In the past two weeks in San Francisco, I have seen:
- Cruise car stopped dead in the middle of Oak street at Divisadero, at night, with no emergency lights on.
- Waymo car driven onto the sidewalk to pick up a passenger on Scott street at Haight street
- Waymo car stopped, blocking the whole road on Carmelita street because it started a 3 point turn and then decided it didn't have enough room to continue
- Cruise car swerving out in front of traffic from the kerb on Divisadero at Ellis street without signaling
This sounds like a great premise for a video game not unlike Crazy Taxi, but from the perspective of a highway trooper who needs to chase buggy autonomous cabs.
"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that" is the actual quote from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
I also love the scene where Dave takes Hal apart. We've always called the first computation the Macaulay computer algebra system completed "Hal's Song".
At least when a human is irrationally angry at the fact that I don't have a legal place to drive they just honk and I know to be on the lookout for road rage and other shenanigans. If a car trained on that data is likely to behave absurdly then I can't protect myself _unless_ it has the loudspeaker function to prepare me for its misdeads.
Admittedly, I don’t know what Waymo is (or Cruise for that matter) but if someone told me it was “Uber but they don’t rate their drivers” it would still sound about right as far as human drivers go.
I don’t think any comparison other transport/policy is good way to discuss safety , otherwise we will be talking gun related homicides compared to other developed countries or discuss our covid deaths with other countries due to policy decisions.
Self driving like regular transport should have strong regulations and policing , today police is not equipped to handle these issues(tickets?) and there is no strong regulatory body (like NTSB) which is looking into non fatal incidents and that is a problem
Trains don’t just appear out of nowhere, their trajectory is quite predictable and well documented. If there is a collision it’s pretty hard to blame the train.
I think you misspelled yell. Has anyone in a traffic related anything ever been told advice? Personally, I've only ever seen (heard) it communicated in a yell
Reminds me of when the first scooters and bikes were deployed across Seattle.
"Oh this is the worst! people leave them in the middle of the sidewalk"
"They are just gonna get stolen and stripped for parts"
"Everyone please, actively break them, throw them into ditches, or into the water."
X years later, people in Seattle love them - they are constantly in use. Less traffic on the streets, fewer drunk people driving. The homeless have a few stolen ones but actually use them practically (so good for them). And people have learned to park them half-decently.
This will be the same story for AVs. The tech is gonna improve faster than the complaints get filled, and very soon everyone is gonna love paying 80% less for their Ubers.
It turns out that it takes a lot of energy to hate/antagonize random stuff going on - you don't get paid and there's no benefit to you. Eventually you just get too busy living your actual life to continue the feud.
Real protests are fueled by real pain, and those don't just peter out because there's refueling every day, not just flavor-of-the-month outrage.
Meanwhile, the entities pushing these advances won't run out of gas because they are making money from real customers who find their service valuable (citation needed admittedly).
Time will tell which of these scenarios it is, but my bet is that people will find these very useful 5 years from now and the rough edges will be sanded down by technological improvement.
I do wonder why they aren’t all stripped for motors and battery cells though. There should be a bit of incentive for that. Maybe they’re sufficiently difficult to get to without expensive tools?
Who are they gonna sell the motors and battery cells to? The only people interested in them would be a few hobbyists doing some DIY stuff. Not like you can just bolt it into your Honda Civic or run them in your laptop. Maybe once the true Civic of EVs comes out, you'll start to see them getting stripped for parts.
You're right that there's less traffic on the streets in Seattle. But I hate to say it, the scooters are not the primary cause by a long shot.
Also, do you really think Uber is gonna pass the savings on to the customers? People been paying high prices for rides for years now, why would they lower the prices when they can just keep the profits? Have the savings ever been passed onto the customer by any company?
It's wild how much they're charging for the scooters. $1 unlock + $.35/min ride time. Back in 2013, you could rent an entire Smart Fortwo from car2go for essentially the same price!
It makes sense when you compare it to other transportation options: if the bus costs $2.75, and a lyft ride costs $20, getting there by scooter for $7 seems reasonable.
