Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anyone who says L5 is bullshitting honestly. L4 is enough to be viable and safe, and is all that is needed. In fact this level crap is bullshit. It's the speak of MBAs at Bain and McKinsey at who think they understand tech, not engineers. Real engineers don't stare at their debugging screens going "check out this data, is it L3 or L4?" Instead engineers look at things like safety-critical interventions per kilometer,…
>It's the speak of MBAs at Bain and McKinsey at who think they understand tech, not engineers. Really? Because the L5 claims come more out of the Ubers and Teslas than the "MBAs".
Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco
551–560 of 691 posts
Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco
#552Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anyone who says L5 is bullshitting honestly. L4 is enough to be viable and safe, and is all that is needed. In fact this level crap is bullshit. It's the speak of MBAs at Bain and McKinsey at who think they understand tech, not engineers. Real engineers don't stare at their debugging screens going "check out this data, is it L3 or L4?" Instead engineers look at things like safety-critical interventions per kilometer,…
It's not an engineer's thing at all. The classifications are very specific differences in the overall system. From an engineer's point of view they are just creating a fully autonomous car. L4 -> L5 is more about how many scenarios is that fully autonomous car been tested through. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-driving_car#Classificatio...
So when people talk about a particular company "achieving" level 4 or level 5, I don't know what they mean. Maybe they mean achieving it "safely" which is murky, since any system can crash. Maybe they mean achieving it legally on public roads, in which case, it's a legal achievement (although depending on what regulatory hoops they had to go through, maybe they had to make technical achievements as well).
[1] : https://web.archive.org/web/20161120142825/http://www.sae.or...
Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco
#553Earlier quoted context omitted.
Middle steps: (1) Board members use product to travel to board meetings. (2) Board members use product as replacement for personal vehicles. (3) Board members demand pay increases. Back in 1999 the Chinese government announced that airline execs would be airborne at the changeover as reassurance that aircraft were safe from Y2K. Like or hate them, the incentive logic was sound. https://www.wired.com/1999/01/y2k-in-ch…
I think of that as a parachute-rigger solution ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parachute_rigger ). Historically, people packing parachutes could be randomly selected to jump with the parachute they had packed.
Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco
#554Earlier quoted context omitted.
Middle steps: (1) Board members use product to travel to board meetings. (2) Board members use product as replacement for personal vehicles. (3) Board members demand pay increases. Back in 1999 the Chinese government announced that airline execs would be airborne at the changeover as reassurance that aircraft were safe from Y2K. Like or hate them, the incentive logic was sound. https://www.wired.com/1999/01/y2k-in-ch…
The acid test will be (4) Board members use product on their children.
Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco
#555“All rides in the program will have an autonomous specialist on board for now” This tells me that we’re still a long way from full level 4 (and certainly level 5) autonomy in a busy city like San Francisco. The edge cases requiring immediate human attention are still too frequent for the human safety driver to be remote, as is the case in Phoenix. Also, just a reminder that Waymo in Phoenix is nowhere close to being…
> I still think that true level 5 (i.e. ability to drive autonomously everywhere with zero human oversight with a safety record equivalent to the median human driver) requires AGI. This might be true. Most of the time (95%) I am on complete human brain autopilot when I’m driving but those other 5% need my full focus and attention. I shut of the radio and tell other passengers to be quite (if I have the time for it).
Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco
#556Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd put 50 years in the "not anytime soon" camp. 50 years is an eternity nowadays with regards to tech.
To put it in perspective, 50 years is still less time than from now until when the transistor was invented.
Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco
#557Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd put 50 years in the "not anytime soon" camp. 50 years is an eternity nowadays with regards to tech.
To put it in perspective, 50 years is still less time than from now until when the transistor was invented.
> The first working device to be built was a point-contact transistor invented in 1947 by American physicists John Bardeen and Walter Brattain while working under William Shockley at Bell Labs. The three shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for their achievement.
Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco
#558Earlier quoted context omitted.
Middle steps: (1) Board members use product to travel to board meetings. (2) Board members use product as replacement for personal vehicles. (3) Board members demand pay increases. Back in 1999 the Chinese government announced that airline execs would be airborne at the changeover as reassurance that aircraft were safe from Y2K. Like or hate them, the incentive logic was sound. https://www.wired.com/1999/01/y2k-in-ch…
> Middle steps: (1) Board members use product to travel to board meetings. (2) Board members use product as replacement for personal vehicles. (3) Board members demand pay increases. How do you know board members aren't already using Waymo product heavily? It still doesn't mean they can go straight from board members using Waymo without backup drivers to arbitrary customers using Waymo without backup drivers.
Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco
#559Earlier quoted context omitted.
Easy, my dumb level-0 car can tell me when it's icy. And finding lane markers is one of the easiest tasks in self driving (the hard part is knowing when to ignore them).
> And finding lane markers is one of the easiest tasks in self driving It's not a matter of "finding" lane markers. There are no lane markers visible after it snows.
We ourselves identify and confirm other urban waymarks via captcha which feeds the nav data -- bridges, signs, hills, hydrants, chimneys, lights. There is mass live verification from android auto in vehicles. There are many yearly layers of street view images and scans.
Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco
#560Earlier quoted context omitted.
>“All rides in the program will have an autonomous specialist on board for now” This tells me that we’re still a long way Did you expect something different? I can't really see a boardroom writing a roadmap that goes straight from test rides (no passengers) with a backup driver onboard to actual rides with passengers - no backup driver onboard with no in-between steps.
I wonder where "a country road with no lanes which barely fits 1.5 car in winter in the Czech republic" is on your scale... Something like this, just imagine the snowdrifts around it https://www.google.com/maps/@49.080269,16.4569252,3a,75y,307...
Every year, I'm amazed at how quickly our personal "veneer of civilization" collapses in the snow.
The prior owners of our home would just keep their kids home from school, and work from home an average of "about a week every winter."
We're a little more aggressive with snow removal, but there are still mornings every winter where I'm getting up at 5 to spend a couple hours plowing and blowing out drifts on our driveway (after typically doing the same thing the night before) just in order for my wife to make it down to our county road which might still have a foot or so of snow covering it.
Similarly, in windy snow-covered conditions, there are a couple spots between us and town where the snow regularly drifts back over the road in a matter of hours, causing a "well, I know the road goes about here, I think I can make it through these drifts if I floor it so here it goes" situation.
Even when the roads are well plowed and clear, there are plenty of situations where it's difficult for me, a human, to distinguish between the plowed-but-still-white-road and the white snow all around it in some lighting conditions.
And let's take snow out of it. Our fastest route into town involves gravel roads. And our paved route is chip-sealed every couple years, and typically doesn't get a divider-line drawn back on it for 6-months or so after.
Which is all to say, I think it's going to be quite a while before I have a car that can autonomously drive me into town in the summer, and global warming aside, I'll probably never have one that can get me there reliably in the winter.