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Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

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Re: Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

#81

Post by fragmede »

mingus88 wrote: post #13
porphyra wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how these cars keep getting stalled for half an hour or something. Surely there must be a team of teleoperators ready to jump in at any time?

The power outage probably knocked out the infra those operators needed to control the cars.

"the infra" is cell phone data coverage though. Which was probably congested by all the city residents using theirs instead of their wifi which was down. Would be fascinating to see just how much Internet traffic flows changed during the outage.

Re: Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

#82

Post by mingus88 »

fragmede wrote: post #81
mingus88 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The power outage probably knocked out the infra those operators needed to control the cars.

"the infra" is cell phone data coverage though. Which was probably congested by all the city residents using theirs instead of their wifi which was down. Would be fascinating to see just how much Internet traffic flows changed during the outage.

In my neighborhood, Xfinity goes out every time we lose power.

Even with my generator and UPS powering my modem, the outage is not resolved until mains power comes back

These monopolies aren’t required to have uptime in the same way the POTS network was.

We had a week long outage last year and people were driving 15 minutes out to get cell signal to catch up on their data

Re: Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

#83

Post by Ukv »

patrick451 wrote: post #67
asdff wrote: post #5

It seems waymo's always fall apart when encountering something that wouldn't be in the training set. Such as a christmas parade: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/NOqK8UEuWjs

Until AVs can deal with OOD scenarios, they should not be on the road.

Autonomous vehicles should be on the road iff they reduce overall incidents/deaths. Failure to deal with an out-of-distribution scenario would count against this, but may be rare enough to not significantly affect the average.

Re: Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

#84

Post by seanmcdirmid »

victorbojica wrote: post #21
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> miss the time when "confused" for a computer program was meant in a humorous way Not sure what about this isn’t funny. Nobody died. And the notion that traffic lights going down would not have otherwise caused congestion seems silly.

Not directly. But what about the emergency services not being able to reach their destinations? It stops being funny really fast

Have you seen how human drivers deal with traffic lights and emergency vehicles at the same time? Waymo made the right call to suspend service, they will probably update their playbook to suspend service during power outages in the future.

Re: Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

#85

Post by cmurf »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #84
victorbojica wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not directly. But what about the emergency services not being able to reach their destinations? It stops being funny really fast

Have you seen how human drivers deal with traffic lights and emergency vehicles at the same time? Waymo made the right call to suspend service, they will probably update their playbook to suspend service during power outages in the future.

Humans certainly are imperfect and make mistakes, but will iterate with the understanding that doing nothing at all and blocking emergency vehicles is untenable.

At the least we will fall back to incentive/disincentive social behavior. People will supply ample friendly and unfriendly advice to try to unwind the knot.

Waymo should lose their operating license based on this experience. It's self-evidently dangerous to everyone to be incapable of basic iteration. There's a whole set of law driver's are supposed to follow for handling failed traffic lights. Why have lower expectations of an anonymous car than a human?

Re: Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

#87

Post by seanmcdirmid »

cmurf wrote: post #85
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you seen how human drivers deal with traffic lights and emergency vehicles at the same time? Waymo made the right call to suspend service, they will probably update their playbook to suspend service during power outages in the future.

Humans certainly are imperfect and make mistakes, but will iterate with the understanding that doing nothing at all and blocking emergency vehicles is untenable. At the least we will fall back to incentive/disincentive social behavior. People will supply ample friendly and unfriendly advice to try to unwind the knot. Waymo should lose their operating license based on this experience. It's self-evidently dangerous to…

> Waymo should lose their operating license based on this experience.

Then everyone should lose their licenses as well by your draconian reasoning. Because…

> There's a whole set of law driver's are supposed to follow for handling failed traffic lights.

And they don’t, it’s chaos.

> Why have lower expectations of an anonymous car than a human?

You obviously have higher expectations for autonomous cars than humans, it is not the other way around for those of us who disagree with you. The only difference is that Waymo can get better with experience and humans generally don’t.

Re: Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

#89

Post by brianwawok »

tiahura wrote: post #86

How does Tesla FSD respond to inactive traffic control lights?

50/50 bet it would either go right through or treat it as a stop.

Don’t think I have had a totally inactive light. I have had the power is out but emergency battery turned to blinking red light, and it correctly treats as a stop sign.

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