If a bus costs me $2.75, I'm almost certainly not paying $7 for a 20 minute scooter ride. The bus will get me there in ~the same amount of time, 98% of Seattle buses are not crowded, and they don't subject me to the risk of a scooter-car collision, which would quickly be followed by an unprotected head-pavement collision.
Whatever works for you! I'm sure it depends a lot on the part of town you live in. For me, the scooter trip to work is only 10 minutes, while the bus trip - including the walk to the departure stop, the wait for the bus, and the walk from the destination stop - takes more like 25.
If I'm in a hurry, then, the scooter has a clear advantage; it's not competing with the bus, it's competing with Lyft, and it's both cheaper and lots more fun.
Most of the time I use scooters not to commute to work, but to run errands around the neighborhood. Then again the scooter is not competing with the bus - it's competing with my own feet! I do a lot of walking, but it can be really nice to have a motor help you carry the groceries home, or just get you where you're going quickly when time is short.
Does that rhyme in Turkish? I’m curious now if it has a certain “beat” when it’s spoken that sort of helps it persist as an idea in the language (at least that seems to). Sort of a short form poetry.
Yes it rhymes. Turkish words are always read as they are written so if it's the same letters it'll sound the same.
The way we were thought about these in school regarding proverbs and idioms is that they were distilled through time to be their most economical and impactful form. So yes, the good ones rhyme and are either funny or poignant.
does seattle even still offer bike rentals for this? for some reason feel like i only see scooters around... in the middle of the sidewalk or in some bush
2. A cafe where too many people would work on their laptops (they petitioned to say it was a zoning violation - coworking space not cafe). It was a nice cafe. Place blighted now
3. A housing project that would take away the Nordstrom valet parking lot. The housing project was blocked, but Nordstrom left independently. Now neither Nordstrom nor housing exists
As far as I can tell, if "grumpy locals" do something in SF, chances are that a normal human being would do the opposite.
These companies always say these taxis are safer on average than the human drivers.
Yes, but I don't drink and drive, which accounts for a huge amount of driver deaths (plus others of course). I don't speed at crazy speeds. I don't aggressively try to pass. I don't use my cell phone to text.
The average deaths stats for a person who does none of the above are VASTLY different than the theoretical average of deaths per 1M miles.
Most people think they're a better driver than average [1], and I bet if you asked 100 people with a history of drunk driving, 90 would say it was a one-time thing, deny it, or argue that it wasn't really that dangerous because they were just going around the block.
The autonomous car doesn't get drunk. It doesn't get tired. It doesn't get road rage. It isn't in a hurry, and it doesn't need to text its girlfriend while going 80 mph. Whatever its flaws will be, they will be consistent.
But sensors get dirty and the ML model that's being used gets updated to a suboptimal but later model. Or reverted to a worse model because the newer one has a bug.
I took a Cruise home late last night and it failed to take a right turn that it took successfully when it picked me up. It mistook the space for the bicycle lane to be for the car, because there was no car parked in the other side of the intersection late at night.
Riding in them it's definitely like living in the future, but it's clear that the technology still needs time to mature. I'll keep riding them and provide bug reports while they're in beta, but I'm not uninstalling Uber/Lyft any time soon, especially because their service area is limited to the city, nothing in the East Bay or down the Peninsula yet.
The cars are small and cramped, but clean. No one is allowed in the front seats so it really only seats two people. Three if they're all small and friendly.
I definitely trust it more than a drunk driver at 2 AM if that's the question though.
The meat of it is this: city driving is harder because of all the chaos, but it's actually easier to be safe, because no one's really moving all that fast. If you floor it, you're not going to get going all that fast before the next light. On the freeway, a bad model could lead to doing over 100 mph and then making a hard turn, causing the vehicle to flip over and crash.
Good insights but one thing I would point out is that your experience with Cruise may not translate directly to all self-driving cars in the world. Or to the next version of Cruise three months from now.
totally. my ultimate point is that in today's ML-driven computing world, algorithms are fuzzy, so while I do trust, say, Cruise, over a drunk driver, computers are no longer this reliable if-then algorithmically driven automatons. maybe the Internet dies and my iot cat feeder fails to feed my cat, maybe my book get charged so I can't read it. the future is amazing but it's also stupid.
