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A Waymo One Rider’s Experiences Highlight Autonomous Rideshare’s Shortcomings

81 points by motiw 8y ago

shiftpgdn 8y ago
Off topic: Is it just me or is the font on this site completely unreadable? I had to copy and paste it into a text file so I could actually read what was written. It's like medium but 80x worse.
- burger_moon 8y ago
  On desktop (mac w chrome) it looks fine. Maybe it rendered weird for you?
- vharuck 8y ago
  It's pretty painful for me, too. I want to say the differing line thickness in a character is th reason, often becoming to thin. Especially for "A" and "e".
- glenneroo 8y ago
  Agreed. In Firefox I had to Ctrl+ 3-4 times to enlarge the text to make it readable.
seibelj 8y ago
It’s mind blowing that even skilled software engineers were fooled into thinking that self driving cars were only months away. The hype was blinding. The amount of complexity involved in a self driving car is unfathomable. They can’t even get the thing to work on simple trips in mega-sprawl Phoenix with perfect weather and solid lane markings. We are decades out, and maybe only if they ban human drivers.
- cloudwalking 8y ago
  Decades out? Here's a real world report. https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/ab2nqe/waymo_one_experience/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/ab2nqe/way...
  - pofilat 8y ago
    What part of that thread/video series are you calling attention to?
    - cloudwalking 8y ago
      > They can’t even get the thing to work on simple trips Clearly it does work for simple trips.
      - oldgradstudent 8y ago
        Trips are only simple in retrospect. To "work", as self-driving car has to be able to deal with all contingencies, such as unexpected heavy traffic, pedestrians, kids, drunk college students, sudden rain, sudden fog, constructions, police redirecting traffic, etc. Oh, and it also shouldn't kill anyone more than once in 100 million miles or so. Even if some trips turned out to be slight less simple than predicted.
    - partingshots 8y ago
      You edited your comment without any mention of it. This is considered bad etiquette and is derailing to the conversation. Please try not to do that in the future.
- dominotw 8y ago
  It can be if we have the correct infrastructure. If we highlight thousands of ppl dying every year in dui, accidents ect. If we highlight this problem same way media highlights mass shootings. Mobilise ppl to buildout infrastructure that would save thousands of lives. But ofcourse nytimes and co doesn't care about that because its not left vs right clickbait.
- empath75 8y ago
  The hype is because not very long ago nobody even expected that what they’re doing now would be possible. That they can even do what they’re doing now is an amazing achievement. It turns out that it’s not enough and we need another breakthrough, but it might not have been possible to see what the limitations of the new approach were going to be when they were doing new, previously impossible things every week. I think this is similar to the belief in the 20th century that right after the moon, we’d be colonizing mars and exploring the galaxy. We had been bound to the surface of the earth for thousands of years of civilization and then suddenly it seemed like we had no limitations. You can probably excuse a little bit of excess enthusiasm.
  - rayiner 8y ago
    > I think this is similar to the belief in the 20th century that right after the moon, we’d be colonizing mars and exploring the galaxy. The takeaway from the history of 20th century technology is that a given field plateaus much more quickly than the optimists expect, sometimes short of what’s needed to be truly useful. Something simple like voice recognition has been an area of intense research for 30-40 years. And it’s still not useful for all but the simplest things. I have 10 Siri reminders from the last couple of days. 4 are so badly mangled I can’t figure out what I meant to remind myself. Barring some fundamental advance, we’re not going to be talking to our computers as a primary input. The same thing with other technologies. We broke the sound barrier, but never developed the tech to make supersonic travel cost effective. We put a man on the moon, but have yet to develop the tech to colonize off world bodies. Transistor speed and density have plateaued. After years of doubling CPU clock speeds every year, Intel crawled from 3 GHz to 5 GHz over 15 years. (If CPU speeds improved so slowly back in the day, we’d be using 200 MHz Pentium Pros today.)
    - njarboe 8y ago
      In the 1970's we saw the rise of "safety first" as a philosophy for life. By the 1990 most people believed it. Safety first as a prime directive leads to doing nothing in the end. Almost none of previous tech advancements from controlling fire a million years ago to nuclear weapons could have happened following "safety first". I can't think of any new inventions (except recreational ones like wing suits, and a some medical devices and drugs) since the 1970's that can kill people when used. A huge number of things we use heavily would never be invented today. Steam engines, cars, trains, electricity, natural gas in homes, etc. Millions died as these inventions were improved and still kill millions today. The inventor of new things were only allowed to put "use at your own risk" on software, so that is where all the new stuff has happened in the last 50 years. That era is now ending as cyberwarfare, ransomware, "fake new" become serious problems and super AGI is popularized as a possibility. Sure, S curves exist for all technologies, but now the only tech allowed to even start are ones that are thought to be powerless (ie., next to useless). We wanted flying cars but got 140 characters.
