Live data from Hacker News

Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

thelastdriverlicenseholder.com

301–310 of 514 posts

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> drivers are expected to takeover for irreconcilable issues Remote employee "drivers" take over when a car signals that it doesn't know what to do

> Remote employee "drivers" take over when a car signals that it doesn't know what to do

Because it has lost connectivity due to a technical glitch, an outage in the cell network, lack of coverage (tunnel, …)

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, nah. Even when you put a self-driving race car on a closed track with no other cars, a human driver still beats its time by a handsome margin. In challenging conditions (visibility/rain/ice/etc) the human will absolutely crush the computer.

I'm extremely confident that self-driving cars will never make a significant improvement on car safety.

I'm also confident that it will never be applicable to anything but highway driving in good weather conditions - we will never see a Level 5 car, those designations have about as much practical relevance to us as the Kardashev scale.

First of all, the safety statistics that we have with modern cars today is such that you need to run 10 million cars for several years before you have gathered enough statistics to say whether a new development has actually improved the situation. For instance if you take the Volvo XC90, there has not been a single fatal accident in the US or UK since the model was launched in 2002, with over 1 million such cars sold in those markets combined. That kind of lag in your dev cycle means it's extremely hard to do any sort of meaningful development of a machine learning system in a way that demonstrably improves safety.

Second of all, human factors such as being distracted by a cell phone or being intoxicated, plus not wearing a seat belt, accounts for the overwhelming majority of fatal accidents. It is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, much easier to build a system that detects such conditions and then deliberately slows down or stops the car. It's already being deployed today and will only increase in the future, so most of the potential safety improvement from self-driving will be eaten up by other tech.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#303

> The Last Driver License Holder ... has already been born. How Google, Tesla, Apple, Uber & Co will change our lives, cities and destroy jobs. And why this is good this way. A bit overdramatic IMO. Personally I can't wait until I never have to drive a car again.

If that means cars replacing public transportation, no thank you.

It doesn't have to. A lot of public transport is already driverless too.

I would imagine it stays the same in high density cities where it's viable to have metro systems and there isn't enough road space for everyone.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#304
post #45

There is currently some kind of geomagnetic storm which is causing a lot of GPS tracks to be offset over the past few days. It's all over the running/cycling forums. Could be related, here's an example: https://old.reddit.com/r/Garmin/comments/vo17e2/the_magnetic...

It couldn't possibly be GPS, right? Networks are unreliable, the cars must be able to reach a safe state if the network drops out. They appear to have stopped in the road. If these cars can't safely navigate their way to the side of the road using local sensors, they are wildly, hilariously unsuited for autonomous operation. > at least a dozen autonomous Chevrolet Bolts from GM Cruise Automation were spotted blocking…

You've nailed the dirty little secret of the AV industry. Everyone's safety model is underpinned by the ridiculous assumption that a human will be (a) reachable with very high reliability over shitty cellular networks; (b) able to correctly interpret complex situations with extremely limited information; (c) able to resolve safety-critical situations by making planner adjustments, without direct control over steering and acceleration.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Cause the post implied that it's right to be mad at Tesla,

Of course it's right to be mad at Tesla - they resolved a property dispute by force.

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

I wouldn't be livid in that situation, but I would consider criminal charges against Tesla in my jurisdiction.

After all, the dealer is only on the hook for civil claims, Tesla is on the hook for very obvious criminal claims.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Actually, autonomous driving stacks can get better doing millions of miles in simulation. The teen, not so much. Have they not already completed many millions of miles in simulation, back in 2018? To me, it looks like self-diving capabilities have reached a maxima. The resources poured into it have barely been needle movers in objective metrics.

Disagree. It’s easy to see how far FSD has progressed, there’s lots of videos to document how far it’s gone from then and today. It’s also not easy to say they’ve reached the point of diminishing returns (which generally takes a massive amount of data to hit, even GPT3 has not hit it) as it’s not clear how much of FSD is powered by heuristic based code and what is NNs. Judging by some of the discussions there’s still…

> Disagree. It’s easy to see how far FSD has progressed, there’s lots of videos to document how far it’s gone from then and today.

Yeah, but videos aren't objective metrics. For me, an objective metric is "went $FOO miles in $BAR conditions without needing any intervention".

What would you consider an objective metric?

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#307
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…

Dead reckoning works surprisingly well at least in Teslas, of which the precision can be seen when they move around in underground facilities and finally resurface: the car pops up pretty close to the entry point.

In any case, aren't all self-driving vehicles equipped with lidars and work in pre-mapped regions? I would 100% expect they are able to just use those maps with lidar to precisely geolocate themselves, probably more precisely than with GPS. And, indeed, GPS itself can at times be inaccurate or simply not available due to obstructions.

So what I'm saying, maybe it's wasn't the GPS.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#308
post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh my sweet summer child.

I am old enough to recall when they did so post-9/11. The US government would never give up such a capability, that would be out of character for them. But they would sure as hell pretend like they did, which is very much in character.

I think they would. There's at least 3 fully operational GPS alternatives, there's no reason to have this capability anymore. Some receivers will combine all of these systems.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#309
post #245

The fact that they all stopped at one intersection, suggests to me that it's a deadlock issue. "You go". "No, you go". "No, really, I insist".

As a kid in the 90’s sitting in the back of the car in a long traffic jam I’d always think of those toy cars that followed an inductive ink path.

My kid brain thought “wouldn’t it be cool if when the light turned green some of that ink bubbled up and all the cars started going at once instead of one after another”

Anyway - as self driving cars have gotten closer and closer to real, I always assumed eventually when most all cars were self driving, there’d be some standardized protocol for cars to coordinate with one another.

It’s hilariously depressing that cars in the same fleet have no interexchange.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#310
post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now let's imagine the same scene but with the car stopping right next to thugs breaking into another car :-D

Now that you mention it, robbing a self driving car would be easy. Just stand in front of it and it'll stop for you.

Except if the car decide to drive you (the thug) to the nearest police station, bypassing human input.
Post reply on HN