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

US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

yahoo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 237 posts

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#191

Post by sdenton4 »

inglor_cz wrote: post #160
sdenton4 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should we exclude the cases of human bad-actors? That's explicitly a major case solved by getting rid of the human behind the wheel...

This is a tradeoff, in which the original case might have been the less dangerous one. Autonomous fleets have a major potential flaw too, in form of a malicious hacker gaining control over multiple vehicles at once and wreaking havoc. Imagine if every model XY suddenly got a malicious OTA update and started actively chasing pedestrians.

Hm, so you would put a hypothetical scenario on the same footing as thousands of actual deaths caused by drunk drivers each year? 30% of us road fatalities involve a drunk driver each year...

I seriously doubt that the "mass takeover and murder" scenario would ever actually happen, and further doubt that it would cause anywhere near 10k deaths if it did occur.

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#192

Post by sdenton4 »

Earw0rm wrote: post #188
sdenton4 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should we exclude the cases of human bad-actors? That's explicitly a major case solved by getting rid of the human behind the wheel...

Because the baseline of human-operated safety is "get law enforcement to do their job of getting rid of the bad actors."

Why is that the baseline? Actual human performance as it exists today gives us tens of thousands of road fatalities per year in the US. We have not solved that problem despite decades of opportunity to introduce regulations and enforcement. Getting rid of human drivers looks like a very promising way forward.

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#193

Post by manwe150 »

sdenton4 wrote: post #152
Earw0rm wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true at least once they surpass human drivers in collisions per driver mile under equivalent conditions. It seems like we're pretty close to that point, but the numbers need to be treated with care for various reasons. (Robotaxis aren't dealing with the same proportions of conditions - city vs suburban vs freeway - and we should probably exclude collisions caused by human bad-actors which should have fallen wi…

Why should we exclude the cases of human bad-actors? That's explicitly a major case solved by getting rid of the human behind the wheel...

At least some of them will likely still occur as those people may decide to override the robot drivers safer choices to save 30 seconds or have fun

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#194

Post by manwe150 »

goobatrooba wrote: post #181
heavyset_go wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless there is one car that everyone drives, it will never be this easy. And if there is one car that everyone drives, it's equally easy for a single bug to harm people on a scale that's inconceivable to me.

Maps and routing errors would likely lead to masses of deaths, an entire motorway population rather than individuals not paying attention.. Like the various "unfinished/broken bridge" deaths that have happened with Google maps involved (not saying to blame.. but certainly not innocent either) https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66873982 https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly23yknjy9o

Granted having all warning signs and barricades removed by vandals seems like the more major issue there, which drivers usually do pay attention to

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#196

Post by terminalshort »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #72
terminalshort wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer the risk of death over constant surveillance

A) everyone is already constantly surveilled via mobile networks and license plate readers, so surveillance is a moot point. We might as well get something out of it. B) the system can be setup to purge and/or record only at relevant times or during infractions

That's kind of like justifying invading a country by saying "we have this big military so we might as well get something out of it."

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#197

Post by Nextgrid »

fendy3002 wrote: post #96
MindSpunk wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You have to know what you're fixing first. You're going to write a lot of code in blood this way. This is exactly how the aviation industry works, and it's one of the safest ways to travel in the world. Autonomous driving enables 'identify problem -> widely deployed and followed solutions' in a way human drivers just can't. Things won't be perfect at first but there's an upper limit on safety with human drivers tha…

But you still don't have autonomous flying, even though the case is much simpler than driving: take off, ascend, cruise, land. It isn't easy to fix autonomous driving not because the problem isn't identified. Sometimes two conflicting scenario can happen on the road that no matter how good the autonomous system is, it won't be enough Though I agree that having different kind of human instead will not make it any safe…

At least one reason for intentionally not having fully autonomous flying is that you want the human pilots to keep their skills sharp (so they are available in case of an emergency).

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#198

Post by tencentshill »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #125

On net, Waymos are safer than human drivers. Really all that matters is deaths per passenger mile, and weighted far less, injury/crash per passenger mile. Waymos exceed human drivers on both metrics, thus it is reasonable to say that Waymos have reduced crashes compared to the equivalent average human driver covering the same distance. Mistakes like this are very rare, and when they do happen, they can be audited, an…

It just looks really bad when that one in a million death is caused by something stupid a human would never do. So far these Waymos are only replacing taxi and Uber drivers, which have a lower rate of accidents than the general population.

"Uber reported 0.87 fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in 2021–2022"

https://insurify.com/car-insurance/insights/rideshare-driver...

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#199

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #125

On net, Waymos are safer than human drivers. Really all that matters is deaths per passenger mile, and weighted far less, injury/crash per passenger mile. Waymos exceed human drivers on both metrics, thus it is reasonable to say that Waymos have reduced crashes compared to the equivalent average human driver covering the same distance. Mistakes like this are very rare, and when they do happen, they can be audited, an…

>> Really all that matters is deaths per passenger mile, and weighted far less, injury/crash per passenger mile.

That's not exactly right. You need to take into account how likely it is for accidents to happen, not just the number of miles travelled. If the low probability of accidents is taken into account it turns out it takes many more millions or even billions of miles than already travelled for self-driving cars to be considered safe. See:

Driving to Safety

How Many Miles of Driving Would It Take to Demonstrate Autonomous Vehicle Reliability?

Given that current traffic fatalities and injuries are rare events compared with vehicle miles traveled, we show that fully autonomous vehicles would have to be driven hundreds of millions of miles and sometimes hundreds of billions of miles to demonstrate their safety in terms of fatalities and injuries. Under even aggressive testing assumptions, existing fleets would take tens and sometimes hundreds of years to drive these miles — an impossible proposition if the aim is to demonstrate performance prior to releasing them for consumer use. Our findings demonstrate that developers of this technology and third-party testers cannot simply drive their way to safety. Instead, they will need to develop innovative methods of demonstrating safety and reliability.

https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1478.html

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#200

Post by 6stringmerc »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #125

On net, Waymos are safer than human drivers. Really all that matters is deaths per passenger mile, and weighted far less, injury/crash per passenger mile. Waymos exceed human drivers on both metrics, thus it is reasonable to say that Waymos have reduced crashes compared to the equivalent average human driver covering the same distance. Mistakes like this are very rare, and when they do happen, they can be audited, an…

So what will these humans alternatively perish from? Old age? How is that fiscally possible?
Post reply on HN