- oldgradstudent 8y ago
  > It’s mind blowing that even skilled software engineers were fooled into thinking that self driving cars were only months away. The hype was blinding. Waymo was giving out multi-million dollar bonuses. You too will learn to believe in whatever it is required for you to believe to get those bonuses.
dpflan 8y ago
It's interesting to consider how much money is required to validate this idea -- there are multiple companies, many investors, and focused engineers trying to solve this problem. Are those resources emotionally driven to a short-term outcome that is proving to be far away (how far, and can this push result in a non-linear jump somewhere?). What is the real hypothesis here that bridges the idea and valuation creation?
- rjf72 8y ago
  There's a few interesting things about self driving vehicles. One surprising thing is that for a very large autonomous taxi company, these vehicles could, in theory, operate at a profit while charging less per mile than it costs you to drive your own car. Economy of scale + vertical integration means maintenance, insurance, and other regular costs are going to be substantially cheaper, mile for mile, than consumer rates. And just consider the amount of money in play here. In 2016 US drivers (only considering cars, trucks, minivans, SUVs) drove 3.22 trillion miles. Imagine you get a marketshare of 10% of these miles. And you have a 'negligible' profit margin of 5 cents per mile. That's $16.1 billion in profit. The potential there is quite remarkable. But it gets even more tempting because of some issues with self driving vehicles. Because of above the the biggest company will not only be able to operate for much cheaper than anybody else, but they'll also be able to offer a better service. They can have more regular cleaning/maintenance, and most importantly you'll be able to get a ride more reliably from them than from any other player and in the widest array of locations. And consider the lobbying that will inevitably happen. The instant that self driving vehicles can show a higher average safety rating, companies such as Google/Waymo will lobby governments to start banning non-autonomous vehicles in urban areas, "for consumer safety." Pair all of these facts with rapidly declining vehicle ownership among the younger generations. Things could end up changing incredibly rapidly. And whoever ends up on top is going to control what might end up becoming the most profitable business to ever exist. We talked about 10% at a $0.05/mile profit margin. That meager $16 billion is an extremely conservative estimate for a single country. --- And then you get into meta-aspects. Getting from A to B is one of the most important parts of basic modern living. It's hard to even imagine the implications if a single company was able to start gaining some significant degree of control on this aspect of life. And then there's the data. Not only would you know where huge chunks of the population is going to and fro at all times, but you'd also have a massive real time surveillance network of practically all of 'real life' society as each and every vehicle you control would need to be constantly autonomously surveilling everything around it. The possibilities there are mostly dystopic, but that sort of knowledge and power is going to be a major driver here.
F_J_H 8y ago
What good is a newborn baby? Benjamin Franklin [1] [1] https://www.americanheritage.com/content/“what-good-new-born-baby” https://www.americanheritage.com/content/“what-good-new-born...
kalenx 8y ago
> it would seem Waymo programmed its autonomous vehicles to treat turn signals as an indicator that the car is about to execute a turn or merge, not an indicator that it is looking for the opportunity to do so. Well, here's one, if not the issue... I do not know the precise wording of trafic Laws in each state, but in many if not all, turn signals should _not_ be used as "an indicator of opportunity". Now, it is already difficult to build a law abiding autonomous car; expecting the car to also break the law in day-to-day cases (not just an emergency) will be downright impossible -- and I'm not even considering the media storm that would be created by a company saying "we program our cars to break the law all the time"...
- vageli 8y ago
  > > it would seem Waymo programmed its autonomous vehicles to treat turn signals as an indicator that the car is about to execute a turn or merge, not an indicator that it is looking for the opportunity to do so. > Well, here's one, if not the issue... I do not know the precise wording of trafic Laws in each state, but in many if not all, turn signals should _not_ be used as "an indicator of opportunity". Certainly not true in NJ. > A signal of intention to turn right or left when required shall be given continuously during not less than the last 100 feet traveled by the vehicle before turning. https://law.justia.com/codes/new-jersey/2013/title-39/section-39-4-126/ https://law.justia.com/codes/new-jersey/2013/title-39/sectio...
  - kalenx 8y ago
    My wording was bad, I admit it. My point was that signals should be given only when you have the _opportunity_ to do such maneuver. If the lane to your right is crowded, putting your right signal on achieves nothing. In other words, your signals do not give you the right of way. I do not think Waymo cars are unable to use their signals, but they are probably programmed not to put them on when the turn/lane change cannot be achieved anyway.
