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GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff

reuters.com

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Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff

#121

Post by mattlondon »

ashtonkem wrote: post #111
mattlondon wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There will be a large market/human-lives-saved benefit from the tech though, even if we never reach 100% self-driving autonomy E.g. it is pretty standard now that pretty much every car on sale has automatic emergency braking that tries to avoid running over pedestrians even if the driver does not see them, many (but not all I admit) cars have lane-keeping assist that automatically keep the car in the lane, and will a…

I’ve always been extremely dubious about the “self driving to save lives” angle for one very specific reason: we already know how to save lives. Slow. The. Cars. Down. Oslo managed to get their car deaths down to 1 in 2019. 1, in a city of 600,000. Los Angeles killed 240 that year, or 36x more per capita. And yet, we don’t actually apply any known techniques to reduce fatalities. If we really cared about saving lives…

A car going at 5mph is still going to kill or main a pedestrian if it hits them.

I agree that speed and general "cars forever!" approach is not great, but there is always room for improvement ... e.g. could tech have saved that 1 person who died in Oslo? Why just stop at "the Oslo model"? Why not do that and autonomous tech? It would be worth it if it saved just a handful of lives a year.

Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff

#122

Post by rifflebutter »

supernova87a wrote: post #9

Funny, as they were just a few weeks ago (even during the lockdown) certain recruiters were saying they were aggressively hiring -- and are still listed as hiring for example here: https://layoffs.fyi/tracker/ Seems like suddenly they got worried about how long they can maintain the burn rate. Doesn't help that driving and commuting fell off the map.

There isn't necessarily any contradiction here. Lay off people whose work you no longer need / are not doing their jobs well, to hire people whose skills you need.

Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff

#123

Post by jcranmer »

Eridrus wrote: post #102
djsumdog wrote: post #86

It's still keeping the self-driving unit thought, even though there's a good chance it won't ever be successful. I don't think self-driving cars are realistic at all. I bet if you did a study and ran the numbers, it would be cheaper to put down rail on existing roads and make them rail-car only, automate those and subsidize rail cars. I feel in the minority in thinking self driving tech will ever be viable. I've work…

It's hard to find out how much has been invested in self driving cars, but I think you're massively underestimating the cost of building rail in the US. A billion dollars a mile is a realistic figure for rail in cities. NYC spent more than double that recently. For those costs, you're probably getting somewhere between 5 and 100 miles of rail.

A billion dollars per mile of rail is an excessively overpriced cost of construction that ought to have severe political pressure to explain why so much money is being wasted.

Construction cost of subways outside of places like NYC that apparently have no concept of cost control is typically about $100-300 million/mile.

Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff

#124

Post by rifflebutter »

ipsum2 wrote: post #70

Sort of off topic, I've noticed news articles have been very lax with basic editing: "Thursday, the layoff includes staff at an engineering team in Padasedna, California" The article says "Reporting By Jane Lanhee Lee and David Shepardson; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and David Gregorio". Two editors missed the typo.

I noticed that too :D

Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff

#125

Post by rifflebutter »

jfoster wrote: post #40
jiofih wrote: post #37

Well, can someone explain how does a company with no product and no market get affected by the pandemic? Seems like a cop out yet again.

Cruise is part of GM.

Correction -- Cruise is majority-owned by GM but not really a GM subsidiary after SoftBank invested in it.

Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff

#126

Post by ashtonkem »

mattlondon wrote: post #121
ashtonkem wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve always been extremely dubious about the “self driving to save lives” angle for one very specific reason: we already know how to save lives. Slow. The. Cars. Down. Oslo managed to get their car deaths down to 1 in 2019. 1, in a city of 600,000. Los Angeles killed 240 that year, or 36x more per capita. And yet, we don’t actually apply any known techniques to reduce fatalities. If we really cared about saving lives…

A car going at 5mph is still going to kill or main a pedestrian if it hits them. I agree that speed and general "cars forever!" approach is not great, but there is always room for improvement ... e.g. could tech have saved that 1 person who died in Oslo? Why just stop at "the Oslo model"? Why not do that and autonomous tech? It would be worth it if it saved just a handful of lives a year.

