91–100 of 248 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you need to exchange data with every other driver when you're on the road?
Isn’t this what turn signals, horns and brake lights are for? Not to mention making eye contact with pedestrians at crossings.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can, today, go to Pheonix Arizona, download the Waymo One app, and summon a full self driving vehicle. This happened silently at the end of 2020, and was overshadowed by the ongoing pandemic doom and gloom. https://blog.waymo.com/2020/10/waymo-is-opening-its-fully-dr... On the subject of danger. Literally everything we do is dangerous to some degree. Everything. Self-driving does not need to be perfect, but only…
> On the subject of automation. Humanity is on track to have the computational power to perform whole brain emulation decades before 2100. Even if we don't solve the general AI problem through other pathways, we will solve it through this path. Ethical problems aside, once this is achieved, everything will be automatable at a human level of competence. Is this actually true? I haven't heard of this. You're saying we…
The human brain works, therefore this technique will work, it's just a matter of having enough computing power.
I will re-iterate though, we are pursuing various alternative pathways to artificial intelligence, and modern machine learning has already demonstrated super-human performance within constrained domains. It's my personal belief that we will achieve human-level general intelligence long before WBE becomes practical.
Some comments are saying self-driving cars are not currently possible and that Waymo isn't successful, but aren't they currently available to the public in some areas in Phoenix, with no safety drivers? There may be many limitations, but self-driving in sunny flat suburban areas would already cover a decent portion of the American market. Sure they might not be ready for chaotic, busy city centres or regions with har…
"Eliminating the safety driver is an important step toward making Waymo's service profitable. But it may not be enough on its own because Waymo says the cars still have remote overseers.
These Waymo staffers never steer the vehicles directly, but they do send high-level instructions to help vehicles get out of tricky situations. For example, a Waymo spokeswoman told me, "if a Waymo vehicle detects that a road ahead may be closed due to construction, it can pull over and request a second set of eyes from our fleet response specialists." The fleet response specialist can then confirm that the road is closed and instruct the vehicle to take another route."
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/10/waymo-finally-launches-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A interesting analogy is the Washington DC Metro, which was automated but now isn't due to a significant accident in 2009 which killed 9 people. That's a train on rails. We have much less tolerance for computers killing people compared to people killing people.
You would think that but then that Uber car ran over a pedestrian in the middle of a typical ultra wide deserted American throughfare with perfect lighting and.. kinda nothing happened? My pulse still rises when I think of that dashcam video they released that predictably shows nothing to blame that lady their negligence killed. Maybe the common denominator is just cars. The regulators are fully absent - they care ab…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there's a crucial issue with sensoring. Companies are tackling the problem mainly using sensors that are contained within the car. Even with LIDAR (and not just cameras) it is very hard to "sense" the full scene[1]. What if our roads were built to communicate with the cars? What if there were only AVs on the street and they communicated with each other? What if every bicycle, school backpack, shopping cart di…
Then we can just build trains instead. Perfectly automated today.
That's sad. I must be the only one who thinks full self driving will not happen before year 2100. Is there an example of anything that's completely automated that's dangerous? I cannot think of a single thing. At best things are partially automated and need humans still. The thing is, if you have "partial" self driving, you might as well just drive yourself IMHO. The consequence of being wrong with a car is literally…
> Is there an example of anything that's completely automated that's dangerous? I think this is just the usual goal post moving, if a machine does it then we decide it wasn't really dangerous for a machine to do it. Garmin Autoland will take a plane which is otherwise working and is in the sky and put it back on the ground because the pilot has a problem (e.g. your plane nut husband finally has another stroke† while…
Indeed. For reasonable values of "land" and "on the ground." It's better than a non-trained pilot, but it also relies heavily on the concept of "emergency" in aviation, in which everything else is put on hold and everyone else gets out of the way.
It has basically nothing to do with driving a car.
