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Waymo Via

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Re: Waymo Via

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah cause screw that person who died.

Arizona allows drivers over 80, and I'd trust Waymo over the average octogenarian driving.

Arizona also allows people under 30 to drive, and every age group under 30 has a much higher accident rate than 80+. People under the age of 18 have quadruple the accident rate of people aged 80. The reason people incorrectly believe that octogenarians are bad drivers is they have a tendency to die in even minor accidents.

Re: Waymo Via

#172

I competed in the DARPA Urban Challenge, back in 2007. While we were watching the finalists trying to sort out the world's first fully-automated traffic jam, the conversation turned to how easy it is to manipulate these vehicles. Imagine a remote stretch of highway frequented by automated 18-wheelers. All that's required to bring the truck to a screeching halt is a bedsheet and some decent timing, at which point the…

That is not an engineering problem, its a social/political problem.

Re: Waymo Via

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arizona allows drivers over 80, and I'd trust Waymo over the average octogenarian driving.

Arizona also allows people under 30 to drive, and every age group under 30 has a much higher accident rate than 80+. People under the age of 18 have quadruple the accident rate of people aged 80. The reason people incorrectly believe that octogenarians are bad drivers is they have a tendency to die in even minor accidents.

I think folks think 80+ drivers are bad, is they drive conservatively and carefully. Its annoying to 20-something drivers who want to race around and take chances.

{not an 80+ driver}

Re: Waymo Via

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does this sort of critique keep coming up in HN threads on autonomous vehicles? have autonomous cars really gotten so good that "what if violent criminals try to attack it" is the only criticism left? I'm pretty sure not hitting cyclists is still a much larger problem than accidentally wandering into the plot of an action movie. less interesting, i guess. theft is an insurance problem. If there's no human driver…

You're correct, autonomous vehicles are absolutely not to the point where highway robbery is a prime concern. But even if they were, the spoofing issue isn't just another tough problem to solve. It's a potential arms race. Faking out machine learning systems is rapidly progressing from a few "fun proof-of-concept" examples to a serious area of study, and we've already seen it (gently) applied to autonomous vehicles […

> It's a potential arms race

but it's currently solved by one guy sitting in a truck, so it's not really a potential arms race that can escalate too far before you fall back to the one guy sitting in a truck.

worst case scenario, you replace a driver with an actual security guard who is trained as a security guard and can focus on security instead of driving.

Re: Waymo Via

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is the two-thousand-year old word for “road”, and an English preposition . Anyone who picked it as a trademark for anything knew what they were getting themselves into.

That's not how trademark law works though. Just because apples are a common, 20 million year old fruit doesn't mean Apple can't trademark the brand Apple in relation to computers and personal electronics.

What a funny example to pick: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer.

Apple got sued for basically exactly that because another company already had that trademark!

Re: Waymo Via

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does this sort of critique keep coming up in HN threads on autonomous vehicles? have autonomous cars really gotten so good that "what if violent criminals try to attack it" is the only criticism left? I'm pretty sure not hitting cyclists is still a much larger problem than accidentally wandering into the plot of an action movie. less interesting, i guess. theft is an insurance problem. If there's no human driver…

have autonomous cars really gotten so good that "what if violent criminals try to attack it" is the only criticism left? No, they haven't. This is (by far) not the only criticism, but it's a valid concern which has literally zero attention to addressing it. I'm pretty sure not hitting cyclists is still a much larger problem... Probably, and that one still isn't fixed either.

What makes you think no one is considering how to address spoofing? It seems likely to me that many of these companies have considered these cases in far more depth than you or I have.

Re: Waymo Via

#177

I competed in the DARPA Urban Challenge, back in 2007. While we were watching the finalists trying to sort out the world's first fully-automated traffic jam, the conversation turned to how easy it is to manipulate these vehicles. Imagine a remote stretch of highway frequented by automated 18-wheelers. All that's required to bring the truck to a screeching halt is a bedsheet and some decent timing, at which point the…

Why does this sort of critique keep coming up in HN threads on autonomous vehicles? have autonomous cars really gotten so good that "what if violent criminals try to attack it" is the only criticism left? I'm pretty sure not hitting cyclists is still a much larger problem than accidentally wandering into the plot of an action movie. less interesting, i guess. theft is an insurance problem. If there's no human driver…

One large difference is that a lot of people hold back from theft purely because there's a human involved. Doing illegal things to human beings is a whole higher tier of scary, compared to doing those same illegal things to robots.

Consider the difference between robbery and shoplifting. One is the domain of rare sociopaths; the other is common-enough to be almost a subculture among teenagers in certain areas.

Robbing a robot is, in some sense, just shoplifting (or, more accurately, warehouse theft) performed against a moving target. It's not "the plot of an action movie"; it's some unethical people's lazy Sunday afternoon. I'd expect it to be far more commonplace, once it is possible at all.

And, as well, keep in mind that, the more predictable something is, the more you can automate attacks on it. It's a lot easier to have a worm going around stealing Bitcoin out of people's digital wallets on their PCs, than it is to steal real wallets. Likewise, it's a lot easier to create some kind of drone that steals from other robots, than it is to create a drone that steals from human-driven vehicles. In combination with the property of people feeling much less compunction against attacking robots in the first place, I'd bet that you'll see e.g. delivery drones having their cargos hijacked by pirate drones, with increasing frequency. Autonomous trucks are just a larger-scale variant of the same.

Re: Waymo Via

#178
post #89

If Waymo is successful, there are potentially massive impacts to the population of the US. Trucking is a major industry. The Luddites weren't mad about the advancement of technology, they didn't destroy looms out of religious or anti-technological ideals. Many of them were skilled loom operators. They were squeezed out of their jobs by the race to the bottom, and they were angry that there wasn't any consideration fo…

I hadn't heard that description of the mentality of Luddites before. Thanks for bringing that up. It may be different for trucking for a few reasons 1) apparently there is a huge shortage of truckers in the US currently 2) autonomous driving may be great for highway today, but seems to still be a bit away from truly autonomous for city environments. This could lead to a hub & spoke structure which keeps truckers empl…

Re 3: humans have required breaks, machines don’t. So they’re effectively driving faster per trip.

Re: Waymo Via

#179

I competed in the DARPA Urban Challenge, back in 2007. While we were watching the finalists trying to sort out the world's first fully-automated traffic jam, the conversation turned to how easy it is to manipulate these vehicles. Imagine a remote stretch of highway frequented by automated 18-wheelers. All that's required to bring the truck to a screeching halt is a bedsheet and some decent timing, at which point the…

Why does this sort of critique keep coming up in HN threads on autonomous vehicles? have autonomous cars really gotten so good that "what if violent criminals try to attack it" is the only criticism left? I'm pretty sure not hitting cyclists is still a much larger problem than accidentally wandering into the plot of an action movie. less interesting, i guess. theft is an insurance problem. If there's no human driver…

Is a warehouse on wheels absolutely festooned with cameras less secure than a warehouse in the middle of nowhere?

Re: Waymo Via

#180

I competed in the DARPA Urban Challenge, back in 2007. While we were watching the finalists trying to sort out the world's first fully-automated traffic jam, the conversation turned to how easy it is to manipulate these vehicles. Imagine a remote stretch of highway frequented by automated 18-wheelers. All that's required to bring the truck to a screeching halt is a bedsheet and some decent timing, at which point the…

Stealing from a regular truck with a lone driver risks becoming a robbery, because there is likely a human around. That alone deters criminals.

Self-driving trucks have no such probabilistic deterrent.

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