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From [1]: Bloomberg asked Urmson about Tesla's Autopilot technology—and particularly Elon Musk's claim that Tesla vehicles will soon be capable of operating as
by utopcell 6y ago
From [1]:
Bloomberg asked Urmson about Tesla's Autopilot technology—and particularly Elon Musk's claim that Tesla vehicles will soon be capable of operating as driverless taxis.
“It’s just not going to happen,” Urmson said. “It’s technically very impressive what they’ve done, but we were doing better in 2010.”
That's a reference to Urmson's time at Google. Google started recruiting DARPA Grand Challenge veterans around 2009. Within a couple of years, Google's engineers had built a basic self-driving car that was capable of navigating a variety of roads around the San Francisco Bay Area.
A couple of years later, Google started letting employees use experimental self-driving cars for highway commutes—an application much like today's Autopilot. Google considered licensing this technology to automakers for freeway driving. But the technology required active driver supervision. Urmson and other Google engineers decided there was too great a risk that drivers would become overly reliant on the technology and fail to monitor it adequately, leading to unnecessary deaths.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/04/the-largest-independent-self-driving-startup-is-under-a-lot-of-pressure/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/04/the-largest-independent...
- djohnston 6y agoDoes failing to monitor adequately include jumping in the back seat? There's inattentiveness and reckless endangerment, I think the driver here should be charged tbh.
- utopcell 6y agoI think the point is that the driver was fully confident that the car would do a much better job at driving compared to them.
- ffggvv 6y agois it reckless endangerment when elon constantly tells people to do this and says theyre gonna be robotaxis later this year and says autopilot is safer than a human driver and calls it "autopilot"?
- halyconWays 6y agoWow, Google backing away from a business opportunity on the basis that proceeding would cause people to die? They really were a different company in 2010.