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Cruise vehicle gets stuck in wet concrete while driving in San Francisco

sfgate.com

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Re: Cruise vehicle gets stuck in wet concrete while driving in San Francisco

#161

Post by gwbas1c »

grecy wrote: post #158
gwbas1c wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are not machines. Machines are not people. But I'll take your bait: I grew up close to a city, (Worcester MA,) with plenty of weirdo streets like San Francisco, and had plenty of teenage friends who lived in the city or travelled through it. Needless to say, we didn't get behind the wheel for the first time in Worcester. We stayed in calmer streets until we were ready. When we drove in Worcester with learner's…

> When we drove in Worcester with learner's permits, we had adult supervision. Afterwards, we were only allowed to drive without adult supervision once we passed the driver's test. Am I to assume you never made a single mistake while doing so? Of course not. Learner drivers stall, they forget turn signals, they don't keep up well with the flow of traffic. That is fine, that's all part of learning and perfectly normal…

Again, the whole thesis of your argument is that you're equating robotic cars with humans. Your statements are irrelevant because robotic cars are not humans.

For example: Yes I did stall, but I did not block traffic for 20 minutes. I started the car and moved the shifter from 3rd to 1st. I did not require outside intervention to move my car.

I am also a person with fundamental human rights. A self-driving car has no rights, and deserves no empathy.

Which is why I'm trying to refocus the discussion back to "tech."

For example, when we talk about disruptive tech: The early customers need to be willing to put up with the "faults." In this case, San Francisco's emergency response departments aren't willing to put up with these faults.

Likewise, when we talk about choosing a market for early markets: That means making sure the market is well-chosen to suite the capabilities of the tech. One of the issues in San Francisco is that demand for self-driving cars outstrips the capabilities at this point. IE, it's better to choose a place where Cruise can meet the demand.

Re: Cruise vehicle gets stuck in wet concrete while driving in San Francisco

#162

Post by grecy »

gwbas1c wrote: post #161
grecy wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When we drove in Worcester with learner's permits, we had adult supervision. Afterwards, we were only allowed to drive without adult supervision once we passed the driver's test. Am I to assume you never made a single mistake while doing so? Of course not. Learner drivers stall, they forget turn signals, they don't keep up well with the flow of traffic. That is fine, that's all part of learning and perfectly normal…

Again, the whole thesis of your argument is that you're equating robotic cars with humans. Your statements are irrelevant because robotic cars are not humans. For example: Yes I did stall, but I did not block traffic for 20 minutes. I started the car and moved the shifter from 3rd to 1st. I did not require outside intervention to move my car. I am also a person with fundamental human rights. A self-driving car has no…

> I am also a person with fundamental human rights. A self-driving car has no rights, and deserves no empathy.

Are you saying that driving a vehicle is a fundamental human right?

Becuase it is absolutely 100% not.

> In this case, San Francisco's emergency response departments aren't willing to put up with these faults.

What are you talking about? San Francisco's emergency response departments absolutely ARE putting up with these faults, and the regulators and people who make decisions about if they should or should not be on those streets are deciding they should be.

I understand the self-driving cars can be inconvenient right now, but that always happens when you're aiming for improvement or progress. When lanes get added to a road the traffic suffers during construction. When you renovate your kitchen it's painful to live in during the work, etc. etc. Just because it's inconvenient doesn't mean you shouldn't do it - the eventual improvement will be worth it.!

Re: Cruise vehicle gets stuck in wet concrete while driving in San Francisco

#163

Post by gwbas1c »

grecy wrote: post #162
gwbas1c wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, the whole thesis of your argument is that you're equating robotic cars with humans. Your statements are irrelevant because robotic cars are not humans. For example: Yes I did stall, but I did not block traffic for 20 minutes. I started the car and moved the shifter from 3rd to 1st. I did not require outside intervention to move my car. I am also a person with fundamental human rights. A self-driving car has no…

> I am also a person with fundamental human rights. A self-driving car has no rights, and deserves no empathy. Are you saying that driving a vehicle is a fundamental human right? Becuase it is absolutely 100% not. > In this case, San Francisco's emergency response departments aren't willing to put up with these faults. What are you talking about? San Francisco's emergency response departments absolutely ARE putting u…

I think you've missed my point: San Francisco is a poor choice for the earliest market of Cruise.

This argument comes from my interpretation of two books: "Crossing the Chasm" and "The Innovator's Dilemma."

Cruise can choose any market they want: any city, any municipality, any closed road network like a resort. I keep arguing that San Francisco is the wrong choice right now.

Choosing an early market is an important step in developing a technology business. It doesn't matter how wonderful your technology is, your company needs to succeed in its first market in order to move to another market and then to larger markets. Furthermore, your customers must be willing to put up with the bugs and shortcomings of your product compared to existing technology.

If a company overestimates the maturity of their product, they can lose the goodwill of the future customers who don't want to put up with bugs or other shortcomings.

I think the big problem that Cruise is facing is that they will be regulated out of existence before they fully debug their product. (For the sake of argument,) if they had used resorts as their first customer, They wouldn't have to worry about being regulated out of existence because they would only have to deal with a government; and they would have had a much easier situation to debug the product.

Re: Cruise vehicle gets stuck in wet concrete while driving in San Francisco

#164

Post by grecy »

gwbas1c wrote: post #163
grecy wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am also a person with fundamental human rights. A self-driving car has no rights, and deserves no empathy. Are you saying that driving a vehicle is a fundamental human right? Becuase it is absolutely 100% not. > In this case, San Francisco's emergency response departments aren't willing to put up with these faults. What are you talking about? San Francisco's emergency response departments absolutely ARE putting u…

I think you've missed my point: San Francisco is a poor choice for the earliest market of Cruise. This argument comes from my interpretation of two books: "Crossing the Chasm" and "The Innovator's Dilemma." Cruise can choose any market they want: any city, any municipality, any closed road network like a resort. I keep arguing that San Francisco is the wrong choice right now. Choosing an early market is an important…

> I think you've missed my point: San Francisco is a poor choice for the earliest market of Cruise.

