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A school district tried to help train Waymos to stop for school buses

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Re: A school district tried to help train Waymos to stop for school buses

#61

Post by mindslight »

zen928 wrote: post #48
tracerbulletx wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use statistical incidence rates and not "i saw a thing.." to make that call. I mean I'm sure most drivers regularly think "wow maybe humans shouldnt be allowed to drive" every time they go out on the road.

People have trouble seeing outside of their own biases and understanding how different another view can be with a different background and context to the situation. I have no problem confidently saying the parent poster has definitely made worse and more questionable driving decisions under more constrained and more dangerous situations on the road, and then never thinks twice about it after that moment because it ha…

You're missing that the difference is incentives, specifically perverse incentives being scaled up. If we were talking about an individual hacker who programmed their car for automated driving and it made the above wrong decision, people would straightforwardly attribute fault to the individual. The problem here is that large corpos, who will eagerly tout their perogative to do whatever they want as long as it's within the law, going beyond even that and breaking the law with impunity.

We can easily imagine a crash from such a thing being declared "no fault" (or even the fault of the turning driver!) based on corpo-sympathetic police, judiciary, and regulators who have succumbed to the inevitable "computer can't be wrong". That perceived lack of justice is the problem - when another individual does something wrong (either accidentally or willful) and gets away with it, we can brush it off as their bad behavior will eventually catch up to them. Whereas with corpos it has been thoroughly demonstrated that this will not happen.

Re: A school district tried to help train Waymos to stop for school buses

#62

Post by milkytron »

SoftTalker wrote: post #34
pavel_lishin wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are highways in the US where drivers regularly go 10-20 over the speed limit, if not more; maintaining the speed limit on a road that's labeled as 45MPH zone, but is treated as a 65, will be dangerous for everyone involved, both the cars approaching the slowpoke at 20+ miles an hour, and the slowpoke itself. I don't know how Waymo is going to square that circle.

> a road that's labeled as 45MPH zone, but is treated as a 65 If this is the case, then the speed limit is too low. To control speed on such a road you either need draconian enforcement or you need to change the road so people aren't comfortable driving that fast. Make the lanes narrower, introduce lane shifts or reduce the number of lanes, etc.

A large problem in speed limit setting is that 85th percentile is used many times for setting the speed limit and other factors are ignored or aren't weighted as heavily.

It's a very fuzzy practice, and I think as we continue towards an automated driving world, we need to be more critical of how speed limits are set.

Using the 85th percentile as a means to determine speed limits ends up with 15% of all drivers exceeding the speed limit, or worse, more drivers exceed the speed limit than those original 15% because they know consequences may be rare.

https://www.ite.org/technical-resources/topics/speed-managem...

Re: A school district tried to help train Waymos to stop for school buses

#64

Post by merelysounds »

kube-system wrote: post #49
merelysounds wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when a Waymo vehicle is driving itself, Waymo may be legally considered the operator, even if a human passenger sits inside Source: https://www.vazirilaw.com/faqs/whos-liable-in-a-waymo-self-d...

That page addresses tort liability, not liability for driving infractions or crimes. Liability for damages when a company does it is more settled of a situation. It still isn't quite as clear who or if anyone is liable when traffic laws are broken: https://web.archive.org/web/20251025055924/https://www.nytim... Often, they are simply getting away with it.

Very interesting, thanks for sharing!

Sounds like the tickets should be at least more expensive than the cost of equivalent QA (and if not, self driving companies might offload QA to the police).

Re: A school district tried to help train Waymos to stop for school buses

#65

Post by djoldman »

The unfortunate situation is that self-driving vehicles need to be fantastically superior to human drivers to secure the public trust.

Self-driving vehicles that are much better than human drivers aren't enough.

It's similar to making alternative software targeting an entrenched incumbent. The disruptor needs to add value that overcomes the friction of switching at a minimum and then more to make it worthwhile.

Re: A school district tried to help train Waymos to stop for school buses

#66

Post by bpodgursky »

olyjohn wrote: post #23
bpodgursky wrote: post #10

> A preliminary report by the NTSB published in early March found that one ensuing incident, on January 12, occurred after a Waymo remote assistant, a Michigan-based human tasked with “helping” the software when it was struggling on the road, incorrectly told the robotaxi that the school bus ahead of it didn’t have active signals on. Six vehicles passed the school bus while it was stopped, the agency said. It is stil…

Stop making bad human drivers an excuse for these machines to also be bad drivers. We're striving to do better, that's the whole point.

This is real life. You and I don't know the context for why the cars went around or how long it had been.

What if the bus driver took a break and forgot to turn off the sign? What if it had been 10 minutes and the driver was obviously dealing with some kind of behavioral problem?

A human is not going to put their life on hold forever just for a flashing light. Part of being a smart AI is figuring out when the rules have broken down just a bit and you have to adapt.

Re: A school district tried to help train Waymos to stop for school buses

#67

Post by mrgoldenbrown »

appreciatorBus wrote: post #9
bushbaba wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a cop notices this, who gets the ticket? Asking because I’ve noticed Waymos starting to go above the speed limit now. They’re generally just matching the flow of traffic like everyone else, but it does raise the question: who gets fined? And if the fleet as a whole racks up more than 4 points in 12 months, would Waymo loose it's license similar to human drivers?

I remember when they told us that autonomous cars wouldn’t break laws and wouldn’t speed. I always felt this was just a strategy, and that soon enough fleet operators would turn up the dials on speed and aggressiveness. After all, the only people who can complain are the people outside the car, and they will be dead.

Tesla specifically programmed their self driving mode to roll through stop signs without stopping. I don't think anyone has believed the claims of the self driving marketers for a long time now.
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