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Waymo illegal overtake into wrong-way driving

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Re: Waymo illegal overtake into wrong-way driving

#61

Post by Timshel »

danielbarla wrote: post #38
Timshel wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes tired, drunk or raging people do stupid shit. But the goal is not exactly to have autonomous driving at their level ...

There are a few more categories of people who often do stupid shit, many of which are fairly mundane and far less easy to disregard (such as: momentarily distracted / semi-permanently fiddling with their phone / dangerously incompetent). I don't think it's unfair to point out that humans, quite often, also suck quite badly at driving.

In general, I don't think human sucks at driving, but there are many times when any driver can be extremely dangerous for many reasons.

Many of those reasons are illegal (alcohol, fiddling with your phone) so it's not a question of fairness an automated program was supposed to be better than that.

I don't see anything unfair in requiring that automated driving which is supposed to not be afflicted from our human failing to not perform illegal and dangerous driving ...

Especially since autonomous driving might bring more car not less (similar to Uber and Lift impact https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00678-z#Sec8 )

Re: Waymo illegal overtake into wrong-way driving

#62

Post by mannykannot »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #51
Jevon23 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>a human clicked on the “overtake” button Ok. So what are the consequences for this human operator and/or Waymo? Human drivers make mistakes all the time, it’s true. But there are consequences for those mistakes. If a human drives into the opposite lane that’s a big problem, especially if they end up causing property damage or bodily injury. Why are the same standards not being applied here?

I've seen plenty of cars drive the wrong way down a one way street. I've done it myself by accident a couple of times. I've never seen any face any consequences other than being honked at. I've seen one pulled over, but they got away with just a warning since they were obviously just confused tourists. OTOH, I doubt the operator still has a job, and Waymo is going to face significant consequences. Likely formal conse…

If this is actually what happened, then regardless of the consequences, it would challenge the notion that human supervisors provide adequate protection of the public while these cars are being tested.

Re: Waymo illegal overtake into wrong-way driving

#63

Post by miki123211 »

blibble wrote: post #47
arethuza wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, I've seen many human drivers doing equally stupid things.

I'd expect to be prosecuted if I was caught driving like this, and probably lose my license as a result what is the threshold for permanently terminating Waymo's license? - an example like this of dangerous driving? - 1 death by dangerous driving? - 10 deaths by dangerous driving? (say it veered right in this video into the other road users) - 100 deaths by dangerous driving? (say it veers into a sidewalk full of ped…

The problem with these self-driving companies is that they drive a lot more miles than a human ever could. Even if their error rates were 1/10th of the most cautious human drivers, if we held them to the same standards as we hold humans, they'd lose their licenses in a week. This is due to the sheer number of cars they have and miles they drive.

This is a variation on the trolley problem. Would you rather have roads that are 10 times safer, with 10 times fewer accidents and 10 times fewer deaths, but where the accidents are completely unexplainable and where nobody can be held guilty, or would you rather have the world stay as it is?

Re: Waymo illegal overtake into wrong-way driving

#64

Post by sva_ »

eklitzke wrote: post #11
underdeserver wrote: post #8

No idea what the Waymo car was thinking, but what are these kids riding? Maybe it thought they were on a bike lane? Where I'm from it's illegal to ride like that in a group outside of police-sanctioned events - you're supposed to ride one after the other and keep right.

The devices they're riding are called electric unicycles, often abbreviated to EUC.

Aka face crayon

Re: Waymo illegal overtake into wrong-way driving

#65

Post by acimim_ha »

blibble wrote: post #47
arethuza wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, I've seen many human drivers doing equally stupid things.

I'd expect to be prosecuted if I was caught driving like this, and probably lose my license as a result what is the threshold for permanently terminating Waymo's license? - an example like this of dangerous driving? - 1 death by dangerous driving? - 10 deaths by dangerous driving? (say it veered right in this video into the other road users) - 100 deaths by dangerous driving? (say it veers into a sidewalk full of ped…

Negative publicity is reflected on their equity evaluation. They have great incentives. The system works.

I think with 100 deaths the company would get liquidated. This incident alone probably caused more damage than a cost of one single driver's license suspension.

Re: Waymo illegal overtake into wrong-way driving

#66

Post by Timshel »

arethuza wrote: post #50
Timshel wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes tired, drunk or raging people do stupid shit. But the goal is not exactly to have autonomous driving at their level ...

The point I was trying to make, clearly not very well, was that nobody would be surprised by a human making a mistake like this so why are we expecting perfection from a software controlled car? They will make mistakes but I'd also expect these mistakes to become less and less common. I'd only worry if the rate of change of performance isn't fairly positive...

Don't know even by low human standard it's bad.

I would not expect a human to drive two blocks while failing to go back to the correct lane; I would expect him to realize after 50m that there are too many and slow down and go back behind the uni cycle. In the same way I do not expect a human driver to stop after hitting someone then start again and drag the body with it.

The problem is that it's easy to pump the statistic while driving miles without issue then it utterly fails when the situation is not well-defined anymore.

Re: Waymo illegal overtake into wrong-way driving

#67

Post by Timshel »

gnfargbl wrote: post #48

Waymo told the Chronicle in a statement that the robotaxi “detected that there may be a risk of a person within that crowd who had fallen down, and decided to carefully initiate a passing maneuver when the opposing lane was clear to move around what could be an obstacle and a safety concern.” “After starting that maneuver, out of an abundance of caution around these vulnerable road users, and to avoid getting too clo…

I love the :

> before returning to its original lane of travel

When it was only able to do so when someone started to block its path to force it to stop ...

Re: Waymo illegal overtake into wrong-way driving

#68

Post by mchanson »

fabian2k wrote: post #7

I would be curious to know what the car thought the situation was, something must have gone really wrong here. It ignored the double lines and crossed them to overtake and then stayed in the wrong lane for a really long time. If the car understood the state of the world around this, this is kind of a huge mistake in behaviour. And if it didn't it is concerning as well as it would mean it can end up in the opposite la…

It’s kinda funny that the Waymo car is so impatient. I’m pretty sure in this situation I would have just waited until the group ride cleared out to ahead of me and then continued. I would not want to crowd or find my way around them. If I wanted to get past such a big group ride I would probably reroute onto another block since they would keep catching me at stop lights.

Re: Waymo illegal overtake into wrong-way driving

#69

Post by everyone »

Self driving is a very difficult (and expensive to develop) engineering challenge.. I think it might end up being cheaper (and thus more likely) that the "solution" will be a legal one rather than an engineering one: Self driving vehicles will have a light and/or klaxon on them, if you see or hear it, it will be your responsibility to get out of it's way.

Thats how the issues with automobiles vs other road users was resolved in the 1920's. The impetus is there, corporations want more and more robots for everything.

Re: Waymo illegal overtake into wrong-way driving

#70

Post by stefan_ »

gnfargbl wrote: post #48

Waymo told the Chronicle in a statement that the robotaxi “detected that there may be a risk of a person within that crowd who had fallen down, and decided to carefully initiate a passing maneuver when the opposing lane was clear to move around what could be an obstacle and a safety concern.” “After starting that maneuver, out of an abundance of caution around these vulnerable road users, and to avoid getting too clo…

It is a really really really bad sign that these companies feel the obsessive need to lie and distort around what are safety-critical incidents. Where is the safety culture? If this is how it's going to be, why on earth should we trust them to deploy them on public streets?
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