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NY Times Rides in Waymo Robotaxis in SF

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Re: NY Times Rides in Waymo Robotaxis in SF

#301

Post by stuartjohnson12 »

mlyle wrote: post #261
stuartjohnson12 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there are self driving cars on the road with a "press here to instantly cause an accident" widget fixed to the dash it's a problem regardless. Testing involves trying out exceptional inputs to find out how the system responds.

If you dive over the seat in a Lyft to grab the wheel and yank it on the freeway, it's going to get pretty interesting, too. It's an already-extent but not frequent threat. The main difference is a change in the amount of social pressure to not do this. That change probably makes it worth exploring a little. If Waymo chooses, those steering actuators have enough oomph to always win.

I don't think the difference is social pressure, I think the difference is understanding of cause and effect. I know exactly what will happen if I grab the wheel while my friend is driving. If this journalist didn't try it, I would not know how the self driving car would respond here.

Would it stop self steering and let me take over? Will it overpower me by force? Will it resist me but let me overpower it if I try hard enough?

All of these outcomes seem to have legitimate arguments for them from a system design perspective.

Re: NY Times Rides in Waymo Robotaxis in SF

#302

Post by bmicraft »

jfoster wrote: post #190
stu2b50 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a good thing to test as a reporter. There are too many people for at least one person not to do something dumb, or fall onto while doing something dumb, so it’s good to know nothing would happen.

That did cross my mind, but how far should they really take it? Should they also deflate a tire to see how the vehicle responds to that?

Now that you mention it, I'm really curious if it could correct it's steering enough to stay in the lane with a deflated tire

Re: NY Times Rides in Waymo Robotaxis in SF

#303

Post by EGreg »

tchaffee wrote: post #297
EGreg wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What you've missed is that productivity (as measured by GDP) has gone way up. Someone captured those profits. Which is why we see such massive wealth gaps. Exactly! That is what happens under capitalism. Which is why we need safety nets in place that can grow and be funded by taxes on automation. The safety nets should redistribute money equally to all citizens. We can also fund them by other pigovian taxes, like t…

> AI that can replace humans at most tasks within a couple years of R&D hasn’t happened before. We've seen absolutely massive automation in manufacturing, and as you noted even in farming. And no massive unemployment as a result. I just won't believe that AI will do anything more than hugely increase productivity until I see the unemployment. People have predicted massive unemployment with every new technology advanc…

No massive unemployment? The Great Depression lasted quite a while! And we only got out of it by after a decade of building up the next job sector of things for people to work in (see three sector model in economics)

Compare pictures of farms before and after automation and count the number of farmhands. Before automation, 20% of American jobs were farm-related!

Read Grapes of Wrath and other books by John Steinbeck… you won’t say there was no unemployment after that.

The Great Depression was largely caused by loss of farm jobs. As the farmhands migrated to the cities it took a decade to build up the manufacturing centers to give them all jobs. In the meantime, one third of the banks failed and the money supply they issued. The Fed didn’t bail them out and we got a depression.

Oh, and the hugely increased productivity led farmers to be engaged in a race to the bottom, trying to make up for falling prices with ever-larger harvests. The land became depleted and this led to the Dust Bowl as it simply blew away in dust storms.

Capitalism does this around the world. TODAY, one third of arable farmland has undergone desertification, likely due to similar economic factors.

This is wayyy more pressing than global warming: https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2017/sep/12/third-of...

> How are the wealthy supposed to get that way and stay that way with no consumers?

The wealthy can get that way without needing to pay much to human PRODUCERS. That’s the point.

If the only way an average person can get money and be a consumer is to sell their labor, then they will get less purchasing power over time. Yes things might get cheaper due to technology, but not everything (eg rent) and also the money supply could be inflated so prices could also rise due to that. The government COULD be giving all that money to people as a UBI but it usually exacerbates inequality by propping up stock markets etc.

