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California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

reuters.com

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Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#541

Post by jjfoooo5 »

Lonestar1440 wrote: post #202
RC_ITR wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with what you said, BUT From my perspective as a person who lives in San Francisco and also bikes a LOT: human driver also do not perform acceptably. I counted 14 cars without headlights on after sunset on a 2 mile bike ride yesterday. I counted 5 cars parked in either a bike lane or active traffic. 2 cars took blind rights (no stops) onto Polk from various alleyways. This was a good day, FWIW. Cruises have o…

Yes, Humans are flawed drivers. But that makes them an Excellent baseline, because the last thing we want to do is make things even worse. I've observed all the things you did (in fact, all of them on Sunday). But I don't do any of them, and you probably wouldn't either if you ever used a car. I'm comparing self-driving cars to an average Human, who truly does drive acceptably. Over 99% of people drive acceptably. Th…

Why is a typical human driver at typical performance the baseline? The bad outcomes from driving come from the poor end of the performance, if the average autonomous vehicle avoids those long tail bad outcomes, some inconveniences like slow turns etc is a very worthy tradeoff.

Autonomous vehicles don't get drunk or sleepy, don't speed, don't leave the scene of an accident...

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#542

Post by lurker919 »

Avicebron wrote: post #530
starlevel003 wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps we could optimise it further, by having sets of steel paths for the cars to drive on too.

Or we could link them together to make it safer so one doesn't veer off the track, maybe get nicely furnished stations where people can switch over to another set of linked cars to get where they need to go. Imagine the possibilities!

Interesting approach, making the links dynamic could help in last-mile mobility as well.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#543

Post by stouset »

olex wrote: post #351
gcampos wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is actually an interesting question. We track how many accidents the automated cars cause, but I'm not sure how many accidents they prevent are tracked.

That metric is tracked indirectly, by the lower number of accidents that AVs are involved in per distance travelled compared to human-driven vehicles.

Although things are changing, the overwhelming majority of AV miles are generally-safer miles on protected highways. And yet their statistics are typically compared against vehicle miles on all road types.

Further, most AVs explicitly disengage when they encounter situations beyond their understanding. So again, we’re selecting AV statistics based on generally favorable conditions, but we don’t track human-operated miles the same way.

It’s not really a fair comparison.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#544

Post by CSMastermind »

Steltek wrote: post #510
CSMastermind wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> by the lower number of accidents that AVs are involved in per distance travelled compared to human-driven vehicles Just a note that this number is hard to calculate accurately with an acceptable degree of certainty. Anyone claiming that AVs are involved in fewer accidents per distance traveled than human drivers is either extrapolating from incomplete data or baking some unreliable assumptions into their statement.…

Can someone summarize the video? That was my first thought as well: crash data for humans is clearly underreported. For example, police don't always write reports or human drivers agree to keep it off the books.

The probability of a human driver causing a fatality on any given mile driven is 0.00000109% (1.09 fatalities occur per 100 million miles driven).

Applying some basic statistics to show to a 95% confidence level that a self driving system causes fewer fatalities than a human you would have to drive 275 million autonomous miles flawlessly.

This would require a fleet of 100 vehicles to drive continuously for 12.56 years.

And in practice self-driving vehicles don't drive perfectly. Best estimates on the actual number of miles driven to validate their safety is around 5 billion autonomously driven miles and that's assuming that they actually are safer than a human driver.

Then you get into the comparison itself. In practice AVs don't drive on all the same roads, at the same times, as human drivers. A disproportionate number of accidents happen at night, in adverse weather, and on roads that AVs don't typically drive on.

Then you have to ask if comparing AVs to all drivers and vehicles is valid comparison. We know for instance that vehicles with automated breaking and lane assist are involved in fewer accidents.

Then of course if minimizing accidents is really what you care about there's something easy we could do right now: just mandate all vehicles must have an breathalyzer ignition. We do this for some people who have been convicted of DUI but doing it for everyone would eliminate a third of fatalities.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#545

Post by eep_social »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #508
eep_social wrote: post #82

But not Waymo. Which confirms all my personal biases. More seriously, the statement cites four specific clauses that caused the permit to be suspended. The second one seems really interesting as it implies that there was a lie of omission where the others are more or less what I’d expect regarding safety risks: > Today’s suspensions are based on the following: > 13 CCR §228.20 (b) (6) – Based upon the performance of…

What biases? Are you saying you expected Waymo to be better than Cruise?

> expected Waymo to be better than Cruise?

Yes, very much so.

In previous discussions Waymo and Cruise were typically lumped together — “self driving bad” — usually by the original article even! However, my personal experience both as rider and as former Google employee says that Waymo is holding itself to a higher standard and therefore having higher order problems. That’s a lot of nuance for a flame-y topic but this permit revocation is rather unambiguous and I am having a smidge of schadenfreude as a result.