    - TomVDB 8y ago
      When someone indicates his intention to change lanes when there is no room, I slow down. I expect the same of others. And when that doesn’t happen, you just continue on because chances are high that the next one will. In many cases of heavy traffic, this is the only way to change lanes.
norswap 8y ago
I like these pieces for tempering the hype around driverless cars. But it's also true it is still early and the technology will improve. I personally don't believe it will become as reliable as people think. The last percent are always the hardest — but to make a driverless car better than a human, they're crucial. But who cares what I (or others) think? We shall find out the truth of the matter soon enough. I just hope whoever mispredicted will take a note of it and keep that in mind the next time they make a prediction.
- vntok 8y ago
  > The last percent are always the hardest — but to make a driverless car better than a human, they're crucial. The last % being crucial is debatable. A self-driving car could be way more reliable than a human driver at all times except during blizzards in which case it's known to crash. That car would be extremely reliable, viable and useful to operate everywhere there's never any blizzard, and even when there happens to be a few blizzard events per year it would only need to be automagically rendered inoperable during those times. The town hall could send that kind of command, just like it would ring a civil defense siren.
burger_moon 8y ago
I'm only about halfway through, but what are the chances 'Carl' doesn't get identified through this story? It seems like it'd be very easy for them to cross check this story with ride history to figure out the person, especially since it's a closed beta kind of thing it sounds like. What kind of consequences will 'Carl' face by speaking to the press about this? Do you just get dropped from the program or are their real consequences? (It doesn't sound like 'Carl' is a Google employee at least)
- jfoster 8y ago
  I'm pretty sure I know who Carl is. I don't think he's concerned about his identity as much as the article has been written to make you believe. I think the author was trying to make it seem more like an inside scoop when it isn't.
DeonPenny 8y ago
Seemed like it fairly good from what I heard. It didn't crash which is the bar they are going for. Driving past a place not only is ok I'd be more than comfortable having the car do so. The issue opponents are going to have in the future is when waymo actually has a chance to go to the general public in one of these cities and doesn't crash. The number of riders will easily outstrip the people screaming. Just like the scooters they will leave for a while but the damage will have been done. There are no fans currently that depend on this but thats easily going to not be true.
- empath75 8y ago
  Yeah I don’t necessarily care if it doesn’t take the most efficient route if it’s within a reasonable amount of time and the ride is pleasant, and I’m not getting charged extra for the detour. Going around the block seems okay, but not taking the freeway and it taking 20 minutes longer definitely isn’t.
- CloudYeller 8y ago
  I agree. When I'm dropping someone off, I often drive past the intended drop point, let them out across the street, etc, because there is an unreasonably high cost to hitting the exact drop point. It sounds like self driving cars are only allowed to do exact drops, which is an irrational constraint IMO. Clearly there's a trade-off between trip time and drop accuracy, and time is usually 10x more important than accuracy.
  - UncleEntity 8y ago
    > ...because there is an unreasonably high cost to hitting the exact drop point. That is literally the difference between a professional driver and a "ride share" amateur. Yeah, yeah, cheap shot but those ride share drivers drive me crazy with their antics.
buboard 8y ago
If that's the entire list of shortcomings it sounds they re in pretty good shape. There are audiences for which this car is an essential, and hopefully drivers will adapt to robocars , just like horsecars adapted to autos.
- oldgradstudent 8y ago
  You may have missed that tiny detail, but they have not one, but two, safety drivers in each car. That is twice the number of drivers a normal human-driven cars have. They are not supposed to talk to passengers, though, for the true driverless experience.
  - Dylan16807 8y ago
    The other one isn't a safety driver. And having the safety driver doesn't tell you all that much about how it would perform without.
    - oldgradstudent 8y ago
      > The other one isn't a safety driver. True, the second person is the co-driver. As Waymo has discovered[1], a single person is not safe enough. > And having the safety driver doesn't tell you all that much about how it would perform without. Theoretically true. But in reality, it tells you all you need to know - the cars are not safe without safety drivers. [1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/troubled-waymo-worker-shows-human-problems-continue https://www.theinformation.com/articles/troubled-waymo-worke...
      - Dylan16807 8y ago
        > But in reality, it tells you all you need to know - the cars are not safe without safety drivers. I disagree. There are other plausible motivations to have a safety driver at this stage even for a safe car.
        8y ago
dqpb 8y ago
On a side note, I'd like to lament the dystopia of reading articles online, where every 4 paragraphs your attention is hijacked by a video ad. Fuck that. Fuck futurism.com.
