but have to be learned (seen on a previous trip, or warned by a friend). Like knowing about a bad pothole ahead, and knowing that the car in front of you is going to turn the corner, slam on the brakes and then swerve to avoid it.

These are the kinds of things that I suspect AI will struggle to keep up with in the foreseeable future. And humans rely on this type of intuition way more than I think most people realize.

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

#137

Post by rayiner »

rubicon33 wrote: post #104
jonplackett wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reflex…

Nearly 1.25 million people die in road crashes each year. Think about that. Self driving cars aren't just a solution to nuisance of driving. They're a solution to one of the leading causes of DEATH and INJURY in the country. Sure there are going to be edge cases where we as humans will be able to point at the car and say "damnit, we could have prevented that"! But I sure hope when we do that, the car points right bac…

> Sure there are going to be edge cases where we as humans will be able to point at the car and say "damnit, we could have prevented that"!

This is a meaningless assertion unless you account for how often "edge cases" arise. If unpredictable pedestrians, unplanned road construction, etc., is an "edge case" the car basically won't work in DC or New York.

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

#138

Post by mdorazio »

xvector wrote: post #32
mdorazio wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. It’s completely fair. Handling basic tasks on nice freeways is exactly what adaptive cruise control + lane keeping is for. Last I checked, autopilot couldn’t even stop for a stop sign unless you count “shadow mode” claims.

I have never seen another TACC implementation that doesn’t ping from side to side. Which cars have you drive with a superior cruise control implementation?

Cadillac super cruise worked pretty damn well when I used it in a rental last month.

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

#139

Post by rayiner »

mgalgs wrote: post #135
rayiner wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 watchin…

> That’s not image recognition. How do you do it? Telepathically? You're still just receiving visual input and processing it.

"Image recognition" is a small subset of "receiving visual input and processing it." We know how to do image recognition with machine learning. Planning and anticipation is a much harder problem.

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

#140

Post by beerandt »

mgalgs wrote: post #135
rayiner wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 watchin…

> That’s not image recognition. How do you do it? Telepathically? You're still just receiving visual input and processing it.

Human knowledge and intuition. Deductive reasoning.

Knowing there is a location ahead without a crosswalk that kids constantly cross at.

Or knowing that the car in front of you is going too fast, implying that they're unaware of the railroad tracks they're about to jump.

You don't need telepathy to make useful predictions. And humans don't need to be accurate, they just need to be prepared to take a measured response.

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