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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

#451

Post by PartiallyTyped »

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,…

This is arguing that because humans are stupid and biased, they will believe they are better drivers despite all the evidence to the contrary, and therefore, a solution needs to be close to perfect so that humans stop being fearful.

We have seen this before with autopilots in aircraft and ship, elevator operators and so on.

All it needs is time and adoption, not perfection, and as adoption increases, the roads get safer and safer, bringing us closer to the ideal, and as time increases, the closer we get to adoption.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#453

Post by rkagerer »

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 ... requires AGI

I agree today's AI tech is a long way off from completely supplanting a human driver. I'm surprised the average consumer I talk to about this seems to think we're on the cusp.

But as vehicles with neural nets become more prevalent I expect we'll see the problem morph as it gets tackled from other angles as well. e.g. Self-driving corridors with road infrastructure aimed to improve AI safety (whether that be additional technology, modified marking standards, etc).

Once upon a time street signs with speed limits, curve warnings, and such didn't exist. After faster cars supplanted horse-drawn carriages, highways became a thing. Eventually when the only reason humans drive is for recreation (e.g. off-roading) the problem from the car's perspective will look somewhat different than it did during the transition.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#454

Post by TaylorAlexander »

acchow wrote: post #446
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,…

I'm a bit surprised by how negative a view HN has towards human adoption of technology. What technology is perfect? What code is perfect and doesn't have bugs in it? And yet we adopt automated systems anyway. Yes, sometimes it is painful and an entire airline grounds all planes for half a day... But that doesn't stop the unending march towards efficiency and technological progress.

I think the point is that the general public is fickle and their trust in self driving cars is tentative. If the public loses confidence in the technology it will make it very difficult for them to roll it out. So this isn't really about what HN thinks, it's about what HN predicts the general public will think.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#455

Post by make3 »

dougmwne wrote: post #445
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,…

The world doesn't work in idealized ways. Yes, perhaps ideally self-driving cars would need to be nearly perfect in order to win wide public acceptance. At the same time there was an article on the front page today investigating literal gulag labor camps in the USA, and I doubt those are popular or going away any time soon. Once this is working technology that can turn a profit, it will depend on who stands to gain,…

Well a large difference is that consumer goods companies like Tesla are reliant on their public image for sales.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#456

Post by trhway »

chx wrote: post #248
paganel wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 “autono…

You don't even need to go that far, the other day I saw an ambulance going down on Burrard Street in Vancouver, BC without lights or sirens then I guess a call came in , it put on both and turned around. It's a six lane street where normal cars aren't allowed to just turn around. It was handled real well by everyone involved, mind you, it wasn't unsafe but I doubt a computer could've handled it as well as the drivers…

a very complex looking behavior sometimes comes from the very simple easy to implement principles, like say a bird flock behavior https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flocking_(behavior)#Rules

I don't believe people are using their full AGI when driving (and the full "AGI" may as well happen to be a set of basic pattern matching capabilities which we haven't discovered yet). After decades of driving the behavior is pretty automatic, and when presented with complex situation following a simple rule, like just brake, is frequently the best, or close to it, response.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#457

Post by erostrate »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #440
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, i…

Do you have a source for that?

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#458

Post by make3 »

not2b wrote: post #449
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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, i…

I don't think it's easy to beat the mean human driver and to demonstrate with solid data that you've done so. In 2019 in California, there were 1.06 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled. Any self-driving automobile technology that doesn't have at least 1 billion vehicle miles of data is in no position to claim that it is safer than human drivers and less likely to kill people. Self driving cars don't make th…

I'd be curious to see a source for your number

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#459

Post by TillE »

zimprop wrote: post #189
ahnick wrote: post #157

Are there any thought pieces on how cities can adapt roads to accommodate SAE level 4 cars to facilitate rolling out a wider deployment more quickly? I'm thinking of something like cities could designate specific routes and lanes for L4 cars with designated drop-off locations and also only allow the service to be operational during clement weather conditions. It seems it would be beneficial to have fully automated ro…

> I'm thinking of something like cities could designate specific routes and lanes for L4 cars with designated drop-off locations I always find it interesting that the further down the road of self-driving we go the more it seems like its a techy version of a known but morre low tech paradigm. This if taken without the self driving part just sounds like a bus lane with bus stops. In fact the driving of a car would be…

The optimistic vision of self-driving vehicles is as a publicly run transit system, where you have a fleet of automated vehicles of varying sizes able to dynamically, collectively route based on demand. A hyper efficient, fully electric bus system.

That would be a pretty exciting development even in, eg, European cities with decent public transit.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#460

Post by make3 »

dougmwne wrote: post #448
thereare5lights wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you think governments can't simply legislate away people's freedom to drive in the service of corporate profits or what's "best for them", you haven't read the news lately.

It's funny how Americans seem to have accepted the idea that corporations control their political life
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