10 ms·

Waymo self-driving car crashed when driver fell asleep and triggered manual mode

135 points by fixermark 8y ago

elbracitosNIR 8y ago
This seems to be fake news from Uber to cover their bad practices.
- thecopy 8y ago
  No, it doesn't. That's absurd, Waymo admits it.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- Fricken 8y ago
  No, that's not what it seems like. This news was broken by Amir Efrati who writes for The Information. He tends to sensationalize his stories, which I don't like, but his facts check out. He has sources inside Waymo and has been reporting stuff like this for a while. He's more than happy to bash Uber as well when he gets the chance.
- PhasmaFelis 8y ago
  Not sure it's in Uber's interest to play up the dangers of self-driving cars in general. Nobody's gonna look at this story and think "I guess Uber's not that bad after all!"
- desdiv 8y ago
  You have been on this site for less than an hour and yet you have three flagged comments already. Maybe it's time to change your approach?
  - duxup 8y ago
    Naw it makes them easy to spot.
  - komali2 8y ago
    Less than a half hour. And one comment is about how it's bad a woman won a Nobel prize, because she's a woman. Gotta be a troll, rolling out new accounts.
  - wlesieutre 8y ago
    Either that or it's a new trolling account for someone who got banned
village-idiot 8y ago
Poor UX, poor safety controls. At this stage in the game, these prototype vehicles should absolutely detect whether or not their operators are paying attention, since they’re part of the safety system of the vehicle. Also, did they not learn from Uber’s fatal crash? A sole operator in these vehicles is a terrible idea. One person to monitor road conditions and one person to operate any computer equipment should be the standard until we hit level IV or V autonomy.
- kalleboo 8y ago
  Especially when drowsiness detection has been an option in various production cars for a decade now
- duxup 8y ago
  What's the point if you have to pay attention? I'm being serious when I ask. I question weather people can safely use these vehicles in these modes where they're supposed to not interact ... but pay close attention at the same time. I think it is going to have to be full autonomy, or not at all.
  - phailhaus 8y ago
    There's a difference between usage while testing and usage in the final product. While they're testing the system, they should probably have two operators paying attention.
  - mikestew 8y ago
    I question weather people can safely use these vehicles in these modes Of course they can't. Watch people who've been looking at their phone while the light's red. Watch how they drive after it turns green. Some of them drive away like they're drunk, lurching and weaving, like they're reorienting themselves to the driving task. On the rare occasions I get even slightly engaged with the phone at a light, it's almost like I have to "reboot" back to driving mode when the light goes green. The part of the "throwing it in the human's lap at the last second" that bothers me is that a lot of context gets missed when it's time to grab the wheel. At least for me, I get context a little bit at a time. That guy in the left lane is looking at his phone more than the road...<a few seconds later>...big truck's going to want in this lane when his ends, leave room...<more seconds>...I see taillights 12 cars ahead, what's going? And Level 3 is going to just hand me the wheel without me knowing any of that? Yeah, I see why Waymo is shooting for Level 4.
jacknews 8y ago
doh! There's a lot more 'understand humans' to add to these systems before they're really ready.
kalleboo 8y ago
It's so sad how these companies are spending billions on developing this technology and then still cheap out on the test drivers by having them drive solo and for too long hours (and presumably at minimum wage)
- melling 8y ago
  Yeah, but he found a flaw in the system before it shipped. People will be driving nonstop cross country in autonomous cars. This could easily happen. NYC to LA in 2 days.
  - bluGill 8y ago
    More than that, the ability to sleep while going from place to place is a feature. I'm looking forward to going to "grandma's" leaving at bedtime, and whereever we wake up telling the car to stop, and spend the morning exploring some random town in the middle of nowhere. Then a short nap after lunch while going to some other random town in the middle on nowhere for the afternoon, then waking up for breakfast with grandma.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    Nope. Waymo's cars don't have passengers in reach of controls. The Firefly didn't even have pedals or a steering wheel, and on the Pacificas they sit in the back, I believe.
    - leesec 8y ago
