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Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

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Re: Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

#181

Post by crooked-v »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #107
MBCook wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know. But if human drivers are having to go around them, they’re not doing the right thing. They need to drive or pull over. Never just stop there in the road and wait.

> if human drivers are having to go around them, they’re not doing the right thing They're not. But it's also not a disaster. Pretending it is on Twitter is pandering, not policymaking. > They need to drive or pull over. Never just stop there in the road and wait Agreed. Waymo has a lesson to learn from. Sacramento, and the NHTSA, similarly, need to draw up emergency minimums for self-driving cars. There are producti…

> They're not.

They are. I did myself yesterday because one was sitting at the front of a turning lane at a dead light, just waiting there forever with the blinker on.

Re: Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

#183

Post by scoofy »

moregrist wrote: post #178
scoofy wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fail-safe is EXACTLY blocking roads at intersections without power, not proceeding through intersections without power. It's much safer to be stopped than to keep going. I honestly wish the humans driving through blacked out intersections without slowing down in my neighborhood last night actually understood this.

It’s not a fail-safe. It’s a different failure mode. Jamming up traffic, including emergency traffic, creates systemic problems. It’s a bit like designing an electronic lock that can’t be opened if the power goes out. If your recourse to exiting a dangerous situation becomes breaking the door, then the lock is unsafe.

Fail-safe means "in a situation where the function fails, fail in a way that doesn't cause injury" -> the cars didn't know how to proceed, so they stopped, with their lights on, in a way that any attentive driver could safely navigate... which is a failing safe.

The alternative here, is a protocol that obviously hasn't been tested. How on earth are you going to test a Waymo in blackout conditions? I would rather have them just stop, than hope they navigate those untested conditions with vulnerable pedestrians and vehicles acting unpredictable.

Re: Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

#184

Post by scoofy »

jeffbee wrote: post #180
scoofy wrote: post #165

I live in SF in an area that was affected by the blackout. I saw four different Waymos stopped. Three were in the middle of the street. One was along the curb. My personal opinion. With number of cars I saw flying through blacked out intersection -- major intersections -- I'm very happy that Waymo had a fail safe protocol for such a "white swan"-style event (that is extremely rare, but known-to-happen event). I saw a…

Pretty much no aspect of this event was "extremely rare". PG&E spends the whole year smoking $100 bills and laughing their assess off, then as soon as it rains even a little bit their junk explodes and they pretend they could not have foreseen water existing on Earth. This is not even the first, or second time that this specific substation has burned in living memory. It already burned in 1996 and 2003.

I'm not going to have a semantic argument with you, but I'd consider anything rarer than "a few hours per year" as an "extremely rare event" for the purposes of training autonomous vehicles.

Re: Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

#185

Post by MBCook »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #153
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How is there not a very basic “pull over and wait” final fallback Barring everything else, the proper failsafe for any vehicle should be to stop moving and tell the humans inside to evacuate. This is true for autonomous vehicles as well as manned ones–if you can't figure out how to pull over during a disaster, ditching is absolutely a valid move.

If the alternative is that the vehicle explodes, sure. And since GP did say " final fallback", I suppose you're right. But if the cars are actually reaching that point, they probably shouldn't be on the road in the first place. The not-quite-final fallback should be to pull over.

Yeah. I wasn’t considering people, just getting the car out of the way.

I wasn’t considering people taking it as a given that any time the car gives up the doors should be unlocked for passengers to leave if they feel it’s safe.

And as a passenger, I’d feel way safer getting out if it pulled over instead of just stopped in the middle of the street and other cars were trying to drive around it.

No one should ever be trapped inside by the car.

