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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

#131

Post by themafia »

dhbradshaw wrote: post #123

To me this doesn't seem like a disaster but just the kind of thing that happens as you role out a service and expose it to new challenges. Presumably they haven't had the chance to do a lot of flood training but now they have that chance. The huge advantage they have over people in general is that ideally if they figure this out then it will stay figured out. Then they can slowly role out and watch for the next hitch…

If your premise is "robotaxis are so much better than human drivers" then this is almost a disaster. This is only the 10th city they've deployed to, all in the south, and nowhere there's significantly inclement weather. It does not bode well for their expansion plans.

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

#132

Post by slongfield »

retrocryptid wrote: post #93
paxys wrote: post #13

Driving through an obviously flooded street thinking "I'll easily make it" and getting stuck in the middle? Yeah, these cars have achieved human level intelligence.

That being said... it's actually somewhat uncommon for humans to drive into flooded streets. To the degree that people think it's notable enough to take videos and post them to social media. I don't have the data, but would be interested to see how many times per passenger mile travelled human-directed and remotely-operated vehicles like Weymos drove into flooded streets. I can appreciate the cameras and lidar on the…

As far as I can tell from these articles, driving into a flood has happened twice to Waymos, once in Texas and once in Atlanta? It does seem like it's pretty uncommon.

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

#133

Post by themafia »

paxys wrote: post #13

Driving through an obviously flooded street thinking "I'll easily make it" and getting stuck in the middle? Yeah, these cars have achieved human level intelligence.

Ask the car, in the sense you can, why it drove into the water.

Then ask the human.

I'm not sure you'd walk away the idea that they have equivalent intelligence. The human at least knew the water was there and took a risk, the car, presumably, had no idea what was in front of it and drove into it anyways.

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

#134

Post by ACCount37 »

RationPhantoms wrote: post #119
etempleton wrote: post #90

This is really my bear case against AI. I am not against it. I actually think it is really neat! But we have been working on driverless cars for how long and spent how much? And still things like a flooded roadway completely throw them. Tesla failed to deliver driverless cars but now is pivoting to the much more complex fully autonomous robots. And we can’t get AI to stop hallucinating facts, but any day we are going…

I will posit something that guides my own thinking about this; robotaxis will never drink and drive. I'll take whatever flavor of mistake they conjure over that. I can deal with stupidity, I cannot (and don't want to) deal with malice.

"No DUI" is a big part of why even the current, flawed and markedly subhuman, self-driving cars casually beat human drivers on road safety.

A self-driving car AI pays less attention than a human driver at his best. It isn't as aware as a human driver at his best. It doesn't have the spatial reasoning, the intuitive understanding of physics and road dynamics that matches that of a human driver at his best.

Human drivers still fall behind statistically, because human drivers are rarely at their best. And the worst of human drivers? It's really, really bad.

AI is flawed, but a car autopilot doesn't get behind the wheel after 3 beers and a pill of benadryl. It doesn't get tired, doesn't get impaired, doesn't lose sleep or succumb to road rage. It always performs the same.

Until it gets a software update, that is. The road performance of an average car AI only ever goes up. I don't think that's true for human drivers, frankly.

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

#135

Post by SoftTalker »

tintor wrote: post #122
mschulkind wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree with basically all of this, and find the FSD on my Tesla to be quite useful, a question pops into my mind. Why can't Waymo ALSO develop the same smarts and just also solve the sensor fusion issue such that they can use the right set of sensors in the right environmental conditions, and then leapfrog Tesla's capabilities?

The main reason Tesla's don't have LIDAR is hardware cost and maintenance cost, not improved safety.

Maybe also that cars with a LIDAR rig on the roof are appallingly ugly.

Tesla wants to make EVs that look like normal cars (Cybertruck being the oddball here, admittedly).

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

#136

Post by paxys »

notahacker wrote: post #108
paxys wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self driving cars are not going to be accepted if they have only marginally better success rates than humans. Just look at the news. Every minor self driving incident is endlessly magnified by the media while millions of human-caused accidents are just a part of life. That's just how our brains work. All major decisions are made primarily based on emotion, not analytics.

