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“All rides in the program will have an autonomous specialist on board for now” This tells me that we’re still a long way from full level 4 (and certainly level

“All rides in the program will have an autonomous specialist on board for now” This tells me that we’re still a long way from full level 4 (and certainly level 5) autonomy in a busy city like San Francisco. The edge cases requiring immediate human attention are still too frequent for the human safety driver to be remote, as is the case in Phoenix. Also, just a reminder that Waymo in Phoenix is nowhere close to being level 5, since it is still heavily geofences and requires those remote safety monitors. I still think that true level 5 (i.e. ability to drive autonomously everywhere with zero human oversight with a safety record equivalent to the median human driver) requires AGI. Would love to be proven wrong!

moralestapia 5y ago
>I still think that true level 5 [...] requires AGI. Oh, but of course! I'm still surprised by people who think otherwise. The amount of corner cases that you have to solve while driving is pretty much limitless, you cannot "train" something on that, heck, some humans are not even fit for that. We are *FAR* from truly autonomous vehicles.
jillesvangurp 5y ago
All that tells you is that they are cautious in the famously litigious California yet confident enough to actually launch their service there. In the unlikely event something goes wrong, even if it is not their fault, they had a person onboard. It's the difference between that being just a minor incident or getting a class action lawsuit with millions/billions in damages. The law is by far the biggest obstacle to level 4 and 5 driving. So, launching in San Francisco is kind of a big step for them. Once it has proven itself for a bit of time and they know how to set up their geo-fences and which streets to avoid, they can probably get rid of the person. That would be evident by that person never actually doing anything long before that. The remote safety monitoring is a smart feature but it's not going to help much for the type of accidents people worry about most where something unexpected happens very rapidly. AIs are actually really good with dealing with those situations. Arguably better than humans for whom this is probably a leading cause of traffic fatalities. The way Waymo operates without hands on the wheel (i.e. level 3 & 4), basically means they have safety nailed already in those kind of situations. There's no way a remote person would be quick enough to intervene. That person is there for other reasons. It's complex traffic situations that cause AIs to get stuck occasionally that require human intervention. Usually this is less of a safety concern and more of an annoyance. The key metric of interventions per hundreds of thousands of miles of distance traveled is the key metric that both Tesla, Waymo, and other companies use for this. Both companies boast some pretty impressive statistics for that. Though of course it's hard to confirm those independently. It's interesting the way Tesla and Waymo approach this problem in different ways. Waymo goes for level 4 but only in areas they've thoroughly vetted. It's taken them many years to start moving to new areas other than relatively safe and easy Phoenix. Tesla on the other hand offers their AI features just about anywhere they can but positions it as level 2 that is really aspiring to be a level 4 but with a requirement for hands on the wheel just in case (which means it's level 2). Level 2 is a legal tool to dodge a lot of legislation and bureaucracy. It basically means that if anything goes wrong, the driver is at fault. It will stay in place a long time for that reason. Liability, not safety, is the key concern here. Arguably, Teslas would probably do pretty well in the areas that Waymo has vetted as well. But they are not in the ride sharing market and need to sell cars world wide and not just in specific geofences in Phoenix and San Francisco. But I wouldn't be surprised to see Tesla offer a similar ride sharing service in similarly geo-fenced areas at some point to get to level 4 & 5. I suspect that race is a lot closer than some people seem to think.
grogenaut 5y ago
I was at Yellowstone this last week. https://ridebeep.com/ https://ridebeep.com/ had some shuttles there doing a pretty straight forward navigation on one straight road, they had human minders as well. The day I went to try them, it was mildly misting, just barely able to see it on the glass. They were not running the machines because they kept stopping because they saw the water drops as obstacles initially. The humans had made the call that it just wasn't an acceptable experience.
id 5y ago
Is this not a legal requirement?
ra7 5y ago
> Also, just a reminder that Waymo in Phoenix is nowhere close to being level 5 Because they are not even trying to be level 5. They've made it very clear that will only ever be a level 4 company and level 5 is not feasible.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  Level 5 isn't feasible as much for legal reasons as technical ones. I don't think any company wants to sign off on the notion that their software will handle all classes of problem, even ones they have no data for at all.
  - ra7 5y ago
    Except Tesla, who are going to be "L5 by the end of the year" every year!
    - Bukhmanizer 5y ago
      I’m pretty sure Tesla’s whole strategy is to overpromise so much it’s as much a legal liability to not have L5 than to have L5.
      - minsc__and__boo 5y ago
        Tesla brand sells a lifestyle at this point, not just a vehicle. They have to keep pumping it.
  - espadrine 5y ago
    > Level 5 isn't feasible as much for legal reasons as technical ones. That point is taken into account under J3016_202104 § 8.8: “There are technical and practical considerations that mitigate the literal meaning of the stipulation that a Level 5 ADS must be capable of ‘operating the vehicle on-road anywhere that a typically skilled human driver can reasonably operate a conventional vehicle,’ which might otherwise be impossible to achieve. For example, an ADS-equipped vehicle that is capable of operating a vehicle on all roads throughout the US, but, for legal or business reasons, cannot operate the vehicle across the borders in Canada or Mexico can still be considered Level 5, even if geo-fenced to operate only within the U.S.”.
