Waymo: Google's self-driving car company • Hacker News Board

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#501

Post by Fricken » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 10:41 PM UTC

munificent wrote: post #422

walrus1066 wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That people are talking as if it's just round the corner, that taxi drivers and truckers are about to become obsolete. Whereas I understand the technical challenges are much greater than is stated, it may even be they won't be all overcome.

It's not that taxi drivers and truckers are going to become obsolete tomorrow. It's that that happening is such a huge cultural and economic change that we need to start planning for it today if we're going to not destroy the livelihood of millions of people when those industries do become obsolete in five or ten years.

About 20 million jobs disappeared in America last year, although there was a net gain in jobs overall. This is going on all the time.

So if all of America's 11 million professional driving jobs were to disappear over the span of a decade, it would be a blip, not an apocalypse.

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#502

Post by tomaskafka » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 10:42 PM UTC

criley2 wrote: post #411

moxious wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a difference between "trying to deal with" and "product on sale next month". These cars are overhyped. They've been just around the corner for the last 10 years. They are the Duke Nukem Forever of Silicon Valley.

>These cars are overhyped Not really, they're correctly hyped. The concept is revolutionary. > They've been just around the corner for the last 10 year B-S. Holy revisionism BS!! We were NOT talking about self-driving cars in 2006! There was no company seriously designing fully autonomous cars in 2006! It was fully in the realm of science fiction, no investment, no major players, nothing. And you make it sound like i…

10 years ago, my peers at uni were building self navigating robots that could autonomously follow a path in a park without gps ...

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#503

Post by tomaskafka » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 10:42 PM UTC

criley2 wrote: post #411

moxious wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a difference between "trying to deal with" and "product on sale next month". These cars are overhyped. They've been just around the corner for the last 10 years. They are the Duke Nukem Forever of Silicon Valley.

>These cars are overhyped Not really, they're correctly hyped. The concept is revolutionary. > They've been just around the corner for the last 10 year B-S. Holy revisionism BS!! We were NOT talking about self-driving cars in 2006! There was no company seriously designing fully autonomous cars in 2006! It was fully in the realm of science fiction, no investment, no major players, nothing. And you make it sound like i…

10 years ago, my peers at uni were building self navigating robots that could autonomously follow a path in a park without gps ...

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#504

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 10:42 PM UTC

criley2 wrote: post #411

moxious wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a difference between "trying to deal with" and "product on sale next month". These cars are overhyped. They've been just around the corner for the last 10 years. They are the Duke Nukem Forever of Silicon Valley.

>These cars are overhyped Not really, they're correctly hyped. The concept is revolutionary. > They've been just around the corner for the last 10 year B-S. Holy revisionism BS!! We were NOT talking about self-driving cars in 2006! There was no company seriously designing fully autonomous cars in 2006! It was fully in the realm of science fiction, no investment, no major players, nothing. And you make it sound like i…

[deleted]

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#505

Post by jugchock » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 10:42 PM UTC

Angostura wrote: post #442

walrus1066 wrote: post #339

It feels there's a mountain of hype around autonomous vehicles. I think the core challenges to a fully autonomous vehicle (with no human backup), are still far from solved. They need to reliably deal with an almost infinite number of edge and corner cases, each quite different from the last. For example: - communication with other human drivers. In London, this is required all the time, like when parked cars block th…

A lot of these problems can be solved by simply making them fly. ... that's right, now you know what the driving force behind all those flying cars in sci-fi was. It's simply a way to separate the autonomous and old-style vehicles.

This seems to have been said in jest but the main thing keeping flying cars in sci-fi and out of the real world is the human element. Most people have a hard enough time driving in two dimensions. Adding a third would be chaos without the aid of our robot overlords.

