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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

#431

Post by ggreer »

im3w1l wrote: post #374
ggreer wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It has killed people letting it self drive on the freeways. It was a while ago and maybe it has gotten better since, but I don't think taking your eyes of the road is advisable.

The latest update has eye tracking and warns you if you take your eyes off the road for more than a second or two.

Nobody is saying that self-driving cars are perfectly safe. Considering how many Teslas are on the road and how many miles are driven on autopilot, it would be surprising if there weren't any deaths. As long as it's safer than unaided human drivers (which it is), it's a net win.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#432

Post by Infinitesimus »

ctvo wrote: post #396
ElFitz wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

> 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). What does SpaceX have to do with Tesla? They're owned by a billionaire with his attention split, but otherwise are structured differently, are in different industries, and most likely have different cultures. The cu…

The parent's point is less about Elon and more about the fact fact all the resources in the world means nothing if you do not have the right team, culture and incentives to pull it off.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#433

Post by throwaways885 »

greesil wrote: post #412
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Middle steps: (1) Board members use product to travel to board meetings. (2) Board members use product as replacement for personal vehicles. (3) Board members demand pay increases. How do you know board members aren't already using Waymo product heavily? It still doesn't mean they can go straight from board members using Waymo without backup drivers to arbitrary customers using Waymo without backup drivers.

Possibly to drive between their various houses?

> Possibly to drive between their various houses?

I'm guessing this is the old joke about Eric Schmidt?

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#434

Post by thereare5lights »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #427
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?

pretty high if people won't use them because they don't trust them.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#435

Post by marwatk »

pitaj wrote: post #354
paxys wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people vastly overestimate the challenges of weather conditions for self driving. With modern car tech (traction monitoring, ability to redirect torque to a specific tire, ABS, radar) an automated car is going to have an easier time navigating snow/ice/rain than a human driver. The real challenges when navigating city streets are the human ones – delivery vehicles blocking lanes, municipal worker fixing a man…

How well do sensors and vision systems handle winter conditions like snow and lack of lane markers?

I suspect it will know where the lane markings are better than human drivers. They are mapped ahead of time and the car can likely localize itself via other landmarks to determine where they are without being able to see them.

The harder part is driving like a human and detecting that a path has been made in the middle of two lanes in heavy snow and not obeying the lines at all.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#436

Post by burnished »

rhacker wrote: post #391
burnished wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of driving well requires a diverse of array of abilities, right? You know what is litter and what is debris because you can make a guess about material properties based on some observations, like looking at something that moves without being touched and is translucent, you probably conclude that its a plastic bag of some sort and not a hazard. Similarly you probably use a wealth of experience to judge that a sma…

I think the engineer's answer to the child entering the roadway would be: The car SHOULD never drive at such a speed that if the child WERE to enter the visible zone that it could swerve+slow enough to not hit it, forget the toy. After that we can move the goal posts and say it's a FAST child on a bike - but then the reasonable solution to that is a human driver may have also hit the biking child. Then, of course, we…

My agreement with you falls largely under my last paragraph. I'm trying to illustrate a couple examples where driving as a human on roads built for human drivers requires perceptive powers and understanding that are beyond 'merely' driving safely, but also require a sort of holistic understanding of the world. If your goal is to make a better than human substitute driver then I don't think it is a completely unreasonable position to believe you'll need some level of AGI. Of course, as we figure out how to do concrete tasks and incorporate them into a system they'll stop being considered traits that would require general intelligence, but I suppose that is a different discussion.

And your example isn't moving goalposts, its just another legitimate example of a situation thats gotta get figured out. If you think that things like understanding that some kid learning to skateboard nearby could fall a surprisingly far distance and thus you should exercise caution, or being aware of factors that imply fast biking children (say, an adult and a child implies the potential for another fast moving child on the same trajectory), that this sort of situational and contextual awareness is critical for proper driving.. then yeah, that would be a reasonable sounding argument to support "I think self driving cars will require some level of progress in AGI".

That's all I'm long-windedly getting at.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#437

Post by lern_too_spel »

hn_go_brrrrr wrote: post #114
XorNot wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You wouldn't achieve any scaling benefits there. But also - trashing an autonomous car (aka a car full of cameras and sensors, which you charged to your credit card) seems like one of those self-limiting problems as the people who do it go bankrupt or to jail.

There's a neverending stream of way-too-drunk people who need a taxi (or at least there were, in the beforetimes). I don't see that happening. Also, I don't particularly want to ride in a car with a bunch of sensors and cameras monitoring my every move.

> Also, I don't particularly want to ride in a car with a bunch of sensors and cameras monitoring my every move.

Many (most?) taxis already have both dashcams and cabin cams. This has already been normalized.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#438

Post by thereare5lights »

minhazm wrote: post #218
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.

Google took a completely different approach and relies heavily on pre-mapped environments. Tesla has several orders of magnitude more vehicles, more data, and a more diverse set of data given their cars are in many different countries. It's not implausible to think that Tesla could arrive at FSD faster than Google.

> pre-mapped environments

this raises the question of: what happens when those environments change?

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#439

Post by judge2020 »

cyberlurker wrote: post #104
judge2020 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, yes https://blog.google/inside-google/company-announcements/1-bi...

That announcement was from 2019. Honest question, how can I see the progress made from this investment? Did they build any, some or all of these homes yet? It does sound great though, I hope they did.

Skimmed, this is probably the San Jose page on it: https://www.sanjoseca.gov/your-government/departments-office...

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#440

Post by MontyCarloHall »

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,…

>human drivers, who aren't actually all that great.

A large fraction of human drivers are actually all that great. The majority of accidents/deaths are caused by a minority of terrible drivers, or good drivers who found themselves in terrible but rare circumstances. The majority of drivers drive hundreds of thousands of miles without any accidents that were their fault, or even any accidents at all.

In other words, it's probably easy to beat the mean human driver, which is greatly dragged down by a minority of terrible drivers. It's probably very difficult to beat the median human driver, and near impossible to beat the top 20% of human drivers.

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