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Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

thelastdriverlicenseholder.com

271–280 of 514 posts

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#272

If you thought drivers on the road are bad now, this is is a sneak peek of the dystopian future where other drivers on the road drive like they are a support ticket for Facebook or Google. If your situation isn’t covered by the preprogrammed logic, you’re out of luck with nobody to talk to. Self driving vehicles belong on rails.

Rails are too restrictive for real life. I trust a self driving fleet to respond immediately to an emergency by stopping. Maybe causing a disruption but very little loss of life or property.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#273
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like a lot of people have kind of wisened up about this hypothetical future anyway, now that we're seeing FSD in practice. Sure, some problems would be eliminated by all cars being self driving, and the roads being tailored to that use case. But then, at the same time, trains literally run on tracks and they still have conductors.

The answer is going to look like: freeway and maybe roadway driving is autonomous while drivers are expected to takeover for irreconcilable issues. There can be no other way outside of someone actually factually creating general AI.

Even humans can't safely drive in all sets of circumstances. There may even be circumstances where autonomous vehicles can drive, but humans can't or shouldn't.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#274
post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or I could be pessimistic about GPS -- these things are, albeit in limited numbers, on the road and actually being used by customers, right? I guess I'm surprised GPS is so reliable that this isn't a widespread, constant issue, if this is the normal "I lost GPS" behavior.

It could be a middle ground kind of thing. The cars have to trust something . For position you have GPS + some interpolation based on your movement sensors + some buildings/streets and maps (also unreliable since construction etc changes a lot, a lot of buildings and intersections look the same, etc). Computers are very far away from understanding where they are from context alone. Hell most humans don't know where t…

[deleted]

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#275
post #37

Yup, it's a mess. What it's not is, a huge multi-car multi-injury accident. So I don't mind it much more than if all the traffic lights in the area were out.

Honestly, a bit of a road diet from the occasional "this intersection is closed due to fleet maintenance" is probably not the worst thing.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#276
post #267

If you thought drivers on the road are bad now, this is is a sneak peek of the dystopian future where other drivers on the road drive like they are a support ticket for Facebook or Google. If your situation isn’t covered by the preprogrammed logic, you’re out of luck with nobody to talk to. Self driving vehicles belong on rails.

Yep and all phones should be copper land lines. Yawn.

The technology will get there, but it hasn’t yet. In the meantime, if the technology fails, someone needs to be available and able to intervene immediately.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla doesn't have dealers. This sounds like a used car.

> Tesla doesn't have dealers. This sounds like a used car. And? If I own something (which I do after I've paid for it),the only way the "legal" owner is getting it back is via the courts. Why is it okay to resolve property disputes by private force?

Cause the post implied that it's right to be mad at Tesla, but that wouldn't help. Feel free to give the car back to the dealer. Although I'd think this would be obvious on the test drive.

Also, being livid is probably bad for your health. Might get high blood pressure.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#278

If you thought drivers on the road are bad now, this is is a sneak peek of the dystopian future where other drivers on the road drive like they are a support ticket for Facebook or Google. If your situation isn’t covered by the preprogrammed logic, you’re out of luck with nobody to talk to. Self driving vehicles belong on rails.

Rails are too restrictive for real life. I trust a self driving fleet to respond immediately to an emergency by stopping. Maybe causing a disruption but very little loss of life or property.

Rails are too restrictive for real life? I'm not sure what you are trying to say here... Rails are widely used for real life around the globe. In many, many places rails significantly out perform cars to the point that people choose not to own cars.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#279
post #267

If you thought drivers on the road are bad now, this is is a sneak peek of the dystopian future where other drivers on the road drive like they are a support ticket for Facebook or Google. If your situation isn’t covered by the preprogrammed logic, you’re out of luck with nobody to talk to. Self driving vehicles belong on rails.

Yep and all phones should be copper land lines. Yawn.

This would make sense if rails were some sort of outmoded transit mechanism, but they can be significantly faster, more efficient, and more pleasant.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#280
post #96

With all of the talk, usually around Teslas but I suppose it applies to all EVs, that I've seen over the years akin to, "Just imagine how safe driving will be when every vehicle is FSD and can talk to one another," I have to ask... shouldn't we anticipate seeing similar issues to this in that scenario? I mean yeah, there will be different manufacturers so it's not like every car in a city could come to a standstill.…

Of course it's a cause for concern. It's a perfectly reasonable concern. It's just about certain that early fleets will have big outages for dumb reasons, just like major websites do. The question will be how frequent those are, how dangerous they are, and how effective the mitigations will be as everything matures. As with many of things related to self-driving cars, the target doesn't have to be "perfection" so muc…

>>the target doesn't have to be "perfection" so much as "better than people on average".

You see, I completely disagree with this assumption. They should be perfect or they shouldn't be allowed on the road at all.

You wouldn't accept a bread slicer that sometimes erroneously slices off your fingers, as long as it does so less frequently than people slice their own fingers on average, would you?

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