Replaying real life: how the Waymo Driver avoids fatal human crashes

In near-critical situations there tend to be disjoint optima in how the group of participants need to behave in order to avoid an incident. If the automated system is programmed to prefer the more - hm how would you call it - calm, civilized, obedient "minimum", but the participants the more agressive one, I can feel your problem. Sometimes just squeezing through resolves a situation more directly and quickly. The designers of those systems are usually not allowed to prefer that. Even if the system would recognize it properly (which needs much more processing power, because the search space is much bigger and, as mentioned, non-convex.

I don't think you should be downvoted, because that is one of the core ethical aspects we need to discuss about those systems. And how they interact with humans. SV dystopia "soon there won't be humans in the loop" doesn't help here.

It's easy to be cynical. Volvo has already said they take responsibility [0], and I assume other manufacturers will also accept blame if their self-driving was involved.

0 - https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a15352720/volvo-will-take-...

They can use it to start fixing the roads, not the cars.

Just look at the cross intersection they use as an example, typical of the US. The ROAD is the death trap there. People are crossing each other at high speed, this is the BUG, and should be fixed.

The proper solution is putting there a roundabout, and you will have instantly less fatal accidents.

The US was the first to use roundabouts, but those early designs did not work well, and as a result we have those monstrosities like in the picture all around the US.

With electric cars that record accidents, the first bugs that we should fix are those in the roads, like those concrete barriers that have no smooth transition but a front wall out of nowhere.

> That's better performance than most humans

I don't know how you can blindly assert that with the limited details in the accident report. I agree that type of intersection is a bit of a free for all, but that doesn't really inform judgement of how Waymo handles it.

My overall point is that city driving necessarily involves a bit of assuming that cars coming at you that are supposed to stop are going to stop. And I can completely see an autonomous vehicle company programming their cars to be overly cautious, and not being tolerant of others cars with just a little too much velocity for comfort (the kind that give your passenger white knuckles, but you have to tolerate as a driver) - as you said, making worst case assumptions rather than average assumptions.

I don't have any personal experience being around self driving vehicles, but in this very thread are people referencing the idea that a self driving car would stop, accelerate to move forward a few feet, and then come to a quick stop again - that's liable to be completely antisocial and unintuitive for other road users. A following driver should be able to handle that and even foresee it based on the car's movement pattern (the car they're following could just as easily be someone looking down at their phone), but continually putting this to the test is questionable.

If we could look at a video of that accident I referenced, it's possible we would see the Waymo doing something absolutely boneheaded like suddenly slamming on its brakes for no reason. It's also possible we would see the Waymo behaving completely reasonably, and the following driver spacing out. My point is that it's impossible to know from such limited reports, and it's a mistake to assume that being hit from behind automatically absolves the autonomous vehicle.

Your original comment did not directly claim that, but it did sort of imply it while stating the solution is for other cars to develop automatic braking, even though that's a long ways off for most cars on the road.

> Almost all the Waymo reports are "vehicle was entering intersection, detected cross traffic, stopped, was rear-ended by human driver". There's one Waymo report where someone ran a stop sign and hit them.

I've driven some some recent cars with a lot of safety systems and more advanced cruise control and they always felt like a bad human driver. They seem to be unpredictable and abuse the breaks, especially when driving on highways where you should just drive with the flow and look in front of you to see what's going on at least 2 or 3 cars ahead of you. I don't know why I have the feeling that technically the Waymo cars are behaving like they should, but some of their actions are just too unpredictable or come all of the sudden, surprising the drivers behind them with sudden breaks and actions that a human driver wouldn't do, or would be more predictable at it.