> Most people think they're a better driver than average
If he doesn't do any high risk driving the relevant risk comparison is much different than general population.
Driving skill is not relevant to his point (you could assume he's an average driver who doesn't engage in high risk driving). If he's under 50 and healthy that's probably a considerable risk decrease (reflexes/vision and less chance of medical condition while driving).
So even if self driving cars were safer than human drivers in total, it could be significantly more dangerous for him.
> Whatever its flaws will be, they will be consistent.
Just wanted to add that most people might actually be better than the mean driver depending on the shape of the distribution (e.g. if a small group accounts for the majority of accidents). Only 50% can be better than the median though.
Your last sentence reminded me of "That terminator is out there. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead."
Likewise, I figured the author was using that particular sentence cadence as a subtle reference to the Terminator (as a more advanced artificially intelligent autonomous creation).
It's obvious. Most drunk people can get home without someone having to grab the wheel and help them. A few do require that, and they often get stopped by police.
Since almost any ai system currently needs SOME help on a 100 mile drive, yet most slightly drunk people would complete that drive just fine, you could argue close to that.
>Whatever its flaws will be, they will be consistent.
It is a strawman argument to say, "humans are unsafe drivers, so it is better to replace them with robot cars that are not as unsafe". Most intelligent, aware and skilled human drivers are consistent too. I've driven well over a million miles over the last 25 years, including cross-country trips but mostly in the heavy traffic in and around NYC and Long Island. Zero accidents and zero moving violations. If we want to make driving safer the very easy answer is to remove people who are unwilling or unable to drive well and safely. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, our disfunctional government refuses to revoke the licenses from people who have proven they are unwilling and/or unable to drive safely and jail people who drive without a license. The 95 year old who lives down the block, cannot see over the steering wheel and regularly wrecks her car continues to drive. The 20 year old a block over who speeds around without a license plate on his car continues to drive. The 35 year old with 55 moving violations and a license that is suspended speeds through the red light on the corner every day. It isn't impossible to make our roads safer - or even difficult - we just lack the political will.
> our disfunctional government refuses to revoke the licenses from people who have proven they are unwilling and/or unable to drive safely and jail people who drive without a license.
No one wants this. At least, no one who thought about what that would mean for more than a few minutes. We built our cities in a way that makes driving a necessity. There's no need to fill already overcrowded prisons with people just because they want to work, or eat, or get medical care but can't do any of those things without a car.
After we redesign our cities to be walkable, and after we've invested in adequate public transportation systems, then maybe you'll find support for stricter enforcement.
I think there's a good case to be made that alcoholics who can't get sober and won't stay off the road, even though they have viable alternatives to driving, are a large enough danger to society that we'd need too keep them away from the rest of us. Ideally that'd be in a treatment center and not a jail cell though. The trick is making sure there are viable alternatives to driving.
>I've driven well over a million miles over the last 25 years
You sure about that?
> Zero accidents and zero moving violations.
Good for you! You must be saving tons of money with your undoubtedly low insurance rates. Props.
> for a variety of reasons, our disfunctional government ...
Police have finite resources. You'll need to pay more taxes to increase that. Oh hang on...
> proven they are unwilling and/or unable to drive safely and jail people who drive without a license.
>The 95 year old who lives down the block, cannot see over the steering wheel and regularly wrecks her car continues to drive.
She passed her licence, did not total her car, and her insurance will go up due to her accidents Granny might not be a great driver, but just because she's 95 does not mean that she deserves to get shivved while bench pressing, surely?
>The 20 year old a block over who speeds around without a license plate on his car continues to drive.
You want him jailed, eh? Seems a bit much for a minor traffic violation.
The 35 year old with 55 moving violations and a license that is suspended speeds through the red light on the corner every day.
How do you know the license is suspended? How did you find out about the moving violations? How would your brownshirts identify these things?