- kencausey 8y ago
  I use the uMatrix plugin and have it configured to block everything, except of course for the base HTML. For more and more sites this means I get no content without adding in exceptions, but for this and many sites I get the part of the content I want, the text. Then I hit the Reader mode button and I get text which is even in the format that is most comfortable for reading for me.
- lquist 8y ago
  Blame the fact that people will pay for very few media sites. Realistically, Futurism’s choice is have ad supported content or don’t exist
  - daveguy 8y ago
    They do have a third option: unobtrusive ads.
    - scarejunba 8y ago
      Those are worth very little when untargeted.
      - seslaire 8y ago
        Quite the contrary: https://digiday.com/media/new-york-times-gdpr-cut-off-ad-exchanges-europe-ad-revenue/ https://digiday.com/media/new-york-times-gdpr-cut-off-ad-exc.... Discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18920079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18920079
        scarejunba 8y ago
ivanhoe 8y ago
Carl wants to live in the world where traffic is safe, no accidents happen, but wants AI that can drive in human-like aggressive manner. Carl's expectations are a bit too high, I'd say...
- riffic 8y ago
  https://daringfireball.net/linked/2018/03/19/crashes-not-accidents https://daringfireball.net/linked/2018/03/19/crashes-not-acc...
  - oldgradstudent 8y ago
    I'm sure language policing will reduce fatalities to zero real soon now.
- crooked-v 8y ago
  For my part, I'd just want the results to be very predictable. If I know that a drive from A to B will always take X minutes +/- 5%, I can just use that as part of my day doing whatever while the car drives itself.
  - Cyph0n 8y ago
    That simply not going to happen until essentially all other cars on the road are self-driving cars.
    - twblalock 8y ago
      And when the weather is perfect and the snowplows always clear the roads on time, etc. There are too many variables. It's incredibly difficult to get consistent on-time performance out of a train system which has far fewer variables to anticipate. It will never happen for cars even if they are self-driving.
      - njarboe 8y ago
        Unless they also have their own lane/road. Maybe in built up areas we will have to build tunnels for them.
maxyme 8y ago
Living in Phoenix for several years and working in Chandler (the headquarters for the self driving car division where my office was actually on the initial training route before they allowed passengers) I can say the cars suffer from being overly conservative. I don't think this is a bad thing for self driving cars, in contrast Ubers cars (before they were banned from the state for disabling collision detection and killing someone) drove aggressively. Ubers cars needed to be taken over to stop from hitting pedestrians crossing at intersections and continually drove at least 5mph above the speed limit. In Phoenix everyone drives fast on the highway, but Waymo cars drive 5-10mph under the speed limit. There are some unprotected left turns across 4 lanes they may try but being conservative they crawl across and eventually get stuck in the middle. This is probably a good thing for now and as confidence with the engineering team on the hardware and software goes up it can likely be tuned.
thenanyu 8y ago
I like to think of autonomous vehicles like trains rather than cars in the general sense. They can operate on pre-existing tracks that were previously unexploited. A lot of track exists out there, and as the technology gets better, they can utilize a higher percentage of what's available.
- lsc 8y ago
  this requires cultural change... living more densely, and being willing to share our commute with other people. Cultural change is... often rather harder than technological innovation.
  - m0zg 8y ago
    If anything, autonomous cars should enable us to live _less_ densely. If you're in a dense area already, you probably don't need a car at all.
    - lsc 8y ago
      I was responding to a comment about using trains. Yes, autonomous cars would make spreading out easier.
super-serial 8y ago
I think a lot of people in this thread are underestimating the possibility of safety drivers going remote and how that could be a solution to these edge cases. When making decisions or coming across strange situations the AI has a confidence level, and when that falls below a threshold it can notify a remote person to potentially handle the situation. Right now Waymo has problems merging on a freeway with asshole drivers... but what's the big deal? It's maybe 1 minute out of a 30 minute drive. If you only need a human operator to take over the vehicle 2 minutes out of every hour of autonomous travel, then you could probably get by with 10 remote operators monitoring a fleet of 200 vehicles. That could translate into way better profit margins than any current ride-share service.
- aedron 8y ago
  Now I'm imagining a guy whose job is to sit all day in a simulator vehicle, 'teleporting' from one stranded Waymo to the next and taking it around school buses and manhole covers, parallel parking, etc. I kind of think that is viable. Replace thirty regular drivers with one. That kind of model doesn't look too far off.
  - cheald 8y ago
    We already do it with military UAVs. Assist-by-wire for vehicles seems like it's not too far-fetched.
- masonic 8y ago
  When you hit a window when you need the 11th human, which you don't have online, what then? The vehicle facing that need just fails?

