7 ms·

From 2016. For one, I appreciate Waymo's cautious approach that values human life more than business success, a la Tesla.

bpodgursky 5y ago
There's a very strong argument that the best way to save lives is whatever strategy advances self-driving technology the fastest. 30,000 Americans (and vastly more people worldwide) die each year from human-driving mistakes... let's not ignore the ongoing human cost of the status quo. Self-driving has the potential to cut that human toll to almost zero. We should not trap ourselves in a future where 1 self-driving mistake death is considered worse than a hundred thousand deaths from normal human mistakes.
- jack_riminton 5y ago
  Exactly. Perfection is the enemy of progress. If one death is caused by Tesla's FSD should we ignore the fact that statistically it would have already saved x lives?
- _jal 5y ago
  So in your analysis, how many people should robocars be killing? The easy answer is "anything less than 30K", right? Somehow that case only looks "very strong" to people with a financial interest in the tech.
  - rightbyte 5y ago
    Unless you are a serial drunk driver you would want FSD to be alot safer then the human average.
  - satisfice 5y ago
    Death by robocar is simply unacceptable. Death by shared responsibility is well accepted. It’s about agency and consent. If you rescued a group of 30 drowning people with your yacht. No one thinks you can shoot one or two on the head, on a whim, and argue that it’s okay— based on the fact that your actions led to a net saving of 28 lives. So, how you die matters. We human drivers are all out there making a reasonable effort to avoid accidents. The standard self-driving tech must be held to is also “reasonableness.” None of the deaths due to self-driving cars I have heard of can meet that standard. They are unacceptable.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  When you factor in the human element, getting on the road as soon as possible may not actually be that strategy. Uber had one fatality and is now out of the market. The public has very little stomach for error here. Multiple companies with multiple fatalities could shelve the whole industry indefinitely.
- farnsworth 5y ago
  The status quo is ridiculous, but we already have a better solution, dense cities and mass transit. We should be building trains using decades old tech, not AI bs. Of course I'm just shouting into the void but the dream of self driving cars is incredible over engineering and will take us backwards in the long run on the problem of global warming.
  - lpapez 5y ago
    Its much easier to sell the future if you portrait it as "autonomous pods for everyone" instead of "trains everywhere", even though the latter is vastly more efficient, simpler, cheaper and eco-friendly. As usual, convenient ideas fare better than good ideas.
- BlueDingo 5y ago
  Wait, does everyone get a free Tesla with FSD at some point? How does your solution spread to millions of drivers? I think if you actually want to start saving lives now (and not decades from now for FSD + policy change + phasing out), mandate real driving classes and tests for licensing.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    So, if you make it more time-consuming and more expensive to get a license, essentially the entire burden is now put onto the less well-off segment of society. And I'm skeptical how much good you do. Yes, younger drivers are less safe, but I'm unconvinced that simply having some more instruction time and a test that is more rigorous but presumably not onerous really provides the equivalent of a few years of experience.
shadowgovt 5y ago
Precisely. Five years on, Waymo is still working on the project and the company Levandowski left to go work for has pulled out of the market after an extremely high-profile fatality.
- hunterb123 5y ago
  Or the fact that Waymo is no closer than they were when he criticized them is proof he was right. How is Waymo doing?
  - ra7 5y ago
    1. First ever fully driverless commercial robotaxi deployment in the U.S. — in Phoenix metro area. 2. Trusted tester program opened up to San Francisco residents for rides with a safety driver. Approved for commercial service (with a safety driver for now) by CA DMV. Seems like they've made progress exactly like what Levandowski would have wanted.
  - alphabetting 5y ago
    Trolling? Rides are open to the public in AZ and SF. They're the leaders in AVs and every company competing with them relies on innovations they developed along the way.
    - hunterb123 5y ago
      5 years for two small sections of two cities isn't exactly inspiring. LA was supposed to happen two years ago. I guess at least they haven't killed an innocent pedestrian with their self driving, like Uber.
Retric 5y ago
