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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

#461

Post by dmix »

spacebanana7 wrote: post #430
dmix wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

Google is capable of burning truly huge amounts of money on projects that look exciting and have long term prospects (e.g Youtube). They could lose $10-20 billion a year on Waymo for a decade if needed. You can't just cancel Sergey's favourite pet project, regardless of economics.

That's easier to stay that when it's an R&D project doing pilot runs in a small set of cities. When you need tell shareholders you want to run a fleet of 100k cars then those numbers start becoming very serious.

Waymo also took $11B from outside investors, so it's just not Alphabet taking the risk

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

#462

Post by warumdarum »

pants2 wrote: post #451
nottorp wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the reality. For both them and Apple. By the way, can these robotaxis handle intersections that aren't at 90 degrees?

They have done a lot of testing in Pittsburgh which has some of the craziest roads and intersections anywhere, so I'd assume yes

Medieval italian towns?

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

#463

Post by qsera »

NiloCK wrote: post #432
qsera wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A Waymo is already a dramatically safer driver than a human, and it isn’t even close. Driving safe is not always about having faster reaction speed.

It's about many things, including reaction speed, visual awareness, specific expertise and informed decision making wrt braking or acceleration power. All of these are better in a modern self-driving car (I do not know whether Tesla falls into this category) than in a human. https://waymo.com/safety/impact/ Over a given driving distance, compared to humans, Waymos produce a 90% reduction in serious injury, 90% reduct…

Reaction speed does not matter if the driver can anticipate things before they happen. Actually I think what makes a good driver is ones ability to anticipate.

I don't think computers are anywhere near a human in that regard.

>visual awareness

A point cloud and some computer vision is not "visual awareness". Your statistics is also biased is of its source.

But in very controlled environments and for sedentary pace of driving, yes, self driving cars could be better than average drivers.

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

#464

Post by dybber »

nottorp wrote: post #425
Sharlin wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An alternate viewpoint is that it looks like after 20 years they still haven't even started solving weather issues that you encounter anywhere outside a California climate.

That's the reality. For both them and Apple. By the way, can these robotaxis handle intersections that aren't at 90 degrees?

Roundabouts with with 5-10 bicycles going in and out from the different roads all the time during rushhour (Copenhagen, Denmark)? I would love to see them looking for people’s tiny hand gestures and not just get stuck in our traffic over here.

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

#465

Post by JamesSwift »

Fernicia wrote: post #223
JamesSwift wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

His point is that humans are prone to the same error. The flooded engine damage doesn't come from humans recognising the danger of a flooded road and choosing not to attempt it.

Im responding to the implication that you "have to be ok with good enough" and that somehow this will be a mostly fine autonomous experience with this

> 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

But its just like LLMs. They will never be perfect, and so if you arent actively paying attention and steering the behavior then there is always a risk of spectacular failure. Because if you arent paying attention to "needing to [apply a] manual override" then all of a sudden the AI has `rm -rf /` and you had it in "bypass permissions" mode.

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

#466

Post by cheesecompiler »

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…

And to me it seems like you're justifying a lack of oversight and dangers of this technology for what purpose exactly? Why are you defending a corporation?

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

#467

Post by cyberax »

dmix wrote: post #352
cyberax wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

They don't actually _need_ to do any of that. They can just license the technology to automakers and local operators.

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

#468

Post by nottorp »

dybber wrote: post #464
nottorp wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the reality. For both them and Apple. By the way, can these robotaxis handle intersections that aren't at 90 degrees?

Roundabouts with with 5-10 bicycles going in and out from the different roads all the time during rushhour (Copenhagen, Denmark)? I would love to see them looking for people’s tiny hand gestures and not just get stuck in our traffic over here.

I've driven in the Netherlands once for a week. Now I have nightmares involving bicycles.

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

#469

Post by robotresearcher »

contubernio wrote: post #394
robotresearcher wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are companies. They can invest where they please. Call your government reps.

They depend on public investment to build and support road infrastructure. If one accepts your point of view, these companies depend on massive government subsidies. Or perhaps they should pay for the construction and upkeep of the roads their vehicles use.

These robot vehicles pay road use taxes, like other vehicles do. And when used commercially, they pay taxi tariffs. There's even an EV-specific road tariff in CA to make up for the lack of gasoline tax revenue.

I'm not sure why you would assume to the contrary.

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

#470

Post by xedrac »

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…

It's funny how people take this perspective for Waymo, but when it comes to Tesla FSD, they are much less forgiving, even though I think Tesla's performance is at least as good, if not better.
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