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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”

#211

Post by jodrellblank »

beerandt wrote: post #140
mgalgs wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Simply track all the pedestrians all the time, and you'll know in advance where the common crossing points are, and when any pedestrians are moving towards a road where your car is moving. Apple, Google, Facebook, have every advantage here.

Tesla track where every Tesla goes, all the time. Will Apple make a car before Tesla makes a 'smartphone'?

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

#212

Post by Judgmentality »

whyaduck wrote: post #209
xxxtentachyon wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did you opt out?

All I can say is NDAs are a hell of a thing.

Wait, the Waymo Lyft drives - the ones that are supposedly public - are under NDA?! Well I guess that explains why I've never heard of it happening.

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

#213

Post by jodrellblank »

beerandt wrote: post #136
foota wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 trigge…

Is this the 'disconnected lever' problem of AI, applied to vehicle driving?

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.

That signal is connected to some much larger dataset of years of human experience - things like what a distracted driver might do, what a tired driver might do, what an old unmaintained vehicle looks like, what hints at an out-of-state or out-of-country driver who might not be aware of local routes or problems, how people tend to behave differently at dawn/rush hour/day/night.

An AI car should be able to tell which is a busy junction pretty easily, but watching a car swerve in a way that might indicate the driver is not paying full attention will make you more cautious around that car for a long time up ahead.

Still, AI cars which don't tailgate, will get an ENORMOUS safety advantage over the people who drive 2ft behind me at highway speeds. That alone might be enough to overcome every other benefit. "AI car doesn't get involved in multi-car pileup", "AI car didn't get shunted at traffic lights", "AI car let me in at that junction" will keep happening and keep boosting people's confidence in them little by little.

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

#214

Post by jodrellblank »

losvedir wrote: post #197
revscat wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla routinely gets data from the fleet and analyzes it. Here is Andre Karpathy speaking on this subject: https://youtu.be/Ucp0TTmvqOE 1:49:30. I’m on mobile otherwise I would link to the exact spot. Tesla has tens (hundreds?) of thousands of vehicles on the road right now that are continuously feeding training data back to Tesla. What evidence is there that this is insufficient, or even deficient? From what I can g…

Unless Teslas are uploading gigabytes every night over your home WiFi (do they?) they're limited by a 4G connection. So you have a lot more Teslas sending a lot less data each. I'm not sure which company has the richer training set.

they're limited by a 4G connection

Are they?

- they could store data to be collected in bulk when the car is in the garage for maintenance or servicing or repair.

- Superchargers could include fast data transfer in their cable for cars using them.

- Superchargers could include a wireless data collection from cars sopped at or near them.

- Cars could connect to public wifi to upload data at any car park, any place, any time.

- Tesla could have vehicles driving around, like Google mapping cars, collecting data wirelessly from nearby Teslas.

I don't know if they do any of them, but none are unreasonable things for companies of 2019 to think about doing.

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

#215

Post by hinkley »

beerandt wrote: post #175
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.

I'm still a little amazed that the AI hype train is still running. That's been the fusion power of CS for almost as long as fusion power has been 30 years out.

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

#217

Post by jodrellblank »

masonic wrote: post #164
anchpop wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

buses would be cheaper to run if they didn't need a driver But those drivers will be paid regardless, given the strength of public sector unions. So, no savings.

But the buses wouldn't need windscreens or wipers or chairs or steering wheels or pedals or payment/coin handling, and the drivers wouldn't need uniforms or eye tests or retraining on routes or overtime or time and a half for holidays. Bus companies won't have to insure the busses for human drivers.

So, yes savings. Nyah on your "unions defending humans against exploitation are the worst thing ever" narrative.

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

#218

Post by beerandt »

BurningFrog wrote: post #201
beerandt wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>save thousands, and kill hundreds Seriously. Why does everyone assume this? Because Tesla's marketing department says so?

Because the overwhelming majority of traffic deaths are due to human errors (A) a computer could easily avoid. It would of course introduce a class of errors (B) that humans would not have made, but those can be iteratively improved until they're substantially lower than the category they're replacing. My point is that once B is substantially lower than A, the tech should be deployed. But I fear people will demand B…

I agree.

>once B is substantially lower than A

It's the presumption that this ^ is a given; that's what I have a problem with.

I think people assume B will continue to decrease in a linear fashion, (or maybe log/exp, but at least not hitting it's asymptote / limit until it's less than A).

But we're already seeing diminishing returns, and since A and B are both difficult to measure, I think presuming that the good will automatically outweigh the bad (at least in the foreseeable future) is nothing more than blind hope at this point.

There's also no reason to believe that it won't become more dangerous at some point.

Look at air travel. Automation made great improvements in safety without many downsides. Until maybe about 10 years ago, when automation related accidents started creeping up (yet usually blamed on pilot error). And then you get to the 737-max problem.

(I'm not claiming air travel is more dangerous, it's not. But mechanical reliability and materials testing / repair are doing far more for safety than automation is. Modern jet engines are an underappreciated marvel of science.)

Personally, I would accept a greater risk for the convenience of being driven by AI, and I don't think I'm alone.

I just think it's a bit of blind hope (and even some arrogance) to assume AI will be safer anytime soon.

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

#219

Post by whyaduck »

Judgmentality wrote: post #212
whyaduck wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All I can say is NDAs are a hell of a thing.

Wait, the Waymo Lyft drives - the ones that are supposedly public - are under NDA?! Well I guess that explains why I've never heard of it happening.

Not that I know of.

Waymo is still Waymo whether they're running rides on their own behalf, or under the Lyft name. Someone who's ridden Waymo in an early adopter program may make their decision on whether to ride Waymo under Lyft based on that experience.

Get it?

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

#220

Post by amyassin »

rightbyte wrote: post #181
avip wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be conservative in what will be delivered, and liberal with when it'll be delivered.

Does 'a liberal' overestimate or underestimate the time needed here?

I think the liberty meant here is not estimating anything :)
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