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Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods

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Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods

#11

Post by moomoo11 »

colordrops wrote: post #10

Self driving will never handle all corner cases until they essentially have a frontal cortex. They probably need something like an LLM to help with very high level abstract situations, e.g. avoiding a hurricane like someone else mentioned in this thread.

how would a llm help

maybe a little biological brain engineered to think it is a car with api access to the car hardware via the llm?

imagine you get into the car and in the center console you just see a floating brain in vat like fallout

Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods

#12

Post by Jabrov »

VoidWhisperer wrote: post #8
jvanderbot wrote: post #5

Snark aside, there will probably always be conditions in which waymo is not the right answer. Are they going to do hurricane evacuation? I think removing the driver just necessitates this.

While this is going to be an overly optimistic scenario: Imagine how smooth a hurricane evacuation would go if _everyone_ used a self-driving car to do the evacuation - atleast there might be less gridlock than there is during any usual hurricane evacuations. And assuming the self driving cars don't do something stupid that causes every car behind it to essentially lock up and stop moving That said, I know a scenario…

Why would there be less gridlock if people were in a driverless car instead of a regular car?

Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods

#14

Post by whimsicalism »

colordrops wrote: post #10

Self driving will never handle all corner cases until they essentially have a frontal cortex. They probably need something like an LLM to help with very high level abstract situations, e.g. avoiding a hurricane like someone else mentioned in this thread.

this is absolutely already a thing under development, you can see Waymo is hiring for reasoning roles

Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods

#16

Post by quantummagic »

colordrops wrote: post #10

Self driving will never handle all corner cases until they essentially have a frontal cortex. They probably need something like an LLM to help with very high level abstract situations, e.g. avoiding a hurricane like someone else mentioned in this thread.

A frontal cortex isn't enough; there are plenty of corner cases that humans fail at too. The real test is if self-driving performs on par, or better than, humans in the vast majority of cases. If it saves 50,000 lives a year to go with self-driving, it's a net-win even if there are a few people who die in situations where they would have survived with a human driver behind the wheel.

Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods

#17

Post by kjkjadksj »

VoidWhisperer wrote: post #8
jvanderbot wrote: post #5

Snark aside, there will probably always be conditions in which waymo is not the right answer. Are they going to do hurricane evacuation? I think removing the driver just necessitates this.

While this is going to be an overly optimistic scenario: Imagine how smooth a hurricane evacuation would go if _everyone_ used a self-driving car to do the evacuation - atleast there might be less gridlock than there is during any usual hurricane evacuations. And assuming the self driving cars don't do something stupid that causes every car behind it to essentially lock up and stop moving That said, I know a scenario…

It would be a failure. Turns out they do something stupid. People tested this in sf by calling a bunch of waymos at once for a prank, but I guess that is the best case example of what a panicked evacuation on the service might be like. It was like a ddos attack. They ended up gridlocking themselves and turned it into a real life version of one of those rush hour board games. No one got out of the little area they called the waymos in.

Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods

#18

Post by steveBK123 »

VoidWhisperer wrote: post #8
jvanderbot wrote: post #5

Snark aside, there will probably always be conditions in which waymo is not the right answer. Are they going to do hurricane evacuation? I think removing the driver just necessitates this.

While this is going to be an overly optimistic scenario: Imagine how smooth a hurricane evacuation would go if _everyone_ used a self-driving car to do the evacuation - atleast there might be less gridlock than there is during any usual hurricane evacuations. And assuming the self driving cars don't do something stupid that causes every car behind it to essentially lock up and stop moving That said, I know a scenario…

I mean the logical conclusion is a dedicated lane for automated cars..

At which point we've reinvented privatized buses with a last mile convenience vs greatly reduced throughput trade-off.

Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods

#19

Post by lukevp »

Jabrov wrote: post #12
VoidWhisperer wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While this is going to be an overly optimistic scenario: Imagine how smooth a hurricane evacuation would go if _everyone_ used a self-driving car to do the evacuation - atleast there might be less gridlock than there is during any usual hurricane evacuations. And assuming the self driving cars don't do something stupid that causes every car behind it to essentially lock up and stop moving That said, I know a scenario…

Why would there be less gridlock if people were in a driverless car instead of a regular car?

Traffic is usually caused by adding inefficiencies across a system with little slack - someone brakes too hard or too early, and if all the cars are stacked up, that one brake event can ripple through hundreds of following cars, getting worse and worse because each person brakes more. Self driving cars can perfectly sync up and move like a train. Theoretically there could be no traffic on highways if all cars are self-driving. Rarely is a highway so full that there couldn’t be more cars (eg. The entrance ramps are backed up) which implies the issues are related to the driving flow and not the capacity of the street itself.

Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods

#20

Post by paxys »

Jabrov wrote: post #12
VoidWhisperer wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While this is going to be an overly optimistic scenario: Imagine how smooth a hurricane evacuation would go if _everyone_ used a self-driving car to do the evacuation - atleast there might be less gridlock than there is during any usual hurricane evacuations. And assuming the self driving cars don't do something stupid that causes every car behind it to essentially lock up and stop moving That said, I know a scenario…

Why would there be less gridlock if people were in a driverless car instead of a regular car?

Same reason there's less gridlock when people obey traffic lights and other rules of the road and don't brake randomly. If every car on the road drove itself then there would never be traffic.
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