651–660 of 813 posts
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> Humans have this intuitive sense. Some do, some of the time. I'm always surprised by how much credence other people give to the idea that humans aren't on average very bad at things, including perception.
It's an autonomous vehicle fitted with a gazillion of sensors and data to drive itself. We can expect better from it than humans.
From the Waymo blog... > the pedestrian suddenly entered the roadway from behind a tall SUV, moving directly into our vehicle's path. Our technology immediately detected the individual as soon as they began to emerge from behind the stopped vehicle. The Waymo Driver braked hard, reducing speed from approximately 17 mph to under 6 mph before contact was made. > Following contact, the pedestrian stood up immediately, w…
Yup. And to add > Waymo said in its blog post that its “peer-reviewed model” shows a “fully attentive human driver in this same situation would have made contact with the pedestrian at approximately 14 mph.” It's likely that a fully-attentive human driver would have done worse. With a distracted driver (a huge portion of human drivers) it could've been catastrophic.
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That's why the speed limit is 25 (lower when children are present in some areas) and not 35 or 40 etc. It's not reasonable to expect people to drive at 40% of the posted speed limit the entire way. We're also not talking about zero visibility (e.g. heavy fog). We're talking about blind spots behind parked cars, which in dense areas of a city is a large part of the city. If we think as a society in those situations th…
It absolutely is reasonable to expect people to drive below the limit. Speed limits are just that, maximum upper bounds of how fast you legally can go, not "recommended" speeds or minimum speeds, nor are they necessarily "safe" speeds. It's just a legal upper bounds. It is a drivers responsibility to drive for the conditions. If conditions are calling for driving 40% slower, then that's what you do and suck it up. If…
If there's cars parked on the side constantly, and that's supposed to slow you down significantly, it should be baked into the speed limit.
From what I'm aware of, you're not actually expected to slow down drastically from parked cars.
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If you drive in Sweden you will occasionally come up to a form of speed reduction strategy that may seem counterintuitive. They all add to make driving harder and feel more dangerous in order to force attention and lower speed. One is to merge opposite directional roads into a single lane, forcing drivers to cooperate and take turn to pass it, one car at a time. For a combined car and pedestrian road (max speed of 7k…
why not just put in speedbumps if all you're trying to do is slow people down? Are you sure this was the purpose of these designs? sounds a little too freakonomics to me.
From the Waymo blog... > the pedestrian suddenly entered the roadway from behind a tall SUV, moving directly into our vehicle's path. Our technology immediately detected the individual as soon as they began to emerge from behind the stopped vehicle. The Waymo Driver braked hard, reducing speed from approximately 17 mph to under 6 mph before contact was made. > Following contact, the pedestrian stood up immediately, w…
Yup. And to add > Waymo said in its blog post that its “peer-reviewed model” shows a “fully attentive human driver in this same situation would have made contact with the pedestrian at approximately 14 mph.” It's likely that a fully-attentive human driver would have done worse. With a distracted driver (a huge portion of human drivers) it could've been catastrophic.
Personally in LA I had a Waymo try to take a right as I was driving straight down the street. It almost T-boned me and then honked at me. I don’t know if there has been a change to the algorithm lately to make them more aggressive but it was pretty jarring to see it mess up that badly
In recent weeks I've found myself driving in downtown SF congestion more than usual, and observed Waymos doing totally absurd things on multiple occasions. The main saving grace is they all occurred at low enough speeds that the consequences were little more than frustrating/delaying for everyone present - pedestrians and drivers alike, as nobody knew what to expect next. They are very far from perfect drivers. And w…
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I see. Thank you for sharing. Insurance here is mandatory here for all motorists. If you are hit by an underinsured driver, the government steps in and additional underinsured motorist protection (e.g. hit by an out of province/country motorist) is available to all and not expensive. Jail time for an at-fault driver here is very uncommon but can be applied if serious injury or death results from a driver's conduct. T…
> Insurance here is mandatory here for all motorists. You do know that insurance being mandatory doesn't stop people from driving without insurance, right? > If you are hit by an underinsured driver, the government steps in and additional underinsured motorist protection (e.g. hit by an out of province/country motorist) is available to all and not expensive. Jolly good for you. If I don't carry underinsured coverage,…
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It's not particularly meaningful to ponder the subjective experience of the waymo driving computer. Instead, focus on its externally visible behavior.
Asking whether an entity has modeled and evaluated a specific situation, using that evaluation to inform its decisions, is not about subjective experience.
While the deep details are not public, Waymo has shared a fair amount of description of their system, from which you can glean some ideas about the world model it creates and the actions it takes in specific situations: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/10/ai-and-ml-at-waymo https://waymo.com/blog/2025/12/demonstrably-safe-ai-for-auto... https://waymo.com/blog/2024/10/introducing-emma
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> like a road with traffic, cars parked, pedestrians about, weather Not all of those need to be done "quickly". That's where LLMs fail You note the weather when you leave. You understand the traffic five minutes ahead. You recognize pedestrians far ahead of time. Computers can process a lot in fractions of a second. Humans can recognize context over many minutes. The Waymo may have done better in the fraction of a se…
Computers can take all of those things into account as well
It doesn't seem like self driving cars take into account the icy conditions of roads for one simple example.
From the Waymo blog... > the pedestrian suddenly entered the roadway from behind a tall SUV, moving directly into our vehicle's path. Our technology immediately detected the individual as soon as they began to emerge from behind the stopped vehicle. The Waymo Driver braked hard, reducing speed from approximately 17 mph to under 6 mph before contact was made. > Following contact, the pedestrian stood up immediately, w…
An honest account of this situation would place at least some blame on there being a tall SUV blocking visibility. These giant SUVs really are the worst when it comes to child safety