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Waymo to customers: “Completely driverless Waymo cars are on the way”

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Re: Waymo to customers: “Completely driverless Waymo cars are on the way”

#161

Post by visarga »

jonplackett wrote: post #71
2bitencryption wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

every now and then I do something while driving that, IMO, requires "human cognition". Not just image recognition, obstacle avoidance, rule following, etc. Like, I'm cruising along at 45mph and a plastic bag is blown in front of my car. Yes, I see an obstacle and need to make a decision about what to do - but I do this as a human who knows what a plastic bag is, and how it is far safer to drive right over it than sla…

I think that sums it up really well. In those kind of edge cases like the basket ball, if an AI driver didn’t slow down and then killed a kid, we’d all be up in arms about It saying how obvious it was that a kid would run out, and we’d have stopped, and we’d be right. But at the same time that AI driver will have stopped in time when 10 other kids jumped out without any warning because it has much, much better reflex…

> if an AI driver didn’t slow down and then killed a kid

An AI driver would have 360 degree coverage with much faster reaction time - think about the cases where a car brakes before the passenger even realises there is danger ahead.

Re: Waymo to customers: “Completely driverless Waymo cars are on the way”

#162

Post by masonic »

BurningFrog wrote: post #101
jonplackett wrote: post #42

I have very mixed feelings about autonomous cars. One side of me is so excited about the prospect and finds it all amazing and futuristic. I love reading about how Tesla and Waymo approach it differently. The other side of me is absolutely not ready to trust my life to a machine - even though I know I do that all the time in other ways in modern life. I think it will be people's emotional evaluation that will matter…

Like someone said, driverless cars will save thousands, and kill hundreds. It's obviously the best choice to adapt a technology like that, but I'm not sure our society has the fortitude to do it.

  driverless cars will save thousands, and kill hundreds
... assuming that they are never, ever hacked, compromised, or sabotaged... especially from the inside.

Re: Waymo to customers: “Completely driverless Waymo cars are on the way”

#163

Post by visarga »

rayiner wrote: post #115
mgalgs wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not just image recognition, obstacle avoidance, rule following, etc. I would argue that the examples you gave are just image recognition, etc. What is your brain doing if not image recognition and obstacle avoidance? We're not there with today's technology but eventually our machines will perform better at those uniquely human tasks you mentioned. After all, we humans and our cognition is just the output of these g…

> I would argue that the examples you gave are just image recognition, etc. What is your brain doing if not image recognition and obstacle avoidance Planning, anticipation, reading body language, etc? Is that person looking like he’s going to jaywalk? That’s not image recognition. Yes, once he steps into the road the self driving car will respond quicker. But the human driver might already be slowing down and watchin…

Actually there are powerful techniques to predict what a person will do based on current position, velocity, body language and other cues. They can be trained by trying to predict future actions from past state, and self driving cars apply these models to all objects - people, cars, other things on the road.

Re: Waymo to customers: “Completely driverless Waymo cars are on the way”

#164

Post by masonic »

anchpop wrote: post #76
majormajor wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. They're cheaper. This sounds crude, until you realize that this makes things like buses and shared rides far more viable. Meaning millions of people have a better commute and collectively save many lifetimes worth of time. It can also mean less air pollution, due to less traffic congestion (this only applies if congestion pricing is done), which will also save lives. IMO autonomous vehicles are just going to fur…

Sure, but but buses would be cheaper to run if they didn't need a driver. My university runs a bus that you have to call and it drives directly to you and picks you up, I could imagine something like that being more common (for public transit)

  buses would be cheaper to run if they didn't need a driver
But those drivers will be paid regardless, given the strength of public sector unions. So, no savings.

Re: Waymo to customers: “Completely driverless Waymo cars are on the way”

#165

Post by visarga »

beerandt wrote: post #81
jonplackett wrote: post #42

I have very mixed feelings about autonomous cars. One side of me is so excited about the prospect and finds it all amazing and futuristic. I love reading about how Tesla and Waymo approach it differently. The other side of me is absolutely not ready to trust my life to a machine - even though I know I do that all the time in other ways in modern life. I think it will be people's emotional evaluation that will matter…

Maybe semantics, but the biggest problem isn't necessarily trusting the machine to do what's expected. The problem is the machine being able to predict what pedestrians and other drivers are going to do. This isn't just a problem for driverless cars, it's become a real problem for people, too. The rules of the road are there for a reason, people! When you wave someone into traffic, or have your emergency flashers on…

> The problem is the machine being able to predict what pedestrians and other drivers are going to do.

That's something machine learning can do pretty well, actually. There has been a lot of research on this topic, and not applied just to self driving - natural language generation, stock prediction, playing games with multiple agents, even content recommendation do future prediction based on past information.

Re: Waymo to customers: “Completely driverless Waymo cars are on the way”

#166

Post by oarsinsync »

xxxtentachyon wrote: post #116
whyaduck wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lyft has been dispatching Waymo self-driving vans (with safety drivers) in Chandler AZ for a while now. I've opted out of Waymo for my occasional rides with Lyft, so I can't say how frequently they show up. But I can say there are lots of the vans running in the service area.

Why did you opt out?

Not the GP, but presumably because opting in to being a beta tester isn't something they're interested in, especially since the risks involved are less 'my app doesnt work' and more 'my life may stop working' if something goes wrong.