      They still have employee's sitting in the drivers seat during their testing.
- Fricken 8y ago
  Waymo's vehicle operators make $20 bucks an hour. The driver was about an hour into his shift when he dozed off.
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
polskibus 8y ago
That tester detected a serious bug in the whole concept, inadvertently risking his life during testing. He should've been promoted.
- Qworg 8y ago
  This is definitely the correct response - what is the role of testing if not to uncover flaws in both design and implementation?
  - loceng 8y ago
    It does make me wonder what screening for test drivers they use.
    - LudoA 8y ago
      Disagree. If you screen your test drivers, you no longer have adequate testing. Your test drivers need to be representative (as much as possible) of the general population.
      - icebraining 8y ago
        No, Waymo's test drivers aren't supposed to be representative of future customers, they're supposed to babysit the cars until drivers are no longer needed at all. That's why their Firefly prototype didn't even have a steering wheel.
    - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
      They call up a temp agency and say "we need X people who have a valid driver's license, a pulse and can piss clean"
      - anoncoward111 8y ago
        Which is incredibly hilarious because surely it shouldn't be too hard to find a volunteer engineer to drive the thing they coded. Surely?
Pxtl 8y ago
That's tricky. So you need to be able to take control of the car quickly in an emergency, but at the same time you want the human pseudodriver to be free to be distracted or drowsy, and so in a state where they could accidentally hit this button.
- bryanlarsen 8y ago
  That would be classified as "Level 3" autonomous, aka "Driver must be available to take over controls". Waymo has publicly stated that it feels that Level 3 autonomous is unsafe and that it's goal is Level 4 "Driver not expected to take control". Waymo currently has Level 3 cars, which is why they employ safety drivers and haven't made their cars publicly available.
  - dmoy 8y ago
    I thought they also had some l4 cars without steering wheels and stuff. Those must not have manual mode (right?! Or what? How?). I have no idea how to know exactly though. Waymo is pretty tight lipped about this. I work at Google and I don't know for sure.
    - williamscales 8y ago
      They had the little bubble cars running around for a while that didn't appear to have a steering wheel but I believe they were controllable via a joystick.
- icebraining 8y ago
  No. Waymo wants their test drivers to be attentive and alert, so that when the cars are ready, the passengers don't have to be. They should really have two test drivers there, though.
  - loceng 8y ago
    Not in all cases perhaps though to mimic real-life usage, as then this scenario may not have been uncovered until mass adoption; I could understand a 'real test driver' and a passive/non-engaged safety person in passenger seat - what can they do but wake a driver who falls asleep though, and perhaps then wake them before they accidentally engage manual mode while asleep?
lolsal 8y ago
I feel like an old man shaking my first at the slow march of inevitable progress - but - this is exactly why 'drive assist' or any other flavor of automated driving that is not 100% automation is not useful to me. If I have to pay attention and babysit piloting the vehicle, I might as well be driving (assuming I'm of sound enough mind and body to actually drive).
- icebraining 8y ago
  Waymo agrees with you, that's why their custom prototype car (the Firefly) didn't even have a steering wheel.
  - lolsal 8y ago
    That sounds more like something up my alley... but I would prefer to be a late-adopter personally :)
    - ceejayoz 8y ago
      Just not a late adopter!
  - dekhn 8y ago
    The Firefly was a joke. They had to install steering wheels shortly after getting them. The vehicles saw very little use.
    - icebraining 8y ago
      I disagree it was a "joke"; I'd say it was a concept car - their vision of the future. They need steering wheels because they're still testing them, but the Firefly is the goal.
      - dekhn 8y ago
        they made a few then had to install wheels after it was pointed out it was illegal in CA to drive without them- IE, lack of basic due diligence. And they've reverted to conventional cars as a platform because that makes more economic sense. Fine to have a goal but if you never get there and make basic bungles on the way, it's a joke.
swlkr 8y ago
I'm starting to think it might be cheaper to lay down more rail lines or something like Japan. I don't mind driving the last few miles or biking.
- icebraining 8y ago
  You might not mind, but someone who can't drive or bike does.
