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Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

blog.waymo.com

661–670 of 691 posts

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As awful of a failure as that is, and as fun as it is to mock Tesla for it, that claim was that they're aware of edge cases and working on fixing them, not that they're already fixed. So your criticism doesn't really make sense.

A system dealing with 'edge cases' by special casing them is not going to work for driving, driving is a continuous string of edge cases, and if you approach the problem that way you fix one problem but create the next.

I don't think anybody said anything about special casing them.

I dislike saying anything in defense of tesla's self-driving research, but let's be accurate.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#662
post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in north-central Idaho. 10 minutes from 2 state-universities, but in an otherwise relatively rural part of the county with a 1/4 mile long, somewhat steep driveway. Every year, I'm amazed at how quickly our personal "veneer of civilization" collapses in the snow. The prior owners of our home would just keep their kids home from school, and work from home an average of "about a week every winter." We're a littl…

Why do you live in a place where you have to shovel snow from 5am on a week day? I mean I appreciate building character but at some point you're just deciding to live life on hard mode.

A large band of the United States reliably gets heavy overnight snows. In my case we're talking an hour west of a major metro--Boston. These days, the inevitable travel snafus notwithstanding, I just stay home. But when I had to go into an office barring a state of emergency digging out in early am was a regular occurrence.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#663

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a pedestrian slips in deep snow while crossing a street and is no longer visible because the snow obstructs them, does the car see a clear path and kill someone or not?

Does a human see a clear path and kill someone or not?

So I’ve encountered this in real life.

The human driver detects the pedestrian, laughs at the fall, then get worried and wait for them to get up, because a human knows someone fell and didn’t magically disappear.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Northern Canada here. We have all been down that road. I had a rental once that wouldn't let me backup as the sensor was frozen over. I doubt AI will ever handle winter situations without help.

> I doubt AI will ever handle winter situations without help. Sure it will, at least eventually. However, I suspect the humans at the time won’t like the answer: that it’s not always safe to drive in these conditions, and then the car refusing to drive autonomously, even if it is technically capable of navigating the route. It may deem the risk of getting stuck, etc. to be too high. Or you may need to accept a report…

Lol. Good luck selling that in the north, the mountains, farm country or anywhere else more than 10 miles from a starbucks. Sometimes lives depend on being able to move and there isnt time to reprogram robot to understand the risk dynamic. Malfunctioning sensors or broken highbeam circuits (tesla) are no excuse for a car to remain stuck in a snowbank.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you never fail, you aren't moving fast enough. A million people are killed globally each year by motor vehicles. Staggering amounts of pain and injuries. Massive amounts of property damage. Tesla's cars are not supposed to be left to drive themselves. The chance to save so much carnage seems worth letting some people driving Tesla's, that fail to pay attention to the road, suffer the consequences of poor decisions…

> If you never fail, you aren't moving fast enough. Start-up religion doesn't really work when there are lives on the line. That's fine for your social media platform du jour but please don't bring that attitude to anything that has 'mission critical' in the description. That includes medicine, finance, machine control, traffic automation, utilities and so on.

But what about that million people who die every year now? Are the few thousand people who will die because of AI mishaps worth more than the million who die due to human mishaps?

Not to say that we shouldn't be cautious here, but over-caution kills people too

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#666
post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This problem has been solved when it comes to hotel rooms, or rental cars. What would be fundamentally different when it comes to autonomous cars?

It's not exactly solved - your examples are close but not equivalent. Hotels have many people who work there and cleaners who enter the room daily (no Hendrix hotel a la Altered Carbon yet). Rental cars are secured with your credit card so there's a massive disincentive to trash the vehicle. Perhaps pervasive recording of the vehicle interior would suffice.

>Rental cars are secured with your credit card so there's a massive disincentive to trash the vehicle.

Yeah, I was thinking along those lines. Trash the vehicle, get a cleaning fee charged to your card.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#667

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla does not want HD maps. They want to be able to place the car somewhere it's never seen and have it drive itself competently. That's by definition more robust than requiring HD maps to navigate anywhere.

What you're referring to is overall coverage not robustness. In fact, placing your car somewhere you've never been before and operate it seems less robust than one that already has HD maps.

ro·bust | rōˈbəst, ˈrōˌbəst | adjective (robuster, robustest) • (of a process, system, organization, etc.) able to withstand or overcome adverse conditions: California's robust property market.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#668
post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in north-central Idaho. 10 minutes from 2 state-universities, but in an otherwise relatively rural part of the county with a 1/4 mile long, somewhat steep driveway. Every year, I'm amazed at how quickly our personal "veneer of civilization" collapses in the snow. The prior owners of our home would just keep their kids home from school, and work from home an average of "about a week every winter." We're a littl…

Why do you live in a place where you have to shovel snow from 5am on a week day? I mean I appreciate building character but at some point you're just deciding to live life on hard mode.

First, they are "plowing and blowing", not shoveling (or not shoveling much) - if you have a significant amount of snow, shoveling is just impractical as well as back-breaking. Second, even if you don't get snow overnight, you get the drifting they mention, which is where winds blow snow onto the nice clean driveway you had cleared previously. Drifting can be quite significant with lots of snow and big open areas!

Lastly, not the OP, but winter is my favorite season for the most part, and I love being around lots of snow!

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguably all modern vehicles are incredibly heavy robots. AVs are just supposed to be better robots.

No more so than a bicycle is a 20lb robot or an airplane is a 20,000lb robot. Clearly a self-driving vehicle is a different paradigm.

"The average car has 30 to 50 different computers, and high-end cars have as many as 100, and they're accompanied by 60 to 100 different electronic sensors." [1]

The median modern bicycle has 0 computers and sensors.

[1] https://www.ceinetwork.com/cei-blog/auto-computers-means-com...

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#670
post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not an engineer's thing at all. The classifications are very specific differences in the overall system. From an engineer's point of view they are just creating a fully autonomous car. L4 -> L5 is more about how many scenarios is that fully autonomous car been tested through. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-driving_car#Classificatio...

> L4 -> L5 is more about how many scenarios is that fully autonomous car been tested through. Not really. L5 is impossible, period. What I think will happen is L4 with 99.999% cases covered and have it come to a safe stop for the 0.0001%, assuming there was a way to safely stop. L5 which means 100.000% covered, will not happen, but the PR people will continue to use the term.

I've always thought of L5 as a car that can operate via its sensors + onboard computing alone, at least as well as a median human driver.

No communicating with a server to download maps, no perfect performance, just a car that knows the state's traffic laws driving a brand new road in any reasonable weather, and getting into less crashes than a human would.

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