Also, if wealthy people control all the resources and infrastructure then they can easily extract rents from all kinds of ecosystems. But even if the people on the ground barely have any money, the wealthy can just pay corporations for their own needs (eg robots doing their work). The owners of the corporations are wealthy and they cover the cost of robots.

We already see this in rising inequality … the wealthy didn’t need the poor to consume their products. Many of them could just have the middle class and wealthy consume them. (Look up Plutocracy.)

Having said that… if the automation could be made accessible to all, then everyone would be increasingly a consumer of products made by robots. Tax the robots, and give the money to the people unconditionally, so they can consume more.

Re: NY Times Rides in Waymo Robotaxis in SF

#304

Post by jfoster »

bmicraft wrote: post #302
jfoster wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That did cross my mind, but how far should they really take it? Should they also deflate a tire to see how the vehicle responds to that?

Now that you mention it, I'm really curious if it could correct it's steering enough to stay in the lane with a deflated tire

Yeah, many failure modes would be interesting. If Waymo think they've handled them well, maybe they should let some journalists have at it on a car or two.

Re: NY Times Rides in Waymo Robotaxis in SF

#305

Post by woah »

ryandrake wrote: post #289
habosa wrote: post #257

The technology is pretty amazing, but does anyone else feel like we (the public) got duped? What I wanted was for my own car to drive itself so I could relax and make better use of car time. I also wanted some new novel ways of interacting with cars to make them feel more like public transit that would be enabled by driverless technology. What we got was ... SciFi Uber. We are not going to be allowed to own the cars,…

There seems to be a growing, invisible force working against us, nudging us toward owning less and less and renting more and more. Don't own and maintain your own car! Pay me every time you need a ride somewhere! Don't own your own single family home! Move to the city and rent an apartment from me! Don't own your own computer! Do everything in "the Cloud" and pay me every month for it! Don't own your own media! Pay m…

Lol this is straight up conspiracy theory stuff. Yea it’s the reptilians who created streaming services instead of letting us all continue owning our VCR tapes like the goddamn red blooded Americans we were meant to be.

It’s the reptilians who have made people want to live above a grocery store and bike 15 minutes to work instead of driving their Ford F-150 two hours every day from their McMansion and back, and 45 minutes to Wal-Mart.

Re: NY Times Rides in Waymo Robotaxis in SF

#306

Post by mcny »

jeffbee wrote: post #211
mcny wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder... Could we sort of mix this self driving car technology with an app that does something like Uber pool and put it on buses? I am not thinking going to a different state. I'm just thinking local public transit. If we have enough buses and assuming there is no rain or snow, passengers just punch in where they want to go and one of the buses takes them there? I feel like there is so much valuable data getting…

I don't see why it needs to be on-demand. Why can't it be a Zoox-sized vehicle that simply goes up and down the street and arrives every minute? If there was a tiny bus that came down every street every minute, not only would that amount to almost zero traffic, it would also be the most brilliant transit service ever deployed. You wouldn't need the app, or even route planning. You only need the driving tech. This app…

I love this idea. The previous idea had a fatal flaw, you need enough buses that people don't have to wait too long. How many buses is that? I have no idea. However, if you're just going up and down a street, it is now a much easier problem.

For a fictional Manhattan, New York, just for a thought experiment if we assume spherical cows for a minute, lets say there are twelve straight avenues with dedicated lanes. Let's assume each avenue is 13.5 miles long. It takes 40.5 minutes to drive this at 20 miles per hour. That's 81 minutes for a full circle. So if you need a car every minute, that's only 81 cars, right? Does that mean you could service this entire fictional city with just 81*12 or 972 cars?

Something feels wrong though. Like it feels this is too inexpensive, too good to be true. Just my gut reaction. Thoughts?

