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S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’

sfchronicle.com

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Re: S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’

#61

Post by satisfice »

These companies cannot be trusted to be honest about incidents or near incidents. They like to crow about safety, but the safety they want credit for is entirely hypothetical.

There is no good reason to believe that autonomous vehicles are actually safer. They haven’t yet been tested enough, and the testing that has been done cannot be generalized to new situations.

I believe they would be safer if all roads were fully digitized, controlled, with no pedestrians and no other human drivers. We have something like that, now, called railroads.

Mass transit is the better investment.

Re: S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’

#62

Post by yazaddaruvala »

cozzyd wrote: post #44
scarmig wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mean is the relevant metric, though. If it's only the bottom 10% of human drivers who cause all crashes and driverless cars are as safe as the 20p human driver, you can replace all human drivers with autonomous ones and eliminate all crashes. That's to say nothing of the fact that driverless cars will improve from their current level, and the fact that companies operating them can be held liable for crashes and force…

you can more easily prevent the bottom 10% from driving by more rigorous driving standards / more stringent revocation of licenses.

> According to the NHTSA, 19% of motor vehicle fatalities involved drivers with invalid licenses. Furthermore, drivers with invalid licenses comprise 13% of all drivers in fatal crashes.

https://www.carinsurance.com/Articles/driving-without-licens...

I'm all for more rigorous driving standards. However, the USA is car centric and people need jobs.

To really do what you're suggesting, the USA would need to regulate car companies to validate driving licenses while the car was in use. AND THEN, the USA would need to figure out what to do with all of these upset newly unemployed and aggressive people.

Re: S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’

#63

Post by reso »

valine wrote: post #47
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #30

>Cruise and Waymo say city officials have mischaracterized their safety track records. Their driverless taxis, the companies say, have lower collision rates than human drivers and public transit. This is comparing the mean driverless incident rate to the mean human driver incident rate. This is disingenuous, since a small minority of human drivers cause the vast majority of incidents, thereby severely inflating the m…

Why does it require AGI? That's a bold, unsubstantiated claim. Let me make my own bold claim: Simple common sense reasoning is very close to being solved with our latest LLMs. You would need AGI if you wanted to replace the team developing your self-driving car. A decent LLM, with vision input that's been fine-tuned on driving scenarios, will be more than sufficient for Level 5 driving.

You need AGI for good self-driving because driving requires predicting the actions of other human drivers at an extremely high level. This is second-nature for humans so we barely notice that we are doing it, but it is extraordinarily difficult for non-humans.

Re: S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’

#64

Post by 8f2ab37a-ed6c »

laweijfmvo wrote: post #24

What seems odd to me is that hardly anyone in SF seems to want them there (citizens, officials) yet it keeps getting pushed through?

I'm not sure how one would go about substantiating that "nobody wants them there". It's hard to get the pulse of it outside of the media bubble which tends to be tech-negative.

Re: S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’

#65

Post by yazaddaruvala »

valine wrote: post #47
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #30

>Cruise and Waymo say city officials have mischaracterized their safety track records. Their driverless taxis, the companies say, have lower collision rates than human drivers and public transit. This is comparing the mean driverless incident rate to the mean human driver incident rate. This is disingenuous, since a small minority of human drivers cause the vast majority of incidents, thereby severely inflating the m…

Why does it require AGI? That's a bold, unsubstantiated claim. Let me make my own bold claim: Simple common sense reasoning is very close to being solved with our latest LLMs. You would need AGI if you wanted to replace the team developing your self-driving car. A decent LLM, with vision input that's been fine-tuned on driving scenarios, will be more than sufficient for Level 5 driving.

I roughly agree. I think the only other piece, that is critical to mention, would be remote humans for support in extremely awkward situations to help get the car get back on track as RLHF.

This requires the car can always come to a safe stop, which I think the LLM-based driver should be very capable of doing.