First, the sky is large - "Big Sky Theory" is the term for it, and it generally means that you can fly around however and wherever you want without hitting anyone. Yes, there are controlled airspace segments, various levels for flying around, but the reality is that if you just ignored all of that and flew a plane from A to B, you wouldn't hit anyone (almost always). It breaks down a bit around airports, and there have been the occasional "plane A not talking to anyone and plane B not talking to anyone colliding" events, but they are exceedingly rare.
Second, large airports are going to be (almost by definition) controlled airspace, with ground response crews. And there are common airbands for radio communication. The Garmin system relies on these things.
If you hit the "Oh Crap!" button, yes. It will control an otherwise operational plane down to landing at some airport (I believe it prefers controlled airspace and emergency services, though I don't know details), and it will clear the road in front of it by setting the appropriate emergency transponder code and broadcasting prerecorded messages on the appropriate frequency that basically amount to "Get out of my way, I'm coming in for a landing at this airport on this runway." Which, for an incapacitated pilot, is absolutely the right thing to do. I'm fairly sure it won't clear the active runway, though. That's a problem for the humans on the ground.
But - literally everyone else in the sky will get out of their way, and ATC will ensure that. If there's an A380 on approach and this system is triggered near the airport, if ATC needs the A380 to get out of the way, they'll tell them to go around and go hold somewhere until the Cirrus is dealt with.
It's really a very, very different class of problem than self driving cars.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Is there an example of anything that's completely automated that's dangerous? I think this is just the usual goal post moving, if a machine does it then we decide it wasn't really dangerous for a machine to do it. Garmin Autoland will take a plane which is otherwise working and is in the sky and put it back on the ground because the pilot has a problem (e.g. your plane nut husband finally has another stroke† while…
> I think this is just the usual goal post moving, if a machine does it then we decide it wasn't really dangerous for a machine to do it. I strongly disagree. Most machines are not capable of killing you because it makes a mistake. Do you have an example of something humans did that could kill them that was automated completely that still can kill them, but generally does not anymore? An elevator is one example, but…
Elevator deaths are extremely rare in industrialized countries (a couple dozen per year in the USA), and most are of people working on the elevator (e.g. accidentally falling down the elevator shaft), not passengers riding in an elevator. I think construction elevators are also quite a bit less safe than ordinary passenger elevators.
Typical elevators are one of the safest forms of transportation, substantially safer than stairs or ladders.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can, today, go to Pheonix Arizona, download the Waymo One app, and summon a full self driving vehicle. This happened silently at the end of 2020, and was overshadowed by the ongoing pandemic doom and gloom. https://blog.waymo.com/2020/10/waymo-is-opening-its-fully-dr... On the subject of danger. Literally everything we do is dangerous to some degree. Everything. Self-driving does not need to be perfect, but only…
Is there any update on how's that truly driverless program going for Waymo?
All of the big players in self-driving have shown that while they can try to solve the tech problem, nobody can solve the team problem. Self-driving brings together people with very diverse backgrounds (perception, planning, controls, hardware, safety, rideshare product, etc), very diverse incentives (established automakers vs start-up founders vs VC investors), and throws them in a pot with a huge amount of money an…
It also seems like you're not really also applying in the fact self driving cars are approved in how many places? And it takes approximately 5 years to get a standard car to market, getting a self driving car that has been tested in just 10 states, it's unreasonable to expect the value to end users you're expecting to see here. Getting the car to market seems to be the actual problem and that seems more of a legal issue of no one wanting to say yes on the major scale. This is a very slow moving industry, electric cars are basically a solved problem, yet we'll be seeing people buying combustion engine cars for decades.
How long has this project been going on for? 12-years? Seeing management change over that amount of time seems normal. It would be notable if we were seeing 1 or 2 people a month leave for 6 months.
All of the big players in self-driving have shown that while they can try to solve the tech problem, nobody can solve the team problem. Self-driving brings together people with very diverse backgrounds (perception, planning, controls, hardware, safety, rideshare product, etc), very diverse incentives (established automakers vs start-up founders vs VC investors), and throws them in a pot with a huge amount of money an…
