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Waymo gets green light in California to pick up passengers in self-driving cars
- mdorazio 7y agoPretty key restrictions here: "though it may not charge riders, and a human safety driver must remain behind the wheel" This is basically greenlighting further testing on CA roads, not actual driverless taxis. I don't expect that to be legally available on CA roads for a couple more years.
- munk-a 7y agoThat is indeed key for restricting running a profitable business - but google could really build demand and public support by running these at a loss. If they're on the streets and commonly visible then they'll quickly be accepted as reality.
- dheera 7y agoAs a user I sure would love free taxis for a while.
- sprafa 7y agoFree with ads! And we to keep your eye tracking, sweat, weight and breathing sensor data for better ad localisation around the city! /sarcasm
- matz1 7y agoTo each of their own. I can monetize all of those? Great. I find it acceptable trade off.
- londons_explore 7y agoI would hand over all my email and bank statements to get unlimited free travel...
- dragonwriter 7y ago> Free with ads! Existing taxis are ad platforms and not free, so this is still an improvement.
- 100100010001 7y agoDo taxis sell your data: when/where they picked you up and dropped you off? Do they sell your facial features for facial recognition? If not, then it is not the same!
- Gigablah 7y agoDoes Google?
- munk-a 7y agoI don't know - do you? Additionally, do you know they never will? They're not collecting (AFAICT) facial information (though there is a camera in nearly all taxis, so it's possible) but it's hard to believe they aren't collecting route data even if it's just to place stands more efficiently to service commonly requested routes, at some point they might start selling that data... or they might be acquired and their acquirer might either sell off their data - or use their data internally for other purposes. In the modern world we really have a lot of fuzziness when it comes to how usage data is treated. There are lots of UX people that want to know how people are using sites to make them better - but that same data can be resold for quite creepy purposes.
- 100100010001 7y agoI do. They don’t. Google does tho.
- icebraining 7y agoWho's they? There are hundreds, if not thousands of taxi (and "ride-sharing") companies across the world. Which ones do you know about?
- throwaway713 7y agoI mean... I’d be fine with that honestly as long as it was stated up front.
- xenospn 7y ago“Just log in using your Facebook account to receive free rides!”
- sprafa 7y agoLol this is exactly what I imagine. With eye tracking!
- anticensor 7y agoNot needed. They can just do route advertising (car passes by and/or does things at a particular place to advertise a brand) personalised based on your audiovisual biometry. ZF is already working on self-driving stack, including moving parts and full SDV-TaaS infrastructure, and they support such an idea.
- munk-a 7y agoSo I have some general deep-seated objections to advertising due to the economic cost it leverages - taking an inefficient route, burning additional fuel to drive it and wasting someone's time, is absolutely ridiculous. How do the people working on this not revolt?
- icebraining 7y agoThere's probably nothing to revolt about yet, just a glint on some executives' eyes.
- dheera 7y agoMaybe they can pool you preferentially with friends of friends, too! And then there can be the LinkedIn version which pools you with potential hires/recruiters. Or the Github account version which pools Java and Python programmers together and livestreams the arguments to the Youtube account car ...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- viscanti 7y agoHow long would we have to wait for one? Free is great, but sometimes I'd pay for an alternative if there are limited Waymos on. I'm not sure that I'd want to wait 30+ minutes longer for the Waymo.
- tehlike 7y agoYou can still get lyft or uber.
- wefarrell 7y agoIt’s great for Google. No other company will have the opportunity to spend what they’re spending on testing and they will continue their lead.
- notus 7y agoHey you gotta take baby steps especially when trying to pave the way for new legislation. I'm just happy there is some movement this direction.
- IshKebab 7y agoA couple more decades you mean? We're still a long way from trusting driverless cars even in easy American suburbs.