actusual 5y ago
Definitionally, the achievement of self driving vehicles does not require AGI. Doing one task very well requires a subset of AGI called Weak AI.
- kspacewalk2 5y ago
  Stacking shelves in a warehouse is one task. Driving is not one task. There are too many corner cases for a modern-day AI system to perform as well as a median driver in, say, 95% of environments and settings in North America and Europe. I think the argument is that such a system might as well be AGI.
  - actusual 5y ago
    The idea that an AI must have the ability to learn how to do anything in order to learn how to drive seems like an extremely pessimistic and misguided goalpost. That is also not how iterative development works.
    - nicoffeine 5y ago
      I think ML is fantastic, and combined with LiDAR, inter-vehicle mesh networking, and geofenced areas where humans take over, we could quickly arrive at mostly automated driving without trying to reinvent the human brain. We should also be more focused on enforcing established legal limits to newly manufactured cars. Just preventing someone from exceeding the speed limit or driving the wrong way would start saving lives immediately. It would also allow traffic flow to be optimized, and eventually prioritize emergency traffic or allow metro areas to be evacuated efficiently for things like natural disasters. It would be great to see the dawn of AGI, but I don't think it will ever happen with classical computation. GPT-3 spits out nonsense with the input of the largest and easiest to parse portion of reality, and I have not seen any ML approach replicate the abilities of something as simple as bacteria. ML requires constant validation from human operators, so the same is going to hold true for ML powered vehicle navigation.
  - s1artibartfast 5y ago
    Driving is a set of tasks, but not AGI. AGI would be if it could drive and then also learn to write poetry without any code update.
bpodgursky 5y ago
They are not legally allowed to not have a human driver onboard. It's a legal requirement that is not a relevant signal one way or another.
thesausageking 5y ago
Level 4 is where most of value is. If a system could drive in all cities and highways, that's more than 90% of benefit.
- snarf21 5y ago
  Agreed 100%. There will be special exit/on ramps built along highways and the trucks will largely just stay in their lane even if slower. It would cut the number of truckers needed by probably 50+%.
  - akira2501 5y ago
    For depot to depot runs, sure. Most runs aren't that though, and require direct delivery from manufacturer to purchaser. Plenty of deliveries, for example in Chicago, basically happen off a residential street. Alley docking and turning around in these environments is challenging even for a human. Add to all this one thing and we're further than I think most people realize: Weather. Show me an FSD doing better than a human in the snow or we're not really anywhere yet.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - mavhc 5y ago
      From 2018 https://www.engadget.com/2018-05-08-waymo-snow-navigation.html https://www.engadget.com/2018-05-08-waymo-snow-navigation.ht...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- pavon 5y ago
  The more I travel, the more I consider myself an SAE level 4 driver :)
- ghaff 5y ago
  More likely driving on most highways in decent weather which is a big win. I'd pay for that.
hammock 5y ago
>“All rides in the program will have an autonomous specialist on board for now” This tells me that we’re still a long way Did you expect something different? I can't really see a boardroom writing a roadmap that goes straight from test rides (no passengers) with a backup driver onboard to actual rides with passengers - no backup driver onboard with no in-between steps.
- VelkaMorava 5y ago
  I wonder where "a country road with no lanes which barely fits 1.5 car in winter in the Czech republic" is on your scale... Something like this, just imagine the snowdrifts around it https://www.google.com/maps/@49.080269,16.4569252,3a,75y,307.21h,76.36t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sADh8CUYDhZWcT9KBTkAZAQ!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DADh8CUYDhZWcT9KBTkAZAQ%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D225.13959%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.com/maps/@49.080269,16.4569252,3a,75y,307...
  - atourgates 5y ago
    I live in north-central Idaho. 10 minutes from 2 state-universities, but in an otherwise relatively rural part of the county with a 1/4 mile long, somewhat steep driveway. Every year, I'm amazed at how quickly our personal "veneer of civilization" collapses in the snow. The prior owners of our home would just keep their kids home from school, and work from home an average of "about a week every winter." We're a little more aggressive with snow removal, but there are still mornings every winter where I'm getting up at 5 to spend a couple hours plowing and blowing out drifts on our driveway (after typically doing the same thing the night before) just in order for my wife to make it down to our county road which might still have a foot or so of snow covering it. Similarly, in windy snow-covered conditions, there are a couple spots between us and town where the snow regularly drifts back over the road in a matter of hours, causing a "well, I know the road goes about here, I think I can make it through these drifts if I floor it so here it goes" situation. Even when the roads are well plowed and clear, there are plenty of situations where it's difficult for me, a human, to distinguish between the plowed-but-still-white-road and the white snow all around it in some lighting conditions. And let's take snow out of it. Our fastest route into town involves gravel roads. And our paved route is chip-sealed every couple years, and typically doesn't get a divider-line drawn back on it for 6-months or so after. Which is all to say, I think it's going to be quite a while before I have a car that can autonomously drive me into town in the summer, and global warming aside, I'll probably never have one that can get me there reliably in the winter.
