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

waymo.com

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

#191

This sounds quite a bit like massaging statistics until you get the numbers you like. A few things that pop to mind: did we exclude drivers who were not eligible to drive (under the influence, no valid driving permit, cars with issues [braking broken]...)? (This mostly matters for evaluating the average performance compared to average non-impaired human — a drunk person might mess up with self-driving vehicle sensors…

Regarding drivers that are drunk or otherwise driving illegally-- why would you want to exclude them from such a study, if you can not exclude them from real traffic?

If our current system of checks and incentives is not able to keep them off the road, then you need to take them and the accidents they cause into account when comparing driving safety with an autonomous system.

Also note that the margins are too big, since only about a third of accidents involve intoxicated drivers, and the accident reduction rates from the paper are much higher than that.

I don't want to come across as harsh or accusing, but the "Methodology" section contains a lot of detail (and a more nuanced discussion could be had without disregarding it entirely :P).

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

#192
post #136
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.

Make a self driving bus then. I take Ubers to bus stops today. Doesn’t seem like much of a leap.

and with dedicated bus lines and predictable behavior that could be easier to do

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

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

#194
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…

Technology will open up new jobs. But I don't expect employed drivers to suddenly become data scientists.

Its a fallacy we constantly use as an argument when we talk about technology taking people's jobs.

Low specialty professions have been in my view a great way to have people employed, people who may be less fortunate, unspecialized or even students. Now that such professions start getting absorbed by tech, I don't know how those people are supposed to get by.

I can see how somebody would argue 6hay this has occurred before, but for example replacing horses with cars just made postpone jump to learning how to drive. They didn't have to "specialize for 4 years" and become computer scientists. Now this is a bolder issue imo. But my perspective can be argued

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

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably equally simple for a machine (if not simpler) to figure out if a human has looked at the oncoming vehicle with sufficiently advanced cameras and computer vision. However, we use a lot more hints (change of pace, facial expressions that indicate presence and focus, nodding etc), which, while not outside the realm of AI CV, would surely need lots of training, yet it comes pretty naturally to humans.

The problem is not whether the machine can see the human, or even whether the machine knows that the human has seen the machine. The problem is that the human currently has no way to know whether the machine has seen the human.

The GP was talking about the driver knowing if the "human has seen the machine".

For the inverse problem, we could simply start adding screens (instead of windshields?) to self-driving cars that acknowledge the pedestrians in a particular way (when there's only a few people, in the Black Mirror realm, they'd actually greet them by name using facial recognition and universal DB of everyone :).

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

#197

This sounds quite a bit like massaging statistics until you get the numbers you like. A few things that pop to mind: did we exclude drivers who were not eligible to drive (under the influence, no valid driving permit, cars with issues [braking broken]...)? (This mostly matters for evaluating the average performance compared to average non-impaired human — a drunk person might mess up with self-driving vehicle sensors…

> did we exclude drivers who were not eligible to drive

I don't think we can discount people who aren't fit/eligible to drive _if they still drove_. They might not have a _legal_ right to be on the road, but they are still on the road.

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

#198

Still worse than public transport, wastes more resources and endangers cyclists and pedestrians. I have yet to see anything that deserves to be called progress in self-driving. Yet another scam to sell more wasteful, inefficient vehicles.

Public transport is not the answer to everything man and saying this again and again is cringe.

-A man in his 20s who doesn't need a car and only uses public transport

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

#199

I think insurance prices will drive adoption of self driving very quickly. Consider: if a non-self driving car is in an accident with a self driving car, it'll almost always be the non-self driving car at fault. And with the telemetry from the self-driving car, they can prove it too, so accidents that would have been no-fault or shared fault become fully the non-self driving cars fault. And so I think insurance for n…

Why would insurance need to get more expensive for manual drivers as self-driving adoption increases? Ideally, insurance cost for self-driving cars would just be lower than insurance costs now (proportional to risk), and even insurance costs for manual drivers might go down because their risk decreases as well.

Insurance premiums are higher for higher risk individuals/circumstances and lower for lower risk ones.

If automatic driving lowers the floor of risk due to even lower risk than even the lowest risk human driver, insurance premiums will adjust to compensate and accomodate the now higher risk human driver compared to the now lower risk computer driver.

And here's the kicker: Insurance premiums don't even have to increase for the human drivers. Once owners of automatic driving cars pay even cheaper premiums, that becomes the new baseline for "cheap" car insurance and the rest should be plainly obvious. "Want lower rates? Get an automatic driving car."

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

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Soviets using pencils wasn't a clever scrappy solution, it was an absolute nightmare for the Soviets Note, too, that NASA didn't pay to develop the pen. Fisher did. > If the Soviets had space pens, they would've switched to those in a heartbeat Guess what cosmonauts use(d) on the ISS? (Qualified because I don't know post-2022.)

> Guess what cosmonauts use(d) on the ISS? (Qualified because I don't know post-2022.) I genuinely don't know. Do they use pencils still or switched to the space pen?

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