Note that while that risk remains true of every transportation journey you take, there is a lot of press generated when an autonomous vehicle takes a life or causes injury, which plays a part in a lot of peoples decision making.

Also note recent articles about automatic stop detection failing >50% of the time. This may or may not be relevant to AVs, but I personally would definitely not want to be in an AV that hit a child. That (theoretical) child's life is worth more than pushing driverless cars into the world before they're potentially ready.

Re: Waymo to customers: “Completely driverless Waymo cars are on the way”

#167

Post by beerandt »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #155
beerandt wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are both faulty assumptions. 1) If I'm considering whether to brake for a plastic bag, I'm also going to check for anyone tailgating me, and take that into consideration. Including whether said tailgater is a geo prism or a Freightliner attached to a tanker of gasoline. Slamming on the brakes for a plastic bag is not the universal safer choice. 2) Already mentioned this, but reaction/breaking time is meaningles…

> Slamming on the brakes for a plastic bag is not the universal safer choice. ...I didn't say it was. And you call me the one making assumptions. > reaction/breaking time is meaningless without timely recognition. If it can't quickly recognize large moving objects then it's not qualified to drive at all . I'm assuming it can do that because self-driving at all is part of the premise. (Well, specifically the recogniti…

1) I'll rephrase: occasionally (and needlessly) stopping for a plastic bag (or any other false positive) should not be considered a massive improvement over current human abilities

2) >>>you might preemptively slow down, but a properly designed system can brake a whole lot faster.

>If it can't quickly recognize large moving objects

I'm not questioning whether it can recognize quickly. Just whether it can ever be better/ faster than humans, taking into account cognitive ability.

It's whether human

(prediction-or-recognition time + reaction time + breaking time)

is more or less than

(AI recognition time + plus reaction time + breaking time)

If AI can react and brake 2 seconds faster than a human, but doesn't recognize the threat until 4 seconds after humans can, then AI drivers will kill more people than human drivers. Which won't be fine.

>being faster is a matter of adding compute power and using cameras

There are other comments about the limitations of relying only on image recognition. While compute power per might improve the AI recognition time, humans still have the advantage of being able to predict instead of react. This will continue to be a major limitation for AI.

Re: Waymo to customers: “Completely driverless Waymo cars are on the way”

#168

Post by glangdale »

dev_dull wrote: post #5
gfodor wrote: post #2

So sounds like we'll get level 4 autonomy in 2020. Once that happens the discussion around the nature of the approach to level 5 (which is probably asymptotic) will be a welcome change vs today where people are questioning if we'll ever have a consumer successfully use an autonomous vehicle.

the 80/20 principle says it's going to be a long, long time before level 5 autonomy is reached. That's 100% in all conditions. In fact, I would say it's more theory than attainable. There's a reason they're testing in Phoenix. It has almost no Inclement weather. Throw a little snow, mud, or sleet in there and it gets hairy fast. Level 2 is basically the 20% of effort in 80/20. It's exponential effort from then on out…

Having been forced to visit Chandler more than a few times, I'd agree.

Also, the prospect of being accidentally killed in a horrible car crash is less poignant if the alternative is more time spent in Chandler.

Re: Waymo to customers: “Completely driverless Waymo cars are on the way”

#169

Post by LoSboccacc »

rubicon33 wrote: post #104
jonplackett wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that sums it up really well. In those kind of edge cases like the basket ball, if an AI driver didn’t slow down and then killed a kid, we’d all be up in arms about It saying how obvious it was that a kid would run out, and we’d have stopped, and we’d be right. But at the same time that AI driver will have stopped in time when 10 other kids jumped out without any warning because it has much, much better reflex…

Nearly 1.25 million people die in road crashes each year. Think about that. Self driving cars aren't just a solution to nuisance of driving. They're a solution to one of the leading causes of DEATH and INJURY in the country. Sure there are going to be edge cases where we as humans will be able to point at the car and say "damnit, we could have prevented that"! But I sure hope when we do that, the car points right bac…

> They're a solution

no, they will, at some point in the future, be a solution. until we seen serious miles in comparable conditions they are an unproven technology, that why I appreciate waymo approach of getting from here to there slowly and carefully compared to Tesla which has a dozen death already under the autopilot and hides them under a pile of pr and terms of services.

but for all the tech they throw at it until the fundamental issues of cognition and prediction are solved they will only be able to reduce a fraction of the accidents because they aren't replacing the most dangerous vehicles on the road and they only are better for a subset of cases, like inattentive or impaired/intoxicated driver.

Re: Waymo to customers: “Completely driverless Waymo cars are on the way”

#170

Post by rimliu »

mgalgs wrote: post #93
2bitencryption wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

every now and then I do something while driving that, IMO, requires "human cognition". Not just image recognition, obstacle avoidance, rule following, etc. Like, I'm cruising along at 45mph and a plastic bag is blown in front of my car. Yes, I see an obstacle and need to make a decision about what to do - but I do this as a human who knows what a plastic bag is, and how it is far safer to drive right over it than sla…

> Not just image recognition, obstacle avoidance, rule following, etc. I would argue that the examples you gave are just image recognition, etc. What is your brain doing if not image recognition and obstacle avoidance? We're not there with today's technology but eventually our machines will perform better at those uniquely human tasks you mentioned. After all, we humans and our cognition is just the output of these g…

No, it is 'model if the world' vs. image recognition. There will be no self-driving cars before the former is available, i. e. for a very long time.
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