spoonjim 5y ago
Beating humans doesn’t require AGI. Just not drinking, texting, or falling asleep will get you halfway there.
baxtr 5y ago
> I still think that true level 5 (i.e. ability to drive autonomously everywhere with zero human oversight with a safety record equivalent to the median human driver) requires AGI. This might be true. Most of the time (95%) I am on complete human brain autopilot when I’m driving but those other 5% need my full focus and attention. I shut of the radio and tell other passengers to be quite (if I have the time for it).
- CoryG89 5y ago
  It's only AGI until someone achieves it. Then it becomes statistical analysis.
- birdman3131 5y ago
  Anybody who rides with me on a normal basis have come to learn to recognize the sudden stop halfway through a word when I switch from autopilot brain to active driving. There are times when you need more focus on everything than others.
- Closi 5y ago
  This assumes that the challenges that are hard for a human are the same challenges that are hard for a self driving car - that might be the case, but self driving cars may have some theoretical advantages such as 360 cameras/lidar and an ability to follow satellite navigation without having to take its eyes off the road. Put another way, the 5% of times I need to focus are usually the times where I am somewhere new and don’t necessarily understand the road layout - which something like Waymo may avoid through mapping for instance. It might be true, but plenty of problems that have been thought to require true AGI have later been found to not require it after sufficient research - for example it’s not long ago that we thought good image recognition was entirely out of reach.
aero-glide2 5y ago
It doesn't matter for the rider though, unlike a Tesla where you still have to keep your hands on the wheel.
spyckie2 5y ago
The key metric is probably "obscure incidents" per miles driven, probably classified manually into various levels of danger. Once the "incidents that lead to disaster" count reaches 0 statistically, it will definitely roll out en masse without the need of safety drivers. My guess is that they know how many miles they have to drive in order to reach that number, and it's a whole lot. Statistics and math stuff but you can probably pin it down to the month or quarter based on trends. Either that, or it's about driving every road in the city with all sorts of weather / traffic / pedestrian conditions until there's no issue. This isn't generalized AI driving (L5) but it's a much more logical approach to getting autonomous driving coverage where it's the most valuable. My guess is that each city will involve a safety driver rollout until they have enough data to know the incident rate is zero. There might be a lot of variance between cities - maps data, weather conditions, customs, etc. Then remove the safety drivers. I'm sure they also are experimenting with disaster/safety protocols while they do the roll out. My prediction is that waymo will be a mainstream option within the next 5 years.
eagsalazar2 5y ago
You are making a ton of assumptions about what is driving this decision.
ren_engineer 5y ago
Would it be easier to just build a "futuristic" test city built around the idea of self-driving cars to make it easier for them to work? If self-driving cars are so great people will move there naturally due to improved quality of life. Trying to make self-driving cars work in current cities is like building around crippling technical debt Seems like Google and a few other tech companies could easily bootstrap a small city by planting some offices somewhere
- tdeck 5y ago
  If we're building a futuristic city from the ground up, wouldn't it be better to rely on mass transit? Self driving cars still have almost all the same problems that human-driven cars have.
- kart23 5y ago
  A futuristic city would have public transport and bikes. 5,000 pounds of metal for transporting one person is horribly inefficient.
dagmx 5y ago
This is legally required today. It's not necessarily a reflection of Waymo. Whether their system was perfect or not, it's legally required they do this till the government changes their minds.
- minsc__and__boo 5y ago
  Yeah, the commenter straight up assumes that a person is present because the L4 tech doesn't work, when in reality there are legal, liability, and even user comfort reasons to have someone on board with this new pilot.
- pavon 5y ago
  California DMV regulations do allow testing of autonomous vehicles without a safety test driver if certain conditions are met, spelled out in Title 13, Division 1, Chapter 1 Article 3.7 Section 227.38 [1]. The most technically challenging of these is that the car must be capable of operating at SAE level 4, which goes back to the OP's comment. CUPC licensing for commercial passenger services also allows this [2]. That said, I agree with others that this is the natural progression of testing rollout and doesn't tell us anything about the pace at which the rollout will occur, in particular whether it will be faster or slower than Phoenix. [1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/file/adopted-regulatory-text-pdf/ https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/file/adopted-regulatory-text-p... [2] https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/regulatory-services/licensing/transportation-licensing-and-analysis-branch/autonomous-vehicle-carrier-pilot https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/regulatory-services/licensing/transp...
jsight 5y ago
Notably, SAE level 5 is actually well below the standard that you've laid out here. The vehicle simply has to be able to make itself safe in situations that it can't handle. This allows room for remote assistance or a human takeover in certain situations.
jedberg 5y ago