Human accidents don't get treated as "just a part of life", serious human driving errors are often considered so egregious that the person making the error picks up a driving ban or even a custodial sentence. So it's actually entirely rational that the bar for companies to be able to ship software that makes those fatal errors without consequence other than an insurance payout should be higher (especially since when…

There are over 6 million auto accidents in the US per year. How many of them make the news? I'm willing to bet that most people don't even know about pedestrian deaths that occur a few blocks away from where they live, at intersections they walk through every day. Meanwhile the same people will read about how a self driving car got into a fender bender on the other side of the country and confidently proclaim "this technology isn't safe, I'm never going to use it".

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

#137

Post by keeda »

This is just part of the slog that autonomous driving was always going to be.

Many many years ago I happened to be in a conversation with one of the guys on a team that participated in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. It was only the second such race after the 2004 one, but arguably the one which set off the autonomous driving race we see today. (Sebastian Thrun's team came in 2nd.)

I went into the conversation thinking it was going to be an extremely challenging but tractable sensors + control-systems problem. But by the end of the conversation I was like, OMG this is going to be a long-haul slog of solving an unending stream of problems, some potentially even AI-complete (i.e. requiring human-level judgment.)

We mostly discussed why his and most other teams failed and the failures were so myriad and so technically intractable that I could not see a path to full self-driving for at least two decades. And all of this was offroad, so it didn't even approach the challenges of sharing human-occupied streets. I cannot remember any details unfortunately, but I remember that one car got stuck in a loop due to a problem that would have been trivial for a human to bypass... but that required human-level judgment. As an analogy it was something like a soft obstacle that could safely be driven over. But for the car to know that it would require a database and an "understanding" of all possible obstacles. An LLM could have helped, but back then they were still firmly in the realm of SciFi.

So the only feasible solution was to painstakingly identify all the edge-cases and work through them slowly, carefully, one-by-one. Which is what Waymo has been doing. This is also why when Elon made his "full self-"driving announcements I knew he had absolutely NO idea what he was talking about, and he was likely going to move fast and break people.

Flooded streets is just another "bump on the road" to full self-driving, but it seems we're actually getting there now. In retrospect, my 2-decade estimate was surprisingly accurate, I have no idea how I landed on that particular number!

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

#138

Post by aerhardt »

etempleton wrote: post #90

This is really my bear case against AI. I am not against it. I actually think it is really neat! But we have been working on driverless cars for how long and spent how much? And still things like a flooded roadway completely throw them. Tesla failed to deliver driverless cars but now is pivoting to the much more complex fully autonomous robots. And we can’t get AI to stop hallucinating facts, but any day we are going…

I’ve just been to Austin where self-driving cars are everywhere but found to my disappointment that they can’t do trips to the airport.

To your point, knowledge work, as a whole is a much larger and complex domain than self-driving.

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

#139

Post by SoftTalker »

LatencyKills wrote: post #111
bhelkey wrote: post #109

Maybe a dumb question, why do electric cars have issues with water? My understanding was that ICE cars have trouble because water get's drawn into the engine. Water in the engine causes it to stall. And the engine must have air in flow and out flow. An electric car doesn't need air in the same way (no oxygen to ignite with gasoline, no air to compress and expand). Shouldn't electric cars to much better at driving thr…

Deep water can still damage an EV by getting into connectors, sensors, wheel bearings, brakes, and cabin electronics. They can also float just like a regular car.

Yep if they are watertight they will float, if they aren't, they'll fill up with water.

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

#140

Post by abfan1127 »

ge96 wrote: post #15
paxys wrote: post #13

Driving through an obviously flooded street thinking "I'll easily make it" and getting stuck in the middle? Yeah, these cars have achieved human level intelligence.

Just get a jeep snorkle

jeep snorkels are for air intakes for engines. electric cars don't have air intakes. they have air cooling for batteries... I suppose you could snorkel those.
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