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”

#171

Post by LoSboccacc » Thu, Oct 10, 2019, 6:22 AM UTC

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.

unless they're white trucks, it seems

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

#172

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Oct 10, 2019, 6:26 AM UTC

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.

[deleted]

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

#173

Post by LoSboccacc » Thu, Oct 10, 2019, 6:31 AM UTC

segh wrote: post #53

ipython wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it’s ok to have 1+ million dead per year? [0] If so why go through all this trouble to creat autonomous vehicles? I, for one, am glad this was not the prevailing attitude when commercial airliner regulatory bodies were set up. [0] https://www.asirt.org/safe-travel/road-safety-facts/

Zero deaths are ideal, but the point is that self driving cars don't have to clear a very high bar. The human driver alternative doesn't do very well, as outlined in your link.

the link show aggregate death for all kind of road vehicles and all kind of weathers. select for clement weather, exclude bikers, filter by city drivig so the comparison is in line with what waymo does and suddenly the bar is much much higher.

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

#174

Post by air7 » Thu, Oct 10, 2019, 6:32 AM UTC

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…

That's a misleading statistic. The death rate is around 1 per a billion kms driven. One might argue that humans are actually very good at driving.

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

#175

Post by beerandt » Thu, Oct 10, 2019, 6:33 AM UTC

hinkley wrote: post #69

"Driverless cars are on the way" is going to be the catchphrase of a dystopian horror movie at some point. I just don't know when.

But will they get here before fusion power? Which I hear is about 30 years out.

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

#176

Post by darawk » Thu, Oct 10, 2019, 6:35 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…

While that's true, the autonomous car can also react so much faster than you can. It may be able to largely trade-off your level of contextual awareness for pure reaction speed in most cases.

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

#177

Post by beerandt » Thu, Oct 10, 2019, 6:39 AM UTC

visarga wrote: post #163

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…

Actually there are powerful techniques to predict what a person will do based on current position, velocity, body language and other cues. They can be trained by trying to predict future actions from past state, and self driving cars apply these models to all objects - people, cars, other things on the road.

Even if (and that's a BIG if),...

There are still a nearly endless number of things the car can't get from on-board sensors, but that people will know, or at least be able to learn.

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

#178

Post by beerandt » Thu, Oct 10, 2019, 6:44 AM UTC

Causality1 wrote: post #112

esoterica wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I suspect this will end up being the Tesla version of "cheap, lightweight, easy to make carbon fiber for all the rocket parts!"

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

#179

Post by beerandt » Thu, Oct 10, 2019, 6:53 AM UTC

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.

The only compelling reason I can think of is:

If for some reason charging technology is unable to be improved to the point that it's comparable in time to filling up, and if for some reason the solution is to go back to the idea of battery swaps. I could see this being reason enough to keep the whole system as rentals.

If I'm an owner, I'm going to think twice about swapping out a part that might be 50% of my cars value.

There would need to be some serious quality assurances to make that work.

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

#180

Post by beerandt » Thu, Oct 10, 2019, 6:54 AM UTC

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.

Insurance, more likely.