> This tells me that we’re still a long way from full level 4 The only thing it tells me is that regulations are more lax in Arizona than California.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> This tells me that we’re still a long way from full level 4 (and certainly level 5) autonomy in a busy city like San Francisco. I think its in part regulatory relating to paid rides in autonomous vehicles in CA, which is why Cruise is dodging it with passenger-carrying but unpaid rides that are fully driverless. I can't find a good summary of the rules, but I infer from the coverage I've seen that the threshold for having no safety driver when offering paid passenger rides is different from that without paid passengers.
Johnny555 5y ago
The edge cases requiring immediate human attention are still too frequent for the human safety driver to be remote, as is the case in Phoenix. I think you can only determine that if you know how many times the human attendant takes over. Just having a human behind the wheel doesn't tell you much, I don't see how to get full self-driving without an intermediate step of human supervision.
pcurve 5y ago
I'm guessing if all cars become Waymo right now, there will probably be reduction in vehicle fatality by 99%. But people have hard time accepting with the notion that unmanned vehicle may be part responsible for that 1%.
crackercrews 5y ago
> I still think that true level 5 ... requires AGI. In case anyone else was wondering what AGI means, its Artificial General Intelligence. [1] 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligenc...
RobRivera 5y ago
This tells me that you can show progress and draw magnifying glass criticism from people. can only please some of the people some of the time.
BurningFrog 5y ago
I suspect the main "roadblocks" are about the environment for the SDC. All traffic signs and signals need to be machine readable at a distance. That is, a traffic light might beam out "I am light 'SFTL783', will be green for 8 more seconds". The location and other data for SFTL783 is in a preloaded database. Same for speed limits and other signage. An updated 3d map of all roads would also help a lot. As would car-to-car communication systems.
dougmwne 5y ago
Note sure about the AGI requirement. The current systems will always need the heavy involvement of human intelligence to be able to rescue stuck cars, drive in new areas or monitor for changing driving conditions and update the driving model. There does seem to be at least some hope these systems will be able to run a true driverless taxi service with minimal geofencing. On the other hand, a human can go to a new country with different road markings, signage, rules, and traffic flows and be able to drive safely pretty much immediately or maybe a quick Google search. That would truly require AGI.
spywaregorilla 5y ago
> ability to drive autonomously everywhere with zero human oversight with a safety record equivalent to the median human driver I think this statement is off the mark. Comparing to a human is hard. Not many accidents happen because people are bad at driving. Driving is honestly pretty easy. They happen because people are distracted, tired, drunk, or perhaps just an asshole driving recklessly for thrills or for speed. A self driving car might be a lot "worse" than the average human driver but could still be a huge improvement in terms of expected safety record for driving overall. They don't need to be better than humans, they just need to be not shit 100% of the time unlike humans.
TulliusCicero 5y ago
> human safety driver to be remote, as is the case in Phoenix. It's not a remote human safety driver, it's more like a remote human safety coach. The difference is giving high level directions vs directly driving the car. They don't remotely drive the car because that would obviously be super dangerous w/r/t connection stability/latency.
rkagerer 5y ago
I still think that true level 5 ... requires AGI I agree today's AI tech is a long way off from completely supplanting a human driver. I'm surprised the average consumer I talk to about this seems to think we're on the cusp. But as vehicles with neural nets become more prevalent I expect we'll see the problem morph as it gets tackled from other angles as well. e.g. Self-driving corridors with road infrastructure aimed to improve AI safety (whether that be additional technology, modified marking standards, etc). Once upon a time street signs with speed limits, curve warnings, and such didn't exist. After faster cars supplanted horse-drawn carriages, highways became a thing. Eventually when the only reason humans drive is for recreation (e.g. off-roading) the problem from the car's perspective will look somewhat different than it did during the transition.
nixpulvis 5y ago
Ah yes, the SF elite will gladly shell out fortunes to ride around in a car just for the opportunity to witness the gross power of AI! Not to mention it's a nice Jag. I wonder if they are hiring models for the "autonomous specialist" role?
kgin 5y ago
L4 with ability to phone home for remote assistance is good enough. By the time L5 arrives people will have been happily riding around in vehicles with no steering wheels for decades. L4 cars that phone home less and less every year. Eventually someone will notice that no L4 car has phoned home for a whole year and almost nobody will care. Just a footnote to an era that already feels taken for granted.
- freyr 5y ago
  Is remote assistance good enough though? It probably works fine when you have a fleet of 100 cars on the road, but 10,00? 1,000,000? How many of those cars have caused a traffic jam at a given moment because they’ve encountered a traffic cone? How long does each issue take to resolve? It seems like, in addition to the technical hurdles, there are many more logistical hurdles before this can be rolled out at scale.
  - alkonaut 5y ago
    When manufacturers (after taxi companies) start competing for this, the manufacturer that can have 1 remote driver per 100 vehicles will beat the one that needs 1 remote driver per 10 vehicles. A manufacturer might require massive halls with thousands of workers to pilot their fleet of cars, but so long as customers pay the bills, that's no problem. And customers will need to pay the bill through subscriptions on FSD packges.
michaelt 5y ago
There's no such thing as a remote safety driver. Cell data connections aren't reliable enough, and having the car emergency stop (and potentially get rear-ended) when it loses signal wouldn't be acceptable.

