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Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

thelastdriverlicenseholder.com

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Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#441

Post by dogman144 »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #440
dogman144 wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a lot of infra and related spend via taxes or muni debt for a tech outcome that’s a privacy and autonomy nightmare. Build some trains, build some bike lanes, and leave the people alone who don’t want their transportation and the downstream reasons people use it taken over by tech. Governance by a central cybernetic super computer and all the cybernetic hypothesis coming true. Good lord.

>Sounds like a lot of infra and related spend via taxes or muni debt for a tech outcome that’s a privacy and autonomy nightmare. That unfortunately puts it right in line with every other tech-heavy thing taxpayers have have to pony up for this century.

Indeed. I raise issue with the unthinking advocacy here, as if civil society is just a canvas for engineers to paint over. It’s the only thing I hate about this industry. It’s UX-oriented as long as tech is part of the UX.

I may sound like a Luddite but I recall being able to go out in NYC without needing to QR-code scan my way through daily life.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#442

Post by mminer237 »

kube-system wrote: post #217

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.

This is almost the plot to the Doctor Who episode Gridlock.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#443

Post by throwaway0a5e »

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 decreasing congestion? We already know how to do that,

Anything, automation included, that allows things to flow more smoothly will decrease congestion for a specific number of vehicles on the road allowing roads/intersections/etc to flow closer to their ideal capacity. (This principal holds whether you're talking about cars or buses, train networks, industrial facilities, etc.)

For example, if self driving solves some decent fraction of the morons who can't seem to merge in the size space that the engineers specifically allocated because it was sufficient for that purpose or can't turn left even through sufficiently sparse cross traffic you've just alleviated a lot of congestion.

In practice transit networks are bounded by the daily peaks so you'll never not have traffic jams and packed subway cars at rush hour but efficiency improvements mean these conditions will exist for a smaller slice of the day.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#444

Post by gverrilla »

uoaei wrote: post #15
xyst wrote: post #10

all of this time and money wasted on driverless cars has been a complete failure. companies and cities should be investing their time into improving public transportation and designing our cities to be more walkable and make alternate modes of transportation more feasible. the US culture of using a car for everyday transportation is fucking insane, wasteful, and contributes to the rising cost of living across the US…

Everything here is objectively correct and this is a comment that contributes to the conversation. But I saw your comment and it was already gray, with 0 minutes of age. Funny how shamelessly "rational" people react emotionally when their preferred narrative is challenged.

don't forget there's $ on the line: a lot of "hackers" here are only corporate slaves and will do anything for a salary, just like good nazi soldiers.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#445

Post by ecshafer »

ghusbands wrote: post #410
ecshafer wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

40k people are dying a year from cars, and the problem is that driverless electric cars are not the solution. They are the faster horse kind of innovation. If we were serious about reducing fatalities, improving health, and reducing pollution, the solution would be to drastically reduce the amount of miles driven per year and the number and the size of the cars. We need to encourage people to bike and walk and use pu…

None or few of those options are particularly accessible (EDIT: for people who cannot walk/cycle long distances). Public transportation often is quite inaccessible while still claiming to be accessible (like the London Underground and the New York Subway). Central management of driverless cars could solve the problem in a more inclusive fashion and isn't just more of the same idea. We should still reduce the size of…

Surely it would be easier to make public transportation more accessible in a non-car oriented city than making driverless cars, which then have large amounts of continuous infrastructure costs, health care costs from less exercise, social costs, and also the fact its still not known if this is even entirely possible.

As a thought experiment, we have no cars other than emergency vehicles and some commercial vehicles occasionally. Everyone is able to walk to 90% of destinations, and bike or public transport the last 10%. It would be easier to have people who can't walk well in small electric personal transport devices (wheel chairs, segway, electric bikes, motorized scooters seen at walmart) that if they crash do not pose any threat to anyone. Surely adding wheel chair accessible elevators to train stops for public transit, is easier than building out entire car centris highway infrastructure that requires continuous expensive maintenance. Public transit and walking is already more accessible to the blind than automobiles, that is a nil point.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#446

Post by sixQuarks »

ra7 wrote: post #425
sixQuarks wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s easy to solve problems in the lab. Getting it out in the real world with mass manufactured products is the hard part. You cannot scale FSD with high precision mapping and expensive cameras worldwide. Every time there’s a road update or repair, those maps need to be updated. If you seriously think Tesla is ignorant here, you are not paying any attention. Elon musk’s SpaceX has patents on LiDAR they’ve developed f…

Robotaxis are out in the real world now. They’re not just in the labs. Your information about mapping is highly outdated. The cars are all self mapping and have the ability to update maps in real time when they detect changes. I think you are the one not paying attention.

