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Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

blog.waymo.com

341–350 of 691 posts

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#341
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 for taxis is a very different problem than for personal vehicles. For the latter you can always rely on the human driver to handle the last 1% or 0.1% edge cases and still provide a ton of value. Taxis don't have that option, so it really is perfect level 5 automation or bust. "Good enough" doesn't cut it.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#342
post #89

Waymo is currently the only SAE Level 4[0] self-driving car in use, right? The wheel must not be used. Even though it is limited to two cities. Their technology seems an order of magnitude above the rest, although factoring in its cost could make it look worse. (Can it turn a profit, when including the development costs?) Tesla FSD is at best SAE level 3 (can need human fallback), and at worst level 2 (needs constant…

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 would think most commercial value comes when you eliminate the human labor from driving, which is the dominant cost of transporting when there is less than ~10 passengers. What makes you think Level 4 is the most economically impactful threshold?

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.

But then the hamburgers used to make food ads are made from plastic and most definitely fake as food goes soggy and off when subjected to lamps used in studio's.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#344
post #278
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

Supposedly more road construction doesn’t alleviate traffic, in only induces more demand (which is moderated by high traffic levels) Source (great read if your interested in the subject): https://www.amazon.com/Traffic-Drive-What-Says-About/dp/0307...

"Induced demand" applies to literally every public resource from subways to parks. If you build it and it's not totally out of place they will come.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#345

You cannot predict the future with patterns from the past, regardless of how many patterns you crunch - the world is always changing. ML can just never solve FSD - conceptual understanding and causality is needed to achieve human level driving capability. We instantly classify things conceptually from our perception, instantly understand how those things may behave, and then learn the specifics of what that thing is…

I think you uave some major misconceptions about how this stuff works. Most vision models output the current state of the world, to be integrated with other sensor data like lidar that is then used for planning. There are models that try to guess things like the crossing intent of pedestrians, but even those models just output a confidence of them crossing. I work for a different self driving company, but this high level stuff is pretty much the same everywhere.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#346
post #281
post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 circumstan…

Would you describe Tesla's tendency to crash full speed into stopped emergency vehicles during highway driving as "excellent"? https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/16/business/tesla-autopilot-fede...

While controversial, we tolerate a great deal of casualties caused by human drivers without trying to illegalise those.

While we can (and should) hold autonomous vehicle developers to a much, much higher standard than we hold human drivers, it is precisely because of excellence.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#347

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.

FSD v2 hw with DOJO - we definitely got it right this time.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#348
post #304
post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you describe Tesla's tendency to crash full speed into stopped emergency vehicles during highway driving as "excellent"? https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/16/business/tesla-autopilot-fede...

I would say it's better then the Human's tendency to drive full speed into anything while impaired by a drug. Especially since the bug was fixed in Tesla's case but the bug in Human's case is probably un-fixable.

Drugs (or alcohol)? There are so many more failure modes that drugs are the least of my concerns. Especially of unspecified type. I'm not the least bit worried about drivers hopped up on tylenol. Humans get distracted while driving, by texting, or simply boredom and start daydreaming. Don't forget about driving while tired. Or emotionally disturbed (divorce or a death; road rage). Human vision systems are also pretty frail and have bad failure modes, eg the sun is close to the horizon and the driver is headed towards the sun.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#349
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…

You forgot a fifth one: Self driving is possible but follows the 80/20 rule that states that the last 20% of work requires 80% of the effort. We probably haven't even started on that 20%

That's the "not possible anytime soon" answer, which is probably the most common choice.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#350
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.

I'd put 50 years in the "not anytime soon" camp. 50 years is an eternity nowadays with regards to tech.
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