Excessive caution also costs lives when it comes to self driving because it pushes adoption further into the future. Tesla is overall near parity with human drivers in terms of casualty rates, though with different people at risk. Assuming Waymo’s system is significantly better than that it’s therefore safer than human drivers and thus should be deployed to save lives. Of course that’s valuing everyone’s lives equally, there are some arguments to be made that slight improvements aren’t enough.
- legolas2412 5y ago
  > Tesla is overall near parity with human drivers in terms of casualty rates, though with different people at risk. Unproven claim.
  - Retric 5y ago
    If it was much worse than people everyone would be talking about it, insurance rates would match etc. I am not saying it’s as good on average and clearly it’s much worse at some things. That said it’s not say ten times as likely to result in a fatal accident.
    - bduerst 5y ago
      That's much different than making a positive claim the autopilot has parity with human drivers for casualty rates, as there are a number of different reasons that is the case.
      - Retric 5y ago
        I didn’t say Autopilot was as good as the average driver. I said it was within the ballpark of the average driver. The fact that some major insurance companies offer discounts for Teslas with self driving over those without seems like strong evidence for such. Unless you have some evidence why there isn’t a huge story around Autopilots overall safety?
    - AlotOfReading 5y ago
stingrae 5y ago
I read this very differently. This was coming off of the failure of Firefly (https://qz.com/1005083/the-cutest-thing-google-has-ever-made-is-dead-waymos-firefly-self-driving-cars-goog/ https://qz.com/1005083/the-cutest-thing-google-has-ever-made...). The problem with it was that you couldn't have a safety driver in the car. So it would require level 5 ready software. My interpretation of Levandowski, is that he is pitching the current waymo strategy, to get as many retrofitted vehicles on the road in the target market and collect a ton of training data. These human driven "self-driving" cars could pick up passengers while collecting the data so as to build up a customer base and service flow for the future service.
- ra7 5y ago
  Yeah, it seems like Waymo did end up following Levandowski's ideas and didn't try to build their own vehicles. They have the Waymo Driver now, which is supposed to be modular and can be upfitted to different types of cars/trucks with OEM partnerships.
misiti3780 5y ago
How many people have died because of Tesla FSD again? Let me check. zero.
- nautilius 5y ago
  You mean it hasn’t already killed anyone since its release - two weeks ago? I don’t know if that’s something to brag about… https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/09/25/tesla-drivers-can-request-fsd-beta-with-a-button-press-despite-safety-concerns.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/09/25/tes...
  - misiti3780 5y ago
    FSD has been released for many months.
- soperj 5y ago
  There have been 10 autopilot deaths last I checked.
- trangus_1985 5y ago
  Car accidents resulting in fatality are relatively uncommon, thanks to modern safety standards, and Tesla FSD doesn't have nearly as many miles as it needs. Your sample size is way too small to be implying that FSD is safe - given a year or so, with millions more miles, we'll see what the score is. By the way, and this is anecdotal, I was personally given a FSD demonstration a few weeks ago. The car immediately did an unsafe lane change in the middle of an intersection. Albeit, that was one of the pilot program beta versions.
- javagram 5y ago
  Several deaths, and more serious accidents, are attributed to Tesla Autopilot though, which Tesla marketing has confused customers into thinking is equivalent to FSD. Compare Tesla’s initial approach (or lack thereof) to driver monitoring vs GM Super Cruise for instance.
- Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
dheera 5y ago
> For one, I appreciate Capitalism, and the stock market, on the other hand, doesn't appreciate it. It kills "cautious" companies and keeps alive companies that have a revenue model, even if that revenue model comes at the expense of safety.
- 35fbe7d3d5b9 5y ago
  What does that say about capitalism?
  - q-big 5y ago
    "Capitalism" means that the customer decides which company gets the money by his buying decisions. So, it says about capitalism that few customers actually care about safety when they do their buying decisions (the market then delivers according to these chosen priorities); customers rather complain when their conscious buying decisions turn out to be bad ideas (instead of accepting these as consequences of their buying decisions).
    - jessaustin 5y ago
      Again, we see a conflation of "capitalism", in which rich people decide everything, with "free markets", in which consumers have some autonomy. In USA, where cheap at-home Covid tests are still not widely available, guess which one we have? https://slate.com/technology/2021/09/covid-rapid-antigen-testing-fda-approval.html https://slate.com/technology/2021/09/covid-rapid-antigen-tes...

