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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

#351

Post by throwaway2037 »

antonymoose wrote: post #167
outside2344 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that they aren't a usual event is probably exactly the challenge here.

It may not be usual in Atlanta itself, but living on the Southeastern coast within a mile or two of the water, for 30+ years, it’s a surprisingly common occurrence. I’ve got old photos around of kayaking through downtown Charleston during college, for instance, where the street flooding is not only usual but a many times per season occurrence. Lots of seaside areas have the same issue.

    > it’s a surprisingly common occurrence
That is wild. What happens to all of the flooded property? Do they tear-down and rebuild everything after every major flood? Or massive rennovations? It cannot believe this is truly possible as flood insurance would become impossible expensive.

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

#352

Post by dmix »

cyberax wrote: post #341
jimbo808 wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The huge disadvantage they have over people is that their cars cost $250k, require a workforce of people to retrieve and repair them, maintain them, clean them, monitor them, etc. They are more expensive to operate than a normal car with a human driver, so far. The break-even point requires a lot of problems to be solved, and even then, the upside is not looking to be astronomical in the best case.

The cost of Waymo cars is immaterial right now. They are not production models, they are test mules. So you might as well make them nice-looking. Real mass-production cars will be comparable with regular cars in price. The sensor suite is not _that_ expensive.

Waymo is talking about scaling up operations globally and the market is competitive, the cost 100% does matter.

They need large Chinese production lines for lidar, integration kits for cars plus the in car computing, repair pipelines for both sensors and cars, real estate to park cars, the infrastructure/processes to clean and charge them quickly, teams of remote drivers, insurance policies, etc. Then they need to compete with mature decentralized Uber and taxi fleets who push their car/maintenance costs onto drivers, while Waymo grows adoption of their mobile app where prices will matter if they aren't as perfectly reliable and low risk as hiring a human. The self driving novelty effect won't last forever

All of that requires large capital expenditure and careful business models

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

#353

Post by throwaway2037 »

sarchertech wrote: post #301
bluGill wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience with them is they only last a short time, and there is almost always an alternate route so you are not shutting anything down, just slowing things down a little.

Sure if your robot tax is correctly able to distinguish between a quarter of an inch of water on the road and 2 inches or more, which doesn’t seem to be the case currently.

Stupid question from a non-driver: How do humans tell the depth of a flooded road? Unless it is an insanely high flood (total change in landscape appearance), it seems difficult to tell the difference between 5cm and 30-60cm of flooding.

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

#354

Post by glenngillen »

ACCount37 wrote: post #120
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…

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…

Yeah, while the "average" person might be able to gracefully handle these situations there's still a lot of people who do things that to me seem obviously silly and avoidable.

Locally there's a bridge that is regularly hit by human drivers. A bridge! Not a rare weather pattern, not some temporary and surprising change in conditions. A physical structure that has literally been there for over 100 years. The approach has numerous warnings, flashing lights, and swinging poles that will hit your vehicle and alert you that you're too high to clear the underpass if you continue. And yet... it's so common that there's websites and instagram tags and all manner of things to track and laugh at the people that continue to do it anyway.

FYI, 59 days since the last incident apparently: https://howmanydayssincemontaguestreetbridgehasbeenhit.com

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

#355

Post by throwaway2037 »

48terry wrote: post #216
ACCount37 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> A part of growing up is learning to put up with "good enough". "I feel content with good enough in this case." - quote from child whose body got folded in half by a Tesla Your growing up and adulthood sounds a lot like settling for mediocrity from those who push shit on us without asking if we ever wanted it. Floods aren't a special edge case, they happen all the time. The people making these are so stupid and blin…

    > what if it isn't a perfectly dry and sunny California day
What a silly comment. Waymo is operating in San Francisco, Houston, and Orlando. All of those get lots of rain. Specifically, SF gets lots of "small rain" and Houston and Orlando are more likely to get short bursts of heavy rain.

The irony of people who are against self-driving cars for safety reasons: They are already much safer than regular drivers -- accidents and deaths per millions of kilometers driven. Also, the software is continuously improving. Are regular drivers also continuously improving at the same rate? If anything, they probably get modestly better from 20s into middle age (40s/50s), then begin to decline with age.

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

#356

Post by throwaway2037 »

stephenr wrote: post #344
Detrytus wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If a child is "folded in half" by someone looking at their phone, no one accepts that as "good enough" But of course we do. Yes, we punish the individual driver that did it, but we still allow humans to drive cars. We accept the fact that driving a car carries sone risks, but we value the convenience of getting to our destination easily more than we value lives of those kids that will get killed from time to time.

> Yes, we punish the individual driver that did it, but we still allow humans to drive cars. Yes because bad drivers aren't representative of all drivers. You also missed the part where laws are changed, safety laws are strengthened. Oh wait. You're American aren't you. In most of the world, laws are put in place to protect people. The Cybertruck for example, cannot be legally driven (regardless of not being for sale…

    > In my home state it's a finable offence to touch or even have your phone sitting in your lap while driving a car, and they've put detection cameras in place to enforce these laws.
I never heard about this. Where?

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

#357

Post by dmix »

whimsicalism wrote: post #14
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

Tesla's already doing it too

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

#358

Post by stephenr »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #356
stephenr wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, we punish the individual driver that did it, but we still allow humans to drive cars. Yes because bad drivers aren't representative of all drivers. You also missed the part where laws are changed, safety laws are strengthened. Oh wait. You're American aren't you. In most of the world, laws are put in place to protect people. The Cybertruck for example, cannot be legally driven (regardless of not being for sale…

> In my home state it's a finable offence to touch or even have your phone sitting in your lap while driving a car, and they've put detection cameras in place to enforce these laws. I never heard about this. Where?

South Australia. Possibly other Australian states too, I haven't checked (I live overseas currently)

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

#359

Post by dmix »

BobBagwill wrote: post #209

You're missing the obvious. Waymo trains with human driver data, and idiotic humans drive into deep water constantly. Oh, you want Waymo's to drive better than humans? Deep Thought paused for a moment's reflection. "Tricky," he said finally.

That's not how the training data works. It's not just a constant stream of human driving footage with no regard for good or bad performance

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

#360

Post by throwaway2037 »

Theodores wrote: post #189
RationPhantoms wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The option that doesn't exist in America is to get the bus. Before the pandemic I was commuting by bus and this meant an early start to the day, but not as early as what the bus driver had. The bus had its own community, so I had my 'bus buddies' and the journey would always be quick because of the social aspect to it. The bus drivers knew the customers and their needs. What the bus drivers had that is absent in robo…

    > What the bus drivers had that is absent in robotaxis is working class pride.
You lost me here. It is too much virtue signalling to bear. Did we also "lose working class pride" when factories became (largely) automated? We did not.
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