221–230 of 498 posts
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you are describing a train
That's the bit. For some reason trains come up on these threads all the time like it's some kind of gotcha alternative solution to driverless cars, forgetting that cars can go to your front door.
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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 drive…
It's not too dissimilar from the Figure demo that was done on X/Twitter recently. Everyone was pointing out what a lackluster demo that was and here I was thinking the total opposite, it worked for 8 hours with no sexual harassment training, KPIs, management oversight, breaks or co-worker chatting. That's the worst job it'll likely ever do. We just witnessed the floor of it's capabilities.
My hope/vision with robotic cars is we make cities more human-friendly/accessible. I want revitalized/bustling downtowns of bikes/bodies and not, what some cities are, which are glorified parking lots. I want to be less alone as an american. I would a physical sense of community injected back into my veins.
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The "responsible adults" know that chasing perfection gets you nowhere fast. A part of growing up is learning to put up with "good enough". A car that only fails in a road conditions edge case is good enough for the vast majority of cases. You accept that, and issue a manual override for when that edge case pops up. Then you add that edge case to your training sets. Then the issue never comes up again. If you think t…
Well its not that simple. In the same way that throwing an LLM into a process will always have a risk of blowing up spectacularly. In this case it failed open. It didnt recognize that it was in an edge case (which itself is an edge case). So what are you proposing to be the solution to that? If the car itself does not recognize that its in an abnormal situation that needs intervention then how do you intervene?
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In ATL this happens often enough that it's not a shock when it happens, we have lots of drainage problems here. I agree that I would have assumed Waymo had tested in events like this, but clearly not. So what I can say is running in ATL is a great test case for these events, and also the people who live here don't do a better job than Waymo did. There were dozens of people who ruined their cars yesterday trying to dr…
As much as one could expect waymo to train on it, one could also expect a functioning city to not have flooded streets
There are problems.
There is money you can throw at those problems.
And there are some problems that are rare & low impact enough that it's not worth throwing money at them.
See also: keeping snowplows in Atlanta.
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“More blood” seems to imply that somebody has already been hurt or died from Waymo driving into floods, but I don’t think that is the case?
As far as I know, nobody has been hurt from floods while in a Waymo. They hide their safety data from the public though ( https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/28/22906513/waymo-lawsuit-ca... ) so it's hard to say for sure. They've certainly been involved in crashes, killed pets (I actually give them a pass on the bodega cat), run over elementary school children, etc. Waymo has said it's only a matter of time until they ki…
Especially your example with "run over elementary school children" is duplicitous. They showed how much less dangerous the impact from the Waymo was.
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.
This is why I personally feel like Tesla's approach is more likely to "win". The fundamental blocker to self-driving cars is not sensing / sensor fusion, it is intelligence. And the Tesla approach seems much more likely to achieve functional intelligence than Waymo's.
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In ATL this happens often enough that it's not a shock when it happens, we have lots of drainage problems here. I agree that I would have assumed Waymo had tested in events like this, but clearly not. So what I can say is running in ATL is a great test case for these events, and also the people who live here don't do a better job than Waymo did. There were dozens of people who ruined their cars yesterday trying to dr…
As much as one could expect waymo to train on it, one could also expect a functioning city to not have flooded streets
Functioning cities often shutdown for a day here or there for weather. I live in a northern city where we laugh at southern cities for shutting down for 1 inch of snow - but it is the right thing for them because it doesn't happen enough to be worth dealing with. If my city shutdown for 6 inches of snow we would be shutdown unacceptably often so we instead have higher taxes to pay for all the infrastructure needed to deal with snow (though honestly this isn't much $ in the total budget).
Which is to say cities need to figure out what is the best use of their efforts/money. It is wrong to fault Atlanta for not dealing with this. If you live there you as a voter should learn all the pros and cons (I suspect there are some unexpected environmental ones) and consider if you should vote for a change or just deal with it. The rest of us won't don't live there though should keep our fingers out of their local issues.
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.
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I wouldn't call floods "very common"
"Floods are the most common and widespread of all weather-related natural disasters...Flooding occurs in every U.S. state and territory, and is a threat experienced anywhere in the world that receives rain." ( https://www.nssl.noaa.gov/education/svrwx101/floods/ ) If they were going to plan for any kind of dangerous weather, flooding should have been very high up on that list. People tend to take flash flood warnings…
This ain't Arizona - Atlanta has REAL weather.