bpodgursky 5y ago

There's a very strong argument that the best way to save lives is whatever strategy advances self-driving technology the fastest. 30,000 Americans (and vastly more people worldwide) die each year from human-driving mistakes... let's not ignore the ongoing human cost of the status quo. Self-driving has the potential to cut that human toll to almost zero. We should not trap ourselves in a future where 1 self-driving mistake death is considered worse than a hundred thousand deaths from normal human mistakes.

jack_riminton 5y ago
Exactly. Perfection is the enemy of progress. If one death is caused by Tesla's FSD should we ignore the fact that statistically it would have already saved x lives?
_jal 5y ago
So in your analysis, how many people should robocars be killing? The easy answer is "anything less than 30K", right? Somehow that case only looks "very strong" to people with a financial interest in the tech.
- rightbyte 5y ago
  Unless you are a serial drunk driver you would want FSD to be alot safer then the human average.
- satisfice 5y ago
  Death by robocar is simply unacceptable. Death by shared responsibility is well accepted. It’s about agency and consent. If you rescued a group of 30 drowning people with your yacht. No one thinks you can shoot one or two on the head, on a whim, and argue that it’s okay— based on the fact that your actions led to a net saving of 28 lives. So, how you die matters. We human drivers are all out there making a reasonable effort to avoid accidents. The standard self-driving tech must be held to is also “reasonableness.” None of the deaths due to self-driving cars I have heard of can meet that standard. They are unacceptable.
shadowgovt 5y ago
When you factor in the human element, getting on the road as soon as possible may not actually be that strategy. Uber had one fatality and is now out of the market. The public has very little stomach for error here. Multiple companies with multiple fatalities could shelve the whole industry indefinitely.
farnsworth 5y ago
The status quo is ridiculous, but we already have a better solution, dense cities and mass transit. We should be building trains using decades old tech, not AI bs. Of course I'm just shouting into the void but the dream of self driving cars is incredible over engineering and will take us backwards in the long run on the problem of global warming.
- lpapez 5y ago
  Its much easier to sell the future if you portrait it as "autonomous pods for everyone" instead of "trains everywhere", even though the latter is vastly more efficient, simpler, cheaper and eco-friendly. As usual, convenient ideas fare better than good ideas.
BlueDingo 5y ago
Wait, does everyone get a free Tesla with FSD at some point? How does your solution spread to millions of drivers? I think if you actually want to start saving lives now (and not decades from now for FSD + policy change + phasing out), mandate real driving classes and tests for licensing.
- ghaff 5y ago
  So, if you make it more time-consuming and more expensive to get a license, essentially the entire burden is now put onto the less well-off segment of society. And I'm skeptical how much good you do. Yes, younger drivers are less safe, but I'm unconvinced that simply having some more instruction time and a test that is more rigorous but presumably not onerous really provides the equivalent of a few years of experience.

shadowgovt 5y ago

Precisely. Five years on, Waymo is still working on the project and the company Levandowski left to go work for has pulled out of the market after an extremely high-profile fatality.

hunterb123 5y ago
Or the fact that Waymo is no closer than they were when he criticized them is proof he was right. How is Waymo doing?
- ra7 5y ago
  1. First ever fully driverless commercial robotaxi deployment in the U.S. — in Phoenix metro area. 2. Trusted tester program opened up to San Francisco residents for rides with a safety driver. Approved for commercial service (with a safety driver for now) by CA DMV. Seems like they've made progress exactly like what Levandowski would have wanted.
- alphabetting 5y ago
  Trolling? Rides are open to the public in AZ and SF. They're the leaders in AVs and every company competing with them relies on innovations they developed along the way.
  - hunterb123 5y ago
    5 years for two small sections of two cities isn't exactly inspiring. LA was supposed to happen two years ago. I guess at least they haven't killed an innocent pedestrian with their self driving, like Uber.