  - fixermark 8y ago
    ... as does the person whose house gets knocked down to make room for the new rail line.
    - digitaLandscape 8y ago
      Fuck them
      - fixermark 8y ago
        Woof. That's one way to do it. The way that'll get you either unelected from whatever municipal elected power position you have or fired from whatever unelected position, but one way.
xoa 8y ago
While no serious injuries here make it easier to be objective about it, I think it's actually good to see one of the suspicions about self-driving cars actually borne out in real life testing: that this is an area where progression/safety isn't a smooth linear progression but more of a step function or something with a valley before rising. That means that Waymo's approach is in fact the best one: either stick to level 1, maybe a bit of level 2, or bite the bullet and go directly to 5 and figure out how to bring statistical rates there combined with the positive utility function to a point where they're flat out superior to human drivers, and then sell that. This is actually kind of unusual for a lot of the history of tech I think, where the (not unwarranted) common wisdom tends to be more that gradual improvement and live testing and maturing over years is more effective then aiming for big leaps all at once. But there are exceptions that prove rules and this seems to be one of them: that overall safety is a combined function of human driver quality to car AI quality, but they're non-linearly inversely linked in that the more the AI takes over the more the human loses ability to stay focus and practiced, and furthermore has to deal with context shifts which are inherently slow and would inherently be required exactly when it's most serious. So it's a lot more all or nothing. None of that should take away from the value of pursuing it however. Humans are in fact bad drivers, and have large numbers of failure modes like getting inebriated or sleepy or angry that a system can simply avoid entirely. But arguably even more important then safety, which is what tends to come up most, is utility (after all we put up with vastly less safe cars and driver practices for decades and decades before the present time already). Personal arbitrary-point-to-point mechanized transportation is effectively required for full participation in much of the modern world, it's just the danger and expense that makes it a quasi-right rather then a full one. The young and elderly being unable to take advantage is already a suboptimal state of affairs, and it's frankly a waste of everyone's valuable and limited human brain time that they're required to act as uncreative biocomputers in that role. It's all been worth it anyway because it's just that valuable, but removing a human having a required role is really just fulfilling what the tech should have been like from the beginning if our synthetic mechanical development didn't far outstrip our synthetic information collection and processing development. A certain amount of ongoing casualties and damage is entirely acceptable to achieve a societal improvement of that level of value, even if it wasn't much safer at all.
fernly 8y ago
I love this understated line: "He regained alertness once the car crashed..." Yeah I bet he did.
userbinator 8y ago
The dozing driver didn’t respond to any of the vehicle’s warnings, including a bell signaling the car was in manual mode and another audio alert Even if he did respond, there's still the problem of whether he can respond in time. Driving normally requires sub-second reaction times.
k_sze 8y ago
And this is why engineers have invented the dead man's switch a long time ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_man%27s_switch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_man%27s_switch The basic idea is that the switch can only be maintained in a non-braking state by an alert, not-incapacitated person. If you press too hard, it brakes; if you don't press hard enough, it brakes. You have to apply just enough force, and that's something only an alert person can do. Clearly, using the gas pedal to turn off auto-pilot is not good enough. By the way, we now have a pilot program in Hong Kong where cameras are installed in buses and use computer vision to detect if a bus driver is dozing off. The system then automatically makes the driver's seat vibrate and sound an alarm to wake the driver up.
- dsamarin 8y ago
  How do you expect a driver to maintain a dead man's switch the entire time they are driving in manual mode? Or conversely, suppose the switch must be maintained while the car is in autonomous mode, should the car pull over and stop on the side of the freeway? In terms of user experience I would expect the car to continue to the destination. The commenter discussing the use of sensors to detect the state of the driver and act accordingly makes more sense.