- mdorazio 7y agoI'll put money on a truly driverless taxi service being available in at least two US cities in under 5 years. The key with driverless is to stop assuming that it has to work everywhere in all conditions or else it's useless. What's actually happening is that the cars are being trained for and tested in specific conditions and locations where they will roll out first (dry, sunny, well-maintained modern roads, etc.), then as the technology improves, the envelope will expand until at some point in the future they do actually work everywhere all the time.
- elif 7y agoThey can't charge riders, but to me that says they can, for instance charge corporations for making rides available to their employees or for their event. It also doesn't say to me that the safety driver has to be an employee. It could just be rider 0 on any given ride is required to be in the driver seat. This looks very profitable to me.
- killjoywashere 7y agoI very seriously doubt Waymo is going to let random riders sit in the driver’s seat. They’ve been paying maps drivers for ever. This endeavour is far to high-value to let some random whip a vehicle into a crowded sidewalk.
- elif 7y agoLike e.g. apple buys the service, and an apple employee chooses to override autonomous control with 3 co-workers in the car to joy-ride? I think "random" is the wrong descriptor for the scenario described
- riantogo 7y agoAnd how does the car get to rider 0?
- lquist 7y agoWhy shouldn't they be allowed to charge? Not sure I understand this provision.
- nothis 7y agoFoot in the door for not making Taxi/Uber drivers jobless? I expect some political backlash in the short term.
- ronilan 7y agoI haven’t seen it mentioned anywhere and not sure I fully understand the legal speak of the permit, so I’m wondering - are they allowed to drive their cars (in California or elsewhere) with no people at all? Reason is that while being an autonomous Uber might be the holy grail, self-driving empty capability will surely bring immediate value in balancing and maintaining car share and rental fleets. Is this being explored by Waymo? Others?
- notus 7y agoThey can't currently but that is the end goal. That's kind of why I feel Uber drivers trying to organize is just going to backfire on them since they are just temporary drivers until automation can take over.
- CobrastanJorji 7y agoSo you think the drivers' strategy should be to fight for lower wages for themselves in hopes that Uber will be able to stay in business should self-driving cars emerge as a viable competitor?
- notus 7y agoI think they shouldn't bite the hand that feeds.
- icebraining 7y agoOn the contrary; drivers should try to get as much as possible ASAP while self-driving isn't here yet, because nothing will save them if and when it comes.
- lukey_q 7y agoUber will replace human drivers with robots the second they can and not a moment later regardless of how much organization their current human drivers have done
- brendanmc6 7y agoI have a feeling our regulatory environment is going to be unfairly hostile towards AVs in the coming months and years. Of course we all want a safe and responsible rollout of this tech, but people too easily forget how ABSURDLY dangerous driving is already. Like with Tesla, every accident and injury caused by a Waymo vehicle is going recieve disproportionate media coverage and subsequent public backlash. I hope we can view these incidents in context. Admittedly, safety is just one speedbump-- social and economic disprution is a whole 'nother beast. Whatever happens it's an exciting time to be alive! AVs have the potential to bring more sustainable, safe, efficient, and affordable mobility and I can't wait to see how it all plays out.
- bsaul 7y agoAV would certainly be judged with less hostility if it hadn’t built itself on the assumption that neural networks were the solution to any problem too hard to model. It’s going to be extremely hard for AV manufacturer to explain that it’s impossible for them to guarantee that a certain abnormal autopilot behavior that caused an accident isn’t going to happen again.
- ehsankia 7y agoI'm not an expert myself, but I think you overestimate how much ML is used in these systems. From my understanding, it's mostly used in classifying objects, but the actual controls are not, and I would assume that the driving logic itself is written in a conservative way and a bad classification wouldn't cause an insane behavior.
- yo-scot-99 7y agoThe Telsa autonomy investor day (which applied to the cars not the people) spent most of their time explaining their NN chip, ghost riding to correct predictions etc. Definitely gave the impression that the network was doing a lot of the decision making.