>It isn't impossible to make our roads safer - or even difficult - we just lack the political will.
100% agree. I'm not paying for room and board for these people. I certainly don't want to default to disenfranchisement, since they've paid years of taxes into road construction.
What I would do, is focus on driving. We don't need to implement the damn Stasi just to fill your dungeons with your undesirables.
Just about everyone believes themselves to be an above average driver with a lower than average risk profile.
And besides, it's not like we're just talking about replacing only the safest drivers' miles with AVs.
We don't really know how safe Waymo is yet, because there's not enough data. It's pretty safe: it's more patient and cautious than most humans are willing to be and also has perfect vigilance; on the flip-side there's more situations it just doesn't understand.
Waymo's goal is to be a more vigilant version of the safest human drivers. They're probably not quite there yet.
Those drivers can also crash into and kill you if you’re a passenger in a self-driving car. The question is: what is my excess death rate if I convert from being a normal, non-impaired driver to a passenger in a self-driving car, assuming all else is equal?
> The obvious long term goal for society is not to have any human drivers anymore.
There's another obvious long-term goal: to eliminate personal vehicle ownership. This is why ride-sharing apps are breaking into the taxi market: because the more people who enjoy not driving their own car, will think twice when contemplating the purchase of a personal vehicle, especially because it's going to become increasingly bothersome to buy and maintain these things.
Mark my words: someday it will be prohibitive for the 99% to own a vehicle; eventually it may even be prohibited.
If we're going to do that, why not invest in mass transit for cities (and between cities)? Leave the self-driving stuff for trips out into the countryside.
FWIW, Waymo benchmarks their safety against a model of an always attentive driver, so they claim they're not just safer than an average driver, but safer than a very good driver. They mentioned this in their blog post today.
Me and my wife constantly have this debate... she worked in insurance and insists that self driving cars will be safer than human drivers. One example she brings up is the time a car in an airport hit a parked plane.
My response is there is a non zero chance that guy got fired from the airport and picked up developing software for self driving cars.
To make this go from a useless dataset of one remark to something insightful, you'd have to back up your "VASTLY" claim with, say, the number of people who suffer/die in road accidents through no fault of their own.
Although I understand it is quite contentious, I disagree with this sentiment. I think we have proven even before motor vehicles that humans are pretty poor at operating a moving vehicle and when it is capable of easily killing another human being it doesnt bode well.
I am not advocating for blind trust in corporations, but I certainly do advocate for pushing the boundaries a bit. Either that or invest heavily in public transport but I dont think that is going to happen in most of the US.
I made zero mention of my driving skill. Assume I have normal driving skill, but don't drink, don't go over 80mph, don't pass aggressively, and don't text and drive.
A Tesla is currently safer than people that do that, and they want me to believe that system is safe enough to get into. But it's not as safe as a sane responsible driver.
I almost was hit by a Cruise car turning left at a busy intersection while I was in the crosswalk (with a walk signal). When I see a car attempting to turn left, I slow down or stop to make sure it sees me. Cruise car just kept going and got super close to hitting me. But there’s no way to complain or collect stats on it.
I’ve been curious what happens if a very red ball is suspended in front of rectangular cardboard about 7 ft up. No person would mistake it for a signal, but what about these “self driving” cars?
i suspect the reason why all these years these cars operate only in like half dozen locations is that these locations have been and probably continuously are being expensively mapped to death in greatest detail (to avoid accidents and bad PR). Otherwise they would have been testing in many more locations.
For sure, I have seen this confirmed by a Waymo employee on HN. I think some people are vastly overestimating how close we are to widespread AVs, since they don't realize how narrow the successes are so far.
Definitely, all the self driving car companies have been driving around SF for years gathering data. I think Waymo even advertised it “got to know the neighborhood and peoples routines” as part of training.
People's routines, huh? Next thing you know you'll get Google ads for divorce lawyers because the car has noticed your wife's car parked not outside the yoga school, but next to this dude's car outside the Holiday Inn every 3rd Thursday of the month...