Obviously cars and pedestrians should be separated, but you are dramatically understating the impact speed has on pedestrian survival rates.

At 5mph your chance of surviving a collision is extremely high. Heck, you have a 93% chance of surviving a 20mph crash, depending on your age. Survival rates drop off quickly with speed however, with only 80% surviving at 30mph, and 45mph being a 50/50 chance for most of the population.

The effect is that slowing cars down from 35mph to 20mph in areas where pedestrians are close to cars could potentially double the chance of a pedestrian surviving a crash. And that’s not even accounting for how much less likely a collision is to happen at 20mph than 35mph.

Source: https://www.propublica.org/article/unsafe-at-many-speeds

Edit: of course, we can and should add more tech to make cars safer. That’s why backup cameras and seat belts are mandatory, and that’s a good thing. But as an argument for self driving cars, I think that they really come up short when there are tons of effective strategies available right now that we aren’t applying. And that’s my point.

Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff

#127

Post by throwaway1940 »

FreedomToCreate wrote: post #26

Just a note, but this is a perfect time for companies to lay off low performers without getting a lot of flak. This is usually the case when you see companies lay off people while continuing to hire as well.

From what I’ve heard about the Airbnb and Lyft layoffs, many people who were affected were actually high performers who were paid well but working on projects that were deprioritized by upper management.

Laying off these people allowed them to satisfy their budget cuts while laying off relatively few people.

Continuing to hire sounds strange, but if the offers are lower the company will still save money. Pausing the recruiting pipeline would also hurt them once things start picking up again.

Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff

#128

Post by economicslol »

djsumdog wrote: post #86

It's still keeping the self-driving unit thought, even though there's a good chance it won't ever be successful. I don't think self-driving cars are realistic at all. I bet if you did a study and ran the numbers, it would be cheaper to put down rail on existing roads and make them rail-car only, automate those and subsidize rail cars. I feel in the minority in thinking self driving tech will ever be viable. I've work…

>I don't think self-driving cars are realistic at all

They said the same thing about a Computer beating a Human at Chess or Go, or Radiology, or countless other examples. I don't see why a random person on hackernews would be any more correct than any of the previous naysayers.

Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff

#129

Post by zelly »

rosywoozlechan wrote: post #88
rtkwe wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's going to be a bit weird because a lot of those should come back because the underlying business didn't suddenly become nonviable.

> the underlying business didn't suddenly become nonviable They may have. We don't know when or if things will go back to the way they were before March 2020 and how consumer and employer behavior will change. For example, maybe movie theaters are completely screwed. Except as a novelty, the big business chains may not survive. Universal Studios is already pushing back on theater release windows and no live-action mo…

> Employers will probably maintain work from home and cut back on office space. All those jobs that support maintaining offices may not come back either.

I think there will be a greater demand for office real estate because suddenly everyone needs double the space and (spacious) cubicles or standalone offices will make a comeback.

That is, unless every company goes full remote.

Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff

#130

Post by kgin »

djsumdog wrote: post #86

It's still keeping the self-driving unit thought, even though there's a good chance it won't ever be successful. I don't think self-driving cars are realistic at all. I bet if you did a study and ran the numbers, it would be cheaper to put down rail on existing roads and make them rail-car only, automate those and subsidize rail cars. I feel in the minority in thinking self driving tech will ever be viable. I've work…

We may never have 100% level 5 driving.

But with level 4 + remote assistance, you don't need to support all the edge cases to have a car with no steering wheel. You only need to reduce the need for remote assistance enough to make the economics work out.

We will all have been riding around happily in cars without steering wheels for decades before "true self driving" comes to pass.

It's possible that remote assistance centers will never shut down entirely, even 100 years from now, still waiting on the off-chance that a .00000000001% edge case pops up that the system still can't handle.

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