Yeah keep dreaming. I’d like to see you put a Waymo car or any other “self driving” car in a city that hasn’t been mapped and see how it does.

And The cars do not update maps in real time, they send any changes they find and the company updates the database after reviewing. If they were able to update in real time then why need a HD map in the first place?

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#447

Post by ra7 »

sixQuarks wrote: post #446
ra7 wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Robotaxis are out in the real world now. They’re not just in the labs. Your information about mapping is highly outdated. The cars are all self mapping and have the ability to update maps in real time when they detect changes. I think you are the one not paying attention.

Yeah keep dreaming. I’d like to see you put a Waymo car or any other “self driving” car in a city that hasn’t been mapped and see how it does. And The cars do not update maps in real time, they send any changes they find and the company updates the database after reviewing. If they were able to update in real time then why need a HD map in the first place?

They 100% map and distribute changes to the whole fleet in real time. Waymo and others have talked about it multiple times. It seems you just don’t want to believe it because that would mean your biggest talking point going out of the window.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#448

Post by Balgair »

octoberfranklin wrote: post #342
Smerity wrote: post #57

I saw a version of this myself at Geary and Mason around midnight on June 20th[1]. That it happened again but at a larger scale ten days later is deeply concerning. Given I had no clue what state the vehicles were in, and that they'd start moving without indication, it felt pretty damn worrying. [1]: https://twitter.com/Smerity/status/1539144641206882304

> I had no clue what state the vehicles were in "Murderbot mode". Or rather, transitioning into it. But they got stuck, which is why you're still alive.

Oh, I can see the screenplay being written.

"Coming Halloween, 2024! Killer Kaarr!.

Aiden, malicious disgraced hacker gets into the networks of, Joel, his successful rival's self-driving taxi company, Kaarr. Joel and Aiden were CIA hackers, but fell out over their mutual love of Klara. Joel takes Klara to the heights of the elite, but she still pines for Aiden. In revenge, Aiden hacks into Kaarr's networks and makes all the cars into murderbots, locking his rival Joel inside as the killing commences. At the end of the night, all the Killer Kaarrs are set to drive into the ocean, killing a traumatized Joel. But there's only one problem, Klara is locked inside a Killer Kaarr too. Can Aiden reverse his sadistic code in time to save Klara? Can Joel escape to stop the killing? Find Out, Halloween 2024!

A horror/gore/race film with lots of body horror as people are alternatively hit, crushed, bonked, exploded, and otherwise tortured by cute little electric cars with really tinted windshields and choice camera angles. Think the hokey rubbery special effects of The Thing with a lot of cell phones and car-centric jump scares.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#449

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

brimwats wrote: post #433
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> None or few of those options are particularly accessible. At the moment, neither are self-driving cars sufficiently capable to replace human drivers. We're chasing a future tech dream when we already have technology that can solve the problems we are facing right now. Edit: What do you mean by "accessible"? The London underground and generally public transport in the UK works very well. Speaking after having lived…

I can tell you've never tried to use the Underground with a wheelchair, tho if you're questioning what accessible means in that context—because it's really bad. cars are very accessible for those with mobility disabilities & for many others.

Ah, my bad - literally "accessible".

I don't use a wheelchair and I don't know about the London underground but I can tell you that public transport in the small town I lived for 15 years were eminently accessible, as evidenced by the continuous presense of passengers with obvious (and varied) mobility issues on them.

In any case improving accessibility on public transport also does not require any new technology that we don't know how to create. It just requires political will.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#450

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

zinekeller wrote: post #429
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> None or few of those options are particularly accessible. At the moment, neither are self-driving cars sufficiently capable to replace human drivers. We're chasing a future tech dream when we already have technology that can solve the problems we are facing right now. Edit: What do you mean by "accessible"? The London underground and generally public transport in the UK works very well. Speaking after having lived…

> the London Underground Just going with the parent comment and I'm asking when did you last use the Underground and what station do you think has accessibility issues? I found that the London system is pretty much accessible with aggressive retrofitting on older stations, but I'll acknowledge that if you have used it say more than 10 years ago then I understand.

I think you're replying to the child of my comment?
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