  - akira2501 8y ago
    > In terms of user experience I would expect the car to continue to the destination. I ultimately hope this is a question answered by legal standards rather than by "user experience." If we're requiring drivers to be present even in autonomous cars, then they need to pull over and possibly take other alerting actions. > The commenter discussing the use of sensors to detect the state of the driver and act accordingly makes more sense. Are they asleep or merely in a diabetic coma? Can we tell? If we can't, should we even try this? Ultimately, I'm really concerned about this line: "Improvements in this case meant altering night-shift protocol to have two safety drivers instead of one." Humans may be bad drivers, I'd say a good look at the data would suggest otherwise; even so, the lesson for Waymo should be "Humans are also bad engineers."
  - jackvalentine 8y ago
feefie 8y ago
On 26 Sep. 1982 in 'Knight of the Phoenix' when Michael falls asleep KITT automatically takes over. Google should have a camera pointing at the driver and use machine learning to detect someone that is asleep or medically impaired and automatically take over if the car starts to leave its lane. Perhaps the driver could configure where it wants the car to go in such a case (if asleep: continue to final destination; if medical issue: drive to nearest hospital and call "Parent" or "Spouse" on cell phone and explain the situation; if smart watch can detect alcohol in your sweat therefore unconsciousness likely due to intoxication: drive to a trusted friend and call ahead, etc.). At the very least, if the person appears to be asleep it could ask "Are you sure you want to return to manual control?". It should be able to tell the difference between someone sleeping and someone alert wanting control back. It's been some decades since fiction inspired us, but we're getting close!
- andrewflnr 8y ago
  Maybe later, but there are an awful lot of fuzzy heroic heuristics in there. For now, I'd say the only safe thing to do when the driver falls asleep is come to a safe stop.
  - Aeolun 8y ago
    A safe stop on the highway?
    - garmaine 8y ago
      A "safe stop on the high way" means the side of the road in normal everyday context. That would be appropriate here, no? Highway patrol would check out the car pretty quickly.
      - erezyehuda 8y ago
        Getting to the side of the road seems like it could be pretty risky for current autopilots, though perhaps things are further ahead than I know.
    - 8y ago
paul_milovanov 8y ago
apropos, Tim Harford is an economist and an author of multiple exceptional books on economics targeted to the general public, not a reporter. He manages to show how deeply fascinating economics is and that economic phenomena are part of the fabric of not just our societies, but the very natural world. I highly recommend his "Undercover Economist" and other books.
- kwhitefoot 8y ago
  He also does a rather good podcast on the BBC. More or less: Behind the stats at https://podcasts.files.bbci.co.uk/p02nrss1.rss https://podcasts.files.bbci.co.uk/p02nrss1.rss
throwbacktictac 8y ago
>> At a company meeting to discuss the incident, one attendee reportedly asked whether safety drivers were on the road too long, and was told that drivers can take a break whenever they need to. I hope they also have reasonable mandatory breaks. It would seem that there is pressure to stay on the road as long as your peers. Which could lead to drivers not taking breaks when they should.
- lovich 8y ago
  "whenever they need to" for breaks usually translates to, "whenever they need to find another job". HR/PR might say it, and they might even believe it, but the company will incentivized management for output. Those managers are going to be pushing their employees to do as much as possible with as little breaks as possible. Unless they set up a completely separate chain of command that is in charge of validating if an employee is legitimately being fired, then it's always going to end up following their incentive structure
wiradikusuma 8y ago
No surprise there. Some people e.g me will feel sleepy when on passenger seat.
Razengan 8y ago
This instantly evokes ideas about distinct technologies from different sources coming together to form a greater whole: Things like the Apple Watch monitoring your awareness and activity level, and sending it to the car which uses that information to influence how it drives, or when it vibrates the seats to keep you awake or wake you up, and so on.
jessriedel 8y ago
Given that this was a crash with no injuries, I think Waymo's severity-weighted crashs per mile is better than a typical human's. Anyone know the numbers on this?

