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US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

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Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#151

Post by spike021 »

DangitBobby wrote: post #135
spike021 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the point of a bus having lights flashing and the stop sign extended is that kids could be coming or going from any direction and especially when least expected. it's certainly a minor issue until the worst case scenario happens.

Lots of people make this mistake around school buses. It's probably time for a different system if we are worried about children's safety.

Sounds more like a testing problem to me. Honestly I can't even remember if this particular rule was on the license exam when I took it. I know it because I put more care into remembering driving laws but many people don't.

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#152

Post by sdenton4 »

Earw0rm wrote: post #148
jfoster wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And "much blood" is (globally) to the tune of ~1.2 million lives lost, and many more injuries. Compared to that, autonomous vehicles have barely harmed anyone. Also they will probably save most of those lives once they become good. The "least harm" approach is to scale autonomous vehicles as quickly as possible even if they do have accidents sometimes.

That's true at least once they surpass human drivers in collisions per driver mile under equivalent conditions. It seems like we're pretty close to that point, but the numbers need to be treated with care for various reasons. (Robotaxis aren't dealing with the same proportions of conditions - city vs suburban vs freeway - and we should probably exclude collisions caused by human bad-actors which should have fallen wi…

Why should we exclude the cases of human bad-actors? That's explicitly a major case solved by getting rid of the human behind the wheel...

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#153

Post by tgv »

krisoft wrote: post #4

To be honest. I think this is one of the strengths of autonomous cars. With humans when they do this at max we can punish that individual. To increase population wide compliance we can do a safety awareness campaign, ramp up enforcement, ramp up the fines. But all of these cost a lot of money to do, take a while to have an effect, need to be repeated/kept up, and only help statistically. With a robot driver we can de…

> With a robot driver we can develop a fix and roll it out on all of them. Problem solved.

I find that extremely optimistic. It's almost as if you've never developed software.

I am curious about Waymo's testing. Even "adding a regression test" can't be simple. There is no well defined set of conditions and outputs.

> Try to do that with human drivers.

At least where I live, the number of cars and car-based trips keeps increasing, but the number of traffic deaths keeps falling.

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#154

Post by rightbyte »

sdenton4 wrote: post #152
Earw0rm wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true at least once they surpass human drivers in collisions per driver mile under equivalent conditions. It seems like we're pretty close to that point, but the numbers need to be treated with care for various reasons. (Robotaxis aren't dealing with the same proportions of conditions - city vs suburban vs freeway - and we should probably exclude collisions caused by human bad-actors which should have fallen wi…

Why should we exclude the cases of human bad-actors? That's explicitly a major case solved by getting rid of the human behind the wheel...

I don't think we are better off putting Elon Musk behind every wheel.

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#155

Post by TOMDM »

rightbyte wrote: post #154
sdenton4 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should we exclude the cases of human bad-actors? That's explicitly a major case solved by getting rid of the human behind the wheel...

I don't think we are better off putting Elon Musk behind every wheel.

Good thing no one is suggesting that

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#156

Post by beeflet »

llsf wrote: post #69

I cannot wait for the school bus to be a waymo, that could tell the other waymos around that it is full of vulnerable and unpredictable little humans, and to be on the watch out.

I can't wait until every car on the road is required by law to be self driving. You could have cars with no adults in them just driving puppers around, and it can tell the other cars hey watch out I've got a couple of good pupperinos inside so watch out!

The future is gonna be awesome. I fricking love science! Once we unlock self driving car technology, we will finally be able to move people and things from one place to another. All we have to do is force everyone on the road to install a transponder in their car that allows the government to track their location at all times, and develop a massively complex computer-camera system inside of the car that phones home and controls what the car is allowed to do.

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#157

Post by rightbyte »

TOMDM wrote: post #155
rightbyte wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think we are better off putting Elon Musk behind every wheel.

Good thing no one is suggesting that

I was a bot hyperbolic but having Teslas steer by wire with remote code execution is close enough to an Elon Musk behind every wheel. What was the name of the movie, "Leave the World Behind"?

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#158

Post by harperlee »

rightbyte wrote: post #157
TOMDM wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good thing no one is suggesting that

I was a bot hyperbolic but having Teslas steer by wire with remote code execution is close enough to an Elon Musk behind every wheel. What was the name of the movie, "Leave the World Behind"?

Not sure about a movie but that reminded me of the "Driver" short story in the "Valuable Humans In Transit and Other Stories" tome by QNTM (https://qntm.org/vhitaos).

I'd recommend to buy the book, but here's an early draft of that particular story:

https://qntm.org/frame

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#159

Post by ErroneousBosh »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #125

On net, Waymos are safer than human drivers. Really all that matters is deaths per passenger mile, and weighted far less, injury/crash per passenger mile. Waymos exceed human drivers on both metrics, thus it is reasonable to say that Waymos have reduced crashes compared to the equivalent average human driver covering the same distance. Mistakes like this are very rare, and when they do happen, they can be audited, an…

> Approximately 1/100 deaths in the US are due to car fatalities. Every year autonomous drivers aren't rapidly deployed is just unnecessary deaths.

You could improve driver training. American drivers are absolutely terrifying.

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#160

Post by inglor_cz »

sdenton4 wrote: post #152
Earw0rm wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true at least once they surpass human drivers in collisions per driver mile under equivalent conditions. It seems like we're pretty close to that point, but the numbers need to be treated with care for various reasons. (Robotaxis aren't dealing with the same proportions of conditions - city vs suburban vs freeway - and we should probably exclude collisions caused by human bad-actors which should have fallen wi…

Why should we exclude the cases of human bad-actors? That's explicitly a major case solved by getting rid of the human behind the wheel...

This is a tradeoff, in which the original case might have been the less dangerous one.

Autonomous fleets have a major potential flaw too, in form of a malicious hacker gaining control over multiple vehicles at once and wreaking havoc.

Imagine if every model XY suddenly got a malicious OTA update and started actively chasing pedestrians.

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