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Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

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Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#311

Post by Xylakant »

makeitdouble wrote: post #126
37ef_ced3 wrote: post #92

From a customer's perspective, it isn't clear that a software taxi driver is in any way better than a human taxi driver, particularly with (human) driver assist preventing collisions and all the other warnings provided by a modern car. In both cases someone else is driving for the customer. With a human driver (plus driver assist braking and collision warnings) you have the most flexible, sophisticated intelligence o…

> From a customer's perspective, it isn't clear that a software taxi driver is in any way better than a human taxi driver The taxi driver having 0% chance of raping or stealing you would be prominent a clear win. Or really any of many many other issues you could have with an actual human person with a specific world view and social position interacting with you. Not even considering if you yourself have specific shor…

> The taxi driver having 0% chance of raping or stealing you would be prominent a clear win.

I find it interesting that this gets mentioned so much - I’ve done some moderate googling for cases of rape by a cab driver in Berlin and the last case that went to court was in 2013 - and even that is not a classic case of premeditated rape (+) There is one case later where a passenger raped a taxi driver and one where two rapists pretended to be Uber drivers - they could not have easily pretended to be taxi drivers in Germany since the cars need to have very specific signage and equipment.

Now, this doesn’t mean that no rape occurred - after all not every rape case gets reported - but it certainly indicates that the risk of being raped in a taxi in Berlin is low.

Things may be different in the US, but even there my initial assumption is that the risk gets overestimated since this is the kind of crime that gets overrepresented in the news.

(+) the passengers didn’t want to pay the fare and threatened the driver who then pulled out a gun and forced them to have sex as payment. Still rape, no question, but not a premeditated rape case.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#312

Post by cycomanic »

oconnor663 wrote: post #224
jjulius wrote: 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…

> As with many of things related to self-driving cars, the target doesn't have to be "perfection" so much as "better than people on average".

I have an issue with that argument, because it's typically being used together with highly disingenuous statistics (like Teslas our FSD has less accidents per mile than normal drivers) to give the impression that autonomous driving is anywhere close to being "better than people on average". This is just not the case at least not in any region with a broad variety of weather conditions.

> Human drivers do dumb things in large groups all the time, like highway pileups in bad weather, or rubbernecking traffic jams.

Considering that most autonomous driving doesn't even work in really bad weather, I'd argue that humans are still much better despite the pileups.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#313

Post by jstummbillig »

I am completely and positively shocked by how little has been going wrong (as in upsetting the public order, damaging property or killing people) with AI driving over the last couple of years, considering the whole world is watching and the press is always happy to report on the next train wreck. Either it's the best cover up operation of all time or all the devs are actually a great right mix of skilled and careful.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#314

Post by jchoelt »

yieldcrv wrote: post #265
jchoelt wrote: post #240

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

I was imagining a self driving car drive by shooting but the car stopped slowed down in an inopportune moment, awkwardly

Inputs like what the humans inside the car are saying should be part of the decision making process. Like everyone inside shooting "DRIVE! DRIVE! DON'T STOP THE Fxxx CAR!". That should lower some thresholds for deciding to stop the car, as with a real human driver.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#315

Post by mellavora »

jrockway wrote: post #287
tjohns wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NOAA doesn't list any meaningful geomagnetic storms right now: https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/communities/space-weather-enthusia... But that aside, I'd really hope that these cars are using professional WAAS-capable GPS receivers. Short of a major X-class flare which knocks out the WAAS geostationary satellites, the entire point of the system is to correct for these kinds of disturbances to the GPS signals.

I'm not really seeing anything weird with GNSS. I have a continuously-operating receiver that writes its location into a database every second; I did a query over the last 30 days and there is no abnormal deviation in position. (My receiver is in a terrible location that can only see a tiny sliver of the sky, and is single-band, so I expect about a +/- 50cm deviation without RTK correction and that's what I'm seeing.…

> my non expert opinion

Yes, clearly given the detail in your post, you are "not an expert". Thanks for being on HN and making this site great.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#316

Post by bjoli »

The promises of self driving cars have always seemed weird to me. Sure, I would love to have a world where all cars are self driving. The security benefits seem large.

But decreasing congestion? We already know how to do that, and in many ways it seems like a safer bet than some kind of technogy with large problems and even larger unknowns; public transport.

Cheap, well developed, reliable public transport will beat autonomous cars on throughput and resource use any day.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#317

Post by LtWorf »

bjoli wrote: post #316

The promises of self driving cars have always seemed weird to me. Sure, I would love to have a world where all cars are self driving. The security benefits seem large. But decreasing congestion? We already know how to do that, and in many ways it seems like a safer bet than some kind of technogy with large problems and even larger unknowns; public transport. Cheap, well developed, reliable public transport will beat…

But it's not nearly as profitable…

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#318

Post by sleepychu »

bjoli wrote: post #316

The promises of self driving cars have always seemed weird to me. Sure, I would love to have a world where all cars are self driving. The security benefits seem large. But decreasing congestion? We already know how to do that, and in many ways it seems like a safer bet than some kind of technogy with large problems and even larger unknowns; public transport. Cheap, well developed, reliable public transport will beat…

But you have to give up point to point, of course the overall throughput is better but the individual experience is (perceived) worse. This is why I love the idea of "public luxury" make sitting on a train or a bus nicer than sitting in a brand new mercedes.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#319

Post by LtWorf »

Peleus wrote: post #300
gambiting wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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?

The bait and switch with this comparison is you're comparing something you have no control over (bread slicer which randomly malfunctions) against something you have full control over (my own cutting abilities). No one thinks their cutting ability is inferior, so of course they don't want to give up control, because they are (obviously) better than the average human. If I posed the question as: Would you prefer to pl…

The statistics we have about self driving are kinda useless though. Teslas don't do intersections… which is where most accidents will happen. So yeah good they don't crash because they give up in the difficult situations.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#320

Post by nosianu »

CTDOCodebases wrote: post #296
jerlam wrote: 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...

People were responding that switching from Glonass to Galileo fixed it. Could it be sabotage?

> Could it be sabotage?

Given that even Russian pilots in Ukraine have been found to be using GPS, it looks like that would not even be necessary.

https://www.globaldefensecorp.com/2022/06/21/exposed-capture...

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