moralestapia 5y ago

>I still think that true level 5 [...] requires AGI. Oh, but of course! I'm still surprised by people who think otherwise. The amount of corner cases that you have to solve while driving is pretty much limitless, you cannot "train" something on that, heck, some humans are not even fit for that. We are *FAR* from truly autonomous vehicles.

jillesvangurp 5y ago

All that tells you is that they are cautious in the famously litigious California yet confident enough to actually launch their service there. In the unlikely event something goes wrong, even if it is not their fault, they had a person onboard. It's the difference between that being just a minor incident or getting a class action lawsuit with millions/billions in damages. The law is by far the biggest obstacle to level 4 and 5 driving. So, launching in San Francisco is kind of a big step for them. Once it has proven itself for a bit of time and they know how to set up their geo-fences and which streets to avoid, they can probably get rid of the person. That would be evident by that person never actually doing anything long before that. The remote safety monitoring is a smart feature but it's not going to help much for the type of accidents people worry about most where something unexpected happens very rapidly. AIs are actually really good with dealing with those situations. Arguably better than humans for whom this is probably a leading cause of traffic fatalities. The way Waymo operates without hands on the wheel (i.e. level 3 & 4), basically means they have safety nailed already in those kind of situations. There's no way a remote person would be quick enough to intervene. That person is there for other reasons. It's complex traffic situations that cause AIs to get stuck occasionally that require human intervention. Usually this is less of a safety concern and more of an annoyance. The key metric of interventions per hundreds of thousands of miles of distance traveled is the key metric that both Tesla, Waymo, and other companies use for this. Both companies boast some pretty impressive statistics for that. Though of course it's hard to confirm those independently. It's interesting the way Tesla and Waymo approach this problem in different ways. Waymo goes for level 4 but only in areas they've thoroughly vetted. It's taken them many years to start moving to new areas other than relatively safe and easy Phoenix. Tesla on the other hand offers their AI features just about anywhere they can but positions it as level 2 that is really aspiring to be a level 4 but with a requirement for hands on the wheel just in case (which means it's level 2). Level 2 is a legal tool to dodge a lot of legislation and bureaucracy. It basically means that if anything goes wrong, the driver is at fault. It will stay in place a long time for that reason. Liability, not safety, is the key concern here. Arguably, Teslas would probably do pretty well in the areas that Waymo has vetted as well. But they are not in the ride sharing market and need to sell cars world wide and not just in specific geofences in Phoenix and San Francisco. But I wouldn't be surprised to see Tesla offer a similar ride sharing service in similarly geo-fenced areas at some point to get to level 4 & 5. I suspect that race is a lot closer than some people seem to think.

grogenaut 5y ago

I was at Yellowstone this last week. https://ridebeep.com/ https://ridebeep.com/ had some shuttles there doing a pretty straight forward navigation on one straight road, they had human minders as well. The day I went to try them, it was mildly misting, just barely able to see it on the glass. They were not running the machines because they kept stopping because they saw the water drops as obstacles initially. The humans had made the call that it just wasn't an acceptable experience.

id 5y ago

Is this not a legal requirement?

ra7 5y ago

> Also, just a reminder that Waymo in Phoenix is nowhere close to being level 5 Because they are not even trying to be level 5. They've made it very clear that will only ever be a level 4 company and level 5 is not feasible.

shadowgovt 5y ago
Level 5 isn't feasible as much for legal reasons as technical ones. I don't think any company wants to sign off on the notion that their software will handle all classes of problem, even ones they have no data for at all.
- ra7 5y ago
  Except Tesla, who are going to be "L5 by the end of the year" every year!
  - Bukhmanizer 5y ago
    I’m pretty sure Tesla’s whole strategy is to overpromise so much it’s as much a legal liability to not have L5 than to have L5.
    - minsc__and__boo 5y ago
      Tesla brand sells a lifestyle at this point, not just a vehicle. They have to keep pumping it.
- espadrine 5y ago
  > Level 5 isn't feasible as much for legal reasons as technical ones. That point is taken into account under J3016_202104 § 8.8: “There are technical and practical considerations that mitigate the literal meaning of the stipulation that a Level 5 ADS must be capable of ‘operating the vehicle on-road anywhere that a typically skilled human driver can reasonably operate a conventional vehicle,’ which might otherwise be impossible to achieve. For example, an ADS-equipped vehicle that is capable of operating a vehicle on all roads throughout the US, but, for legal or business reasons, cannot operate the vehicle across the borders in Canada or Mexico can still be considered Level 5, even if geo-fenced to operate only within the U.S.”.