They've stopped because the moon looked like a traffic light. I don't think it'd be hard to trick them with just about anything. A red LED hung in front of the camera with tape and pipe cleaners might be enough.
I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that deliberately messing with autonomous cars to cause an accident is an act of terrorism and should be prosecuted as such.
You are saying that it would be easier to cause chaos, but I'm not sure. I can imagine various ways of tampering with roads to cause disaster irrespective of the cars being self-driving.
The article doesn't say, but for those of us who are uninformed, what does the cone do? Is it decoration, or does it 'actively' interfere with the navigation sensors?
Well, I would guess that it leaves the vehicle stranded until someone comes along to remove the cone.
The vision system recognises the cone, gets confused because a cone on the hood is outside of the normal operating parameters, and refers the problem to a teleoperator. Pulling high-G manoeuvres in the hopes of dislodging the cone obviously isn't an option. The teleoperator can't do anything about the cone, so the car becomes stranded.
They don’t have a way to remotely drive the vehicle. They complete Mechanical Turk-like tasks, classifying images, approving the vehicle’s plan around an obstacle, etc.
That actually depends. You can either have teleoperators do waypoint control, or you can have them directly drive the vehicle remotely.
Waypoint controling has its upsides and downsides, and so does direct teleops.
The main upside of waypoint control is you have less strict latency requirements and its easier for operators to "drive," the obvious downside is that it requires the onboard planner to be working.
Direct teleop allows for more granular control, but has stricter latency requirements and is often annoying to actually drive with.
Interesting, I assumed that latency and dead zones made direct drive a no-go. Plus throughput could become an issue as AVs scale. Is there actually some truth to the 5g = AV hype?
I think direct drive has its use cases but big players (i.e waymo) use the former method of waypoint teleoperations, for the reasons you mentioned.
From a business perspective its also more scalable since you can just remotely control the bot with a mouse and a screen (and not need a full gaming setup). Also as you can imagine many companies probably also multiplex single teleoperators over multiple vehicles. Having indirect control facilitates this better since you dont need operators to effectively "drive" bots with their undivided attention one at a time.
5g does make teleops better in general, but its also kind of expensive and still incurs a latency penalty (i.e remote driver action --> bot action feels insanely sluggish). I think as you scale it becomes less feasible to do direct drive, as you said.
Disclaimer: I work at another AV adjacent company so this is just my take on what I think others are doing from hearsay.
even though the cars aren't very smart, i feel like this is a good demonstration for why humans will always have something of value that an AI does not: silliness, when properly applied it can defeat anything
The cars in question have 360-degree camera coverage. Use facial recognition and sue these clowns. In a civil court, where they have to pay for their own attorneys.
> This aligns with their statement that "all cars are bad" regardless of who is (or isn't) behind the wheel. So take what they say with a grain of salt.
I absolutely hate and dislike bike lanes. They are nothing but urban sabotage.
Should I be able to put up concrete blocks in bike lanes because I dislike them?
I have not studied ALL cities in the US, but in Seattle, SF, and Portland new bike lanes in more than 90% of cases carry _less_ traffic than the car lane that they had replaced. For the rest 10% there isn't enough data.
> The cars in question have 360-degree camera coverage. Use facial recognition and sue these clowns. In a civil court, where they have to pay for their own attorneys.
People in the video are covering their faces. Also, one of their complaints is non-consentual surveiller of the public, using face recognition to harass them would be playing into their hands.
Well, they'll be easy to track down with street cams and cell phone data.
And since they care about "surveillance", they are likely to be rich bike bros, so they can be profitably sued. Heck, probably just look at Reddit posts in "/r/fuckcars" and subpoena Reddit for the IPs.
- Cruise car stopped dead in the middle of Oak street at Divisadero, at night, with no emergency lights on.
- Waymo car driven onto the sidewalk to pick up a passenger on Scott street at Haight street
- Waymo car stopped, blocking the whole road on Carmelita street because it started a 3 point turn and then decided it didn't have enough room to continue
- Cruise car swerving out in front of traffic from the kerb on Divisadero at Ellis street without signaling