Re: NY Times Rides in Waymo Robotaxis in SF

#307

Post by prepend »

pb7 wrote: post #219
checkyoursudo wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree that we live in a relatively good time right now, but I do wonder if this is the best it has ever been in the history of humanity. We have more pollution (air, water, noise, light), more cancer, more heart disease, more obesity, more addiction, more suicide, much worse environmental impact, and so on (though these are the worst that I can think of off the top of my head). Your points about safety, vi…

Not interested in commenting on the rest but do we have more cancer or are we better at detecting cancer?

Also we live longer so it’s more likely to detect and die from cancer.

Even over 100 years ago is true incidence of cancer higher? Not to mention why we would think we have more cancer now than 1000 years ago. Or perhaps we have more cancer but that’s because people aren’t dying of other things first, so it doesn’t matter we have more cancer.

This is the kind of counterproductive examples I find people arguing about. Of course there are more vehicle accidents now, but that’s because there’s more people driving, not that cars are more dangerous.

Re: NY Times Rides in Waymo Robotaxis in SF

#308

Post by lm28469 »

habosa wrote: post #257

The technology is pretty amazing, but does anyone else feel like we (the public) got duped? What I wanted was for my own car to drive itself so I could relax and make better use of car time. I also wanted some new novel ways of interacting with cars to make them feel more like public transit that would be enabled by driverless technology. What we got was ... SciFi Uber. We are not going to be allowed to own the cars,…

> We are not going to be allowed to own the cars

You'll own nothing and be happy ;)

Everything will be a subscription/lease/rental, your medias, your car, your house, your land, &c.

Re: NY Times Rides in Waymo Robotaxis in SF

#309

Post by lm28469 »

woah wrote: post #305
ryandrake wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There seems to be a growing, invisible force working against us, nudging us toward owning less and less and renting more and more. Don't own and maintain your own car! Pay me every time you need a ride somewhere! Don't own your own single family home! Move to the city and rent an apartment from me! Don't own your own computer! Do everything in "the Cloud" and pay me every month for it! Don't own your own media! Pay m…

Lol this is straight up conspiracy theory stuff. Yea it’s the reptilians who created streaming services instead of letting us all continue owning our VCR tapes like the goddamn red blooded Americans we were meant to be. It’s the reptilians who have made people want to live above a grocery store and bike 15 minutes to work instead of driving their Ford F-150 two hours every day from their McMansion and back, and 45 mi…

> Lol this is straight up conspiracy theory stuff.

It's not. The system needs growth, can't have growth if everyone owns reliable things. What you need is people either owning thing that need constant maintenance or straight up renting/leasing everything

In France they're preparing a law to build your "own" house on rented land, to "help ease access to home ownership" because land is to expensive. What will happen is that land ownership will be even more concentrated and the average joe will never ever be able to buy land, you'll need to rent the land $$$ a month, with whatever terms (which might or might not change with time)

Re: NY Times Rides in Waymo Robotaxis in SF

#310

Post by jeffbee »

mcny wrote: post #306
jeffbee wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see why it needs to be on-demand. Why can't it be a Zoox-sized vehicle that simply goes up and down the street and arrives every minute? If there was a tiny bus that came down every street every minute, not only would that amount to almost zero traffic, it would also be the most brilliant transit service ever deployed. You wouldn't need the app, or even route planning. You only need the driving tech. This app…

I love this idea. The previous idea had a fatal flaw, you need enough buses that people don't have to wait too long. How many buses is that? I have no idea. However, if you're just going up and down a street, it is now a much easier problem. For a fictional Manhattan, New York, just for a thought experiment if we assume spherical cows for a minute, lets say there are twelve straight avenues with dedicated lanes. Let'…

I don't think you are missing anything. People who stop and do the math are likely to be surprised by the incredible cost of the existing private car traffic system that we tolerate. Every reasonable option is dramatically cheaper.

People may quibble with the constants in that model. Even after eliminating competing private passenger traffic, a hop on/hop off local bus is probably not going to average 20 MPH. It would probably be more like 5-10 MPH.

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