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Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

blog.waymo.com

221–230 of 691 posts

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#221
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…

> - Self driving is not possible anytime soon

Define “soon”. For me it means 50 years. That’s an infinitesimally small amount of time. If we can have level 5 autonomy in 50 years I will say that progress was rapid and we really excelled.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#222

I wonder if the cars will always have a human chaperone. Not as a safety driver, but to prevent riders from trashing the car.

If you can teach a car to drive, you can teach a car to detect when it's being thrashed.

Unless it comes with the ability to eject participants, how would that help?

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#223

I wonder if the cars will always have a human chaperone. Not as a safety driver, but to prevent riders from trashing the car.

This problem has been solved when it comes to hotel rooms, or rental cars. What would be fundamentally different when it comes to autonomous cars?

If a human has to clean the car between rides that seems like a pretty big problem

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#224
post #68

I'll never forget I almost got murdered terminator style by a Cruise while riding my bicycle around SF... hopefully they figured that out.

Can you elaborate more on how? HN is getting to reddit's status where people make comments and everyone just upvotes because it sounds good to them.

People have been saying “HN is turning into Reddit” for over ten years. There’s a bit of an Easter egg at the bottom of the HN guidelines about it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#225

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.

Driving is a set of tasks, but not AGI. AGI would be if it could drive and then also learn to write poetry without any code update.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>“All rides in the program will have an autonomous specialist on board for now” This tells me that we’re still a long way Did you expect something different? I can't really see a boardroom writing a roadmap that goes straight from test rides (no passengers) with a backup driver onboard to actual rides with passengers - no backup driver onboard with no in-between steps.

For the computer it doesn't make much difference if there's a passanger or if there isn't.

For a company having paying customers does matter a lot.

Having customers paying for the R&D will help make it sustainable.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>“All rides in the program will have an autonomous specialist on board for now” This tells me that we’re still a long way Did you expect something different? I can't really see a boardroom writing a roadmap that goes straight from test rides (no passengers) with a backup driver onboard to actual rides with passengers - no backup driver onboard with no in-between steps.

I wonder where "a country road with no lanes which barely fits 1.5 car in winter in the Czech republic" is on your scale... Something like this, just imagine the snowdrifts around it https://www.google.com/maps/@49.080269,16.4569252,3a,75y,307...

Or an ambulance going on the opposite direction (because that’s the only available choice) on a boulevard in a busy capital city like Bucharest. Saw that a couple of hours ago, the ambulance met a taxi which was going the right way but of course that the taxi had to stop and find a way for the ambulance to pass (by partly going on the sidewalk). I said to myself that unless we get to AGI there’s no way for an “autonomous” car to handle that situation correctly.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#228
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Okay... let me know when their market is the contiguous United States.

That's the point of this comment chain. They don't have to make it work everywhere in the contiguous United States to have a useful product. The (robo)taxi market is concentrated in big metro areas and that's what their focus is.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>“All rides in the program will have an autonomous specialist on board for now” This tells me that we’re still a long way Did you expect something different? I can't really see a boardroom writing a roadmap that goes straight from test rides (no passengers) with a backup driver onboard to actual rides with passengers - no backup driver onboard with no in-between steps.

I wonder where "a country road with no lanes which barely fits 1.5 car in winter in the Czech republic" is on your scale... Something like this, just imagine the snowdrifts around it https://www.google.com/maps/@49.080269,16.4569252,3a,75y,307...

From what I've seen of Tesla's solution at least - even busy city centers and complex parking lots are very difficulty for present day autonomous driving technologies. The understanding level necessary just isn't there.

These things are excellent - undeniably better than humans at the boring stuff, highway driving, even major roads. They can rightfully claim massive mileage with high safety levels in those circumstances... but throw them into nastier conditions where you have to understand what objects actually are and things quickly seem to fall apart.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#230
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Okay... let me know when their market is the contiguous United States.

Surely this is just moving the goal posts. If they can launch in Chandler and in San Francisco then a huge amount of the contiguous United States is on the table.
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