Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Waymo’s Backseat Drivers: Confidential Data Reveals Self-Driving Taxi Hurdles

theinformation.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 196 posts

Re: Waymo’s Backseat Drivers: Confidential Data Reveals Self-Driving Taxi Hurdles

#171

Post by vasilipupkin »

ghaff wrote: post #167
vonmoltke wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thus requiring the car to always have a licensed driver in the driver's seat. Basically, exactly what we have now with the safety drivers.

Even if you assume requiring human takeover to be a relatively uncommon event (whatever that means), as soon as you posit it as something that will be needed from time to time, you've significantly constrained the car's usage models. You now must have a licensed, unimpaired driver in the car at all times. Even if they don't have to be paying attention, this means no empty cars, no unaccompanied children, no "driving"…

Sure, but maybe we can start there. I would certainly buy a car that could drive itself a significant percentage of the time

Re: Waymo’s Backseat Drivers: Confidential Data Reveals Self-Driving Taxi Hurdles

#172

Post by nishantvyas »

masonic wrote: post #125
nishantvyas wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. It’s amazing, how much forgiving we can be for human errors ( accidents every year) but absolutely not for machine/autonomous vehicles, even when, statistically speaking, machines may make better decision much faster(or at-least no worse than human judgement)... I guess feeling/perception of being in control is more important to us... Other interesting observation I find in every autonomous vehicle discussio…

amazing, how much forgiving we can be for human errors ... but absolutely not for machine A given human fail produces one event. A flaw in autonomous driving software can mean thousands of failure events. Also, when a human driver's negligence results in injury or severe damage, criminal charges result. That's a deterrent. With autonomous driving, you can't prosecute an algorithm.

Yes. point about the charges would be a thing, something that should be debated...

would "use at your own risk" vindicate the company behind autonomous vehicle? or owner is responsible for his vehicle's actions? i guess never in the history, we had so much advance automations in direct hands of consumer...

As for the failure, I have reasons to disagree... if autonomous cars are working under "unsupervised learnings", my assumptions is, it most likely will makes different decisions for same scenarios based on data on hand.... so thousand's of failure events... though it may look similar may or may not end in same results... similar to how we would react when faced to some unknown situation on road... your scenario might more likely to play out for bad batch of hardware devices/sensors/lidar/camera etc in autonomous system...

Re: Waymo’s Backseat Drivers: Confidential Data Reveals Self-Driving Taxi Hurdles

#173

Post by nishantvyas »

skywhopper wrote: post #147
nishantvyas wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. It’s amazing, how much forgiving we can be for human errors ( accidents every year) but absolutely not for machine/autonomous vehicles, even when, statistically speaking, machines may make better decision much faster(or at-least no worse than human judgement)... I guess feeling/perception of being in control is more important to us... Other interesting observation I find in every autonomous vehicle discussio…

The problem is that you encounter edge cases on every drive, and you need to be ready to respond. The car may be able to handle 80% of the trip, but one of those edge cases will sneak up on you and the car. How long would it take you to regain situational awareness and safely maneuver the car in the event of some unexpected situation after you've been cruising in self-driving mode for an hour? Ten seconds? Five? Can…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SexsvIO4vE internet is full of these examples.

My point is, computer with,

- more data, (historic on how to act on certain situation, live data for event i.e. sensor data, lidar/radar data, images) vs human driver who would not have access or the ability to process these.

- faster and parallel processing vs human driver

- single focus/goal (of driving from x to y safely and making appropriate decisions to achieve it) vs human driver (with "physical limitations", "emotions", "hormones" and other things that makes up "life") is more likely to be distracted...

computer with all of above advantages compared to human driver may able to make better informed decision much faster than human driver can do (and when it doesn't it's hard to know/prove if human driver would consistently make better decision every time for same situation)

having said above, I agree that tech is in its infancy and it's gonna take a decade or two to be matured and even after that human intervention just in time in some cases would be needed but for the most controlled/learned environment (which is 70-80% of total driving on day to day basis) these systems would be immensely helpful.

Re: Waymo’s Backseat Drivers: Confidential Data Reveals Self-Driving Taxi Hurdles

#174

Post by JoeAltmaier »

Barrin92 wrote: post #150
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human drivers have their own low-hanging fruit that can be pointed at for accident reduction. Tired, impaired, distracted driving are horribly commonplace. Its a low bar, for automated cars to be better than human drivers. Sure they'll have their 'blind spots'. That's no condemnation of the whole industry. Because what we have now is not very good at all (fallible humans, all different). And when automated drivers ha…

As the article lays out waymo has accurate data on where the cars glitch out. Take that data, put it onto a public map, make that available for resdients to browse so they have accurate, data driven insight into what they need to look out for when they encounter autonomous vechilces. There is absolutely no reason not to do this, the amount of effort is trivial, and it would enhance the safety of people living in thos…

But … we have Saturday Night human drivers, and we have no such rule for them. No complex system of reporting maps of bars and festivals and when to avoid them. Doesn't seem fair, somehow.