- xmprt 7y ago
- acchow 7y agoThese clickbait headlines are not helping set public expectations around autonomous vehicles...
- misterprime 7y agoI agree. However, it is an interesting topic and milestone for this forum, imo. I'd like to try recommending a title edit. ~~Waymo gets green light in California to pick up passengers in self-driving cars~~ "California authorizes next step of Waymo testing, including picking up but not charging passengers."
- bamboozled 7y agoImagine if California just had proper trains ? Sydney, Australia has driverless trains now.
- jedberg 7y agoWe have driverless trains too, they're called BART. To be fair, there is a person in front who watches what it's doing, but when they launched in the 60s, they didn't have anyone up front, and people got freaked out, so they added "drivers" who don't actually do anything but tell it when to close the doors.
- tjohns 7y agoMy understanding was that the drivers were originally added partly in response to the "Fremont Flyer" incident, where a test train under autonomous control drove itself off the end of the track: https://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/8143196966 https://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/8143196966 Even today, the automation on BART is far from perfect, and the drivers are more involved than most people realize. The trains still like to over-shoot the end of stations, requiring the driver to quickly initiate a manual stop. (The stop signal is RF based, and apparently sometimes the train misses it.) On top of that, they often need to drop down to manual control for certain sections of track, for various reasons.
- quickthrower2 7y agoSydney is not the shining beacon for public transport. London is far superior.
- tialaramex 7y agoPolitics means that London only has one GoA 3 system (the Docklands Light Railway, a grade-separated system where each train has a human operator who closes the doors and interacts with passengers) and no GoA 4 systems (which don't have any staff, humans are merely passengers). Even in the longer term London has no specific plans for GoA 4, although some London Underground lines which are below ground for their entire run will likely become GoA 3 and several are already GoA 2 (meaning a driver sits at the front but they don't make most routine operating decisions they just close the doors and watch the track ahead) Sydney has a GoA 4 system already.
- spermboy 7y agoThe article makes it seem like they are going to start competing with Uber right this moment. In reality the body of the article indicates that a human driver will have to be employed and that only Waymo employees and their friends will be using them. So in other words, it will be more expensive than Uber and it will only be active in an area where Uber drivers would rather not be anyway. This terrifies me. Uber is a very good source of income for a lot of people. So google is going to run Waymo at a loss out of their endless pockets and starve thousands of people of essential income? And we are all supposed to dangle on the edge of our seats while we wait to see whether or not this task is within the capabilities of our current technology, with all these people’s livelihoods at stake? This is fucking bullshit. There aren’t good jobs to transition into at the same skill level because of automation and outsourcing. Expecting everyone to go to college, let alone go to college and become programmers, is mental gymnastics levels of rationalization. Rationalizing away the difficult and uncomfortable question of whether or not technology is leading is to a place we want to be and what we can do a about it. One job after another will disappear and don’t believe for a second that programming is safe. They used to say it about lots of writing tasks that are now automated by gtp2. I would bet most “journalists” could be automated by gtp2 because most of their readership doesn’t look for or recognize high-level order or coherency or even truth anyway. And don’t for even one split second try to tell yourself that high level order and logic are off the table for robots.
- falcor84 7y agoI for one welcome our jobless future, even though I'm pretty sure we'll keep inventing new roles for quite a few decades more.
- spermboy 7y agoI just hate that I have to make all my plans around the fact that The economy will be scrambled in as little as a couple decades. I wish I was born in a time when things were stable and you could count on certain basic things like the value of human labor.
- 7y ago
- fgnoplm 7y agoIt amazes me how many otherwise intelligent people believe in the bullshit hype of fully-self-driving cars. In reality, a car that can drive you from New York to Boston with zero human intervention as safely as an average human driver is probably several decades away at least.
- wrycoder 7y agoOn Route 66, maybe, but IMO it's coming to the interstate much sooner.
