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GM's Cruise alleged to rely on human operators to achieve "autonomous" driving

nytimes.com

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Re: GM's Cruise alleged to rely on human operators to achieve "autonomous" driving

#121

Post by patrick451 »

kvogt wrote: post #60

Cruise CEO here. Some relevant context follows. Cruise AVs are being remotely assisted (RA) 2-4% of the time on average, in complex urban environments. This is low enough already that there isn’t a huge cost benefit to optimizing much further, especially given how useful it is to have humans review things in certain situations. The stat quoted by nyt is how frequently the AVs initiate an RA session. Of those, many ar…

It's telling that you declined a request for an interview, yet still feel the need to clarify on HN. You'd be doing a lot better with transparency and public trust by just taking the interview.

Re: GM's Cruise alleged to rely on human operators to achieve "autonomous" driving

#122

Post by pj_mukh »

patrick451 wrote: post #119
pj_mukh wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“ They should not only not cause incidents, they should also not make existing incidents far worse because of terrible decisions.” Just FYI, it made this terrible decision because people were mad at cruise for stopping in the middle of the road to decide if it was safe to proceed. They were asked to change that behavior and pull over and they did, this time just dragging a human along. So yes let’s set these absurdly…

This is the problem with self driving cars. A human has the awareness to pull over when it's appropriate and also is able to recognize they just ran over somebody and it's best to stop completely. But AVs seem to just have a dumb if/else statement to control this behavior (yes, I know it is actually more complex than that, I work in this space. But that is how they behave). Driving is infinitely complex. It's becomin…

A humans awareness is not constant. It waxes and wanes, even more so with cellphones in hand.

The status quo is indefensible so setting up moving unknowable goal posts for something to replace them doesn’t make sense to me.

This particular problem can be easily solved by cameras in the under carriage to make sure there aren’t humans shoved in there by other bad drivers. I wouldn’t mind making that a requirement across the board and moving on to the next challenge the unpredictability of human drivers throws at a repeatable robotic system.

There is no evidence that there is a magical different approach that will work better.

Re: GM's Cruise alleged to rely on human operators to achieve "autonomous" driving

#123

Post by pj_mukh »

wolverine876 wrote: post #108
pj_mukh wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm? I saw it exactly the opposite. A lot of people in the autonomous driving industry are driven by exactly what Vogt describes (little girl in the stroller etc.). See also Chris Urmson of Waymo fame's TED talk, he talks about a similar motivation[1]. Its a fallacy everyone conveniently ignores. The woman the Cruise car ran over was actually first hit by a human driver who is still at-large , not a peep about him. T…

> A lot of people in the autonomous driving industry are driven by exactly what Vogt describes (little girl in the stroller etc.). See also Chris Urmson of Waymo fame's TED talk, he talks about a similar motivation[1]. To me, that's evidence that it's performative. First, it's a talking point; it looks, smells, walks and talks just like typical corporate/industry framing and messaging, with even a 'think of the child…

Whether the corporate honchos are "sincere" or not is wholly irrelevant to me (and frankly unknowable).

"Think of the children" is usually a vapid misdirect, except of course in the objective measurable leading cause of death right? So in terms of issues where "something must be done", this should be objectively pretty high.

Either we drastically reduce the number of cars on the road and restructure American society around public transit (I wholly support this), or we take the humans out of the equation by making things autonomous. Or some combination of both.

I dont care if this happens under some grand socialist program if we so hate corporations/industries, but it needs to happen yesterday.

The rest is just status quo protection which is unacceptable.

Re: GM's Cruise alleged to rely on human operators to achieve "autonomous" driving

#124

Post by dventimi »

southerntofu wrote: post #114
kvogt wrote: post #60

Cruise CEO here. Some relevant context follows. Cruise AVs are being remotely assisted (RA) 2-4% of the time on average, in complex urban environments. This is low enough already that there isn’t a huge cost benefit to optimizing much further, especially given how useful it is to have humans review things in certain situations. The stat quoted by nyt is how frequently the AVs initiate an RA session. Of those, many ar…

Hello Cruise CEO, there's a huge market for durable and profitable "dumb" cars. Why don't you get on that market? In a time when electronics represents over 30% of car costs and ~50% of car failures, people like me would be happy to buy a car that doesn't suck (low-tech) and can be maintained for decades for a reasonable price. In the meantime, i'll keep buying old Renault/Peugeot cars from the fifties/sixties i gues…

Why don't YOU get on that market if you think it's so worthwhile?

Re: GM's Cruise alleged to rely on human operators to achieve "autonomous" driving

#125

Post by dventimi »

tcoff91 wrote: post #87
amluto wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? 100% is scalable, and it’s the common case today. 2% scales just as linearly as 100% does.

That 2% is not the person in the vehicle, it’s cruise employees. It doesn’t scale because it is paid employees intervening instead of the customer driving. It scales in comparison to ride sharing competition but not in terms of people owning the vehicles.