Re: Waymo’s Backseat Drivers: Confidential Data Reveals Self-Driving Taxi Hurdles

#175

Post by m3at »

yifanl wrote: post #156
gok wrote: post #35

What a strange thing to have leaked. Not details how the tech works, but the database of customer ride reviews?

I imagine ride reviews are considerably less confidential than training data.

Yes, also a few hundreds of terabytes of data are much less convenient to upload and share.

Re: Waymo’s Backseat Drivers: Confidential Data Reveals Self-Driving Taxi Hurdles

#176

Post by rowanG077 »

tracker1 wrote: post #123
rowanG077 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self driving car technology has huge public benefit.

If people aren't sharing the vehicle there's the same number of vehicles on the same number of roads, just less need for parking spaces. Of course, the potential for reduced accidents should help. Unfortunately, part of why AZ was probably chosen is that it's mostly sunny/clear weather during the year.

Reduced accidents. Increased time for people using self driving cars. Companies no longer needing to pay for staff that pilots cars. Just the time and cost savings alone for private people and companies is hard to be overstated.

Re: Waymo’s Backseat Drivers: Confidential Data Reveals Self-Driving Taxi Hurdles

#177

Post by jessriedel »

calcifer wrote: post #112
jessriedel wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That phrase is just thrown in there to stoke the reader and create a story out of nothing. It indicates a lack of journalistic integrity.

> It indicates a lack of journalistic integrity. Or, the author is suggesting that public resources should be used for public, not private benefit?

Making normative suggestions in the middle of a news article is exactly the lack of integrity that I'm talking about. Rather than reporting the facts, the "journalist" is writing an opinion column without having the decency to label it as such. The validity of his opinions are irrelevant.

Re: Waymo’s Backseat Drivers: Confidential Data Reveals Self-Driving Taxi Hurdles

#178

Post by ghaff »

vasilipupkin wrote: post #171
ghaff wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you assume requiring human takeover to be a relatively uncommon event (whatever that means), as soon as you posit it as something that will be needed from time to time, you've significantly constrained the car's usage models. You now must have a licensed, unimpaired driver in the car at all times. Even if they don't have to be paying attention, this means no empty cars, no unaccompanied children, no "driving"…

Sure, but maybe we can start there. I would certainly buy a car that could drive itself a significant percentage of the time

Oh, I would too assuming it were relatively affordable. I'd be pretty happy with one that even just let me doze off when highway driving in a limited set of weather conditions.

I was just pointing out that, if you can't guarantee you won't need to handoff to a physically present driver, then there are a lot of things you can't do with the car even if needed interventions are just an occasional thing.

Re: Waymo’s Backseat Drivers: Confidential Data Reveals Self-Driving Taxi Hurdles

#179

Post by ghaff »

nishantvyas wrote: post #172
masonic wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

amazing, how much forgiving we can be for human errors ... but absolutely not for machine A given human fail produces one event. A flaw in autonomous driving software can mean thousands of failure events. Also, when a human driver's negligence results in injury or severe damage, criminal charges result. That's a deterrent. With autonomous driving, you can't prosecute an algorithm.

Yes. point about the charges would be a thing, something that should be debated... would "use at your own risk" vindicate the company behind autonomous vehicle? or owner is responsible for his vehicle's actions? i guess never in the history, we had so much advance automations in direct hands of consumer... As for the failure, I have reasons to disagree... if autonomous cars are working under "unsupervised learnings",…

>or owner is responsible for his vehicle's actions?

If it's sold as fully autonomous, i.e. significantly beyond Tesla's system today, I don't see how the manufacturer could not have the liability. How comfortable would you be to use a car that could expose you to severe criminal liability because some company made a mistake with their software?

Re: Waymo’s Backseat Drivers: Confidential Data Reveals Self-Driving Taxi Hurdles

#180

Post by wpietri »

inflatableDodo wrote: post #83
wpietri wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I think this is going to be a long one. Rodney Brooks, AI researcher and Roomba cofounder, says he doesn't expect a real robot taxi service before 2035: https://rodneybrooks.com/my-dated-predictions/ > When Waymo can get rid of the safety drivers [...] they're getting close to something useable. I suspect that they can cheat this one a little. As long as they're in an area with good connectivity and the cars ar…

Run the live video feeds from the vehicles through a style transfer AI that has been trained on Mario Kart, then secretly stream the result to a mobile app disguised as a free taxi driving game. All the app needs is a feature where the app turns off adverts if the player keeps completing taxi journeys without crashing the vehicle and you are good to go.

You would probably enjoy the John Barnes story "The Lost Princess Man", which has a much fancier version of this as a core element: https://www.amazon.com/Princess-Barnes-Short-Story-Collectio...

[Also seen in the collection "The New Space Opera 2".]

Post reply on HN