81 points by motiw 8y ago

Off topic: Is it just me or is the font on this site completely unreadable? I had to copy and paste it into a text file so I could actually read what was written. It's like medium but 80x worse.

burger_moon 8y ago
On desktop (mac w chrome) it looks fine. Maybe it rendered weird for you?
vharuck 8y ago
It's pretty painful for me, too. I want to say the differing line thickness in a character is th reason, often becoming to thin. Especially for "A" and "e".
glenneroo 8y ago
Agreed. In Firefox I had to Ctrl+ 3-4 times to enlarge the text to make it readable.

seibelj 8y ago

It’s mind blowing that even skilled software engineers were fooled into thinking that self driving cars were only months away. The hype was blinding. The amount of complexity involved in a self driving car is unfathomable. They can’t even get the thing to work on simple trips in mega-sprawl Phoenix with perfect weather and solid lane markings. We are decades out, and maybe only if they ban human drivers.

cloudwalking 8y ago
Decades out? Here's a real world report. https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/ab2nqe/waymo_one_experience/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/ab2nqe/way...
- pofilat 8y ago
  What part of that thread/video series are you calling attention to?
  - cloudwalking 8y ago
    > They can’t even get the thing to work on simple trips Clearly it does work for simple trips.
    - oldgradstudent 8y ago
      Trips are only simple in retrospect. To "work", as self-driving car has to be able to deal with all contingencies, such as unexpected heavy traffic, pedestrians, kids, drunk college students, sudden rain, sudden fog, constructions, police redirecting traffic, etc. Oh, and it also shouldn't kill anyone more than once in 100 million miles or so. Even if some trips turned out to be slight less simple than predicted.
  - partingshots 8y ago
    You edited your comment without any mention of it. This is considered bad etiquette and is derailing to the conversation. Please try not to do that in the future.
dominotw 8y ago
It can be if we have the correct infrastructure. If we highlight thousands of ppl dying every year in dui, accidents ect. If we highlight this problem same way media highlights mass shootings. Mobilise ppl to buildout infrastructure that would save thousands of lives. But ofcourse nytimes and co doesn't care about that because its not left vs right clickbait.
empath75 8y ago
The hype is because not very long ago nobody even expected that what they’re doing now would be possible. That they can even do what they’re doing now is an amazing achievement. It turns out that it’s not enough and we need another breakthrough, but it might not have been possible to see what the limitations of the new approach were going to be when they were doing new, previously impossible things every week. I think this is similar to the belief in the 20th century that right after the moon, we’d be colonizing mars and exploring the galaxy. We had been bound to the surface of the earth for thousands of years of civilization and then suddenly it seemed like we had no limitations. You can probably excuse a little bit of excess enthusiasm.
- rayiner 8y ago
  > I think this is similar to the belief in the 20th century that right after the moon, we’d be colonizing mars and exploring the galaxy. The takeaway from the history of 20th century technology is that a given field plateaus much more quickly than the optimists expect, sometimes short of what’s needed to be truly useful. Something simple like voice recognition has been an area of intense research for 30-40 years. And it’s still not useful for all but the simplest things. I have 10 Siri reminders from the last couple of days. 4 are so badly mangled I can’t figure out what I meant to remind myself. Barring some fundamental advance, we’re not going to be talking to our computers as a primary input. The same thing with other technologies. We broke the sound barrier, but never developed the tech to make supersonic travel cost effective. We put a man on the moon, but have yet to develop the tech to colonize off world bodies. Transistor speed and density have plateaued. After years of doubling CPU clock speeds every year, Intel crawled from 3 GHz to 5 GHz over 15 years. (If CPU speeds improved so slowly back in the day, we’d be using 200 MHz Pentium Pros today.)
  - njarboe 8y ago
    In the 1970's we saw the rise of "safety first" as a philosophy for life. By the 1990 most people believed it. Safety first as a prime directive leads to doing nothing in the end. Almost none of previous tech advancements from controlling fire a million years ago to nuclear weapons could have happened following "safety first". I can't think of any new inventions (except recreational ones like wing suits, and a some medical devices and drugs) since the 1970's that can kill people when used. A huge number of things we use heavily would never be invented today. Steam engines, cars, trains, electricity, natural gas in homes, etc. Millions died as these inventions were improved and still kill millions today. The inventor of new things were only allowed to put "use at your own risk" on software, so that is where all the new stuff has happened in the last 50 years. That era is now ending as cyberwarfare, ransomware, "fake new" become serious problems and super AGI is popularized as a possibility. Sure, S curves exist for all technologies, but now the only tech allowed to even start are ones that are thought to be powerless (ie., next to useless). We wanted flying cars but got 140 characters.
oldgradstudent 8y ago
> It’s mind blowing that even skilled software engineers were fooled into thinking that self driving cars were only months away. The hype was blinding. Waymo was giving out multi-million dollar bonuses. You too will learn to believe in whatever it is required for you to believe to get those bonuses.

