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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.’

#171

Post by BaculumMeumEst »

dekhn wrote: post #115

"Skyrocket" is a word people use when they don't have the data to support their claim, but want to make it sound as extreme as possible. When I hear "skyrocket" I think "several orders of magnitude in a very short time". But the source of the quote with skyrocket, basically admits that they didn't have any quantitative evidence to support a massive change in incidents. Remember: reality is banal. Things are far bette…

It’s also language that the mainstream media uses to install as much anxiety and terror into as many people as it possibly can. These publications want you to be permanently miserable, outraged, and most importantly constantly refreshing your phone.

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

#172

Post by civilitty »

brigade wrote: post #112
paxys wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would you do if you were stopped at an intersection and someone put a traffic cone in front of you? Sit there for the rest of your life blocking everyone behind you, or move it/drive around it? Same for literally every example that deviates from the happy path, no matter how minor. Construction work, something fallen on the road, a delivery van stopped on the side, temporary street closures. These cars are nowhe…

They put the cone on the hood, it's not an obstacle on the road. The car could try to shake it off, maybe, but is shaking it into the middle of the street and creating an obstacle really the right move? Should self-driving cars be required to have a robotic arm capable of moving a traffic cone from a car surface to the sidewalk to handle this specific situation? Also the anti-car activists can easily move on to a wid…

I think the answer is quite obvious: require self driving cars to have a six degree-of-freedom robotic arm that folds into the front of the car.

It can be used to remove traffic cones and clothesline cyclists!

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

#173

Post by hosh »

dekhn wrote: post #168
hosh wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There may not be data to support this, but on the other hand, informal perceptions -- even if unsupported by data -- matters a great deal with products and systems. But I would ask the people living there what they perceive, not just relying on a news reporter.

informal perceptions are about the last thing you want when making decisions about large-scale technology roll-outs. Instead, people should be informed with the highest quality data, and need to be reminded that informal perceptions are often biased and skewed.

A study of the formalism called Promise Theory will quickly show how that is not true.

Autonomous agents -- humans or otherwise -- base their decision on the imperfect information they have. No one has a global, perfect view of everything, and so the perception of how well other agents fulfill their promises (formally defined as intentions made known to an audience) will always be based upon local, imperfect information.

I can mention other frameworks -- Cynefine, and the error where one confuses a Complicated domain (that can still be accurately modeled) with a Complex domain (that is impossible to accurately model). Or what James C Scott discusses an idea called "legibility" and the fallacy in imposing legibility on complex systems in his book, Seeing Like a State.

Perceptions matter. Blaming the participants of a system for their being uninformed will not lead to voluntary cooperation, much less reliable systems that involve both machines and humans.

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

#174

Post by __loam »

imperialdrive wrote: post #46
wordsarelies wrote: post #23

So it's funny, when they first started rolling these out folks were interested, intrigued even. Folks walking would give them deference, mostly not run in front of them if they saw them, very unlike how they treat regular drivers. But now folks are getting sick of them. So they were modeling all their behavior and driving around cooperative pedestrians and cars (mostly) now they have to model for an adversarial publi…

They are MUCH more aggressive now. It used to be that if you saw one, you could be 99% sure it would stop and wait for the path to be fully clear. Now, they will buzz right by you within a foot or two. Very alarming how quickly they progressed to being careless.

Do you have anything beyond anecdotal evidence to support this?

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

#175

Post by btown »

rubyron wrote: post #159
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…

They need a fake hand to rise up and wave over the steering wheel so pedestrians will know they’re waiting for them.

There's a lot of research on possibilities here! eHMIs (external human-machine interfaces) are the term.

https://www.theturnsignalblog.com/blog/ehmi/

https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/21/9/2912

It's unclear that there's a consensus on something that reliably works across cultural contexts, though - which, to be fair, is also a problem with human-human interactions!

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

#176

Post by __loam »

dekhn wrote: post #156
__loam wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a lot higher than 0.1 people. 40 people died in SF last year due to traffic accidents. I've yet to hear about a self driving car killing someone despite how many there are in the city. I also disagree that coning a self-driving car's sensor is a "regular day to day situation". Throwing paint on someone's windshield or slashing their tires is a crime. E: making stat accurate

Your numbers are wrong: https://sfgov.org/scorecards/transportation/traffic-fataliti... In 2022 (the year with the most), there were 40, not hundreds. Please try to keep your stats as honest as possible.

My bad. Still 40 more than self-driving cars.

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

#177

Post by dekhn »

Zetice wrote: post #166
dekhn wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've commented elsewhere I don't think the chart is informative (and listed several good reasons why). But all you're describing is a 300% increase, not several orders of magnitude increase. If you look at Google's QPS chart (maintained in crayon by the original engineers!) you will see that they frequently had to rescale the chart by factors of ten because their growth rate in the early days was exponential. The cha…

Exponential growth, several orders of magnitude... these are not what "skyrocketing" means, in actuality. So you are correct, none of those phrases describe the graph here, but none of those phrases matter. It's a sudden, alarming, and seemingly sustained trend, and it's worth writing an article over.

Have you ever looked at the chart of the velocity of a rocket? Rockets accelerate from 0 to 17,000 mph in ~5-6 minutes. the initial phase is exponential.

(it's not useful being pedantic here, I think I've captured what people think when they hear the word "skyrocket"; it's intentionally used to frame the discussion)

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

#178

Post by reaperducer »

waldohatesyou wrote: post #93
jarjoura wrote: post #75

Laws are written and designed for humans who constantly try to push it to the limit and get away with things. These cars are all over the place and I've been caught stuck on a street in Bernal Heights because it couldn't quite fit and just froze in place. I had to back out of the street because there wasn't any room for me to go around it. Yes it may be following laws to the letter, but not only was I grumpy about ha…

Isn’t the gain that those folks can find another job that’s more useful?

Isn’t the gain that those folks can find another job that’s more useful?

What makes you think that if finding another job that they are capable of doing was so easy they wouldn't have already done so? Because they were waiting for some tech billionaire to throw them on the unemployment line?

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

#179

Post by Eisenstein »

__loam wrote: post #121
Eisenstein wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on driverless taxis instead of having emotional people who need parking all the time seems to be a win, as long as they are safe and someone is held accountable when they mess up . I am very unwilling to change 'people are flawed but (mostly) held accountable' to 'a corporation owned robot car ran someone over because of a software glitch and it is nobody's fault'. The problems with 'oops we got hacked or l…

It's a lot easier to hold a single corporation accountible than it is for the distributed responsibility of individuals. Uber killed someone and they had to leave the industry. Tesla is being actively investigated for their fly by night approach. Additionally, when one of these cars fucks up, these companies know exactly what happened because they are collecting data about the cars performance 24/7.

> Additionally, when one of these cars fucks up, these companies know exactly what happened because they are collecting data about the cars performance 24/7.

And if it turns out they had data that showed that they knew someone was gonna get killed, but they would make more money not fixing the bug -- I would want someone to go to jail.

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

#180

Post by jacobsenscott »

> Cruise and Waymo say city officials have mischaracterized their safety track records

Also, Cruise and Waymo refuse to release their safety records. I'll believe the city officials in this case, since they actually have some data. The car companies just have hand waves.

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