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Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

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Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#631

Post by mwattsun »

redytedy wrote: post #628
mwattsun wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to be surprised, but after all the hype by FSD boosters, I'm prepared to be disappointed. I'm skeptical because San Francisco is probably the worst city in North America to do this. I could believe this in San Jose with it's wide flat boulevards and I'm suspicious it's not San Jose first. San Francisco is unique in that the city planners decided to ignore that they had mountains in the middle of their city and…

I think your criticism in this thread is fully valid. But I wanted to say that even "glorified light rail" is an incredible accomplishment... The challenges are immense for getting failure rates as low as that would require. Behavior prediction, avoidance, pedestrian interaction, etc are all issues for any subset of streets.

I thought the same thing after I had time to think about the light rail comment. I certainly don't want to downplay the technical achievements. I am really excited about the progress. I think myself and others just want these companies to be honest with us, give it to us straight and tell us how we can help create the future, not blast out PR releases meant to suck in the less informed investor. I suppose if that's the only way to get the money to create this then I should learn to accept it.

Edit: two other concerns of mine 1) SF is a great place to kill a pedestrian with not completely proven driving technology, especially kids, because there are so many of them. And 2) These companies give very little consideration, if any, to the millions of people who drive for a living who might no longer have that means of supporting themselves.

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#632

Post by wutbrodo »

mvhvv wrote: post #584
wutbrodo wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this question is even meaningfully-defined. There is no "the" point of comparison. The relevant point of comparison is whatever ride it's displacing. The rideshare explosion has already had a measurable effect on drunk-driving deaths; to the extent that a theoretical lower-cost AV will make rideshare even more accessible, then its effect on drunk-driving reduction absolutely makes non-sober drivers a re…

Is it reasonable to assume AV will be lower-cost than rideshare? The key thing that makes Uber more affordable than a taxi is that vehicle purchase/maintenance/depreciation/liability are all externalised. In a full-self-driving situation you no longer have to pay your driver, but you do have to pay for all of the above. With the inevitably higher standards of maintenance required for AV fleet vehicles I can't really…

> Is it reasonable to assume AV will be lower-cost than rideshare?

That's what the industry is betting on. I think it's reasonable in the steady-state: labor costs are expensive as hell.

> vehicle purchase/maintenance/depreciation/liability are all externalised.

These aren't 100% externalized with Uber, as they show up in the labor cost. They're only externalized with Uber to the extent that drivers do the math wrong on the costs they're paying[1]. Most of the analyses I've seen of this choose every possible pessimistic assumption, and still end up with net wages that are very high. They're of course low relative to "a living wage", which is what the analyses are focusing on, but that's precisely the point of what we're talking about: even the floor of labor costs is very high, when you're looking at expenses.

[1] Completely tangentially, but also note that this ignores the extent to which people derive value from being able to convert assets around. It's hard to imagine for us SWEs making 1% salaries and sitting on mountains of wealth, but liquidity is a constant and pressing concern for a large portion of the country. See also: payday lenders, where there's a stark difference between the opinions of those who've actually studied the economics of the industry and the midwit affluent John-Oliver-watcher.

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#633

Post by wutbrodo »

gibsonf1 wrote: post #607
wutbrodo wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people are going to get injured and or killed by unusual real-world events riding in these autonomous cars I don't think anyone inside or outside of the AV industry is expecting that there will be zero injuries or fatalities involving AVs. Why would that be the bar, when AV rides displace human drives that already injure and kill tens of thousands?

The difference would be frequency of injury and/or death as AV cars can't think and react dynamically to non-pattern situations.

Sure, and they can't get drunk or fall asleep either. Even for taking for granted that AVs can't find an operating domain in which "non-pattern situations" are covered by failsafes, it's far from obvious that the net advantage goes to human drivers.

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#634

Post by wutbrodo »

bluGill wrote: post #586
wutbrodo wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I also see no reason, a priori, to 'blind' a vehicle to certain spectra of EM emissions The reason is simple: cost. The goal isn't to build a proof-of-concept safe AV, it's to build one that meets the safety bar _and_ is as cost-effective as possible, in a reasonable timeframe. I happen to agree with the target-then-scale approach, but I also agree with Kyle that it's not a given that this is approach is definitely…

Sure, but we already know that humans are not very good drivers (car accidents are #1 or #2 causes of death for age groups between 5 and 50). If you can do better than humans with more input, then that is compelling reason to use more input even if you can do just as good with a cheaper system.