dpflan 8y ago

It's interesting to consider how much money is required to validate this idea -- there are multiple companies, many investors, and focused engineers trying to solve this problem. Are those resources emotionally driven to a short-term outcome that is proving to be far away (how far, and can this push result in a non-linear jump somewhere?). What is the real hypothesis here that bridges the idea and valuation creation?

rjf72 8y ago
There's a few interesting things about self driving vehicles. One surprising thing is that for a very large autonomous taxi company, these vehicles could, in theory, operate at a profit while charging less per mile than it costs you to drive your own car. Economy of scale + vertical integration means maintenance, insurance, and other regular costs are going to be substantially cheaper, mile for mile, than consumer rates. And just consider the amount of money in play here. In 2016 US drivers (only considering cars, trucks, minivans, SUVs) drove 3.22 trillion miles. Imagine you get a marketshare of 10% of these miles. And you have a 'negligible' profit margin of 5 cents per mile. That's $16.1 billion in profit. The potential there is quite remarkable. But it gets even more tempting because of some issues with self driving vehicles. Because of above the the biggest company will not only be able to operate for much cheaper than anybody else, but they'll also be able to offer a better service. They can have more regular cleaning/maintenance, and most importantly you'll be able to get a ride more reliably from them than from any other player and in the widest array of locations. And consider the lobbying that will inevitably happen. The instant that self driving vehicles can show a higher average safety rating, companies such as Google/Waymo will lobby governments to start banning non-autonomous vehicles in urban areas, "for consumer safety." Pair all of these facts with rapidly declining vehicle ownership among the younger generations. Things could end up changing incredibly rapidly. And whoever ends up on top is going to control what might end up becoming the most profitable business to ever exist. We talked about 10% at a $0.05/mile profit margin. That meager $16 billion is an extremely conservative estimate for a single country. --- And then you get into meta-aspects. Getting from A to B is one of the most important parts of basic modern living. It's hard to even imagine the implications if a single company was able to start gaining some significant degree of control on this aspect of life. And then there's the data. Not only would you know where huge chunks of the population is going to and fro at all times, but you'd also have a massive real time surveillance network of practically all of 'real life' society as each and every vehicle you control would need to be constantly autonomously surveilling everything around it. The possibilities there are mostly dystopic, but that sort of knowledge and power is going to be a major driver here.

F_J_H 8y ago

What good is a newborn baby? Benjamin Franklin [1] [1] https://www.americanheritage.com/content/“what-good-new-born-baby” https://www.americanheritage.com/content/“what-good-new-born...

kalenx 8y ago

> it would seem Waymo programmed its autonomous vehicles to treat turn signals as an indicator that the car is about to execute a turn or merge, not an indicator that it is looking for the opportunity to do so. Well, here's one, if not the issue... I do not know the precise wording of trafic Laws in each state, but in many if not all, turn signals should _not_ be used as "an indicator of opportunity". Now, it is already difficult to build a law abiding autonomous car; expecting the car to also break the law in day-to-day cases (not just an emergency) will be downright impossible -- and I'm not even considering the media storm that would be created by a company saying "we program our cars to break the law all the time"...

vageli 8y ago
> > it would seem Waymo programmed its autonomous vehicles to treat turn signals as an indicator that the car is about to execute a turn or merge, not an indicator that it is looking for the opportunity to do so. > Well, here's one, if not the issue... I do not know the precise wording of trafic Laws in each state, but in many if not all, turn signals should _not_ be used as "an indicator of opportunity". Certainly not true in NJ. > A signal of intention to turn right or left when required shall be given continuously during not less than the last 100 feet traveled by the vehicle before turning. https://law.justia.com/codes/new-jersey/2013/title-39/section-39-4-126/ https://law.justia.com/codes/new-jersey/2013/title-39/sectio...
- kalenx 8y ago
  My wording was bad, I admit it. My point was that signals should be given only when you have the _opportunity_ to do such maneuver. If the lane to your right is crowded, putting your right signal on achieves nothing. In other words, your signals do not give you the right of way. I do not think Waymo cars are unable to use their signals, but they are probably programmed not to put them on when the turn/lane change cannot be achieved anyway.
  - TomVDB 8y ago
    When someone indicates his intention to change lanes when there is no room, I slow down. I expect the same of others. And when that doesn’t happen, you just continue on because chances are high that the next one will. In many cases of heavy traffic, this is the only way to change lanes.

