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This doesn't prove that the technology is ready or safe. It only proves that Waymo thinks it's a worthwhile gamble. This is the same place where Uber's self-dri

by bo1024 6y ago

This doesn't prove that the technology is ready or safe. It only proves that Waymo thinks it's a worthwhile gamble. This is the same place where Uber's self-driving car killed a person with no repercussions to the company.

nmfisher 6y ago
"Ready" or "safe" are matters of opinion, though. It's ready/safe when governments ("the people") decide it's such.
howlgarnish 6y ago
It's obviously ready and safe enough for Waymo to roll it out (and they've been a lot more conservative than Uber here). As for safety, all we really need is for them to be safer than the average human driver. As evinced by the ~40,000 road deaths every year in the US, that's really a pretty low bar. I'd even argue that full autonomous is/will be less risky than halfway houses like Tesla Autopilot where neither side is really in full control, but that's another story.
- woeirua 6y ago
  That’s actually a high hurdle to clear. Looking at fatalities per hundreds of thousands of miles driven humans are insanely good at driving. Using the 2018 NHTSA number of 1.13 deaths per 100 million miles driven, avg speed of 60 mph, 20 predictions per second, that equates out to an autonomous system can make a fatal mistake on average about every 120 billion predictions.
  - sitkack 6y ago
    You make it sound like every mis-prediction could result in death.
berdario 6y ago
The technology is safe: https://storage.googleapis.com/sdc-prod/v1/safety-report/Waymo-Public-Road-Safety-Performance-Data.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/sdc-prod/v1/safety-report/Way... They've been very careful about it, and they have not finished work on it, so they need to keep the same standard that they had until now. The technology is also ready for Phoenix. The company is not yet ready for the whole world (but I have no specific insight into what's holding them back). It's totally different from Uber.

by bo1024 6y ago

nmfisher 6y ago

"Ready" or "safe" are matters of opinion, though. It's ready/safe when governments ("the people") decide it's such.

howlgarnish 6y ago

It's obviously ready and safe enough for Waymo to roll it out (and they've been a lot more conservative than Uber here). As for safety, all we really need is for them to be safer than the average human driver. As evinced by the ~40,000 road deaths every year in the US, that's really a pretty low bar. I'd even argue that full autonomous is/will be less risky than halfway houses like Tesla Autopilot where neither side is really in full control, but that's another story.

woeirua 6y ago
That’s actually a high hurdle to clear. Looking at fatalities per hundreds of thousands of miles driven humans are insanely good at driving. Using the 2018 NHTSA number of 1.13 deaths per 100 million miles driven, avg speed of 60 mph, 20 predictions per second, that equates out to an autonomous system can make a fatal mistake on average about every 120 billion predictions.
- sitkack 6y ago
  You make it sound like every mis-prediction could result in death.

berdario 6y ago

The technology is safe: https://storage.googleapis.com/sdc-prod/v1/safety-report/Waymo-Public-Road-Safety-Performance-Data.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/sdc-prod/v1/safety-report/Way... They've been very careful about it, and they have not finished work on it, so they need to keep the same standard that they had until now. The technology is also ready for Phoenix. The company is not yet ready for the whole world (but I have no specific insight into what's holding them back). It's totally different from Uber.