135 points by fixermark 8y ago

elbracitosNIR 8y ago

This seems to be fake news from Uber to cover their bad practices.

thecopy 8y ago
No, it doesn't. That's absurd, Waymo admits it.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Fricken 8y ago
No, that's not what it seems like. This news was broken by Amir Efrati who writes for The Information. He tends to sensationalize his stories, which I don't like, but his facts check out. He has sources inside Waymo and has been reporting stuff like this for a while. He's more than happy to bash Uber as well when he gets the chance.
PhasmaFelis 8y ago
Not sure it's in Uber's interest to play up the dangers of self-driving cars in general. Nobody's gonna look at this story and think "I guess Uber's not that bad after all!"
desdiv 8y ago
You have been on this site for less than an hour and yet you have three flagged comments already. Maybe it's time to change your approach?
- duxup 8y ago
  Naw it makes them easy to spot.
- komali2 8y ago
  Less than a half hour. And one comment is about how it's bad a woman won a Nobel prize, because she's a woman. Gotta be a troll, rolling out new accounts.
- wlesieutre 8y ago
  Either that or it's a new trolling account for someone who got banned

village-idiot 8y ago

Poor UX, poor safety controls. At this stage in the game, these prototype vehicles should absolutely detect whether or not their operators are paying attention, since they’re part of the safety system of the vehicle. Also, did they not learn from Uber’s fatal crash? A sole operator in these vehicles is a terrible idea. One person to monitor road conditions and one person to operate any computer equipment should be the standard until we hit level IV or V autonomy.

kalleboo 8y ago
Especially when drowsiness detection has been an option in various production cars for a decade now
duxup 8y ago
What's the point if you have to pay attention? I'm being serious when I ask. I question weather people can safely use these vehicles in these modes where they're supposed to not interact ... but pay close attention at the same time. I think it is going to have to be full autonomy, or not at all.
- phailhaus 8y ago
  There's a difference between usage while testing and usage in the final product. While they're testing the system, they should probably have two operators paying attention.
- mikestew 8y ago
  I question weather people can safely use these vehicles in these modes Of course they can't. Watch people who've been looking at their phone while the light's red. Watch how they drive after it turns green. Some of them drive away like they're drunk, lurching and weaving, like they're reorienting themselves to the driving task. On the rare occasions I get even slightly engaged with the phone at a light, it's almost like I have to "reboot" back to driving mode when the light goes green. The part of the "throwing it in the human's lap at the last second" that bothers me is that a lot of context gets missed when it's time to grab the wheel. At least for me, I get context a little bit at a time. That guy in the left lane is looking at his phone more than the road...<a few seconds later>...big truck's going to want in this lane when his ends, leave room...<more seconds>...I see taillights 12 cars ahead, what's going? And Level 3 is going to just hand me the wheel without me knowing any of that? Yeah, I see why Waymo is shooting for Level 4.

jacknews 8y ago

doh! There's a lot more 'understand humans' to add to these systems before they're really ready.

kalleboo 8y ago

It's so sad how these companies are spending billions on developing this technology and then still cheap out on the test drivers by having them drive solo and for too long hours (and presumably at minimum wage)

melling 8y ago
Yeah, but he found a flaw in the system before it shipped. People will be driving nonstop cross country in autonomous cars. This could easily happen. NYC to LA in 2 days.
- bluGill 8y ago
  More than that, the ability to sleep while going from place to place is a feature. I'm looking forward to going to "grandma's" leaving at bedtime, and whereever we wake up telling the car to stop, and spend the morning exploring some random town in the middle of nowhere. Then a short nap after lunch while going to some other random town in the middle on nowhere for the afternoon, then waking up for breakfast with grandma.
- icebraining 8y ago
  Nope. Waymo's cars don't have passengers in reach of controls. The Firefly didn't even have pedals or a steering wheel, and on the Pacificas they sit in the back, I believe.
  - leesec 8y ago
    They still have employee's sitting in the drivers seat during their testing.
Fricken 8y ago
Waymo's vehicle operators make $20 bucks an hour. The driver was about an hour into his shift when he dozed off.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago

polskibus 8y ago

That tester detected a serious bug in the whole concept, inadvertently risking his life during testing. He should've been promoted.

