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Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

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

#531

Post by teknoxjon »

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…

I'd imagine all the GPS data could be loaded into the system beforehand and updated when there is a consistent signal. The same way cars now deal with GPS.

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

#532

Post by achamayou »

baq wrote: post #444
achamayou wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His point is that the remaining 5% of a problem can take considerably longer to solve than might initially be anticipated by looking at the quick progress made on the first 95% of it. A textbook example of that is voice recognition. It's also not particularly clear that the costs will drop rapidly to zero or even to a level that leads to mass adoption (see air travel at Mach 1+, Segways...).

Your examples aren't very good, sorry. We're talking about adding AI, autopilot, autonomous capabilities, whatever you want to call it to already existing hardware. It's mostly a matter of software and you're a living example that it can be done, in 20W, with nothing more than stereo cameras and mics. If I had to compare, I expect the change to be more akin to what Excel has done to paper spreadsheets.

Current voice processing tech is still very much worse than an average human, no matter how fancy the microphones and how much power it's allowed to consume from the grid.

Good sensors aren't cheap, the optical and mechanical elements aren't likely to drop in price soon. Only the computing power is getting cheaper, but harnessing it isn't particularly easy (we're not getting better at programming as quickly as we're making faster chips).

If you need another example, consider automated cleaning robots. It's a considerably simpler problem to solve, and they're still only a marginal product. At the moment, autonomous tech is only really used in well-controlled industrial environments. It will surely break out of there progressively, but chances are it will take a while.

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

#533

Post by ageofwant »

woofyman wrote: post #496
ticviking wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a key point here. The cars don't have to be perfectly safe, just safer than the average driver.

It has be better than the best human driver or they'll get sued out of existance. You can't sell a product that you know will hurt or kill a certain number of people.

Sorry no. Cars kill thousands of people every year, and will continue to do so. Car companies are doing just fine. Power companies literally kill millions every year, a-ok. McDonalds, Coca Cola ? ditto.

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

#534

Post by crazybigdan »

kcanini wrote: post #454
dragonwriter wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But why would the existence of cars with better systems make driving vehicles like most people own today more expensive than currently? Safer options will, as they become available, be disproportionately chosen by the safety conscious. This can, potentially, make the less-safe legacy option more dangerous (per use) than before the safer option became available, because the safest users of the less-safe option befor…

Conversely, if a significant proportion of the cars on the road are autonomous and safer than human-driven cars, then the accident rate for everyone could decline, making insurance cheaper for both autonomous and human-driven cars.

Wouldn't that make insurance cheaper for autonomous cars and more expensive for human-driven cars since humans would be more of a liability behind the wheel?

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

#535

Post by melling »

TillE wrote: post #433
melling wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You want to regulate politeness?

Reckless driving is already a crime (not just a civil offense) in many states. In New York: "Reckless driving shall mean driving...in a manner which unreasonably interferes with the free and proper use of the public highway" Simple aggressive driving as described in the linked article is, well, not a real problem. Unless you cause an accident.

No one was talking about reckless driving. Aggressive driving could be a problem. That's why it is being discussed.

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

#536

Post by semi-extrinsic »

robbiemitchell wrote: post #346
jcranmer wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also: Private car ownership is going to fall off a cliff shortly after autonomous ride services arrive. Which probably means general demand for vehicles will fall off a cliff. I've seen this sentiment so many times now that I have to ask a serious question to anyone who echoes this sentiment: Do you own a personal car right now? If so, why? All of this... excitement over the transformations that self-driving vehicl…

I have two kids. They need car seats. We often haul stuff between home and the in-laws. This makes perma-Ubering infeasible. We need a radically new car seat design, either: 1. Super portable and quick to install/remove, or 2. Built into the car, safe for all ages, easily extended/retracted.

1. is never happening. If you want a proper safe car seat for a 1-3 year old, it's going to weigh 30-40 lbs no matter what sintered pixie dust you build it from. And it has to be pretty huge since a small person has to fit almost inside it.

Even the ones for babies, that people for some reason I can't fathom like to carry around in the supermarket, are actually also 20+ lbs, you've just left 15 lbs remaining in the car occupying a seat while you're shopping. And they're also bulky.

2. could happen for children aged 4+ in a minivan-sized car. I've already seen it on some long distance buses. For younger kids however, they really need to sit facing rearward, but also must be well protect against side impacts, so it's very tricky to make something retractable that doesn't take a huge amount of space.

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

#537

Post by AgentME »

andrewljohnson wrote: post #473
LinuxBender wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with all of this. I would also add; that I will stay consider these vehicles to be unsafe until the manufacturers can prove to be beyond a shadow of doubt that I or the local computer are the ones piloting the vehicle. When a random person can remotely take control of a vehicle; whether it be the windshield wipers, or full control of the vehicle, then it is not safe to contain a power source in the vehicle ne…

I'd consider autonomous cars to be more safe than a car I drive when statistically I'm less likely to get hurt or die. If there was some chance my car could get hacked, or other weird vulnerabilities that robocars had that traditional cars did not, I would still want to be in a robocar if my chance of dying was cut in half.

Getting targeted for a hack isn't a purely random thing though.

It may be true that the chance for an average person to get targeted multiplied by the chance for a targeted person to get their car hacked is lower than the chance of dying while driving yourself, but that's not reassuring at all if you think you have a higher than normal chance of being targeted or are already being targeted. From experience of being on the receiving end, it's really not that hard to piss off 4chan or get unwanted attention from other crazed parts of the internet. (For an extreme case, consider a certain pizza place in the news lately...)

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

#538

Post by nialv7 »

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…

> They need to reliably deal with an almost infinite number of edge and corner cases, each quite different from the last.

It doesn't need to be perfect. It just needs to be better than average human drivers. Sure there will be cases it can't handle. But the same is much more true for human.

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

#539

Post by woofyman »

ageofwant wrote: post #533
woofyman wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has be better than the best human driver or they'll get sued out of existance. You can't sell a product that you know will hurt or kill a certain number of people.

Sorry no. Cars kill thousands of people every year, and will continue to do so. Car companies are doing just fine. Power companies literally kill millions every year, a-ok. McDonalds, Coca Cola ? ditto.

Drivers kill, not the cars. That's totally different from an autonomous car killing someone. Humans make mistakes. That's different from a defective product.

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

#540

Post by walrus1066 »

ageofwant wrote: post #526
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.

It only needs to be a better driver than you for you to be safer, and its that already. I can guarantee you that on a one to one driving skills shootout between you and the software you will loose 98% of the time.

Sure, but put a tumbleweed in front of the driverless car and it's stuck. Or wood with a nail sticking out/generic movable obstacle, a human can remove it, the auto-car cannot.
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