actusual 5y ago

Definitionally, the achievement of self driving vehicles does not require AGI. Doing one task very well requires a subset of AGI called Weak AI.

kspacewalk2 5y ago
Stacking shelves in a warehouse is one task. Driving is not one task. There are too many corner cases for a modern-day AI system to perform as well as a median driver in, say, 95% of environments and settings in North America and Europe. I think the argument is that such a system might as well be AGI.
- actusual 5y ago
  The idea that an AI must have the ability to learn how to do anything in order to learn how to drive seems like an extremely pessimistic and misguided goalpost. That is also not how iterative development works.
  - nicoffeine 5y ago
    I think ML is fantastic, and combined with LiDAR, inter-vehicle mesh networking, and geofenced areas where humans take over, we could quickly arrive at mostly automated driving without trying to reinvent the human brain. We should also be more focused on enforcing established legal limits to newly manufactured cars. Just preventing someone from exceeding the speed limit or driving the wrong way would start saving lives immediately. It would also allow traffic flow to be optimized, and eventually prioritize emergency traffic or allow metro areas to be evacuated efficiently for things like natural disasters. It would be great to see the dawn of AGI, but I don't think it will ever happen with classical computation. GPT-3 spits out nonsense with the input of the largest and easiest to parse portion of reality, and I have not seen any ML approach replicate the abilities of something as simple as bacteria. ML requires constant validation from human operators, so the same is going to hold true for ML powered vehicle navigation.
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  Driving is a set of tasks, but not AGI. AGI would be if it could drive and then also learn to write poetry without any code update.

bpodgursky 5y ago

They are not legally allowed to not have a human driver onboard. It's a legal requirement that is not a relevant signal one way or another.

thesausageking 5y ago

Level 4 is where most of value is. If a system could drive in all cities and highways, that's more than 90% of benefit.

snarf21 5y ago
Agreed 100%. There will be special exit/on ramps built along highways and the trucks will largely just stay in their lane even if slower. It would cut the number of truckers needed by probably 50+%.
- akira2501 5y ago
  For depot to depot runs, sure. Most runs aren't that though, and require direct delivery from manufacturer to purchaser. Plenty of deliveries, for example in Chicago, basically happen off a residential street. Alley docking and turning around in these environments is challenging even for a human. Add to all this one thing and we're further than I think most people realize: Weather. Show me an FSD doing better than a human in the snow or we're not really anywhere yet.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - mavhc 5y ago
    From 2018 https://www.engadget.com/2018-05-08-waymo-snow-navigation.html https://www.engadget.com/2018-05-08-waymo-snow-navigation.ht...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
pavon 5y ago
The more I travel, the more I consider myself an SAE level 4 driver :)
ghaff 5y ago
More likely driving on most highways in decent weather which is a big win. I'd pay for that.

hammock 5y ago

>“All rides in the program will have an autonomous specialist on board for now” This tells me that we’re still a long way Did you expect something different? I can't really see a boardroom writing a roadmap that goes straight from test rides (no passengers) with a backup driver onboard to actual rides with passengers - no backup driver onboard with no in-between steps.

VelkaMorava 5y ago
I wonder where "a country road with no lanes which barely fits 1.5 car in winter in the Czech republic" is on your scale... Something like this, just imagine the snowdrifts around it https://www.google.com/maps/@49.080269,16.4569252,3a,75y,307.21h,76.36t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sADh8CUYDhZWcT9KBTkAZAQ!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DADh8CUYDhZWcT9KBTkAZAQ%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D225.13959%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.com/maps/@49.080269,16.4569252,3a,75y,307...
- atourgates 5y ago
  I live in north-central Idaho. 10 minutes from 2 state-universities, but in an otherwise relatively rural part of the county with a 1/4 mile long, somewhat steep driveway. Every year, I'm amazed at how quickly our personal "veneer of civilization" collapses in the snow. The prior owners of our home would just keep their kids home from school, and work from home an average of "about a week every winter." We're a little more aggressive with snow removal, but there are still mornings every winter where I'm getting up at 5 to spend a couple hours plowing and blowing out drifts on our driveway (after typically doing the same thing the night before) just in order for my wife to make it down to our county road which might still have a foot or so of snow covering it. Similarly, in windy snow-covered conditions, there are a couple spots between us and town where the snow regularly drifts back over the road in a matter of hours, causing a "well, I know the road goes about here, I think I can make it through these drifts if I floor it so here it goes" situation. Even when the roads are well plowed and clear, there are plenty of situations where it's difficult for me, a human, to distinguish between the plowed-but-still-white-road and the white snow all around it in some lighting conditions. And let's take snow out of it. Our fastest route into town involves gravel roads. And our paved route is chip-sealed every couple years, and typically doesn't get a divider-line drawn back on it for 6-months or so after. Which is all to say, I think it's going to be quite a while before I have a car that can autonomously drive me into town in the summer, and global warming aside, I'll probably never have one that can get me there reliably in the winter.

spoonjim 5y ago

Beating humans doesn’t require AGI. Just not drinking, texting, or falling asleep will get you halfway there.

baxtr 5y ago

> I still think that true level 5 (i.e. ability to drive autonomously everywhere with zero human oversight with a safety record equivalent to the median human driver) requires AGI. This might be true. Most of the time (95%) I am on complete human brain autopilot when I’m driving but those other 5% need my full focus and attention. I shut of the radio and tell other passengers to be quite (if I have the time for it).

