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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

#461

Post by MontyCarloHall »

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 don't think it's easy to beat the mean human driver and to demonstrate with solid data that you've done so.

Agreed. I should have written "relatively easy."

> 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.

The circumstances under which those miles are driven (e.g. road type, location, weather, time of day, etc.) also have to be consistent with circumstances under which humans are driving. 10 billion autonomous vehicle miles driven only on highways in broad daylight is a worthless point of comparison, whereas 500 million miles driven across a variety of conditions representative of the full human driving population is worth a lot more.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#462

Post by ElFitz »

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…

You will notice that I expand my point way beyond SpaceX, and even start by stating

> While I do get your point and have my own doubts […]

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#463

Post by MichaelGroves »

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…

Exactly right. Furthermore, most risky behavior is a choice. Crashes aren't random "acts of god" that strike anybody with equal likelihood. If you choose not to drive drunk, drive in bad weather, or for many hours without rest, then you can greatly improve your odds and almost certainly reduce your risk below the average. In these discussions I often see far too much fatalism; "Everybody thinks they're above average but half of you aren't". ignores both the fact that crashes aren't distributed like that, and the fact that the riskiest behavior is a choice. The mean number of miles driven drunk is greater than zero, but the number of miles I drive drunk is zero.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#464

Post by ElFitz »

diegocg wrote: post #356
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…

The problem with your comparison is that the company that is "the spacex of FSD" is Waymo. And even them can not get FSD right.

Who would be Boeing then?

Because almost no company has much more serious experience with self-driving cars, let alone FSD.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#465

Post by pvarangot »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #284
pvarangot wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This cars don't even work with a light drizzle.

That’s a big point if true. What’s the source for that info?

Not sure if I can tell so I'll have to pass on answering that. You can take a look at this though: https://youtu.be/0oyjYH6v0b8?t=434

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#466

Post by fooker »

jeffbee wrote: post #60
bluGill wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may not scale to rural areas though. There are some roads were you don't need to look at the road in front of your: it is there and nothing else is. Instead you need to watch the ditches in a wide area around because that is where wildlife will jump out of in front of you.

The superiority of a blended computer vision system for this task, over a human performance, is almost impossible to overstate. The computer is not going to overlook even one deer.

>The computer is not going to overlook even one deer.

Oh it will. Animals have evolved amazing camouflage. Computer Vision will easily miss a deer hidden in a dark treeline. And radar/lidar even more so because the forest is going to have a pretty irregular geometry.

Even identifying a bicycle in a regular city street is something we have not convincingly solved yet. Animals on the side of a forest road is pretty far away.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#467

Post by mortehu »

make3 wrote: post #458
not2b wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not really answering your question, but CDC says 28% of all traffic-related deaths in 2016 involved alcohol. Excluding these would immediately improve the mean performance.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#468

Post by joecool1029 »

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…

> but they make different kinds of mistakes.

This is key, there's expectation and some wiggle room that as a human driver, humans will fuck up predictably and experienced drivers know how to avoid getting into incidents when this happens (usually).

Self-driving cars are weird to drive around. They will absolutely stop in situations where no human would think to stop. I think about this as a motorcycle rider, what if I'm committed to cornering on a corner I can't see around and the software decides on a self-driving car that it should just stop in the middle of the road after the apex? A human driver could do this too but many will know that this is a dangerous place to stop and try to put the car on the shoulder or minimize the amount of time it's stuck there.

I don't know if this is something we need to tolerate a temporary increased incident rate on as people get used to them being on the road, or if we need to make the software drive more like humans (with the assumption that means potentially making the behavior act sloppier than it can handle so that increased software reaction rate doesn't cause humans with slow reaction rate to slam into them)

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#469

Post by mikestew »

make3 wrote: post #458
not2b wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I see why LMGTFY had its day in the sun: you can literally paste the first sentence of parent’s post into DDG, and the first link answers your question. Hell, the preview answers your question, you don’t even need to click it.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#470

Post by MichaelGroves »

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 don't think it's easy to beat the mean human driver and to demonstrate with solid data that you've done so.

It is. The mean is dragged down by alcoholics who drive drunk every single day. If you never drive drunk, that gives you a significant advantage.

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