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Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

blog.waymo.com

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Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#181

Post by darkwater »

ericye16 wrote: post #96
tshaddox wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those SAE levels apparently don’t specifically mention the geographic range the vehicle can operate in [0], but at some point that’s pretty important. Having “full automation” on a very tiny section of roads is hardly what I would call “orders of magnitude above the rest.” [0] edit: that's incorrect, L4 and L5 are primarily defined by differences in geography range.

The difference between SAE level 4 and 5 is explicitly whether the autonomy is geographically limited or not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-driving_car#SAE_Classific...

Am I the only one seeing the change between l4 and l5 abysmal? Also L5 description, at least in the Wikipedia article, is much more vague than the rest

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#182

Post by Rebelgecko »

hn_go_brrrrr wrote: post #150
jefftk wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't in Phoenix; the article links https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdrV9wqXyH0 as an example. (Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself.)

Thanks! I'd love to see their data on rider behavior. AIUI, they have hand-selected a group of riders into their pilot program there. I suspect those people probably behave better than your average taxi passengers. Either way, fascinating to see.

I think initially they opened it up to handpicked riders that were willing to sign NDAs, but now anyone can sign up in the Waymo app

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#183

Post by ra7 »

afavour wrote: post #134
ra7 wrote: post #19

It's fantastic to see Waymo's progress. SF is a real nightmare to drive. If they can nail it there, that's 2/2 for busy, urban street driving (SF) and "boring" suburban driving (Chandler, AZ). They've been quietly very confident of their tech, but this is a real test. Tangentially, I've also noticed that Waymo has picked up pace ever since the recent leadership changes. They are publishing more blog posts, offering m…

> SF is a real nightmare to drive. Yes and no. The weather conditions are probably close to perfect for a project like this. A city that spends months with icy roads... _that_ would be the real nightmare.

Yeah, fair enough. Only adverse weather they'd encounter in SF is fog and may be light rain. But I still consider driving in SF pretty challenging, especially for an autonomous vehicle – narrow roads, people not following rules, pedestrians everywhere, cable cars in the middle of roads. Certainly more complex than Chandler, AZ.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#184

Post by pfarrell »

Lammy wrote: post #67
ra7 wrote: post #19

It's fantastic to see Waymo's progress. SF is a real nightmare to drive. If they can nail it there, that's 2/2 for busy, urban street driving (SF) and "boring" suburban driving (Chandler, AZ). They've been quietly very confident of their tech, but this is a real test. Tangentially, I've also noticed that Waymo has picked up pace ever since the recent leadership changes. They are publishing more blog posts, offering m…

> SF is a real nightmare to drive. 'cause they decided not to build most of the roads: https://www.cahighways.org/maps/1955trafficways.jpg

There's a second Oakland/SF bridge that doesn't exist. Well, I assume it would go to Oakland. It's marked with "???" and just says "Crossing". I presume that hypothetical bridge wouldn't have Yerba Buena Island to connect through, so would be really impressive and long (compared to the Golden Gate and Bay bridges).

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#185

Post by _rpd »

MattGaiser wrote: post #49
gfodor wrote: post #27

Kind of interesting to consider how this adjusts priors on these outcomes: - Self driving is not possible - Self driving is not possible anytime soon - Self driving is possible, but requires LIDAR - Self driving is possible, and can be done with normal cameras I've engaged with a lot of people who presume self-driving reduces onto AGI, therefore it will not be achieved anytime soon if ever. I wonder which of their as…

I assume that they just don't solve the really wacky edge cases which might require AGI. Many people assume that a self driving car must be 100% successful. To me it is sufficient to beat the top 20%/bottom 80% of drivers. So the car will crash if a seagull flies in front of the camera and there is a deer just beyond it. The human would probably crash too.

> To me it is sufficient to beat the top 20% of drivers.