Qworg 8y ago
This is definitely the correct response - what is the role of testing if not to uncover flaws in both design and implementation?
- loceng 8y ago
  It does make me wonder what screening for test drivers they use.
  - LudoA 8y ago
    Disagree. If you screen your test drivers, you no longer have adequate testing. Your test drivers need to be representative (as much as possible) of the general population.
    - icebraining 8y ago
      No, Waymo's test drivers aren't supposed to be representative of future customers, they're supposed to babysit the cars until drivers are no longer needed at all. That's why their Firefly prototype didn't even have a steering wheel.
  - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    They call up a temp agency and say "we need X people who have a valid driver's license, a pulse and can piss clean"
    - anoncoward111 8y ago
      Which is incredibly hilarious because surely it shouldn't be too hard to find a volunteer engineer to drive the thing they coded. Surely?

Pxtl 8y ago

That's tricky. So you need to be able to take control of the car quickly in an emergency, but at the same time you want the human pseudodriver to be free to be distracted or drowsy, and so in a state where they could accidentally hit this button.

bryanlarsen 8y ago
That would be classified as "Level 3" autonomous, aka "Driver must be available to take over controls". Waymo has publicly stated that it feels that Level 3 autonomous is unsafe and that it's goal is Level 4 "Driver not expected to take control". Waymo currently has Level 3 cars, which is why they employ safety drivers and haven't made their cars publicly available.
- dmoy 8y ago
  I thought they also had some l4 cars without steering wheels and stuff. Those must not have manual mode (right?! Or what? How?). I have no idea how to know exactly though. Waymo is pretty tight lipped about this. I work at Google and I don't know for sure.
  - williamscales 8y ago
    They had the little bubble cars running around for a while that didn't appear to have a steering wheel but I believe they were controllable via a joystick.
icebraining 8y ago
No. Waymo wants their test drivers to be attentive and alert, so that when the cars are ready, the passengers don't have to be. They should really have two test drivers there, though.
- loceng 8y ago
  Not in all cases perhaps though to mimic real-life usage, as then this scenario may not have been uncovered until mass adoption; I could understand a 'real test driver' and a passive/non-engaged safety person in passenger seat - what can they do but wake a driver who falls asleep though, and perhaps then wake them before they accidentally engage manual mode while asleep?

lolsal 8y ago

I feel like an old man shaking my first at the slow march of inevitable progress - but - this is exactly why 'drive assist' or any other flavor of automated driving that is not 100% automation is not useful to me. If I have to pay attention and babysit piloting the vehicle, I might as well be driving (assuming I'm of sound enough mind and body to actually drive).

icebraining 8y ago
Waymo agrees with you, that's why their custom prototype car (the Firefly) didn't even have a steering wheel.
- lolsal 8y ago
  That sounds more like something up my alley... but I would prefer to be a late-adopter personally :)
  - ceejayoz 8y ago
    Just not a late adopter!
- dekhn 8y ago
  The Firefly was a joke. They had to install steering wheels shortly after getting them. The vehicles saw very little use.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    I disagree it was a "joke"; I'd say it was a concept car - their vision of the future. They need steering wheels because they're still testing them, but the Firefly is the goal.
    - dekhn 8y ago
      they made a few then had to install wheels after it was pointed out it was illegal in CA to drive without them- IE, lack of basic due diligence. And they've reverted to conventional cars as a platform because that makes more economic sense. Fine to have a goal but if you never get there and make basic bungles on the way, it's a joke.