- hjfihrbrrhrb 7y agoCould be, but then it would just be a glorified train system. People generally want to be driven from some building far from the interstate to some other building far from the interstate, not from onramp to exit. I doubt that self-driving car technology is even close to being interstate-ready, though.
- benatkin 7y agoI think NYC to Boston has traffic and bad drivers and that's why GP used it as an example of something today's tech is far from being ready for. I think it will take a lot of work but that it will happen rapidly.
- aidenn0 7y agoDid you mean Route 1? Route 66 isn't an option for NY to Boston...
- whymauri 7y agoThe amount of hype for self-driving cars, even if they come several decades from now, is not 'bullshit.' Just because things don't happen immediately doesn't make them 'bullshit hype.'
- hjfihrbrrhrb 7y agoYeah, but the hype is that they are right around the corner.
- carapace 7y agoI don't think it's okay to test big powerful robots on public roads. Just because a robot looks like a car and has people sitting inside it doesn't make it okay to ignore common sense. These things have already killed at least one person. I've said it before: we could build self-driving light-weight "nerf" golf carts that would be useful without being deadly. Trying to jump immediately to self-driving cars is a techno-fetish. - - - - Edit to add: "People kill people so robots should be allowed to kill people too." is a rotten argument, eh?
- AOsborn 7y agoIn isolation, you're right. Why on earth should giant robots be tested on public roads, especially when they can kill people? When we actually look at safety on public roads, you know what kills more people? Other people. We don't need the robots to be perfect to get them on the road. We just need them to be safer than human drivers. That is a much lower bar to meet.
- carapace 7y ago> We don't need the robots to be perfect to get them on the road. We just need them to be safer than human drivers. > That is a much lower bar to meet. First, maybe. I don't doubt that auto-autos will be able to handle anything that's "in the book", and that, if we set it up right, "the book" will be constantly expanding and becoming more comprehensive as each machine in the fleet shares its history in near-realtime and offline processors integrate the data into new stimulus-response patterns or whatever. Etc. Handwave. But I also suspect that driving safely IRL requires GAI. (After all, we evolved GAI to deal with the world, eh? If the world were simpler we would be dumber, no?) Anyhow, let's grant the point for the sake of discussion: > We just need them to be safer than human drivers. Okay, fine... How do you know when they pass that point? Until we are sure that's the case, don't test them on the public roads with moms and dads and kids and old people and cats and dogs, eh? eh? - - - - And what about the nerf golf cart? I would love to have a machine into which I could confidently place my mother, who is suffering from dementia and can no longer drive or even ride the bus by herself, and have it transport her safely to and from, say, an appointment with her doctor. That machine doesn't have to travel more than 5-10 kph. One of the basic principles of safe auto-autos is that they should never travel faster than they can stop. Meaning, whatever the conditions, the aa should be 100% "confident" that it could stop before a collision, even if that means traveling at a walking pace. (If this isn't the case then you have built a killer robot whatever else it is. And it won't even protect you from the Terrible Secret of Space.) That's what I mean about self-driving cars being a techno-fetish. We could build something tomorrow that wouldn't be able to kill people and sell it, but we're obsessed with speed and don't even realize it. We're blinded by visions of driving Knight Industries Two Thousand.
- Animats 7y agoNot really self-driving. Waymo is still using "safety drivers". Until the technology gets past that, it's not adding any value.
- docker_up 7y agoIf a human has to be behind the wheel, then it will be even more expensive than Uber. They won't be able to handle the demand and wait times will be huge. So as a competitor to Uber I can't see how it will be effective. It's definitely an interesting development but financially it doesn't make sense unless the human is out of the equation.
- lazyasciiart 7y agoJust like Uber, it will burn investor money in the hopes of one day making financial sense.
- c3534l 7y agoSelf-driving cars are just a scam to get investor money out of people who want to hop on the next big thing. The point of this is optics, not profit.