I agree, but was narrowly addressing the claim " I also see no reason, a priori, to 'blind' a vehicle to certain spectra of EM emissions". Cost is the a priori reason, albeit one that is potentially balanced by others.

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#635

Post by graderjs »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #611
graderjs wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? You think full autonomous that's better than human drivers is not AGI? Perhaps time will tell if your opinion is right.

Yes, it seems pretty obvious to me. I mean, we already have cars that can handle driving themselves in some contexts (e.g. Waymo in suburban Phoenix) but we're obviously nowhere close to AGI.

That's the thing tho. Specialization (in some contexts), versus a general field of endeavor.

Plus you got, "handle themselves", versus, better than humans drivers.

You may be underestimating how hard that is.

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#636

Post by walrus01 »

ramesh31 wrote: post #592
andy_ppp wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've met quite a few people like her and I really don't believe they are sociopaths - they say things that sound real and even convince themselves of it but as soon as you start peeling back details they don't exist. It's like you are talking to a Turing machine and it's you failing the test. People on these forums never really speak to these people because we are already largely scientists and love empirical evidenc…

>There's a whole class of people who have learned to pattern match talking like us without anything to back it up. See the industry "Comms" for many many examples. Have noticed this through my career as well. There is a whole class of people who go through life never actually doing anything. They just talk about people doing things. And get paid to talk about people doing things. And by the time people realize that t…

I see you've discovered the people who work in "enterprise sales" for any niche software or technical product.

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#637

Post by throwawaylinux »

birdyrooster wrote: post #489
dustintrex wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure there are lots of other people out there who could run today's SpaceX as a space cargo trucking company. But Elon deserves the credit for creating two wildly successful companies that revolutionized their respective industries, both in the face of hugely entrenched competitors in highly regulated markets that hadn't seen successful new players in decades, and both as a side effect of his actual goal of getti…

The only people who were even competing were eccentric billionaires so let's be clear that he only beat a handful of other people who even had access to attempt the business. It's not that huge of an accomplishment because private space was theorized for a long time but NASA sucked up all the air in the room for the longest time but Elon's timing was just right. He out of the handful of billionaires working on this w…

He wasn't a billionaire for years after SpaceX had its first major successes and the "millionaires bad" narrative got retired since Bernie Sanders became one, so that's not going to work either.

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#638

Post by Tucanix »

Disappointing the amount of ragging people are doing towards Tesla here, Tesla is far ahead and I can't believe people are falling for this promotional video and assuming they are farther ahead.

Tesla's vehicles are in the consumers hands and have many many thousands of drivers using their system every day. Also the VERY first comment here mentions a misleading article "Tesla to recall vehicles". This is misleading since Tesla probably didn't recall even a single vehicle, they probably all got an over the air update within a couple days of the problem being spotted. When a problem comes up Tesla is quick to send out an update and the news loves to write misleading articles every damn time because bad news about Tesla sells, there are so many wrong articles out there it's insane.

So disappointing that even the people I assumed would be smarter (Hacker News), are falling for this shit. Also this debate of cameras vs lidar is so old and outdated because LIDAR IS NOT GOD DAMN MAGICAL it has it's problems too. Tesla has also dropped radar because they don't see it being beneficial enough.

In reality talking about lidar vs cameras is not too important especially in the long ron, how far the tech is underneath is the most important thing currently and over time the amount of compute power you have in each car will be the most important factor.

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#639

Post by marmshallow »

Tucanix wrote: post #638

Disappointing the amount of ragging people are doing towards Tesla here, Tesla is far ahead and I can't believe people are falling for this promotional video and assuming they are farther ahead. Tesla's vehicles are in the consumers hands and have many many thousands of drivers using their system every day. Also the VERY first comment here mentions a misleading article "Tesla to recall vehicles". This is misleading s…

I'm not sure what there is to "fall for". Cruise is offering truly driverless rides (in a limited domain), and Tesla does not have any kind of truly driverless product (although they still call it Full Self Driving).

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#640

Post by marmshallow »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #595

I think I saw one of these at night with no humans inside . Drivers or passengers. Is that legal?

Yes, Cruise has obtained the relevant permits from the CA DMV. The only permit they're currently missing is the one that let's them charge customers for rides.
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