It's interesting that you set the threshold there (I presume you meant 'beat the bottom 80% of drivers'). Rationally, we should be happy if their driving performance is above average. I fear that the public (and the courts and the insurers, etc) will require airline levels of per-mile safety and still be wary.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#186

Post by mostdataisnice »

dilippkumar wrote: post #24

> We can’t wait to hear from more San Franciscans as they experience the Waymo Driver themselves. Beginning later today, San Franciscans can sign up for the Trusted Tester program and help us shape the future of mobility in this city. Just download the Waymo One app to get involved. Anyone else got this to work? I only see a message that says "It looks like you're not in our service area..."

Delete the Waymo One app and reinstalling worked for me when I saw this bug.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#187

Post by ggreer »

aaroninsf wrote: post #98
gfodor wrote: post #27

Kind of interesting to consider how this adjusts priors on these outcomes: - Self driving is not possible - Self driving is not possible anytime soon - Self driving is possible, but requires LIDAR - Self driving is possible, and can be done with normal cameras I've engaged with a lot of people who presume self-driving reduces onto AGI, therefore it will not be achieved anytime soon if ever. I wonder which of their as…

I am in the AGI camp, but have wondered and still wonder, Why are efforts not focused primarily on interstate/highway travel, specifically, collaboration with DoT for mesh/distributed/coordinated long-term travel? I don't need a self-driving taxi. I would pay 20K for a car which participated in a federally-regulated framework which let me let go of the wheel when I get on a highway and let teh emergent cloud determin…

If you just want a car that drives itself on freeways, get a Tesla. Probably 80% of my car's 15,000 miles have been on autopilot. It automatically changes lanes to pass and automatically gets out of the passing lane afterwards. It takes offramps and interchanges. It automatically brakes for obstacles. It aborts lane changes if someone else gets in the way. It even works in rain and light snow.

Other car companies are a few years behind, but even something as simple as adaptive cruise control + lane centering is a huge help on freeways.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#188

Post by pbreit »

afavour wrote: post #125
pbreit wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the commercial value is achieved at Level 4. I'm curious what all the folks who claimed this was decades away are thinking?

> I'm curious what all the folks who claimed this was decades away are thinking? What is the "this" you're talking about here? I don't think there were many skeptics out there saying that it'll be decades before a taxi service will be able to launch a small, manned trial in a single municipality. Given that it's manned it still isn't quite at Level 4. The cynicism (and I'd consider myself a mild cynic I guess) was an…

This is the 2nd market and the other is unmanned.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#189

Post by zimprop »

ahnick wrote: post #157

Are there any thought pieces on how cities can adapt roads to accommodate SAE level 4 cars to facilitate rolling out a wider deployment more quickly? I'm thinking of something like cities could designate specific routes and lanes for L4 cars with designated drop-off locations and also only allow the service to be operational during clement weather conditions. It seems it would be beneficial to have fully automated ro…

> I'm thinking of something like cities could designate specific routes and lanes for L4 cars with designated drop-off locations

I always find it interesting that the further down the road of self-driving we go the more it seems like its a techy version of a known but morre low tech paradigm. This if taken without the self driving part just sounds like a bus lane with bus stops. In fact the driving of a car would be a less efficient mode of transportation considering that they usually only carry one person at a time.

I used to be very pro self-driving cars, but tthte moree I explored urbanism and transportation the more it became apparent that, self-driving is over optimization of an already bad paradigm that is car-centric development. You could cut out the middle man of needing a self driving car if you didn't live far away from the things you needed or if the public transit was efficient and reliable, that seems way easier than trying to figure out how to make cars drive themselves!

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#190

Post by actusual »

kspacewalk2 wrote: post #175
actusual wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitionally, the achievement of self driving vehicles does not require AGI. Doing one task very well requires a subset of AGI called Weak AI.

Stacking shelves in a warehouse is one task. Driving is not one task. There are too many corner cases for a modern-day AI system to perform as well as a median driver in, say, 95% of environments and settings in North America and Europe. I think the argument is that such a system might as well be AGI.

The idea that an AI must have the ability to learn how to do anything in order to learn how to drive seems like an extremely pessimistic and misguided goalpost. That is also not how iterative development works.
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