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#506

Post by alooPotato » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 10:42 PM UTC

j_jochem wrote: post #478

alooPotato wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you use autonomous miles driven as a metric, there is actual progress happening. That metric is increasing exponentially btw. This tells you nothing about time to market, but it does tell you that the time to market is a definite (but maybe unknowable number). In contrast, fission reactors have been around the corner for a long time, however, there if you use the metric of net power generated from fission as a met…

I think you meant to say fusion. Fission reactors have been in productive use for decades.

yes you're correct, my mistake

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#507

Post by jasonwatkinspdx » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 10:42 PM UTC

walrus1066 wrote: post #475

thaw13579 wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that it's safe to assume folks at these companies are aware of these issues. But if I'm going to risk my life by using one of these systems, I'd want to have good answers to how they have solved them. Until then, I think it's fair to keep asking to avoid unrealistic hype.

I think safety is fine, especially in cities with not too crazy weather. It's more that if an autonomous car with no human stalls, due to a traffic light that's stopped working, or an oddly shaped plastic bag in the road, it's stuck, and would cause a traffic jam. Not sure how to resolve such a scenario, can't rely on someone remotely taking control, as mobile data doesn't have 100% coverage, so a human who is allowe…

First, some baselines: humans suck at driving too. Next, coverage isn't an all or nothing thing, it'd be quite easy for an autonomous uber like service to restrict itself to areas that permit remote control when cars need assistance. Last I'd encourage reading some of the literature behind what folks are doing: it's a very different sort of system, one that blends a lot of complex probability estimates. It's not like everyday coding where a human developer needs to anticipate every combination of corner cases.

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#508

Post by mypalmike » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 10:42 PM UTC

aetherson wrote: post #384

robszumski wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With a huge fleet of self-driving cars, there would be enough capacity to have permanently configured cars for child seats, bike racks, dog areas, etc. eg. "I need a 4wd vehicle for 2 adults and 2 bikes to take me to X park at 10am tomorrow."

Not without seriously increasing the costs for car rental. The cost savings for car rental are predicated on increased utilization. Increased utilization is predicated on each car having more people using it on any given day. And these things don't scale infinitely -- each car can only serve a particular locality. The number of variations that you propose is a fast geometric progression. Kids 0-12 months or so need d…

> The number of variations that you propose is a fast geometric progression.

Only if you're an engineer. To a marketing person, you bundle groups of features together and price them at various tiers.

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#509

Post by anchpop » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 10:43 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #60

tedajax wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems a little premature to require this as we don't necessarily know that this would help.

Chris Urmson, back when he headed Google's self driving car effort, said car to car communication was unnecessary. The car has to have good enough sensors and decision-making to deal with all the things that aren't communicating, from pedestrians to deer.

It could still be helpful, however. If your car gets a signal that there are an unusual amount of cars stopped half a mile ahead of it, it might be able to deduce that there has been an accident or something else stopping traffic and navigate away before it becomes an issue. Sort of like an automatic version of Waze

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#510

Post by NolF » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 10:43 PM UTC

imh wrote: post #389

NolF wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that notion very frustrating. 30,000 people die on the road in the US every year and no one seems to bat an eye, a self driving vehicle has one and it's the end of the world. The expectations seems rather unrealistic and the media seems to love creating a controversy.

On their webpage, waymo breaks down that 30k into smaller pieces. 94% of those deaths were due to human choice or human error. At least 71% were due to speeding, alcohol, distraction, and drowsiness. It's probably safe to say that driving like those 94% during your DMV driving test would mean a human wouldn't even get licensed. Why lower the bar to just being better than them? I want my autonomous car to be better th…

But they should be compared. As you indicated and the statistics show the death primarily happen when people are impaired (drugs and alcohol, fatigue, distractions etc), the machines substitute these human errors by fewer and further apart potential engineering faults. With proper Root Cause Analysis of the investigations (helped with all the data collected of all the accidents), overtime fewer and fewer would be expected.

If you can go from 30000 to 1000 just by changing to good enough autonomous cars that's a change worth doing. Then you can look at improving it to 0 and encourage that process if not through insurance liability processes through regulations that require ongoing improvement in autonomous safety.