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A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

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Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

#161

Post by mulmen »

heroprotagonist wrote: post #141
mulmen wrote: post #56

I rode in a Waymo recently and was amazed at how good it was. It was easily in the top 5 best drivers I have ridden with. Really really impressive. It wasn’t nearly as cautious or timid as I expected it to be. But it also wasn’t reckless. I would describe it as assertive, but I’m sure some people would call it aggressive. It knows the rules and what’s going on around and acts accordingly. This really should be the no…

> The future is bright. Ask the 2.3 million employed drivers in the United States how the future looks. Because pretty soon, they'll all need to be doing something else. And I don't see a technology that will open up 2.3 million jobs for them to move into, or training initiatives to support them while they shift professions. The future _could_ be bright, if we approach AI right, and build the social safety net to sof…

Eh, ask switchboard operators how they feel about the Internet.

Cars wiped out farriers. Should we go back to riding horses?

Gig work is a symptom. Not a triumph worthy of protection.

Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

#162

Post by HPsquared »

lastdong wrote: post #140
rglullis wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole thing with self-driving cars is that it feels like the story of NASA's space pen. All this money being poured into a technology that would not be needed if the richest country in the world had the common sense of simply getting rid of its car dependency and developed proper public transit infrastructure.

If it succeeds, self-driving technology is likely to be integrated into public transit systems, enhancing their reliability and overall efficiency.

With self-driving tech, buses could be made a lot smaller and more frequent. They are large and infrequent because of fixed per-vehicle costs (mostly the driver).

EDIT: Small size then enables personalized routing: a multi-passenger taxi taking a set of people to similar destinations.

Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

#163

Post by necovek »

mulmen wrote: post #131
mstade wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just in CA for a few weeks and drove in SF quite a bit. There are Waymo cars everywhere and from the perspective of a driver I was more than a little cautious driving behind or next to one of them. I would rate their driving as quite good, but their signaling of intent was terrible. More than once did I see them use turn signals, only to never actually turn. Turn the signals on, then off again, then on again, e…

Good point about intent. As a passenger I appreciated how smooth it was but I can see how the lack of “body language” could be disorienting for human drivers. The Waymo driving style is almost passive-aggressive. It has superhuman situational awareness and knowledge. I wonder if it isn’t using blinkers effectively but it’s everyone else that’s technically wrong. It’s also not perfect so who knows. There’s probably st…

That sounds great for Waymo: I'd love to experience a ride in one and I'll make sure to catch a ride next time I am in CA.

I wonder what it does in common situations, like stop-and-go traffic with two streets joining at an angle, where one has to yield? In that case, if everyone simply followed the rules, the cars in the yielding street would never get through. While I am passive-aggressive myself as a driver, I religiously follow alternating one-by-one from either street "rule", even if I am in a street that has right of way, to ensure traffic moves for both of those and reduce chances of someone overly aggressively moving in from the yielding street.

If it is still passive aggressive in that case, it will work ok while there are other passive human drivers in the road, but would quickly fall apart when everyone drives the same.

Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

#164

Post by shafyy »

graemep wrote: post #156
kiba wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's impressive and all, but my reaction to self driving cars are completely different. It's a great technical feat, but it's not ever going to be efficient as public transportation. The form factor of the car works against it.

Public transport cannot do everything cars can do, especially outside big cities. Better public transport can reduce the need for car ownership - I did not own a car for much of my life for that reason. However, it does not eliminate it.

Sure cars are helpful for transporting stuff. But most car rides is one dude sitting alone in a 1.5 ton machine moving his lazy ass around town.

Public transport, if done correctly, can replace that, also outside of big cities. There are good examples across Europe for this.

Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

#165

Post by Qem »

kiba wrote: post #127
mulmen wrote: post #56

I rode in a Waymo recently and was amazed at how good it was. It was easily in the top 5 best drivers I have ridden with. Really really impressive. It wasn’t nearly as cautious or timid as I expected it to be. But it also wasn’t reckless. I would describe it as assertive, but I’m sure some people would call it aggressive. It knows the rules and what’s going on around and acts accordingly. This really should be the no…

It's impressive and all, but my reaction to self driving cars are completely different. It's a great technical feat, but it's not ever going to be efficient as public transportation. The form factor of the car works against it.

I suspect the advent of self driving cars will just help get the streets even more clogged with cars.

Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

#166

Post by graemep »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #99
rglullis wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole thing with self-driving cars is that it feels like the story of NASA's space pen. All this money being poured into a technology that would not be needed if the richest country in the world had the common sense of simply getting rid of its car dependency and developed proper public transit infrastructure.

> the story of NASA's space pen As an example of an urban legend/facile pop science take being treated as fact [1]? > if the richest country in the world had the common sense of simply getting rid of its car dependency and developed proper public transit infrastructure Is there a single developed economy that doesn't make significant use of trucks and cars? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Pen#Uses_in_the_U.S.…

> Is there a single developed economy that doesn't make significant use of trucks and cars?

You do not even need to restrict it to developed economies. Every city (even not very large ones) I have been to around the world, developed or not, has streets lots of cars: London, Manchester, Paris, Nairobi, Colombo, Madras, Bangalore, Sydney, Singapore..... and smaller towns and rural areas in those countries too. Those cover a pretty wide range of quality of public transport too.

Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

#167

Post by shafyy »

fragmede wrote: post #137
kiba wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's impressive and all, but my reaction to self driving cars are completely different. It's a great technical feat, but it's not ever going to be efficient as public transportation. The form factor of the car works against it.

Once the technology exists and is proven, the only thing stopping public transportation from being automated with the same technology is their union.

I doubt that the reason public transport is not as prevalent e.g. in the US as in some European countries is the cost of the driver. The fixed costs of operating a train or a bus must be many many times more.

Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

#168

Post by Panzer04 »

heroprotagonist wrote: post #141
mulmen wrote: post #56

I rode in a Waymo recently and was amazed at how good it was. It was easily in the top 5 best drivers I have ridden with. Really really impressive. It wasn’t nearly as cautious or timid as I expected it to be. But it also wasn’t reckless. I would describe it as assertive, but I’m sure some people would call it aggressive. It knows the rules and what’s going on around and acts accordingly. This really should be the no…

> The future is bright. Ask the 2.3 million employed drivers in the United States how the future looks. Because pretty soon, they'll all need to be doing something else. And I don't see a technology that will open up 2.3 million jobs for them to move into, or training initiatives to support them while they shift professions. The future _could_ be bright, if we approach AI right, and build the social safety net to sof…

2.3m people we don't need to pay any more. Jobs'll open up, that money will go somewhere else.

Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

#169

Post by anal_reactor »

heroprotagonist wrote: post #141
mulmen wrote: post #56

I rode in a Waymo recently and was amazed at how good it was. It was easily in the top 5 best drivers I have ridden with. Really really impressive. It wasn’t nearly as cautious or timid as I expected it to be. But it also wasn’t reckless. I would describe it as assertive, but I’m sure some people would call it aggressive. It knows the rules and what’s going on around and acts accordingly. This really should be the no…

> The future is bright. Ask the 2.3 million employed drivers in the United States how the future looks. Because pretty soon, they'll all need to be doing something else. And I don't see a technology that will open up 2.3 million jobs for them to move into, or training initiatives to support them while they shift professions. The future _could_ be bright, if we approach AI right, and build the social safety net to sof…

Hard agree. Soviet Union built its economy around making sure that everyone had a job and, as a result... oh wait, nevermind.

Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

#170

Post by Dalewyn »

kiba wrote: post #127
mulmen wrote: post #56

I rode in a Waymo recently and was amazed at how good it was. It was easily in the top 5 best drivers I have ridden with. Really really impressive. It wasn’t nearly as cautious or timid as I expected it to be. But it also wasn’t reckless. I would describe it as assertive, but I’m sure some people would call it aggressive. It knows the rules and what’s going on around and acts accordingly. This really should be the no…

It's impressive and all, but my reaction to self driving cars are completely different. It's a great technical feat, but it's not ever going to be efficient as public transportation. The form factor of the car works against it.

You're conflating two tangential things, automatic driving is automatic driving whether it's a car or a bus.

The biggest issue that automatic driving needs to overcome is that it's sharing the road with manually driven cars. We've already had the technology for a long time to have perfect automatic driving if the environment was fully automatic; computers are unparalleled at accurately sharing and processing data with each other.

This isn't to say that the solution is to get rid of human drivers, because driving a car has been one of the most empowering paradigm shifts for the commons. Being able to travel yourself timely anywhere anytime for any reason is a level of power that pre-automobile commons simply did not have. Subjugating your power to travel to a computer is surrendering that incredible power.

If (and likely when) we can figure out how to better share human data with computers and vice versa computer data with humans, everyone on the road will be better off.

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