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US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

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Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#61

Post by lawlessone »

bluGill wrote: post #19
trollbridge wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

… assuming the GiantCorp running the robotaxis cares about complying with the law, and doesn’t just pay a fine that means nothing to them.

The first fines should be meaningless to the company. If the issue isn't fixed the fines should get higher and higher. If the company fixes one issue but there is a second discovered quickly we should assume they don't care about safety and the second issue should have a higher fine than the first even though it is unrelated. Companies (and people) have an obligation to do the right thing.

>The first fines should be meaningless to the company.

Why?

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#62

Post by hamdingers »

izacus wrote: post #16
jmpman wrote: post #10

I’m also curious about school zones. The one near my house has a sign, “School” “Speed Limit 35” “7:00AM to 4:00PM School Days” Now, how does a robotaxi comply with that? Does it go to the district website and look up the current school year calendar? Or does it work like a human, and simply observe the patterns of the school traffic, and assume the general school calendar? I suspect it continues in Mad Max mode.

Wait, how does that work? Every person in your city needs to know the exact calendar of that school?

You are not penalized for failing to go over 35 on non-school-days. School zones are sufficiently small that the time penalty for complying on a summer weekday isn't that much of an inconvenience.

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#63

Post by hamdingers »

terminalshort wrote: post #47
lotsofpulp wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With how cheap high definition cameras are, I don’t see why society needs a person to be physically present.

I prefer the risk of death over constant surveillance

If you're want to operate a deadly vehicle in public you need to compromise, sorry.

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#64

Post by [deleted] »

themafia wrote: post #42
krisoft wrote: post #4

To be honest. I think this is one of the strengths of autonomous cars. With humans when they do this at max we can punish that individual. To increase population wide compliance we can do a safety awareness campaign, ramp up enforcement, ramp up the fines. But all of these cost a lot of money to do, take a while to have an effect, need to be repeated/kept up, and only help statistically. With a robot driver we can de…

> we can develop a fix and roll it out on all of them. You have to know what you're fixing first. You're going to write a lot of code in blood this way. It's not that people are particularly bad at driving it's that the road is exceptionally dynamic with many different users and use cases all trying to operate in a synchronized fashion with a dash of strong regulation sprinkled in.

[deleted]

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#65

Post by hamdingers »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #37
lotsofpulp wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With how cheap high definition cameras are, I don’t see why society needs a person to be physically present.

“Wasn’t me in the car”

"Don't care, car is registered to you, pay up"

This is only an issue because traffic code violations are treated like criminal acts instead of... code violations. We don't have this issue with parking tickets, there's no reason we should have it with automated red light and school bus cameras.

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#66

Post by righthand »

paxys wrote: post #2

I'm not complaining, but like..maybe also do this for the vast majority of human drivers who also flout these rules.

Yeah fair treatment for billion dollar corporations and robots and all. Who could forget. Waymo is such a lovely person, why would anyone ask them to do better?

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#67

Post by bink »

buckle8017 wrote: post #28
jmpman wrote: post #10

I’m also curious about school zones. The one near my house has a sign, “School” “Speed Limit 35” “7:00AM to 4:00PM School Days” Now, how does a robotaxi comply with that? Does it go to the district website and look up the current school year calendar? Or does it work like a human, and simply observe the patterns of the school traffic, and assume the general school calendar? I suspect it continues in Mad Max mode.

They should just always observe the lower speed limit. The difference is usually 5 or maybe 10 mph. Which over the distance of a school zone is nothing.

It can be dangerous though. In my area we have roads with speed limits of 45 that drop to 25 "when children are present". My EV always assumes children are present as it has no real way to determine if they are. Driving 25 in a 45 is dangerous for many reasons.

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#68

Post by terminalshort »

hamdingers wrote: post #63
terminalshort wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer the risk of death over constant surveillance

If you're want to operate a deadly vehicle in public you need to compromise, sorry.

Sounds like you're the one who needs to compromise because most people agree with me, or we would already have such a system.

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#70

Post by mastax »

themafia wrote: post #49
jefftk wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're going to write a lot of code in blood this way. Waymo has been doing a lot of driving, without any blood. They seems to be using a combination of (a) learning a lot from close calls like this one where no one was hurt even through it still behaved incorrectly and (b) being cautious so that even when it does something it shouldn't the risk is very low because it's moving slowly.

Waymo operates in a very limited scope and area. I would not attempt to extrapolate anything from their current performance.

If you were trying to evaluate that code deployed willy nilly in the wider world, sure. But that code exists within a framework which is deliberately limiting rollout in order to reduce risk. What matters is the performance of the combined code and risk management framework, which has proven to be quite good.

Airbus A320s wouldn’t be very safe if we let Joe Schmo off the street fly them however he likes, but we don’t. An A320 piloted within a regulated commercial aviation regime is very safe.

What matters is the safety of the entire system including the non-technological parts.

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