> it [does not scale] in terms of people owning the vehicles

Can you clarify what you mean here?

Re: GM's Cruise alleged to rely on human operators to achieve "autonomous" driving

#126

Post by dventimi »

jdjdjdhhd wrote: post #115
kvogt wrote: post #60

Cruise CEO here. Some relevant context follows. Cruise AVs are being remotely assisted (RA) 2-4% of the time on average, in complex urban environments. This is low enough already that there isn’t a huge cost benefit to optimizing much further, especially given how useful it is to have humans review things in certain situations. The stat quoted by nyt is how frequently the AVs initiate an RA session. Of those, many ar…

Can spying be disabled on your cars?

Wut

Re: GM's Cruise alleged to rely on human operators to achieve "autonomous" driving

#127

Post by patrick451 »

pj_mukh wrote: post #122
patrick451 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the problem with self driving cars. A human has the awareness to pull over when it's appropriate and also is able to recognize they just ran over somebody and it's best to stop completely. But AVs seem to just have a dumb if/else statement to control this behavior (yes, I know it is actually more complex than that, I work in this space. But that is how they behave). Driving is infinitely complex. It's becomin…

A humans awareness is not constant. It waxes and wanes, even more so with cellphones in hand. The status quo is indefensible so setting up moving unknowable goal posts for something to replace them doesn’t make sense to me. This particular problem can be easily solved by cameras in the under carriage to make sure there aren’t humans shoved in there by other bad drivers. I wouldn’t mind making that a requirement acros…

> A humans awareness is not constant. It waxes and wanes, even more so with cellphones in hand.

And even with supposedly* perfectly consistent awareness, the automation still failed catastrophically.

> The status quo is indefensible so setting up moving unknowable goal posts for something to replace them doesn’t make sense to me.

AVs are not better than the status quo, making them even less defensible. A human would not have drug that poor women for 20 feet because it was compelled to execute a pull-over maneuver. Even an OCD psychopath knows better.

* None of these things run actual realtime operating systems with fixed, predictable deadlines. Compute requirements can vary wildly depending on the circumstance. When compute spikes, consistency drops. A robot can only way approximate constant awareness by massively undersubcribing the compute budget.

Re: GM's Cruise alleged to rely on human operators to achieve "autonomous" driving

#128

Post by pj_mukh »

patrick451 wrote: post #127
pj_mukh wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A humans awareness is not constant. It waxes and wanes, even more so with cellphones in hand. The status quo is indefensible so setting up moving unknowable goal posts for something to replace them doesn’t make sense to me. This particular problem can be easily solved by cameras in the under carriage to make sure there aren’t humans shoved in there by other bad drivers. I wouldn’t mind making that a requirement acros…

> A humans awareness is not constant. It waxes and wanes, even more so with cellphones in hand. And even with supposedly* perfectly consistent awareness, the automation still failed catastrophically. > The status quo is indefensible so setting up moving unknowable goal posts for something to replace them doesn’t make sense to me. AVs are not better than the status quo, making them even less defensible. A human would…

"AVs are not better than the status quo"

We don't have the data to claim this, this confidently, and the only way to get the data is let the experiment keep running in the real world (only place that matters).

There will obviously with holes in the awareness (literal missing cameras under the car) that's what the testing is for. If someone says they can sit in a room, in a simulation environment and come up with all potential crazy things humans can do around autonomous cars, they are lying to you.

To me, its either this, or we pull all human drivers off the road, restructure our cities and put em on public transit (wholly support this).

I re-iterate: The status quo is unacceptable and indefensible. The human driver who actually caused the accident has still not been held to account (and probably never will be).

P.S: I accept your point about the system being non-realtime. Though I think there are some critical safety systems (LIDAR/RADAR cutoffs etc.) that might have a real-time response?

Re: GM's Cruise alleged to rely on human operators to achieve "autonomous" driving

#130

Post by oldgradstudent »

pj_mukh wrote: post #128
patrick451 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A humans awareness is not constant. It waxes and wanes, even more so with cellphones in hand. And even with supposedly* perfectly consistent awareness, the automation still failed catastrophically. > The status quo is indefensible so setting up moving unknowable goal posts for something to replace them doesn’t make sense to me. AVs are not better than the status quo, making them even less defensible. A human would…

"AVs are not better than the status quo" We don't have the data to claim this, this confidently, and the only way to get the data is let the experiment keep running in the real world (only place that matters). There will obviously with holes in the awareness (literal missing cameras under the car) that's what the testing is for . If someone says they can sit in a room, in a simulation environment and come up with all…

> We don't have the data to claim this, this confidently, and the only way to get the data is let the experiment keep running in the real world (only place that matters).

How about we start with something simpler: have Waymo, Cruise and their likes produce a rigorous safety case[1] arguing why their vehicles are safe.

Once the safety case is in the open, we can also evaluate how well their system satisfy the claims in the safety case, and if the assumption do not hold, we can stop the experiment.

They are experimenting on humans. The usual requirement is informed consent.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_case

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