Re: Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

#186

Post by dmix »

themafia wrote: post #175
MBCook wrote: post #93

From John Ripley on Mastodon: “Thought of the day, and I wish there were a way to get this to legislators: Come the next Big One earthquake, all of San Francisco’s emergency services will be blocked by Waymos.” I’m AMAZED they’re not designed to handle this better. This does indeed seem like a massive problem. “Oops we give up” right when things get the worst? How is this OK? I’ve been very impressed by Waymo’s more…

> Perhaps they haven’t fully thought through the ramifications of it though. There is a chorus of voices here on HN that have tried to do this openly, obviously, myself included. It seems to be almost universally derided by people who apparently assume that we're just trying to hurt a start up out of anti-environmental sentiment and jealousy. There are more ways to get "self-driving cars" wrong than there are to get…

What was the better solution here then? Assuming there's hundreds or thousands of self-driving cars suddenly driving in environment without any traffic lights. In the pictures you can see six Waymo cars at a single intersection. Assuming some of them had passengers should they all try to turn at the intersection anyway, when their LIDAR says the lane is likely free and pull over to the side? Is that the safest option? Should there be human police to direct the self driving cars through intersections? Or wait out the temporary electricity failure?

I believe the answer is far more complicated than it seems and in practice having the cars stay still might have been the safest option any of the parties could agree on (Waymo's office, the city traffic people, state regulators, etc).

There are people thinking this stuff out and those cars can 100% pull over automatically but an explicit choice was made not to do so for safety.

Re: Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

#187

Post by scoofy »

empressplay wrote: post #177
scoofy wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fail-safe is EXACTLY blocking roads at intersections without power, not proceeding through intersections without power. It's much safer to be stopped than to keep going. I honestly wish the humans driving through blacked out intersections without slowing down in my neighborhood last night actually understood this.

An intersection without power is just a 4-way stop.

An intersection without power is supposed to be treated as a 4-way stop. An unfortunately high, nontrivial number of drivers last night were not following that rule.

Re: Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

#188

Post by MBCook »

scoofy wrote: post #183
moregrist wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not a fail-safe. It’s a different failure mode. Jamming up traffic, including emergency traffic, creates systemic problems. It’s a bit like designing an electronic lock that can’t be opened if the power goes out. If your recourse to exiting a dangerous situation becomes breaking the door, then the lock is unsafe.

Fail-safe means "in a situation where the function fails, fail in a way that doesn't cause injury" -> the cars didn't know how to proceed, so they stopped, with their lights on, in a way that any attentive driver could safely navigate... which is a failing safe. The alternative here, is a protocol that obviously hasn't been tested. How on earth are you going to test a Waymo in blackout conditions? I would rather have…

Simulate them on a test course? There are absolutely places with street lights and everything that you could test something. Hell since they don’t need to work you can just have some put up in a parking lot to test with. Who cares.

You don’t need to wait for a city blackout to actually test this kind of scenario.

The thing still has cameras. And LIDAR. It should be fully capable of pulling over on its own safely. Why would not having a traffic light prevent that?

Humans are expected to negotiate this. The robots should be too. That’s part of driving. If the lights fail, the law tells you what you’re supposed to do. And it is not stop the intersection.

Re: Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

#189

Post by MBCook »

scoofy wrote: post #187
empressplay wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An intersection without power is just a 4-way stop.

An intersection without power is supposed to be treated as a 4-way stop. An unfortunately high, nontrivial number of drivers last night were not following that rule.

And yet the humans managed.

Even at a normal four-way stop with stop signs people sometimes blow through it. The Waymo has to handle it.

That’s part of driving.

It can creep through at 3 miles an hour if it thinks that’s what’s safe. All it has to do is get out of the intersection.

Re: Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

#190

Post by MBCook »

cgriswald wrote: post #162
MBCook wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If Waymo literally didn't foresee a blackout, that's a systemic problem. I agree with this bit > If, on the other hand, there was some weird power and cellular meltdown that coïncided with something else, that's a fixable edge case. This is what I have a problem with. That’s not an edge case. There will always be a weird thing no one programmed for. Remember a few years ago when a semi truck overturned somewhere and…

This isn't to disagree with your overall point about proper emergency mitigation and having humans available. > Remember a few years ago when a semi truck overturned somewhere and poured slimy eels all over the highway? No one‘s ever gonna program for that. While the cause is unusual, this is really just three things that everyone absolutely should be programming into their autonomous vehicles: accidents, road debris…

Certainly. That one was interesting both because of the odd specifics of it and because it made the road more slippery than any normal accident where just a bunch of boxes of random dry goods fell over.

It just happens to make a fantastic example of “thing no one is ever going to foresee“.

If there wasn’t footage how many people would even believe it happened?

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