swlkr 8y ago

I'm starting to think it might be cheaper to lay down more rail lines or something like Japan. I don't mind driving the last few miles or biking.

icebraining 8y ago
You might not mind, but someone who can't drive or bike does.
- fixermark 8y ago
  ... as does the person whose house gets knocked down to make room for the new rail line.
  - digitaLandscape 8y ago
    Fuck them
    - fixermark 8y ago
      Woof. That's one way to do it. The way that'll get you either unelected from whatever municipal elected power position you have or fired from whatever unelected position, but one way.

xoa 8y ago

While no serious injuries here make it easier to be objective about it, I think it's actually good to see one of the suspicions about self-driving cars actually borne out in real life testing: that this is an area where progression/safety isn't a smooth linear progression but more of a step function or something with a valley before rising. That means that Waymo's approach is in fact the best one: either stick to level 1, maybe a bit of level 2, or bite the bullet and go directly to 5 and figure out how to bring statistical rates there combined with the positive utility function to a point where they're flat out superior to human drivers, and then sell that. This is actually kind of unusual for a lot of the history of tech I think, where the (not unwarranted) common wisdom tends to be more that gradual improvement and live testing and maturing over years is more effective then aiming for big leaps all at once. But there are exceptions that prove rules and this seems to be one of them: that overall safety is a combined function of human driver quality to car AI quality, but they're non-linearly inversely linked in that the more the AI takes over the more the human loses ability to stay focus and practiced, and furthermore has to deal with context shifts which are inherently slow and would inherently be required exactly when it's most serious. So it's a lot more all or nothing. None of that should take away from the value of pursuing it however. Humans are in fact bad drivers, and have large numbers of failure modes like getting inebriated or sleepy or angry that a system can simply avoid entirely. But arguably even more important then safety, which is what tends to come up most, is utility (after all we put up with vastly less safe cars and driver practices for decades and decades before the present time already). Personal arbitrary-point-to-point mechanized transportation is effectively required for full participation in much of the modern world, it's just the danger and expense that makes it a quasi-right rather then a full one. The young and elderly being unable to take advantage is already a suboptimal state of affairs, and it's frankly a waste of everyone's valuable and limited human brain time that they're required to act as uncreative biocomputers in that role. It's all been worth it anyway because it's just that valuable, but removing a human having a required role is really just fulfilling what the tech should have been like from the beginning if our synthetic mechanical development didn't far outstrip our synthetic information collection and processing development. A certain amount of ongoing casualties and damage is entirely acceptable to achieve a societal improvement of that level of value, even if it wasn't much safer at all.

fernly 8y ago

I love this understated line: "He regained alertness once the car crashed..." Yeah I bet he did.

userbinator 8y ago

The dozing driver didn’t respond to any of the vehicle’s warnings, including a bell signaling the car was in manual mode and another audio alert Even if he did respond, there's still the problem of whether he can respond in time. Driving normally requires sub-second reaction times.

k_sze 8y ago

And this is why engineers have invented the dead man's switch a long time ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_man%27s_switch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_man%27s_switch The basic idea is that the switch can only be maintained in a non-braking state by an alert, not-incapacitated person. If you press too hard, it brakes; if you don't press hard enough, it brakes. You have to apply just enough force, and that's something only an alert person can do. Clearly, using the gas pedal to turn off auto-pilot is not good enough. By the way, we now have a pilot program in Hong Kong where cameras are installed in buses and use computer vision to detect if a bus driver is dozing off. The system then automatically makes the driver's seat vibrate and sound an alarm to wake the driver up.

