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Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

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Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#621

Post by mwattsun »

kgin wrote: post #452
mwattsun wrote: post #203

> Today we are opening up our driverless cars in San Francisco to the public I doubt that means what they hope we think it means. So your employees have been taking your carefully designed ride and now you've let a couple of non-employees ride the course. If it means more than that, especially allowing random rides with random passengers, I'd be very surprised.

Get ready to be surprised. The routes are created by the car on the fly. There is no preset course. The service area is bounded by the current permit, but within those bounds, the car can go anywhere.

I want to be surprised, but after all the hype by FSD boosters, I'm prepared to be disappointed.

I'm skeptical because San Francisco is probably the worst city in North America to do this. I could believe this in San Jose with it's wide flat boulevards and I'm suspicious it's not San Jose first. San Francisco is unique in that the city planners decided to ignore that they had mountains in the middle of their city and laid a grid plan over the mountains. Most other cities lay roads that gently circle around and up a mountain. Not San Francisco. You go a straight line up and then straight down at an extreme angle.

The only way this can work is if they've cherry picked the safest streets and geofenced the cars to those routes. That's not what most people imagine about robo taxis. Not glorified light rail without the rails.

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#622

Post by harpersealtako »

rfrey wrote: post #439
BurningFrog wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've given it some thought, and I think the SDC manufacturer must be liable for any accidents the SDC causes. Who else is there? The passengers certainly can't be responsible for any programming or manufacturing errors. There are corner cases and exceptions, but that has to be the rule. Which should mean that as and SDC owner, you don't have to pay car insurance.

>the SDC manufacturer must be liable for any accidents the SDC causes. There's the rub... How do you seperate those from the rest?

If there is disagreement between the relevant parties, through the court system (or through insurance agreements).

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#624

Post by jfoster »

top_sigrid wrote: post #582
jfoster wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think along the lines of: 1. What is necessary vs sufficient. 2. Processing power. 3. Power consumption. 4. Hardware cost. (even if may have decreased now, the cost of initiating the programme years ago) 5. Training cost / volume of data. The approach that Tesla is using balances all these things. I can't fully explain why it's so controversial, but I suspect this topic attracts folks from autonomous startups who are…

As long as Teslas regularly crash into stationary objects because they have no depth sensing system and rely only on camera images, I wouldn't call the perception part of the problem solved.

https://docs.opencv.org/4.x/dd/d53/tutorial_py_depthmap.html

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#625

Post by rightbyte »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #619
rightbyte wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunately, I expect that automation will be held to a higher standard than human drivers, rather than the same standard. The average driver in a crash is worse than the average driver. Why would we compare FSD with reckless drunks, etc.

I'm expecting that we should compare self-driving vehicles to the average driver, not "the average driver in a crash".

Ye.

Also, I should have written "the average driver in a crash is worse than the median driver".

"* In 2016, 10,497 people died in alcohol-impaired driving crashes, accounting for 28% of all traffic-related deaths in the United States.

* Drugs other than alcohol (legal and illegal) are involved in about 16% of motor vehicle crashes." https://www.cdc.gov/transportationsafety/impaired_driving/im...

If we include recklessness, FSD maybe need better than half the fatality rate of human drivers, to be on par with the median driver.

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#626

Post by Retric »

jowday wrote: post #618
Retric wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> edge cases are way more common It’s not a question of parsing a known sign, even extremely complex rules can be encoded. Further that process can take place from a photo of the sign uploaded by the car to then be encoded by the rules. The general case is stopping and having a remote driver slowly tell the car what to do. An unknown sign in a place without cellphone reception is about the only case where it really n…

> Further that process can take place from a photo of the sign uploaded by the car to then be encoded by the rules. The general case is stopping and having a remote driver slowly tell the car what to do. So you’re now agreeing that you need some level of remote support to handle edge cases like this? >An unknown sign in a place without cellphone reception is about the only case where it really need to just figure it…

> So you’re now agreeing that you need some level of remote support to handle edge cases like this?

As a bootstrap step yes, after that no just regular updates for new traffic rules and such. You can’t make a purely offline self driving system that doesn’t get updated for 30 years because laws change. But presumably a non geofenced self driving car is going to be tested by driving on every road either directly or via someone’s mapping project.

> What if it misinterprets a one way sign at night when there’s no other signal that it’s turning on to a one way lane and it suddenly finds itself traveling opposite the direction of traffic for a long period before encountering another car? You have to consider all of these edge cases when talking about a generalized solution.

You mean in some location without maps? There are a finite number of roads in the world and they don’t change that quickly. If you’re worried that the AI is going to say end up on an ice road that melts, sure that’s the kind of thing that happens once. But the threshold isn’t perfection it’s ~30,000 dead people per year in the US. Beat that and you win.

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#627

Post by hgomersall »

Jeff_Brown wrote: post #615
hgomersall wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still think the cars should anticipate risks and behave accordingly. Out and out fraud aside, they should basically never injure anyone.

There's always some kind of risk. The bridge you're on could fall down. Somewhere, someone will have to judge whether a bad outcome was a failure.

Well as a pedestrian or cyclist, I'd like to make that risk judgment, not the vendor of the car that the person passing my bought from.

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#628

Post by redytedy »

mwattsun wrote: post #621
kgin wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get ready to be surprised. The routes are created by the car on the fly. There is no preset course. The service area is bounded by the current permit, but within those bounds, the car can go anywhere.

I want to be surprised, but after all the hype by FSD boosters, I'm prepared to be disappointed. I'm skeptical because San Francisco is probably the worst city in North America to do this. I could believe this in San Jose with it's wide flat boulevards and I'm suspicious it's not San Jose first. San Francisco is unique in that the city planners decided to ignore that they had mountains in the middle of their city and…

I think your criticism in this thread is fully valid. But I wanted to say that even "glorified light rail" is an incredible accomplishment... The challenges are immense for getting failure rates as low as that would require. Behavior prediction, avoidance, pedestrian interaction, etc are all issues for any subset of streets.

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#630

Post by anamax »

CPLX wrote: post #554
astrange wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Theranos didn't use the normal set of VCs because they all thought it was a scam; they raised from some random rich people who weren't professional tech VCs instead. It's unfortunate the only thing she was convicted for was defrauding them, since being accredited investors they should be able to live with that. As for Elon, he's currently doing a bad boy anti-government bit in an attempt to make Tesla "electric cars…

Tim Draper wasn’t random.

How many other SV VCs joined Draper? FWIW, I heard that Ellison also put in some early money. If that was it, then will you agree that "mostly outside of the usual SV crowd." is accurate

How many rounds did Draper participate in? If Draper stopped after the first round or two, then it "got some early money from SV but everything else came from outsiders."

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