CoryG89 5y ago
It's only AGI until someone achieves it. Then it becomes statistical analysis.
birdman3131 5y ago
Anybody who rides with me on a normal basis have come to learn to recognize the sudden stop halfway through a word when I switch from autopilot brain to active driving. There are times when you need more focus on everything than others.
Closi 5y ago
This assumes that the challenges that are hard for a human are the same challenges that are hard for a self driving car - that might be the case, but self driving cars may have some theoretical advantages such as 360 cameras/lidar and an ability to follow satellite navigation without having to take its eyes off the road. Put another way, the 5% of times I need to focus are usually the times where I am somewhere new and don’t necessarily understand the road layout - which something like Waymo may avoid through mapping for instance. It might be true, but plenty of problems that have been thought to require true AGI have later been found to not require it after sufficient research - for example it’s not long ago that we thought good image recognition was entirely out of reach.

aero-glide2 5y ago

It doesn't matter for the rider though, unlike a Tesla where you still have to keep your hands on the wheel.

spyckie2 5y ago

The key metric is probably "obscure incidents" per miles driven, probably classified manually into various levels of danger. Once the "incidents that lead to disaster" count reaches 0 statistically, it will definitely roll out en masse without the need of safety drivers. My guess is that they know how many miles they have to drive in order to reach that number, and it's a whole lot. Statistics and math stuff but you can probably pin it down to the month or quarter based on trends. Either that, or it's about driving every road in the city with all sorts of weather / traffic / pedestrian conditions until there's no issue. This isn't generalized AI driving (L5) but it's a much more logical approach to getting autonomous driving coverage where it's the most valuable. My guess is that each city will involve a safety driver rollout until they have enough data to know the incident rate is zero. There might be a lot of variance between cities - maps data, weather conditions, customs, etc. Then remove the safety drivers. I'm sure they also are experimenting with disaster/safety protocols while they do the roll out. My prediction is that waymo will be a mainstream option within the next 5 years.

eagsalazar2 5y ago

You are making a ton of assumptions about what is driving this decision.

ren_engineer 5y ago

Would it be easier to just build a "futuristic" test city built around the idea of self-driving cars to make it easier for them to work? If self-driving cars are so great people will move there naturally due to improved quality of life. Trying to make self-driving cars work in current cities is like building around crippling technical debt Seems like Google and a few other tech companies could easily bootstrap a small city by planting some offices somewhere

tdeck 5y ago
If we're building a futuristic city from the ground up, wouldn't it be better to rely on mass transit? Self driving cars still have almost all the same problems that human-driven cars have.
kart23 5y ago
A futuristic city would have public transport and bikes. 5,000 pounds of metal for transporting one person is horribly inefficient.

dagmx 5y ago

This is legally required today. It's not necessarily a reflection of Waymo. Whether their system was perfect or not, it's legally required they do this till the government changes their minds.

minsc__and__boo 5y ago
Yeah, the commenter straight up assumes that a person is present because the L4 tech doesn't work, when in reality there are legal, liability, and even user comfort reasons to have someone on board with this new pilot.
pavon 5y ago
California DMV regulations do allow testing of autonomous vehicles without a safety test driver if certain conditions are met, spelled out in Title 13, Division 1, Chapter 1 Article 3.7 Section 227.38 [1]. The most technically challenging of these is that the car must be capable of operating at SAE level 4, which goes back to the OP's comment. CUPC licensing for commercial passenger services also allows this [2]. That said, I agree with others that this is the natural progression of testing rollout and doesn't tell us anything about the pace at which the rollout will occur, in particular whether it will be faster or slower than Phoenix. [1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/file/adopted-regulatory-text-pdf/ https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/file/adopted-regulatory-text-p... [2] https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/regulatory-services/licensing/transportation-licensing-and-analysis-branch/autonomous-vehicle-carrier-pilot https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/regulatory-services/licensing/transp...

jsight 5y ago

Notably, SAE level 5 is actually well below the standard that you've laid out here. The vehicle simply has to be able to make itself safe in situations that it can't handle. This allows room for remote assistance or a human takeover in certain situations.

jedberg 5y ago

> This tells me that we’re still a long way from full level 4 The only thing it tells me is that regulations are more lax in Arizona than California.

dragonwriter 5y ago

> This tells me that we’re still a long way from full level 4 (and certainly level 5) autonomy in a busy city like San Francisco. I think its in part regulatory relating to paid rides in autonomous vehicles in CA, which is why Cruise is dodging it with passenger-carrying but unpaid rides that are fully driverless. I can't find a good summary of the rules, but I infer from the coverage I've seen that the threshold for having no safety driver when offering paid passenger rides is different from that without paid passengers.