- shirro 7y agoSelf driving vehicles are already in operation in many locations though usually under more restricted use such as a fixed bus route. I wonder if the question is not if the technology can do the job but if it should. Having a small self driving electric shuttle bus moving old people around a regional town in rural Australia seems like an empowering use of technology to provide a service to people who otherwise would not be served. But when we have youth unemployment over 10% we should be looking to services that employ people.
- a13n 7y agoWhy is unemployment a bad thing?
- shirro 7y agoGood question. I don't believe it is fundamentally bad but in the context of an economy and society where personal advancement and prosperity are strongly connected to employment it doesn't help. There may be other ways such as universal income but I still can't get my head around how that is sustainable. In Australia we are teetering into our first recession in decades. Retail spending is down, property values are going backwards and increased defaults put the stability of the financial system at risk. Wages growth has stagnated, work has become casualised and the only people getting richer are those who were rich to begin with. In that context having public funds go towards technology instead of giving someone an income seems wrong. The people who made the self driving bus aren't spending at local shops like a driver would. California may not have the same economic pressures but I would be surprised if people aren't asking some of the same questions. There is a massive number of people employed operating vehicles. They feed families and contribute to local economies. What happens when they lose their jobs?
- soup10 7y ago"Busy work" jobs that aren't needed is not good. Investing in technology creates wealth and better standard of living. Most people are smart and resourceful when they want to be. If their job gets automated they should find a different one, and if there are no jobs then entrepreneurs and governments should think up ways to make use of the surplus labor.
- ec109685 7y agoThese different classes of permits are hard to parse. Has waymo driven a single mile on a public road in California or Phoenix without a safety driver behind the wheel?
- Paraesthetic 7y agoInterestingly for me it will very hard to read what an autonomous car is going to do, there is no veering a bit left in the lane before they change lanes, there is no driver looking over their shoulder for a clear lane, nothing. Probably explains why most of the accidents with autonomous vehicles has been people crashing into them.
- sam_goody 7y agoMy take on the future. ATM self driving has two issues - the places where it fails in safety are not yet well enough known, and it causes major disruptions for the other cars on the road while turning, parking, or anything that involves interaction / guessing the bahavior of human drivers for something more complex than staying in a lane. If we would ONLY have self driving cars (no human drivers) and there was some standard they would use to communicate cross company, than self driving would be MUCH faster, not inconvenient, safer and what not else. As time goes by, there are more and more cars that are being built with the sensors to do self driving, even if they don't have the capability or legal rights. We will find ourselves in a few years where the majority of cars in certain areas will have the capabilities built in. At that point, some cities will start requiring self driving only, and the software will be built on that assumption. And then suddenly all this effort that Waymo is putting into coexisting with humans will be redundant.
- monk_e_boy 7y ago> And then suddenly all this effort that Waymo is > putting into coexisting with humans will be redundant I can't imagine this will ever be removed. Take rural UK, there are still steam powered traction engines on the road (occasionally), pony and traps, horses, cyclists. India will never be 100% AI cars .... not even in the cities.
- sametmax 7y agoSuburban US maybe. The rest of the world, you gotta wait a long time. The thing is, there are plenty of roads that are complicated. There are plenty of vehicles that are not cars: bikes, motorbikes, trucks, buses, mega transporters, construction / fixing machines, tractors, etc. Plus of course, you share the road occasionally with protests, parties, events... And of course criminals won't want self driving cars. And so cops won't. Fire fighters won't. Ambulance driver won't. Anything that needs to get in and out quickly, and each time changing direction, or park in weird locations. Eventually privacy conscious people will also tilt on how dangerous for society those cars are: you can be spied on, it collects data, it's easy to kill you if you are a political dissident with a simple switch. So a small group of people will also want to opt out. So while I'm all for as much as self driving car as we can, Waymo effort will still be worth for a long, long time.
- astannard 7y agoAs long as a scapegoat, erm I mean "human saftey driver" is present