norswap 8y ago

I like these pieces for tempering the hype around driverless cars. But it's also true it is still early and the technology will improve. I personally don't believe it will become as reliable as people think. The last percent are always the hardest — but to make a driverless car better than a human, they're crucial. But who cares what I (or others) think? We shall find out the truth of the matter soon enough. I just hope whoever mispredicted will take a note of it and keep that in mind the next time they make a prediction.

vntok 8y ago
> The last percent are always the hardest — but to make a driverless car better than a human, they're crucial. The last % being crucial is debatable. A self-driving car could be way more reliable than a human driver at all times except during blizzards in which case it's known to crash. That car would be extremely reliable, viable and useful to operate everywhere there's never any blizzard, and even when there happens to be a few blizzard events per year it would only need to be automagically rendered inoperable during those times. The town hall could send that kind of command, just like it would ring a civil defense siren.

burger_moon 8y ago

I'm only about halfway through, but what are the chances 'Carl' doesn't get identified through this story? It seems like it'd be very easy for them to cross check this story with ride history to figure out the person, especially since it's a closed beta kind of thing it sounds like. What kind of consequences will 'Carl' face by speaking to the press about this? Do you just get dropped from the program or are their real consequences? (It doesn't sound like 'Carl' is a Google employee at least)

jfoster 8y ago
I'm pretty sure I know who Carl is. I don't think he's concerned about his identity as much as the article has been written to make you believe. I think the author was trying to make it seem more like an inside scoop when it isn't.

DeonPenny 8y ago

Seemed like it fairly good from what I heard. It didn't crash which is the bar they are going for. Driving past a place not only is ok I'd be more than comfortable having the car do so. The issue opponents are going to have in the future is when waymo actually has a chance to go to the general public in one of these cities and doesn't crash. The number of riders will easily outstrip the people screaming. Just like the scooters they will leave for a while but the damage will have been done. There are no fans currently that depend on this but thats easily going to not be true.

empath75 8y ago
Yeah I don’t necessarily care if it doesn’t take the most efficient route if it’s within a reasonable amount of time and the ride is pleasant, and I’m not getting charged extra for the detour. Going around the block seems okay, but not taking the freeway and it taking 20 minutes longer definitely isn’t.
CloudYeller 8y ago
I agree. When I'm dropping someone off, I often drive past the intended drop point, let them out across the street, etc, because there is an unreasonably high cost to hitting the exact drop point. It sounds like self driving cars are only allowed to do exact drops, which is an irrational constraint IMO. Clearly there's a trade-off between trip time and drop accuracy, and time is usually 10x more important than accuracy.
- UncleEntity 8y ago
  > ...because there is an unreasonably high cost to hitting the exact drop point. That is literally the difference between a professional driver and a "ride share" amateur. Yeah, yeah, cheap shot but those ride share drivers drive me crazy with their antics.

buboard 8y ago

If that's the entire list of shortcomings it sounds they re in pretty good shape. There are audiences for which this car is an essential, and hopefully drivers will adapt to robocars , just like horsecars adapted to autos.

oldgradstudent 8y ago
You may have missed that tiny detail, but they have not one, but two, safety drivers in each car. That is twice the number of drivers a normal human-driven cars have. They are not supposed to talk to passengers, though, for the true driverless experience.
- Dylan16807 8y ago
  The other one isn't a safety driver. And having the safety driver doesn't tell you all that much about how it would perform without.
  - oldgradstudent 8y ago
    > The other one isn't a safety driver. True, the second person is the co-driver. As Waymo has discovered[1], a single person is not safe enough. > And having the safety driver doesn't tell you all that much about how it would perform without. Theoretically true. But in reality, it tells you all you need to know - the cars are not safe without safety drivers. [1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/troubled-waymo-worker-shows-human-problems-continue https://www.theinformation.com/articles/troubled-waymo-worke...
    - Dylan16807 8y ago
      > But in reality, it tells you all you need to know - the cars are not safe without safety drivers. I disagree. There are other plausible motivations to have a safety driver at this stage even for a safe car.
      - 8y ago

dqpb 8y ago

On a side note, I'd like to lament the dystopia of reading articles online, where every 4 paragraphs your attention is hijacked by a video ad. Fuck that. Fuck futurism.com.

