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Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

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Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#641

Post by forgetfreeman »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #583
forgetfreeman wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Idgaf if they're round-tripping the equivalent to mars and back weekly, the fact of the matter is their tech cannot perform at the level of a human driver who's had their license for a week, by their own admission. No amount of argle-bargle changes that as the autonomy levels are very well-defined and Waymo self-reports as L4 under optimal conditions and no clear path to L5 in sight in the next decade. Let's not conf…

You are splitting hairs. Tens of thousands of rides per week. Autonomously. Those are the keywords. Other things they are bragging about involve such things as 24/7, night and day, and foggy conditions. I would suggest actually reading the short press release. They make quite a few interesting claims in it. Anyway, anyone in the SFO area will probably be reporting all the wonderful and uneventful rides they are enjoy…

I'm not splitting hairs. The difference between L4 and L5 autonomy is enormous. I submit that you cannot get enhanced safety outcomes out of a system that cannot perform the task at hand at least as well as a mediocre human, and realistically not until you're routinely out-performing the bulk of human operators. And if you think not crashing into random shit in a perfectly chaotic environment is an easily solved problem please explain to me why store PoS tech (orders of magnitude smaller problem space) has been a roiling dumpster fire for decades now. Software doesn't have an amazing track record at solving problems. It has proven to be absolutely phenomenal at shifting problem spaces in weird ways and introducing spectacularly stupid unplanned side effects however.

Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#642

Post by x-complexity »

miki123211 wrote: post #500
x-complexity wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So do hotels, I guess that’s why no hotel room has ever been trashed. The point is when there's damage, it can be billed to the malicious actor in question.

Unlike Waymo, hotels can't really bar the bad actors from staying in any hotel ever again. At some point, the people who tent to leave a mess in Waymos just... won't be allowed to ride in Waymos any more.

> At some point, the people who tent to leave a mess in Waymos just... won't be allowed to ride in Waymos any more.

This would reductively mean a more effective form of punishing vandalism, which would in of itself be a slight net good overall.

In the ideal case, there would be a recompense program to pay for the damages made + extra, in return for being able to ride them again.

Meta-point: This discussion has significant overlap with busses/trains/public transportation. How we deal with bad actors in that space would translate well into this space.

Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#644

Post by Karrot_Kream »

999900000999 wrote: post #597
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're the age I think you are (mid-30s), then during your grandfather's time most women didn't work and many racial minorities were barred from many jobs and forms of housing. If you cut the labor supply in half or more, then wages naturally go up because demand doesn't change that much per capita. That said I completely agree with you about everything else. I think the US needs to firm up its social safety net (…

The biggest issue is zoning and other restrictions on construction. Back in the 1950s, it was much easier to build. Now it takes much longer and it's more expensive to just get permits. It's kinda wacky to think we're still using housing stock from 100 years ago. New construction is rare. A middle class person, say a Firefighter needs to be able to buy a home where he works. Many city workers in California have to ri…

100%. Our local bus system can't hire operators because they're priced out of the area for housing, so all operators have to come from a 4 hour Metrolink ride away.

Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#645

Post by jessriedel »

kajecounterhack wrote: post #628
jessriedel wrote: post #624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the next couple years Waymo will have accumulated more than 100M miles driven, which is the number a human drives statistically before causing 1 death on average. Are you still going to be worried when they drive 1B miles and have 2 deaths? What about 100B miles with 30 deaths? At what point will you accept the statistical evidence?

A new software release has driven zero miles. You do not know what kind of performance it has -- regressions both happen and are expected with every launch. The number of miles a release ends up driving is mostly in simulation + some human-supervised on-road testing, and may be low / influenced by the availability of resources ($$$). There are little to no regulations or 3rd party checks on the process used to clear…

> They could have no deaths for years, then suddenly a whole lot after a bad software push.

The software release process itself becomes the thing that is tested statistically. If they release 100 versions, and each is safer than the last, it’s silly to think that one can’t be confident in the safety of the 101st without some gov’t software approval/validation process.

> What happens to Waymo if they kill even 1 child due to a bug or lapse in model quality? …would you continue to let your kid ride Waymo?