Johnny555 5y ago

The edge cases requiring immediate human attention are still too frequent for the human safety driver to be remote, as is the case in Phoenix. I think you can only determine that if you know how many times the human attendant takes over. Just having a human behind the wheel doesn't tell you much, I don't see how to get full self-driving without an intermediate step of human supervision.

pcurve 5y ago

I'm guessing if all cars become Waymo right now, there will probably be reduction in vehicle fatality by 99%. But people have hard time accepting with the notion that unmanned vehicle may be part responsible for that 1%.

crackercrews 5y ago

> I still think that true level 5 ... requires AGI. In case anyone else was wondering what AGI means, its Artificial General Intelligence. [1] 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligenc...

RobRivera 5y ago

This tells me that you can show progress and draw magnifying glass criticism from people. can only please some of the people some of the time.

BurningFrog 5y ago

I suspect the main "roadblocks" are about the environment for the SDC. All traffic signs and signals need to be machine readable at a distance. That is, a traffic light might beam out "I am light 'SFTL783', will be green for 8 more seconds". The location and other data for SFTL783 is in a preloaded database. Same for speed limits and other signage. An updated 3d map of all roads would also help a lot. As would car-to-car communication systems.

dougmwne 5y ago

Note sure about the AGI requirement. The current systems will always need the heavy involvement of human intelligence to be able to rescue stuck cars, drive in new areas or monitor for changing driving conditions and update the driving model. There does seem to be at least some hope these systems will be able to run a true driverless taxi service with minimal geofencing. On the other hand, a human can go to a new country with different road markings, signage, rules, and traffic flows and be able to drive safely pretty much immediately or maybe a quick Google search. That would truly require AGI.

spywaregorilla 5y ago

> ability to drive autonomously everywhere with zero human oversight with a safety record equivalent to the median human driver I think this statement is off the mark. Comparing to a human is hard. Not many accidents happen because people are bad at driving. Driving is honestly pretty easy. They happen because people are distracted, tired, drunk, or perhaps just an asshole driving recklessly for thrills or for speed. A self driving car might be a lot "worse" than the average human driver but could still be a huge improvement in terms of expected safety record for driving overall. They don't need to be better than humans, they just need to be not shit 100% of the time unlike humans.

TulliusCicero 5y ago

> human safety driver to be remote, as is the case in Phoenix. It's not a remote human safety driver, it's more like a remote human safety coach. The difference is giving high level directions vs directly driving the car. They don't remotely drive the car because that would obviously be super dangerous w/r/t connection stability/latency.

rkagerer 5y ago

I still think that true level 5 ... requires AGI I agree today's AI tech is a long way off from completely supplanting a human driver. I'm surprised the average consumer I talk to about this seems to think we're on the cusp. But as vehicles with neural nets become more prevalent I expect we'll see the problem morph as it gets tackled from other angles as well. e.g. Self-driving corridors with road infrastructure aimed to improve AI safety (whether that be additional technology, modified marking standards, etc). Once upon a time street signs with speed limits, curve warnings, and such didn't exist. After faster cars supplanted horse-drawn carriages, highways became a thing. Eventually when the only reason humans drive is for recreation (e.g. off-roading) the problem from the car's perspective will look somewhat different than it did during the transition.

nixpulvis 5y ago

Ah yes, the SF elite will gladly shell out fortunes to ride around in a car just for the opportunity to witness the gross power of AI! Not to mention it's a nice Jag. I wonder if they are hiring models for the "autonomous specialist" role?

kgin 5y ago

L4 with ability to phone home for remote assistance is good enough. By the time L5 arrives people will have been happily riding around in vehicles with no steering wheels for decades. L4 cars that phone home less and less every year. Eventually someone will notice that no L4 car has phoned home for a whole year and almost nobody will care. Just a footnote to an era that already feels taken for granted.

freyr 5y ago
Is remote assistance good enough though? It probably works fine when you have a fleet of 100 cars on the road, but 10,00? 1,000,000? How many of those cars have caused a traffic jam at a given moment because they’ve encountered a traffic cone? How long does each issue take to resolve? It seems like, in addition to the technical hurdles, there are many more logistical hurdles before this can be rolled out at scale.
- alkonaut 5y ago
  When manufacturers (after taxi companies) start competing for this, the manufacturer that can have 1 remote driver per 100 vehicles will beat the one that needs 1 remote driver per 10 vehicles. A manufacturer might require massive halls with thousands of workers to pilot their fleet of cars, but so long as customers pay the bills, that's no problem. And customers will need to pay the bill through subscriptions on FSD packges.

michaelt 5y ago

There's no such thing as a remote safety driver. Cell data connections aren't reliable enough, and having the car emergency stop (and potentially get rear-ended) when it loses signal wouldn't be acceptable.