Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

blog.waymo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 691 posts

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#331

Post by r00fus »

kspacewalk2 wrote: post #178
hn_go_brrrrr wrote: post #85

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?

It's not exactly solved - your examples are close but not equivalent.

Hotels have many people who work there and cleaners who enter the room daily (no Hendrix hotel a la Altered Carbon yet). Rental cars are secured with your credit card so there's a massive disincentive to trash the vehicle.

Perhaps pervasive recording of the vehicle interior would suffice.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#332

Post by cookingrobot »

alex_young wrote: post #223
kspacewalk2 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It’s also been solved (or isn’t a problem) with car share apps like Car2Go or Zipcar. Those cars don’t get cleaned between rides, but system asks how clean the car is when you start a trip.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#333

Post by asdff »

jcranmer wrote: post #141
Lammy wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Cities that did decide to tear up urban areas for freeways aren't really any better. Consider places like Los Angeles, Dallas, or Houston. What makes SF difficult to drive in (from my perspective of only ever being a pedestrian there) is a) extremely hilly terrain, b) the general difficulty of a dense urban environment anywhere , and only a distant third is c) traffic, which is merely an added stressor to the complex…

Los Angeles also didn't build all its planned freeways, and today LA has fewer freeway miles per area and per capita than most american cities

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#334

Post by coding123 »

sandworm101 wrote: post #171
sschueller wrote: post #123

If Google can't do it with its massive resources and sensors don't ever expect a Tesla to perform better than this. It's time for Elon to pay the piper and refund all users who were hoodwinked into purchasing FSD. Especially people who's cars are nearing end of life.

>> who were hoodwinked into purchasing FSD. Fools and their money. Like most every expensive car, Teslas are luxury vehicles and fashion statements. People buy them because they are cool. That product was delivered. As for future features, nobody should believe Telsa's advertising any more than we do Microsoft's advertising about how the next version of Windows will solve all our computing problems. The hamburger nev…

That hamburger sure TASTES better than it does in the commercial.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#336

Post by Closi »

baxtr wrote: post #165
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #59

“All rides in the program will have an autonomous specialist on board for now” This tells me that we’re still a long way from full level 4 (and certainly level 5) autonomy in a busy city like San Francisco. The edge cases requiring immediate human attention are still too frequent for the human safety driver to be remote, as is the case in Phoenix. Also, just a reminder that Waymo in Phoenix is nowhere close to being…

> I still think that true level 5 (i.e. ability to drive autonomously everywhere with zero human oversight with a safety record equivalent to the median human driver) requires AGI. This might be true. Most of the time (95%) I am on complete human brain autopilot when I’m driving but those other 5% need my full focus and attention. I shut of the radio and tell other passengers to be quite (if I have the time for it).

This assumes that the challenges that are hard for a human are the same challenges that are hard for a self driving car - that might be the case, but self driving cars may have some theoretical advantages such as 360 cameras/lidar and an ability to follow satellite navigation without having to take its eyes off the road.

Put another way, the 5% of times I need to focus are usually the times where I am somewhere new and don’t necessarily understand the road layout - which something like Waymo may avoid through mapping for instance.

It might be true, but plenty of problems that have been thought to require true AGI have later been found to not require it after sufficient research - for example it’s not long ago that we thought good image recognition was entirely out of reach.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#337

Post by travisporter »

nradov wrote: post #92
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 hardly a nightmare to drive. Try Boston during a winter storm.

What if the car/service just doesn't work or is planned to be offline based on the weather? It would suck to be stranded because it started raining, but would it still be valuable to have an automated taxi service on good weather days in big cities? I am inclined to say yes, and also delighted that this is the question I'm asking, but I'm an optimist.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#338

Post by ElFitz »

sschueller wrote: post #123

If Google can't do it with its massive resources and sensors don't ever expect a Tesla to perform better than this. It's time for Elon to pay the piper and refund all users who were hoodwinked into purchasing FSD. Especially people who's cars are nearing end of life.

While I do get your point and have my own doubts, I fail to see how this is a fair argument:

> If Google can't do it with its massive resources

The companies behind the SLS had and have an enormous amount of resources. Yet, they have failed to even launch it.

Arianespace has a huge amount of resources and experience too. Yet, when asked, they said landing a rocket couldn’t be done. Then, back-pedalling, that it was pointless and would never make any economic sense.

Yet, SpaceX has developed three generations of rockets (Falcon 1, 9 and heavy), builds them, launches them, iterates on them, lands them, reuses them, and is now working on a fourth rocket (SuperHeavy).

They have also created 4 different rocket engines and are working on two others.

Honestly, where are Boeing and Arianespace?

Another example? Microsoft, their incredible wealth of resources and superior position falling flat on their face with smartphones.

Funnily enough, Google getting the greatest share of the global smartphone OS market, despite having had no real experience with operating systems, consumer hardware, or licensing operating systems before.

Kodak, which had some of the first patent on digital camera sensors, going pretty much extinct despite their massive resources and market position.

Xerox, failing to ever enter the personal computer market despite designing what everyone else would copy for the next 10 or 20 years.

Sure, the amounts of resources and experience seem to help, a lot, but it also certainly doesn’t seem to help reliably predict any outcome.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#339

Post by legolas2412 »

sandworm101 wrote: post #256
nullc wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the person you're responding to was referring to specifically to the add-on pre-order for full self driving, not the entire car.

As was I. Consumers had an opportunity to test drive the wanted feature and find it lacking, or read reviews of the same. Tesla hid nothing. If customers want to spend money on hope for the future then that is their right. They paid for hope and that is what they got.

> Tesla hid nothing.

But they lied a lot though, right? "Cross county automous summon in 2017" "Coast to coast autonomous drive in 2018" "Tesla driverless taxis in 2019" are a few examples. One may hold the view that Elon musk can make grandiose statements about solving AGI and nuclear fusion in 1 hour and make futuristic statements about that, but when does it go from projection to lying?

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#340

Post by goldbattle »

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 think from the original DARPA challenges most researchers knew that while self driving is possible or more correctly "a promising direction", but its application to the realworld and its robustness was a far larger barrier back then.

We have the advantage of retrospect when looking at these claims which now may seem more possible then before due to our better understanding of the difficulties and technologies to address them.

I think many people confuse their excitement for the promise of having self driving cars and the actual technical and political barriers that still need to be addressed to bring this to reality (ranging from robustness, infinite number of edge cases, perception, insurance, or public policies).

Post reply on HN