Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah cause screw that person who died.
No regulation was going to prevent a death where developers intentionally disabled all safety checks.
What about a regulation requiring reasonable safety checks?
Waymo Via
71–80 of 277 posts
Re: Waymo Via
#72anybody knows - is that new slim sensor package a major upgrade to the set/quality of sensors or just a re-packaging? They've only recently appeared in MV, so i haven't been able to get a good look yet :) It is interesting that it appeared on the wave of doubling of the Waymo staff in 1 year plus major outside investment and all those new announcements. It makes one wonder whether they've got major improvements or are only gearing toward it and/or just preparing to expand the operations for one final push across the finish line.
Re: Waymo Via
#73I competed in the DARPA Urban Challenge, back in 2007. While we were watching the finalists trying to sort out the world's first fully-automated traffic jam, the conversation turned to how easy it is to manipulate these vehicles. Imagine a remote stretch of highway frequented by automated 18-wheelers. All that's required to bring the truck to a screeching halt is a bedsheet and some decent timing, at which point the…
This is easy to prevent. First of all, it’d be crammed with cameras. If it’s truly unmanned, there wouldn’t be a steering wheel, so it would be impossible for a human to drive, even if a robber could somehow gain access to the locked cabin. The trailer can also be secure with heavy locks. I suppose you could brute force your way into the cabin, but you’d need another truck to load the goods onto. So what’s the plan, drive an empty semi down the highway in the middle of the night, somehow hijack and break into an unmanned one unnoticed, load up pallets of dog food or onions or whatever the thing might be transporting, quickly enough before cops show up? Good luck!
Re: Waymo Via
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
The idea that Bloomberg and Yang share any sort of common philosophy is laughable.
That's awkward, why did Yang tweet and go on TV saying how awesome Bloomberg's operation was?
It seems like Yang has written something nice on Twitter about every candidate who dropped out? He seems to like people and praise doesn't cost anything.
I don't know if it's mutual, though?
Re: Waymo Via
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's awkward, why did Yang tweet and go on TV saying how awesome Bloomberg's operation was?
Is it not possible for Yang to acknowledge the scale and capability of Bloomberg's operation without it being considered an endorsement of some kind??
This is like when people started calling Glenn Greenwald an "alt-right supporter" because he said he admired the rise and efficacy of Brietbart's operations some time during or after the previous election (can't remember when exactly, it was after they skyrocketed from fringe site to a major news operation).
Social media is turning sections of the public back a few centuries where mere a positive reference is guilt-by-association and the tribalistic off-with-the-head mentality kicks in.
It's quite nasty and anti-intellectual, and the growing prevalence and toleration of it for political ends honestly scares me a bit.
Re: Waymo Via
#76Does a self-driving truck need a sleeper cab? Is the sleeper compartment filled with equipment?
No need if you can have the drive unit changed just off the highway in a well mapped/instrumented yard. eg.
highway (fully automated truck) yard (switch out container/trailer from self-driving truck to manned/normal trucks) local (manned)
Re: Waymo Via
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have not thought much about robbing trucks before, but I disagree this is the same as a manned truck. I think it's much more like the difference between robbing a house that is empty and a house while the owners are home. Most burglaries happen when nobody is home. Why would trucks be any different? Besides that, it is (likely) easier to trick an unmanned truck into stopping as OP mentioned. A person would easily r…
The unmanned truck would likely be _crammed_ with cameras and other surveillance tools like hidden gps senders in the containers. It might initially be easier but I'm not sure if you would get very far with the stolen goods.
I used to work for a company that made long-life self-contained GPS locators, for commercial asset tracking. I remember how much we chortled ironically when a shipment of our devices was literally stolen by a hapless meth addict who noticed keys left in the ignition.
Everyone was laughing because "ha, that idiot stole a thousand GPS trackers, he's the most tracked criminal ever!" But of course every single one of those trackers was in sleep mode, and the only tracking bug was not part of the shipment. Sure, he was caught red-handed within half an hour while a police dispatcher watched a moving dot on a google map, but he was only being tracked by a single device, and we had no way to remote-active the other thousand.
Just an amusing related anecdote.
Re: Waymo Via
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
>But as just a passenger, aboard the truck but not driving it, you aren't using up those precious hours. This is inaccurate. If you are sitting in the passenger seat you are classified as "On-Duty Not Driving" You are only 'resting' (aka "Off-Duty") when you are in the bunk.
This however is frequently violated and widely ignored, as there is no enforcement mechanism, when I teamed, I'd do my 8 hours of sleep, then come up at sit with my co-driver and talk with him about the day ahead as he drove until it was time to stop
Very true.
Re: Waymo Via
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have not thought much about robbing trucks before, but I disagree this is the same as a manned truck. I think it's much more like the difference between robbing a house that is empty and a house while the owners are home. Most burglaries happen when nobody is home. Why would trucks be any different? Besides that, it is (likely) easier to trick an unmanned truck into stopping as OP mentioned. A person would easily r…
The unmanned truck would likely be _crammed_ with cameras and other surveillance tools like hidden gps senders in the containers. It might initially be easier but I'm not sure if you would get very far with the stolen goods.
Set fire to the truck after you rob it to destroy any on-board evidence (like hard drives containing surveillance footage), only commit crimes in a wireless dead zone so no data is transmitted outside (or better yet, use a police stingray so you can do it anywhere), and put all cargo inside a faraday cage. Also I'm not sure there's any reason to believe those kind of security measures wouldn't already exist for a manned truck if the goods are expensive enough, so really it's the benefit of not having to deal with a person.
I'd much rather do all that than kill an armed truck driver.
Now that I actually am thinking about this more, I'd just get a sniper rifle and shoot the sensor units on the truck so it would be incapable of driving further (as opposed to throwing a mattress onto the road).
But again, I'm not in the business of robbing trucks. I'm just saying I'd rather rob a robot than a person. I doubt robberies are a big concern for driverless trucks.
Re: Waymo Via
#80Are these semis truly driverless or does the testing that Waymo is conducting still require staff to monitor the drive? I want to parse through the hype here. Fully automated, point-to-point, driverless semis seem far off, as Hotz of Comma.ai was pointing out. Am I wrong on this assumption?
> Are these semis truly driverless or does the testing that Waymo is conducting still require staff to monitor the drive?
I would assume they're planning to follow a similar trajectory to their passenger vehicles.
There are almost certainly human monitors on the trucks that are running right now, but the long term goal is to be driverless.
> Fully automated, point-to-point, driverless semis seem far off, as Hotz of Comma.ai was pointing out. Am I wrong on this assumption?
I think fully automated arbitrary point-to-point anything is a long way off at best and potentially impossible. Being able to handle any situation, including those that often give human drivers trouble, seems like it very likely could be a "hard AI" problem to me
I think that shrinking the problem space to a fixed route makes things a lot simpler, especially for deliveries that aren't extremely time critical where the vehicle could safely pull off if things got questionable. Think about something like a load of cars being shipped from Detroit to Denver.
Even if the autonomous trucks are limited to interstate-class highways, it could work like Turnpike Triples do here in Ohio where the autonomous truck could handle the interstate part and then drop the trailer(s) in a transfer lot located right at the exit. Human drivers could then pick them up from there for the local portion of the haul. That seems like it'd be a win-win, the companies get their loads able to drive any distance with no time limits while the drivers get a nice local loop where they're home every night.