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GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff
221–230 of 296 posts
Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
I doubt the consumer confidence will be the same. Not to mention that some people will be staying at home much longer.
And some people will cook more. For example, we have a lovely little neopolitan pizza joint a block away, but two days ago I received an Ooni Koda 16 and have discovered how easy it is to make my own neopolitan pizzas. That's basically a permanent reduction in my spending on pizza if/when it does reopen.
My guess is when you're tired and just want dinner now-ish, you'll learn to value that nearby restaurant. It's not like restaurants are only viable because people don't know how to cook themselves.
Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
We may never have 100% level 5 driving. But with level 4 + remote assistance, you don't need to support all the edge cases to have a car with no steering wheel. You only need to reduce the need for remote assistance enough to make the economics work out. We will all have been riding around happily in cars without steering wheels for decades before "true self driving" comes to pass. It's possible that remote assistanc…
Can you explain this more thoroughly? So the AI cannot itself resolve a situation that requires resolution within a split second, therefore it passes control (reliable, latency free?!) to a remote operations center where humans get to... assess the situation in order to remotely tell the vehicle how to react in time? I must have completely misunderstood, because I don’t see how any part of that plan is working?
The idea is that such situations are non life threatening. The vehicle will pull over and wait for a human operator.
It's not crazy to imagine that computers could handle split second decisions better than humans but choose to bail out to the side of the road if there's something they can't handle.
Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know how this makes any sense. Engineering is the only way to automate things to allow a business to scale sublinearly. Why layoff high performing engineers when you can reassign them to problems where the goal is to automate things enough to reduce costs to below the cost of keeping them around. Any high performer should be able to create enough value within 6 months to pay the salary for the hole year. If a…
If there isn't sufficient work available, there isn't sufficient work. For a highly-paid employee, you sometimes just can't create sufficient other work for them to do if you eliminate the work they were originally doing and other people are already doing the work they could putatively have been assigned to. And quite honestly, a person's understanding of non-engineering functions would have to be extremely limited t…
At both AirBnB and Lyft, I promise you there is sufficient work. I've had AirBnB employees ask me about joining the company to work on a large money saving problem I've got experience with that I'm certain they still have because it wouldn't be possible to have implemented since the last time I was asked.
Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I bet if you did a study and ran the numbers, it would be cheaper to put down rail on existing roads and make them rail-car only, automate those and subsidize rail cars. Lane miles in the US are in the many millions. Each mile of track costs a million+ dollars. You're talking many trillions of dollars to railify every road in the country. So no, there's basically no way that's cheaper than figuring out self-driving…
It is so strange that people don't see what is happening at Tesla. They are driving billions of miles under AI control. It is totally fine to dislike Musk or to think that autopilot is unsafe today, but how can you look at billions of miles and say that it isn't going to work within the next few years.
There is a long long tail of edge cases that kill people.
When drivers go a few trillion miles per year in the US, any anomaly in your driving software is going to be measured in deaths per hour. There is a built-in human sympathy for accidents caused by people which will not be at all present with accidents caused by machines. You can't sure a maker for wrongful death by a faulty human, you can easily sue a car company.
It will just take one cute kid getting killed by an errant robot car to end the dream completely. Machines don't make human mistakes, they make mistakes that are alien and frightening, things you couldn't ever a person imagine doing.
The public will get scared and automatic driving will be banned.
For Tesla and everyone else doing unattended driving, it isn't a matter of covering the last few bits left, it's a matter of increasing precision by several factors of ten, and ultimately, I'm guessing robot cars won't be a reality until their intelligence starts to reach the point where people are asking questions about sentience.
Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
We may never have 100% level 5 driving. But with level 4 + remote assistance, you don't need to support all the edge cases to have a car with no steering wheel. You only need to reduce the need for remote assistance enough to make the economics work out. We will all have been riding around happily in cars without steering wheels for decades before "true self driving" comes to pass. It's possible that remote assistanc…
Can you explain this more thoroughly? So the AI cannot itself resolve a situation that requires resolution within a split second, therefore it passes control (reliable, latency free?!) to a remote operations center where humans get to... assess the situation in order to remotely tell the vehicle how to react in time? I must have completely misunderstood, because I don’t see how any part of that plan is working?
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Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff
#227Hard to see this as indicative of anything other than covid19.
Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff
#228Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
If there isn't sufficient work available, there isn't sufficient work. For a highly-paid employee, you sometimes just can't create sufficient other work for them to do if you eliminate the work they were originally doing and other people are already doing the work they could putatively have been assigned to. And quite honestly, a person's understanding of non-engineering functions would have to be extremely limited t…
At both AirBnB and Lyft, I promise you there is sufficient work. I've had AirBnB employees ask me about joining the company to work on a large money saving problem I've got experience with that I'm certain they still have because it wouldn't be possible to have implemented since the last time I was asked.
There are definitely similar such needs at basically every company, but allocation of resources is not perfectly efficient (and often far from it).
Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
Waymo/Cruise and Uber aren't even in the same class and as I said, Waymo/Cruise cars go thousands of miles without driver intervention. Waymo cars go 11,000+ miles without driver intervention on average. I would encourage doing actual research into this subject, rather than relying on your gut or the news articles you read.
Spare me. Most self-driving is done in warm climates, in a circle. These companies are amassing thousands of empty miles on the same streets every day to impress people who don't know any better. I lived on a branch of the main Google circuit, and often they were the only traffic for most of the day. Even saw three Google vehicles in a line, but two were more common. What's the value of "self-driving" with no weather…
I don't understand. There are self driving cars in SF. I saw one today. It is/ was raining.
There was a driver, but I'm fairly certain that the drivers are not actively driving but are legally required to be there.