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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

#631

Post by RecycledEle »

thesz wrote: post #596
throw310822 wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy, humans prevent nearly 100% of the accidents. A car without a driver invariably crashes in a few seconds. The question is how many accidents (if any) self driving prevents with respect to average human drivers .

Self-driving cars are used in a very controlled environment. They will not function in high grass, I guess from my experience with different parktronics. The best "off road" demonstration of self-driving and/or AI assistance I've found is this: https://media.jaguarlandrover.com/news/2016/07/jaguar-land-r... Note they avoid going into grass. Human can deduce trails from grass profile, AI? I don't think so. Will you co…

We have not trained AIs to deduce trails from grass.

AIs need training before they can do things.*

*They just might be learning to do things without being trained based on the emergency behavior I see in LLMs.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#633

Post by austhrow743 »

BoorishBears wrote: post #607
filoleg wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yeah, when something doesn’t conform to your narrative, it surely is an astroturf. All coming from accounts that are many years old and have thousands of karma points that leave meaningful posts on all types of topics. But the second they post about Waymo in a positive light, that instantly means astroturfing and not their true opinion based on their lived experiences.

Realistically, there are a lot of Googlers and Xooglers on Hacker News. One of the messages in this thread is literally stating they have special knowledge of the behinds the scene workings of Waymo. I work in the AV space and I honestly don't think there's much of a competitive mentality between the companies in the space, but at the same time there is a tendency of people to psudeo-astroturf these brands: where the…

People taking it upon themselves to talk up a brand is the opposite of astroturfing, not pseudo-astroturfing.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#634

Post by elteto »

cddotdotslash wrote: post #500
elteto wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably this is why the permit is being suspended: "The AV detected a collision, bringing the vehicle to a stop; then attempted to pull over to avoid causing further road safety issues, pulling the individual forward approximately 20 feet." First of all, I find it ironic that the human driver is still at large. I'm sure the Cruise car recorded the plate and they passed this to the police. Second, the corporate spe…

My theory is that we’re just going to read about a never-ending (but possibly increasingly rare) series of edge cases. And in every one, it’ll be dismissed as “oh that was a really rare edge case” yet humans would have been able to make a better choice in the same circumstances.

This makes sense, although I think that as the edge cases get rarer and rarer it’ll be a tossup whether a human could have reacted better.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#635

Post by thereisnospork »

saalweachter wrote: post #98
thereisnospork wrote: post #20

How many surplus people will be killed by human drivers today, tomorrow, next year, and next decade because of this suspension I wonder? No one ever seems to consider them in these decisions[0]. [0]I can see myself not agreeing with the conclusions, but to not even see the question broached in these terms is maddening.

We -- in the US -- could cut our traffic-related death rate in half (or more!) by just doing whatever it is that most European countries [UK, German, Sweden, etc] do different from us. No advanced robotics necessary.

The thing is we aren't doing those things. Maybe its because we don't want to, maybe its because we can't. My point is let's not add advanced robotics to the things we can't or won't do: There is a future where 40k automotive deaths/year becomes closer to 40 on the back of self-driving cars, but we can't get to that future[1] with the current level of risk tolerance.

[1]And getting there slower has the opportunity cost of surplus deaths at the current rate minus the terminal rate - a year delay to that future costs 39,960 lives. (A year delay to ubiquitous public transport does as well ofc.)

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#636

Post by jjoonathan »

CSMastermind wrote: post #501
olex wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> 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.…

Tesla just announced 500 million miles driven by FSD [1]. Per the video, were it fully autonomous they could have a 95% CI on "safer than human" at only 275 million miles [2], but obviously having human supervision ought to remove many of the worst incidents from the dataset. Does anyone know if they publish disengagement data?

[1] https://digitalassets.tesla.com/tesla-contents/image/upload/...

[2] https://youtu.be/yaYER2M8dcs?t=477

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#637

Post by stouset »

l33t7332273 wrote: post #575
stouset wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

> most AVs explicitly disengage when they encounter situations beyond their understanding What do you mean by disengage? Cruise’s AVs don’t have a driver to take over.

I’m lumping things like Tesla FSD.

But also, there are explicitly times and areas where Cruises don’t operate due to being insufficiently able to operate. And times where they do just pull over and wait for human intervention when they don’t know what else to do. Both of which are safe and reasonable, but which also selects themselves into a safer set of miles actually traveled.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#638

Post by a_wild_dandan »

Mathnerd314 wrote: post #506
olex wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not sure that's fair - the number of accidents in human-driven vehicles varies significantly by the human driving it. Do you compare with the teen that just obtained their license and is more interested in their phone than in driving properly, or the 65-year old doctor who's been driving for work and other purposes every day for the past 40 years? According to https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/overview/age-of…

You compare what matters — mean accidents per mile driven. And like any actuary, you can compare distributions with finer granularity data (location, tickets, ages, occupations, collusion severity, etc). None of this is new or intractable. We can have objective standards with confident judgements of what’s safe for our roads.

As an aside, public acceptance of driverless cars is another story. A story filled with warped perspectives due to media outlets stoking the audience emotions which keep outlets in business — outrage, fear, and drama. For every story covering an extreme accident involving human drivers, there might be 100 stories covering a moderate driverless accident. No matter how superhuman autonomous cars perform, they’ll have a massive uphill battle for a positive image.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#639

Post by dataflow »

BoorishBears wrote: post #607
filoleg wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yeah, when something doesn’t conform to your narrative, it surely is an astroturf. All coming from accounts that are many years old and have thousands of karma points that leave meaningful posts on all types of topics. But the second they post about Waymo in a positive light, that instantly means astroturfing and not their true opinion based on their lived experiences.

Realistically, there are a lot of Googlers and Xooglers on Hacker News. One of the messages in this thread is literally stating they have special knowledge of the behinds the scene workings of Waymo. I work in the AV space and I honestly don't think there's much of a competitive mentality between the companies in the space, but at the same time there is a tendency of people to psudeo-astroturf these brands: where the…

Astroturfing isn't "I have worked here and am therefore biased when expressing support for the product", it's (to quote Wikipedia) "the practice of hiding the sponsors of a message or organization (e.g., political, advertising, religious, or public relations) to make it appear as though it originates from, and is supported by, grassroots participants."

If they explicitly disclose their internal knowledge or affiliation, it's not astroturfing. If they used to work for the company but are now unaffiliated, it's not astroturfing. If the company isn't knowledgeable or supporting of the effort, it's not astroturfing. etc.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#640

Post by wlonkly »

ballooney wrote: post #567
ethbr1 wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One huge advantage sensor-equiped vehicles have is knowing velocity and acceleration of traffic around them. Human drivers are often conservative because they don't know the speed/acceleration of a potentially colliding vehicle. We look at something and estimate (How fast? Speeding up or slowing down?), but we don't know . If you could put an actual number on it, I think you could drive a lot more "aggressively" and…

To be clear and dispel your misconception: These cars estimate rather than ‘know’.

In the same way a highway cop's lidar gun estimates.
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