If they had driven billions of death-less miles and then a software update killed a child, I would obviously let my kid ride Waymo. It wouldn’t be close.

Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#646

Post by kajecounterhack »

jessriedel wrote: post #645
kajecounterhack wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A new software release has driven zero miles. You do not know what kind of performance it has -- regressions both happen and are expected with every launch. The number of miles a release ends up driving is mostly in simulation + some human-supervised on-road testing, and may be low / influenced by the availability of resources ($$$). There are little to no regulations or 3rd party checks on the process used to clear…

> They could have no deaths for years, then suddenly a whole lot after a bad software push. The software release process itself becomes the thing that is tested statistically. If they release 100 versions, and each is safer than the last, it’s silly to think that one can’t be confident in the safety of the 101st without some gov’t software approval/validation process. > What happens to Waymo if they kill even 1 child…

> If they release 100 versions, and each is safer than the last, it’s silly to think that one can’t be confident in the safety of the 101st without some gov’t software approval/validation process.

That's just the thing. Each release is not always safer than the last. Even ascertaining that with any reasonable level of certainty requires a lot of technology. In a company's hands alone, this "trust me bro" amounts to a ticking time bomb since companies have a tendency to trade safety for profit.

> If they had driven billions of death-less miles and then a software update killed a child, I would obviously let my kid ride Waymo. It wouldn’t be close.

You don't think the outcry at Boeing applies to Waymo?

Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#647

Post by kajecounterhack »

rsanek wrote: post #640
kajecounterhack wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A new software release has driven zero miles. You do not know what kind of performance it has -- regressions both happen and are expected with every launch. The number of miles a release ends up driving is mostly in simulation + some human-supervised on-road testing, and may be low / influenced by the availability of resources ($$$). There are little to no regulations or 3rd party checks on the process used to clear…

I feel like this concern is mostly a thing having to do with safe rollouts. Just as with any other software, I'm sure there's a gradual rollout to ensure bugs don't just kill a ton of people at once. Google and other large cos have largely solved the reliability problem with web services. while cars are ofc different i think the same learnings apply

> while cars are ofc different i think the same learnings apply

They are very different. Unit tests and stress tests can be conducted on pure software. You can monitor them and if there are failures you can retry.

Robot software needs all the stuff you use for regular software, but then you have this huge space of counterfactuals that can only be verified using large scale simulation. How do you know the simulator is realistic? That it has a sufficient level of scenario coverage? That the simulation was even run? That the car didn't catastrophically regress in a way that will lead to a crash after 1M miles of driving (which in a scaled service will happen quite frequently)?

Oh and a fault can result in a death for Waymo, but not for Google Search. So that's kind of a major difference.

Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#648

Post by saagarjha »

mlboss wrote: post #591
ModernMech wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That kind of misses the point; it was the human that was interesting to me and the interaction we had, not that he gave information.

I think llms can create a good interaction based on the exchange. But is the real question is what make humans unique that these algorithms cannot do.

Their infectious enthusiasm and warmth.

Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#649

Post by hiptobecubic »

BurningFrog wrote: post #536
ctvo wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you remotely detect if car stinks or not? Why do you think they need to? These cars go to a centralize location every night, I would assume, and cleaning at scale can happen. How often do you think an Uber driver cleans their car in comparison?

People take taxis because they're too drunk to drive. This sometimes leads to in-car vomiting. There are also still smokers among us.

I'm confused, are you saying that no one can detect if you're smoking or vomiting?

Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#650

Post by dventimi »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #644
999900000999 wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest issue is zoning and other restrictions on construction. Back in the 1950s, it was much easier to build. Now it takes much longer and it's more expensive to just get permits. It's kinda wacky to think we're still using housing stock from 100 years ago. New construction is rare. A middle class person, say a Firefighter needs to be able to buy a home where he works. Many city workers in California have to ri…

100%. Our local bus system can't hire operators because they're priced out of the area for housing, so all operators have to come from a 4 hour Metrolink ride away.

100%. Incidentally (obviously) that also applies to teachers, restaurant workers, and others who aren't fortunate enough to be among the tech Eloi.
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