Edit: There are dozens of us https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38003860

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#546

Post by unshavedyak »

pbarnes_1 wrote: post #515
fhub wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my perspective, as a relatively early adopter of Waymo (60+ rides). I have zero gripes with the driving itself. In fact I've seen Waymos do things that no human would be able to do*. Drop-offs and pickups I'd like to see improvements made like getting a bit closer to the curb. Occasionally the route selections make no sense at all. * Waymo made a right turn up a steep hill. Two lanes each way. It then pulled a b…

I saw a Waymo come to a screeching halt in a split second as a... less than intelligent individual... skateboarded in front of a bus, into the extremely busy road . If it was a human that person would have been dead, no question. Sometimes I'm riding in a Waymo (which I do every single day, 4x) and it does something, and I double take. Then a second later I see whatever it was it reacted to, and I'm like "dang, why d…

I can't wait till those are generally available. I'd go out more if i could have a nice night and not have to deal with coming home later. Hell i live about 1.5h from Seattle and i never go because it's just awful (to me) dealing with cars there. If i could get a cab all the way there and back? Oh man, amazing. Or even park and ride would be nice. Cities seem so much more approachable to me if i don't need to drive them. It's a me-issue, for sure, but still.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#547

Post by tanseydavid »

pj_mukh wrote: post #387
alooPotato wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is satire right?

Are people this incredulous about public transit? I love autonomous cars, but its not scalable at all. Its obvious to me that public transit is the real future as the population grows.

Can you expand on that a little bit? What are the reasons that you believe that AVs are "not scalable at all?"

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#548

Post by stouset »

Waterluvian wrote: post #208
Lonestar1440 wrote: post #120

From my perspective as a person who lives in San Francisco and also drives a LOT (10-20k miles per year, and many small drives within the city): Cruise cars do not perform acceptably. They manage to avoid collisions by driving extremely conservatively, but the way they traverse, say, a left turn against traffic is absurd. They slow everyone down, including emergency vehicles and public transit, by performing far belo…

Are these autonomous vehicles so littered throughout California that you run into them weekly? I realize I don’t have a real concrete sense of just how many of these there are. Like is this a whole thing already? Edit: thanks for the responses…. Good gravy…

Weekly? I encounter at least one every few blocks.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#549

Post by robomartin »

Well, the problem is that our AI systems don't have a clue.

At all.

They are classification systems. They have no understanding whatsoever of anything around them. Which means it is likely that the AV which is the subject of this accident didn't understand that it hit a person, what a person is, how a person could be stuck under the car, how a person could be dragged by a car, how a person could be hurt by a car, how a person is more fragile than a car, why it might be better to not move in any of the above contexts, how a human driver would more likely get out of the car and make sure it was safe to move (and render first aid), etc.

We are calling this crap "Artificial Intelligence". It isn't. It is not at all. It's a parlor trick devoid of anything that resembles understanding. A dog understands the world far better than the most advanced self-driving-car.

This lack of understanding issue carries with it layers of significance. For example, a human driver understands consequences to his/her actions. Yes, of course, there are a-holes in every crown...yet, the vast majority of people are good. If that were not the case society would not function as it does. Lacking the concept and understanding of consequences, just assigning scores to things and path planning accordingly, removes important decision-making layers and drives suboptimal AV decisions.

You can add responsibility, fear, financial consequences, emotion, care, consideration and a whole host of human condition realities to the list of important factors completely lacking from AV's today.

Driving is fine when reality is reduced to easy-to-classify monotonically varying experiences. Not so easy when reality becomes, well, real.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#550

Post by fhub »

fhub wrote: post #277
Lonestar1440 wrote: post #120

From my perspective as a person who lives in San Francisco and also drives a LOT (10-20k miles per year, and many small drives within the city): Cruise cars do not perform acceptably. They manage to avoid collisions by driving extremely conservatively, but the way they traverse, say, a left turn against traffic is absurd. They slow everyone down, including emergency vehicles and public transit, by performing far belo…

From my perspective, as a relatively early adopter of Waymo (60+ rides). I have zero gripes with the driving itself. In fact I've seen Waymos do things that no human would be able to do*. Drop-offs and pickups I'd like to see improvements made like getting a bit closer to the curb. Occasionally the route selections make no sense at all. * Waymo made a right turn up a steep hill. Two lanes each way. It then pulled a b…

Another fun anecdote. When a Waymo is in the vicinity of another Waymo they acknowledge each other in a whimsical/cute way - the windshield wipers swipe once (I'm not sure they still do this). But it wasn't implemented very well at some point since the Waymo I was in was behind another one for many blocks. The wipers went at least 17 times. As an earlier adopter I provided lots of feedback. Even little things like I tried working on a laptop in the back* and when I went to type in my 1password password I reached up to cover the camera that is positioned perfectly to see my keystrokes.

* Not recommended in SF. But I imagine on the 280 it would be great one day.

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