dsamarin 8y ago
How do you expect a driver to maintain a dead man's switch the entire time they are driving in manual mode? Or conversely, suppose the switch must be maintained while the car is in autonomous mode, should the car pull over and stop on the side of the freeway? In terms of user experience I would expect the car to continue to the destination. The commenter discussing the use of sensors to detect the state of the driver and act accordingly makes more sense.
- akira2501 8y ago
  > In terms of user experience I would expect the car to continue to the destination. I ultimately hope this is a question answered by legal standards rather than by "user experience." If we're requiring drivers to be present even in autonomous cars, then they need to pull over and possibly take other alerting actions. > The commenter discussing the use of sensors to detect the state of the driver and act accordingly makes more sense. Are they asleep or merely in a diabetic coma? Can we tell? If we can't, should we even try this? Ultimately, I'm really concerned about this line: "Improvements in this case meant altering night-shift protocol to have two safety drivers instead of one." Humans may be bad drivers, I'd say a good look at the data would suggest otherwise; even so, the lesson for Waymo should be "Humans are also bad engineers."
- jackvalentine 8y ago

feefie 8y ago

On 26 Sep. 1982 in 'Knight of the Phoenix' when Michael falls asleep KITT automatically takes over. Google should have a camera pointing at the driver and use machine learning to detect someone that is asleep or medically impaired and automatically take over if the car starts to leave its lane. Perhaps the driver could configure where it wants the car to go in such a case (if asleep: continue to final destination; if medical issue: drive to nearest hospital and call "Parent" or "Spouse" on cell phone and explain the situation; if smart watch can detect alcohol in your sweat therefore unconsciousness likely due to intoxication: drive to a trusted friend and call ahead, etc.). At the very least, if the person appears to be asleep it could ask "Are you sure you want to return to manual control?". It should be able to tell the difference between someone sleeping and someone alert wanting control back. It's been some decades since fiction inspired us, but we're getting close!

andrewflnr 8y ago
Maybe later, but there are an awful lot of fuzzy heroic heuristics in there. For now, I'd say the only safe thing to do when the driver falls asleep is come to a safe stop.
- Aeolun 8y ago
  A safe stop on the highway?
  - garmaine 8y ago
    A "safe stop on the high way" means the side of the road in normal everyday context. That would be appropriate here, no? Highway patrol would check out the car pretty quickly.
    - erezyehuda 8y ago
      Getting to the side of the road seems like it could be pretty risky for current autopilots, though perhaps things are further ahead than I know.
  - 8y ago

paul_milovanov 8y ago

apropos, Tim Harford is an economist and an author of multiple exceptional books on economics targeted to the general public, not a reporter. He manages to show how deeply fascinating economics is and that economic phenomena are part of the fabric of not just our societies, but the very natural world. I highly recommend his "Undercover Economist" and other books.

kwhitefoot 8y ago
He also does a rather good podcast on the BBC. More or less: Behind the stats at https://podcasts.files.bbci.co.uk/p02nrss1.rss https://podcasts.files.bbci.co.uk/p02nrss1.rss

throwbacktictac 8y ago

>> At a company meeting to discuss the incident, one attendee reportedly asked whether safety drivers were on the road too long, and was told that drivers can take a break whenever they need to. I hope they also have reasonable mandatory breaks. It would seem that there is pressure to stay on the road as long as your peers. Which could lead to drivers not taking breaks when they should.

lovich 8y ago
"whenever they need to" for breaks usually translates to, "whenever they need to find another job". HR/PR might say it, and they might even believe it, but the company will incentivized management for output. Those managers are going to be pushing their employees to do as much as possible with as little breaks as possible. Unless they set up a completely separate chain of command that is in charge of validating if an employee is legitimately being fired, then it's always going to end up following their incentive structure

wiradikusuma 8y ago

No surprise there. Some people e.g me will feel sleepy when on passenger seat.

Razengan 8y ago

This instantly evokes ideas about distinct technologies from different sources coming together to form a greater whole: Things like the Apple Watch monitoring your awareness and activity level, and sending it to the car which uses that information to influence how it drives, or when it vibrates the seats to keep you awake or wake you up, and so on.

jessriedel 8y ago

Given that this was a crash with no injuries, I think Waymo's severity-weighted crashs per mile is better than a typical human's. Anyone know the numbers on this?