kencausey 8y ago
I use the uMatrix plugin and have it configured to block everything, except of course for the base HTML. For more and more sites this means I get no content without adding in exceptions, but for this and many sites I get the part of the content I want, the text. Then I hit the Reader mode button and I get text which is even in the format that is most comfortable for reading for me.
lquist 8y ago
Blame the fact that people will pay for very few media sites. Realistically, Futurism’s choice is have ad supported content or don’t exist
- daveguy 8y ago
  They do have a third option: unobtrusive ads.
  - scarejunba 8y ago
    Those are worth very little when untargeted.
    - seslaire 8y ago
      Quite the contrary: https://digiday.com/media/new-york-times-gdpr-cut-off-ad-exchanges-europe-ad-revenue/ https://digiday.com/media/new-york-times-gdpr-cut-off-ad-exc.... Discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18920079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18920079
      - scarejunba 8y ago

ivanhoe 8y ago

Carl wants to live in the world where traffic is safe, no accidents happen, but wants AI that can drive in human-like aggressive manner. Carl's expectations are a bit too high, I'd say...

riffic 8y ago
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2018/03/19/crashes-not-accidents https://daringfireball.net/linked/2018/03/19/crashes-not-acc...
- oldgradstudent 8y ago
  I'm sure language policing will reduce fatalities to zero real soon now.
crooked-v 8y ago
For my part, I'd just want the results to be very predictable. If I know that a drive from A to B will always take X minutes +/- 5%, I can just use that as part of my day doing whatever while the car drives itself.
- Cyph0n 8y ago
  That simply not going to happen until essentially all other cars on the road are self-driving cars.
  - twblalock 8y ago
    And when the weather is perfect and the snowplows always clear the roads on time, etc. There are too many variables. It's incredibly difficult to get consistent on-time performance out of a train system which has far fewer variables to anticipate. It will never happen for cars even if they are self-driving.
    - njarboe 8y ago
      Unless they also have their own lane/road. Maybe in built up areas we will have to build tunnels for them.

maxyme 8y ago

Living in Phoenix for several years and working in Chandler (the headquarters for the self driving car division where my office was actually on the initial training route before they allowed passengers) I can say the cars suffer from being overly conservative. I don't think this is a bad thing for self driving cars, in contrast Ubers cars (before they were banned from the state for disabling collision detection and killing someone) drove aggressively. Ubers cars needed to be taken over to stop from hitting pedestrians crossing at intersections and continually drove at least 5mph above the speed limit. In Phoenix everyone drives fast on the highway, but Waymo cars drive 5-10mph under the speed limit. There are some unprotected left turns across 4 lanes they may try but being conservative they crawl across and eventually get stuck in the middle. This is probably a good thing for now and as confidence with the engineering team on the hardware and software goes up it can likely be tuned.

thenanyu 8y ago

I like to think of autonomous vehicles like trains rather than cars in the general sense. They can operate on pre-existing tracks that were previously unexploited. A lot of track exists out there, and as the technology gets better, they can utilize a higher percentage of what's available.

lsc 8y ago
this requires cultural change... living more densely, and being willing to share our commute with other people. Cultural change is... often rather harder than technological innovation.
- m0zg 8y ago
  If anything, autonomous cars should enable us to live _less_ densely. If you're in a dense area already, you probably don't need a car at all.
  - lsc 8y ago
    I was responding to a comment about using trains. Yes, autonomous cars would make spreading out easier.

super-serial 8y ago

I think a lot of people in this thread are underestimating the possibility of safety drivers going remote and how that could be a solution to these edge cases. When making decisions or coming across strange situations the AI has a confidence level, and when that falls below a threshold it can notify a remote person to potentially handle the situation. Right now Waymo has problems merging on a freeway with asshole drivers... but what's the big deal? It's maybe 1 minute out of a 30 minute drive. If you only need a human operator to take over the vehicle 2 minutes out of every hour of autonomous travel, then you could probably get by with 10 remote operators monitoring a fleet of 200 vehicles. That could translate into way better profit margins than any current ride-share service.

aedron 8y ago
Now I'm imagining a guy whose job is to sit all day in a simulator vehicle, 'teleporting' from one stranded Waymo to the next and taking it around school buses and manhole covers, parallel parking, etc. I kind of think that is viable. Replace thirty regular drivers with one. That kind of model doesn't look too far off.
- cheald 8y ago
  We already do it with military UAVs. Assist-by-wire for vehicles seems like it's not too far-fetched.
masonic 8y ago
When you hit a window when you need the 11th human, which you don't have online, what then? The vehicle facing that need just fails?