Re: S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’

#66

Post by Tempest1981 »

laweijfmvo wrote: post #21
DragonStrength wrote: post #14

I left SF a year ago but had Cruise and Waymo cars in my neighborhood constantly. They were a total nuisance. They'd jerk towards pedestrians in crosswalks leading to this uncomfortable standoff where no one in the neighborhood would ever step in front of one. I'd wager any stats here are way lower than real incidences as I was nearly hit multiple times and never got to the "report it" stage as there are so many barr…

I have similar experiences (as a pedestrian) crossing in front of Cruise cars, especially at 4-way stops when there aren't crosswalks explicitly drawn. It's odd because the cars are generally excruciatingly cautious, but for some reason as I'm crossing they seem to calculate exactly how fast they can take off such that they pass me right as I'm clear of their path -- whereas most drivers might wait for the pedestrian…

Sounds risky.

I thought California law was to let the pedestrian fully cross, but apparently not:

> In California, the law does not state that a driver must wait for the pedestrian to fully exit the crosswalk or the street before they proceed on their way in their lane. A pedestrian must be safely out of the driver's path of travel for them to begin driving again.

Re: S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’

#67

Post by yazaddaruvala »

reso wrote: post #63
valine wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does it require AGI? That's a bold, unsubstantiated claim. Let me make my own bold claim: Simple common sense reasoning is very close to being solved with our latest LLMs. You would need AGI if you wanted to replace the team developing your self-driving car. A decent LLM, with vision input that's been fine-tuned on driving scenarios, will be more than sufficient for Level 5 driving.

You need AGI for good self-driving because driving requires predicting the actions of other human drivers at an extremely high level. This is second-nature for humans so we barely notice that we are doing it, but it is extraordinarily difficult for non-humans.

This is overcome with super human sensing and reaction time and better visual angles.

i.e. radar based deceleration to avoid accidents already helps many humans avoid collision. It'll help the robot too.

The rest of driving is relatively simple, methodological, and slow.

Re: S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’

#68

Post by valine »

reso wrote: post #63
valine wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does it require AGI? That's a bold, unsubstantiated claim. Let me make my own bold claim: Simple common sense reasoning is very close to being solved with our latest LLMs. You would need AGI if you wanted to replace the team developing your self-driving car. A decent LLM, with vision input that's been fine-tuned on driving scenarios, will be more than sufficient for Level 5 driving.

You need AGI for good self-driving because driving requires predicting the actions of other human drivers at an extremely high level. This is second-nature for humans so we barely notice that we are doing it, but it is extraordinarily difficult for non-humans.

No you don’t. I can feed images of crazy driving scenarios into LLaVA and get reasonable responses. That’s a general purpose LLM with $500 worth of fine tuning running locally on my PC. You should look into what can be done with the current state of the art LLMs. Your intuition for what’s possible is out of date.

If I can do that with open source LLaMA variants, I can only imagine what’s possible if you have an actual annotated dataset of driving scenarios. Imagine a LLaMA model thats been fine tuned for lane selection, AEB, etc.

Re: S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’

#69

Post by cozzyd »

yazaddaruvala wrote: post #62
cozzyd wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can more easily prevent the bottom 10% from driving by more rigorous driving standards / more stringent revocation of licenses.

> According to the NHTSA, 19% of motor vehicle fatalities involved drivers with invalid licenses. Furthermore, drivers with invalid licenses comprise 13% of all drivers in fatal crashes. https://www.carinsurance.com/Articles/driving-without-licens... I'm all for more rigorous driving standards. However, the USA is car centric and people need jobs. To really do what you're suggesting, the USA would need to regulate ca…

Yes, car-centricity is a big problem, I agree (as someone who doesn't own a car or regularly drive...).

Are robo-cars going to prevent people from driving with invalid licenses?

Re: S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’

#70

Post by cozzyd »

scarmig wrote: post #58
cozzyd wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can more easily prevent the bottom 10% from driving by more rigorous driving standards / more stringent revocation of licenses.

About a month ago a human driver ran into me while I was riding a bike and sped away (luckily I was unharmed, aside from a scrape or two). How exactly would stricter driving tests or revocation of licenses have prevented that? If a Waymo had done that, on the other hand, it'd have stopped and I'd be getting a nice big check from Google.

traffic enforcement cameras (e.g. automatic tickets for speeding, running red lights, hitting cyclists etc.) would probably help, but for some reason motorists are against that.

I guess the nice thing about robocars is that they can be effectively regulated not to drive at unsafe speeds (though probably people would be mad about that too...).

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