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

421–430 of 691 posts

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#421

Post by ketzo »

Many comments in this thread are variations on a theme of "self-driving cars don't need to be perfect, they just need to be better than human drivers, who aren't actually all that great." I think it would be nice if this were true, and I suppose it is from an actuarial perspective, but it's also an extremely flawed point.

From a public confidence perspective, it doesn't matter if a self-driving car crashes one tenth, even one one-hundredth as often as human drivers.

If you see a self-driving car cause an accident, particularly a lethal one, in a situation that almost any human driver would have avoided, you've totally destroyed any and all confidence in this car's driving ability, because "I would never, ever have crashed there."

As we've seen, there are lots of scenarios like this. The Tesla crash from last year, where the car simply didn't see a white truck against a light background. Or imagine an adversarial image attack, where some tiny insignificant detail is placed onto a stop sign or a "do-not-enter" that turns it into nothing from the perspective of the AI driver.

These kinds of scenarios obliterate public confidence in self-driving cars, because intuitively, you immediately realize that you're "a much better driver" than this car! Even if that's untrue 99/100 times, it only takes one visceral example to drive this kind of wedge.

Self-driving cars don't just have to be better than human drivers. They have to be as close to perfect as is possible, because that's what people will expect.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#422

Post by p1mrx »

r00fus wrote: post #331
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?

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.

I think they should record passengers boarding and unboarding, with motorized camera shutters that close while in transit for privacy.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#423

Post by bitsoda »

I'm happy for their efforts and hope my kids never have to drive unless they want to, but I still think we're 20+ years out from level 4+ autonomy. Maybe when Waymo tests in a city that has weather -- like anywhere in the Northeast -- I'll be more enthusiastic.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#424

Post by morpheos137 »

oppositelock wrote: post #272
morpheos137 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most important one you missed: Given sufficient qualitative and quantitative investment self driving may be technologically feasible at some point in the future but not price competitive with human driving. Self driving proponents seem to assume the tech is free. Just keeping sub meter scale 3d street maps up to date has a massive cost.

I make these kinds of maps for a living. Yes, it's expensive, however, as we refine algorithms, and the processing systems, it gets cheaper, especially amortized over more cars, where the per-car cost becomes affordable. ML doesn't work well enough for offline maps generation either, and all the high quality maps require human editors for final touch. All this work is currently done because realtime perception doesn'…

So you think self driving cars will be able to profitably offer a 10 mile ride for $20 in suburbia of second tier cities like Springfield MA? If your opinion is that cab drivers make much more than $10 an hour today then I suggest you look at things outside the bay area.

Self driving does not scale at all now. Because as you said these special maps need to a lot of human labor to make and the cars need a lot of sensors on top of the auto patform. Labor is not even the main cost driver in person transportation.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#425

Post by noneeeed »

Ftuuky wrote: post #122
noneeeed wrote: post #79

As someone who lives in Bath, an old european city with roads (and other drivers) that can give experienced human drivers a nervous breakdown I'm rather more interested in how they do in SF than their current deployment in Phoenix. From what I've heard repeatedly, SF sounds much more irregular and messy than Phoenix, so it should be something of a stepping stone to making them usable more widely if they can crack it.…

Same with Coimbra, Portugal. Would love to see a Waymo car trying to navigate those old intricate roads.

Just checked it out on google. What a beautiful place.

My scepticism around SD cars in places like that and Bath is not even the roads themselves, but the traffic.

The are quite a lot of roads around me that are quite narrow and frequently drop to single lanes. I feel like any self-drive system will need to develop quite an advanced theory of mind to perform the weird silent negotiation that happens when I'm driving a long, with three cars behind me, and come face-to-face with a bus coming the other way, and somehow we have to either backup en-masse, or perform the squeeze dance as we edge past each other with inches to spair.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#426

Post by dougmwne »

Given the number of people here saying self-driving cars require AGI (a.k.a. sand that thinks a.k.a. fairy magic), I would say we have definitely hit the bottom of the trough of disillusionment. But since Waymo is launching in a second city, this is perhaps the very start of the slope of enlightenment.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#427

Post by sillysaurusx »

ketzo wrote: post #421

Many comments in this thread are variations on a theme of "self-driving cars don't need to be perfect, they just need to be better than human drivers, who aren't actually all that great." I think it would be nice if this were true, and I suppose it is from an actuarial perspective, but it's also an extremely flawed point. From a public confidence perspective, it doesn't matter if a self-driving car crashes one tenth,…

Here's a particularly spicy viewpoint: It doesn't matter if you obliterate public confidence in self-driving cars, or if there are lethal accidents that would've been avoided.

As t approaches infinity, what are the chances that self-driving cars won't take over the world?

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#429

Post by dylan604 »

dougmwne wrote: post #426

Given the number of people here saying self-driving cars require AGI (a.k.a. sand that thinks a.k.a. fairy magic), I would say we have definitely hit the bottom of the trough of disillusionment. But since Waymo is launching in a second city, this is perhaps the very start of the slope of enlightenment.

>start of the slope of enlightenment

that would be more like staircase of enlightenment. or up the down escalator to enlightenment

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#430

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

blamazon wrote: post #224
mas-ev wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't know. I've been here for nearly a decade (I switch accounts every once in a while), and in the last six months or so, it sure feels like somethings different. Specifically, I'm noticing more joke replies that aren't downvoted. Maybe I'm just getting old.
Post reply on HN