601–610 of 691 posts
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Followed by (5) board members claiming legal bills for child custody disputes after caught leaving kids unsupervised in the custody of a 3000lb robot.
Arguably all modern vehicles are incredibly heavy robots. AVs are just supposed to be better robots.
“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…
Oh, but of course! I'm still surprised by people who think otherwise. The amount of corner cases that you have to solve while driving is pretty much limitless, you cannot "train" something on that, heck, some humans are not even fit for that. We are *FAR* from truly autonomous vehicles.
Safety is obviously important, but we already accept a decrease in safety over money and convenience (otherwise, we would have a 30kph speed limit everywhere).
But most people use their car for commuting, groceries, dropping the kids to sports, etc. They may make one or two road trips a year for vacations or business.
To facilitate this, a middle class family will often own two vehicles, pay tax, insurance and maintenance on said vehicles, pay for parking, etc.
If that suddenly wasn't necessary, that would be a massive saving for most people. You no longer need the capital investment in something that loses value.
Even better, you don't need to bring little Suzy to football, you can put her in a waymo instead (once she's old enough obviously).
And when you want to go drive to see grandma, you rent a car for the longer trip.
All of that depends on affordable self driving transport of course.
I feel like people here are missing the other factor that will drive adoption of self driving vehicles: economics. Safety is obviously important, but we already accept a decrease in safety over money and convenience (otherwise, we would have a 30kph speed limit everywhere). But most people use their car for commuting, groceries, dropping the kids to sports, etc. They may make one or two road trips a year for vacation…
I don't doubt there will be a shift in the overall economic picture, but it may not be as large for the car _user_ as we would hope. It will need to be better/cheaper in some dimension for it to get adopted, but the rent-seeking vultures are always circling, spoiling the utopia :-(
I feel like people here are missing the other factor that will drive adoption of self driving vehicles: economics. Safety is obviously important, but we already accept a decrease in safety over money and convenience (otherwise, we would have a 30kph speed limit everywhere). But most people use their car for commuting, groceries, dropping the kids to sports, etc. They may make one or two road trips a year for vacation…
Financial Times (Alphaville Blog): The questionable economics of autonomous taxi fleets: https://www.ft.com/content/aa05823d-e58f-33ee-a99c-d50f2fd0c...
... quotes this Harvard/MIT study: Autonomous Taxis and Public Health: High Cost or High Opportunity Cost?: https://psyarxiv.com/6e94h
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I can imagine that as the world grows more urbanised, and wealth concentrates in urban areas, that people will want to pay for the convenience and safety of a robot taxi.
It's fantastic to see Waymo's progress. SF is a real nightmare to drive. If they can nail it there, that's 2/2 for busy, urban street driving (SF) and "boring" suburban driving (Chandler, AZ). They've been quietly very confident of their tech, but this is a real test. Tangentially, I've also noticed that Waymo has picked up pace ever since the recent leadership changes. They are publishing more blog posts, offering m…
Even fairly simple autonomous tech will have better peripheral vision at near-to-mid range than one human can manage, so for all those bikers, crazy walkers, and chaotic 15mph cars you shouldn't hit, it stands a pretty good chance of being better. And when it's not, come to a stop and you're fine (barring some honks) - few are moving fast enough to hit you dangerously hard in those human-complex areas, and you don't need to stop instantly, just fast enough.
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Honestly, I'd put SF at dramatically easier than either residential or highway roads. Residential (and adjacent) has fast-moving cars ignoring signs with obstructed vision, and inattentive humans at relatively high speed (bikers used to low traffic and swerving, kids and animals running literally through bushes adjacent to roads, general lack of care around vision-blockers like fences due to perceived low risk, etc). Who's-at-fault doesn't matter - in car vs human, humans lose, and people rightfully get upset.
Highways also seem harder, if highly specialized: accurate decisions 100+ feet in advance are absolutely critical due to the speeds involved, computer vision at that range has fairly low detail compared to humans, and lidar is practically braille for "car". Radar has trouble distinguishing stopped cars from the road because neither are moving. Ultrasonics as an ultimate backup really only work up to around 10m (and that's about the distance to stop a car at 25MPH, which you'll regularly encounter in dense city traffic).
I'll also point out that more people have died due to Tesla's autopilot on highways than Waymo, Uber, Cruise, heck all self-driving companies I'm aware of at any size combined. They're riding all the terminology lines they can to get away with it, and they may very well have an order of magnitude or two more miles, but I believe the point still stands - highways are hard.
“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…
L4 with ability to phone home for remote assistance is good enough. By the time L5 arrives people will have been happily riding around in vehicles with no steering wheels for decades. L4 cars that phone home less and less every year. Eventually someone will notice that no L4 car has phoned home for a whole year and almost nobody will care. Just a footnote to an era that already feels taken for granted.
How many of those cars have caused a traffic jam at a given moment because they’ve encountered a traffic cone? How long does each issue take to resolve? It seems like, in addition to the technical hurdles, there are many more logistical hurdles before this can be rolled out at scale.
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Most of the commercial value is achieved at Level 4. I'm curious what all the folks who claimed this was decades away are thinking?
> I'm curious what all the folks who claimed this was decades away are thinking? What is the "this" you're talking about here? I don't think there were many skeptics out there saying that it'll be decades before a taxi service will be able to launch a small, manned trial in a single municipality. Given that it's manned it still isn't quite at Level 4. The cynicism (and I'd consider myself a mild cynic I guess) was an…
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I would be fine with beating average but as soon as this thing kills someone, I want there to be a significant difference in accident rate so it does not end up in regulatory hell.
I think from a statistical standpoint, beating average is great. But the big difference is that we have this odd and fundamental requirement for justice/punishment in our society that gets lost with self-driving cars. If a human driver kills someone / injures someone / damages property, people get satisfaction or resolution when the human is punished - insurance increases, license points, jail, etc. But when a self-d…
Pick something you pay extra attention to. Now imagine being informed you can't do that any more, you have to take what [this robot] does for you. Also remember all the terrible UI changes in software that have been done for a majority instead of your use-case.
Reluctance until it's substantially better seems reasonable to me. Somewhat unfortunate on a species level, but not for many individuals.
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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...
Believe it or not there are tons of two-way roads like that just 30 minutes from Silicon Valley that self-driving cars could practice on. Here's an example: https://goo.gl/maps/1CVb7Mpiwv1VL2sd7
Strangely I've never seen Waymo vehicles practicing on that. They're all over Mountain View, but I have never once seen them in the mid-peninsula hills.