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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

#501

Post by rurp »

goldbattle wrote: post #340
gfodor wrote: 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…

I think from the original DARPA challenges most researchers knew that while self driving is possible or more correctly "a promising direction", but its application to the realworld and its robustness was a far larger barrier back then. We have the advantage of retrospect when looking at these claims which now may seem more possible then before due to our better understanding of the difficulties and technologies to ad…

> I think many people confuse their excitement for the promise of having self driving cars and the actual technical and political barriers that still need to be addressed to bring this to reality

I think most of the confusion is due to deceptive marketing. Sales people like Elon Musk have been saying that the big dream of true self driving is just around the corner for years now, even though they were nowhere close.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#502

Post by chrisseaton »

yupper32 wrote: post #497
chrisseaton wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Niche in that they only sell a hundred thousand or so a year, yes. If Waymo are planning to seriously scale up they'll be using every Jaguar they're making!

Why would they need all Jaguars to scale up?

Why would you want to have a hodge-podge of random vehicle makes to service?

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#503

Post by Larrikin »

whimsicalism wrote: post #378
arsome wrote: 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…

It's unclear to me why Tesla's solution is so discussed. They are definitely not on the same playing field as Waymo or even Cruise.

There's a lot of people on here who have invested in Tesla

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#504

Post by yupper32 »

eachro wrote: post #152
pm90 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It says they will have a human onboard at all times.

I remember this one bit from a video on self driving cars back a few years ago where someone basically said that self driving cars would not work well in cities because people will always want to mess with the cars just because they can. Consider how in the early 2000s when people would mess around with AIM's smarterchild chat bot and gave it outlandish scenarios just to see how it would react. I have to imagine you…

Is everyone forgetting that they have a ton of cameras, sensors, lidar, etc on their cars?

Messing with the cars means they have a full 3D video of you doing it.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#505

Post by hellbannedguy »

jjoonathan wrote: post #231
VelkaMorava wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder where "a country road with no lanes which barely fits 1.5 car in winter in the Czech republic" is on your scale... Something like this, just imagine the snowdrifts around it https://www.google.com/maps/@49.080269,16.4569252,3a,75y,307...

I'd still buy a self-driving car that refuses to drive on that road.

In the back seat of the Waymo there's a "Pull Over" emergency lever.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#506

Post by rurp »

im3w1l wrote: post #367
Mangalor wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there's a person at an intersection directing traffic, it will be very hard to have the car itself communicate with them as easily as a human can. Edge cases like that is where AGI would be needed it seems.

People directing traffic use only a handful of signals.

I would believe that people directing traffic usually use only a handful of signals, but it's certainly not a universal truth. This is one more case of the 80/20 problem that self driving tech keeps running into.

Sure it's probably feasible for cars to handle hand signals in the happy path, but anything outside of that will be disastrous. How will the car understand and communicate with a person who doesn't use the standard signals, aside from having some level of intelligence?

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#507

Post by CarelessExpert »

paxys wrote: post #308
nradov wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SF is hardly a nightmare to drive. Try Boston during a winter storm.

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…

> I think people vastly overestimate the challenges of weather conditions for self driving.

This remark makes me wonder if you've ever lived in an area that actually experiences winter.

Around here, dead of winter, there are no lines visible on the streets. Heck, after a good snow storm the lanes are basically a function of group consensus.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#508

Post by naveen99 »

sandworm101 wrote: post #235
hammock wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>“All rides in the program will have an autonomous specialist on board for now” This tells me that we’re still a long way Did you expect something different? I can't really see a boardroom writing a roadmap that goes straight from test rides (no passengers) with a backup driver onboard to actual rides with passengers - no backup driver onboard with no in-between steps.

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. Back in 1999 the Chinese government announced that airline execs would be airborne at the changeover as reassurance that aircraft were safe from Y2K. Like or hate them, the incentive logic was sound. https://www.wired.com/1999/01/y2k-in-ch…

Maybe open up waymo rides to people with alphabet shares ? Then the owners and customers are the same group. Unfortunately multiple spouses aren’t really allowed in America, or you could limit ridership to spouses.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#509

Post by [deleted] »

make3 wrote: post #478
mikestew wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

the writer has the responsibility give a source, not the reader

[deleted]

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#510

Post by MichaelGroves »

not2b wrote: post #498
MichaelGroves wrote: post #470

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. 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.

We were talking about self-driving cars. The mean is given by the number I posted, about 1 death per 100 million miles traveled. That number includes drunk drivers, distracted drivers trying to text, everything.

The point is that "1 death per 100 million miles traveled" is the mean average, but most drivers do better than the mean. Mean, median, and mode are not the same and the mean crash rate is not relevant to most drivers.
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