There are plenty of regulators and people who's entire job is to figure out if it makes sense in their city or not. Those people are in charge of making that decision for San Francisco, not you.

Re: Cruise vehicle gets stuck in wet concrete while driving in San Francisco

#165

Post by DerekL »

kayodelycaon wrote: post #146
alistairSH wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but we don't know if there was a flagger either. Only a single construction worker standing to the side. I'm not debating whether an AI car should "see" possible construction, even when not marked appropriately (most humans can too). Only pointing out we don't know if this zone was marked/flagged - and if it wasn't, there's a higher likelihood of human driver error as well.

> Rachel Gordon, a spokeswoman for the San Francisco Department of Public Works, said that the paving project on Golden Gate Avenue had been marked off with construction cones and that there were workers with flags at each end of the block.

That's from the New York Times article: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/17/us/driverless-car-acciden.... The linked article is currently from SFGATE. It may have changed since you made this comment.

Re: Cruise vehicle gets stuck in wet concrete while driving in San Francisco

#166

Post by cozzyd »

amscanne wrote: post #27
kube-system wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And over the course of a year their fleet has collectively driven somewhere around a million miles. Human drivers on US roads complete over 3 trillion miles per year. So, one Cruise vehicle driving into concrete is about equivalent to 3 million human drivers driving into concrete on an equal rate basis.

Discrete events and very small numbers make it hard to draw good conclusions, and you shouldn’t extrapolate like that. With the exact same logic, you could have argued yesterday that Cruise vehicles are less likely to drive into concrete than humans with an extrapolated rate of zero! This claim is just as suspect as the other — n=1 just isn’t giving you enough data.

You can set an upper limit with zero events.

Re: Cruise vehicle gets stuck in wet concrete while driving in San Francisco

#167

Post by robswc »

alistairSH wrote: post #127
robswc wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP, my issue with public transport is mostly the "public" part. At least on the DC metro, its not uncommon to see people getting harassed and MPD doing nothing about it. I've personally seen a drunk man pissing in the corner and watching it get carried by momentum through half the car. Sure, it's probably like a 1/50 trips you see something bad happening... but its still enough for me to prefer personal transport…

The answer to those problems is more public transit (in the US, it's mostly working class - if we make it normal across the socio-economic spectrum, people will demand more of it), more bike lanes, and safer spaces for pedestrians. If it took you ~10 minutes to get to the store, it's probably ~2 miles by car. Maybe a bit further. That's easily done on a bicycle (not for large boards, but easily doable for moderate gr…

>If it took you ~10 minutes to get to the store, it's probably ~2 miles by car

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but its closer to 7. Speed limit is 70 mph for most of the drive, haha.

Even if it was 2 miles, that's gonna be close to 30 min each way, an hour spent just on commuting for groceries. I don't think I could justify it tbh, and I like biking enough. I'm usually just carrying stuff though, if I'm leaving the house to go shopping.

If it was going to/from the exact place, perhaps. It's just so convenient to grab the keys and not have to worry about schedules or arranging how you'll carry everything back.

Perhaps if I lived in a city and it was my only choice though.

Re: Cruise vehicle gets stuck in wet concrete while driving in San Francisco

#168

Post by robswc »

alistairSH wrote: post #149
danielvaughn wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not bad reasoning, though I just want to point out that NYC has tons of public transit, used by both working class and non-working-class people, and those problems persist.

Well, that stinks. I haven't been to NYC since I was a kid. How do other countries solve this? Is it just an off-hours thing, or a problem mid-day?

The DC metro is also used by lots of "elite" types.

The problem is nobody does anything because nobody else cares enough, tbh.

Nobody cares enough to call the police because they know the police won't do anything. The police won't do anything because they'll arrest people and those people will be let out a few days later with no punishment. Why? Ask the elite representatives in DC I guess. They probably just don't care to solve it or don't want to solve it. There was a dude who vandalized a store and stole some stuff in DC, got arrested, let out 2 weeks later and literally 2 days after being released did the same exact thing.

I've unfortunately seen creeps doing awful things in front of innocent people too and its one of those things that nobody will spend time tracking down I guess.

Re: Cruise vehicle gets stuck in wet concrete while driving in San Francisco

#169

Post by haterforhire »

sundaeofshock wrote: post #108
LatteLazy wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The owner of the car initially. The passenger(s) and maker may also be liable depending on circumstances.

Under what circumstances would the passenger be liable? They have no control over the vehicle so I fail see how an event like this would be their fault.

If you hire someone to perform a service for you, and during the performance of the service they cause someone harm, you can definitely be sued civilly, or even be criminally liable (to take an exaggerated example, consider murder for hire).

No idea how that would apply specifically here though.

Re: Cruise vehicle gets stuck in wet concrete while driving in San Francisco

#170

Post by bcrl »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #59
pshc wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the infinitely long tail of exceptional circumstances mean that automated driving is an AGI-complete problem. These exceptions are fairly rare, but once there are many driverless vehicles they’ll be more common. Vehicles will need to learn and problem solve to keep up.

1000s of exceptional circumstances, but once added to training data, is solved forever.

You say that with the air of confidence of someone that believes their test cases cover all possible circumstances. I know for a fact that none of the large, complex real world systems I've worked on have ever had complete test coverage.
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