Retric 5y ago

Excessive caution also costs lives when it comes to self driving because it pushes adoption further into the future. Tesla is overall near parity with human drivers in terms of casualty rates, though with different people at risk. Assuming Waymo’s system is significantly better than that it’s therefore safer than human drivers and thus should be deployed to save lives. Of course that’s valuing everyone’s lives equally, there are some arguments to be made that slight improvements aren’t enough.

legolas2412 5y ago
> Tesla is overall near parity with human drivers in terms of casualty rates, though with different people at risk. Unproven claim.
- Retric 5y ago
  If it was much worse than people everyone would be talking about it, insurance rates would match etc. I am not saying it’s as good on average and clearly it’s much worse at some things. That said it’s not say ten times as likely to result in a fatal accident.
  - bduerst 5y ago
    That's much different than making a positive claim the autopilot has parity with human drivers for casualty rates, as there are a number of different reasons that is the case.
    - Retric 5y ago
      I didn’t say Autopilot was as good as the average driver. I said it was within the ballpark of the average driver. The fact that some major insurance companies offer discounts for Teslas with self driving over those without seems like strong evidence for such. Unless you have some evidence why there isn’t a huge story around Autopilots overall safety?
  - AlotOfReading 5y ago

stingrae 5y ago

I read this very differently. This was coming off of the failure of Firefly (https://qz.com/1005083/the-cutest-thing-google-has-ever-made-is-dead-waymos-firefly-self-driving-cars-goog/ https://qz.com/1005083/the-cutest-thing-google-has-ever-made...). The problem with it was that you couldn't have a safety driver in the car. So it would require level 5 ready software. My interpretation of Levandowski, is that he is pitching the current waymo strategy, to get as many retrofitted vehicles on the road in the target market and collect a ton of training data. These human driven "self-driving" cars could pick up passengers while collecting the data so as to build up a customer base and service flow for the future service.

ra7 5y ago
Yeah, it seems like Waymo did end up following Levandowski's ideas and didn't try to build their own vehicles. They have the Waymo Driver now, which is supposed to be modular and can be upfitted to different types of cars/trucks with OEM partnerships.

misiti3780 5y ago

How many people have died because of Tesla FSD again? Let me check. zero.

nautilius 5y ago
You mean it hasn’t already killed anyone since its release - two weeks ago? I don’t know if that’s something to brag about… https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/09/25/tesla-drivers-can-request-fsd-beta-with-a-button-press-despite-safety-concerns.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/09/25/tes...
- misiti3780 5y ago
  FSD has been released for many months.
soperj 5y ago
There have been 10 autopilot deaths last I checked.
trangus_1985 5y ago
Car accidents resulting in fatality are relatively uncommon, thanks to modern safety standards, and Tesla FSD doesn't have nearly as many miles as it needs. Your sample size is way too small to be implying that FSD is safe - given a year or so, with millions more miles, we'll see what the score is. By the way, and this is anecdotal, I was personally given a FSD demonstration a few weeks ago. The car immediately did an unsafe lane change in the middle of an intersection. Albeit, that was one of the pilot program beta versions.
javagram 5y ago
Several deaths, and more serious accidents, are attributed to Tesla Autopilot though, which Tesla marketing has confused customers into thinking is equivalent to FSD. Compare Tesla’s initial approach (or lack thereof) to driver monitoring vs GM Super Cruise for instance.
Sohcahtoa82 5y ago

dheera 5y ago

> For one, I appreciate Capitalism, and the stock market, on the other hand, doesn't appreciate it. It kills "cautious" companies and keeps alive companies that have a revenue model, even if that revenue model comes at the expense of safety.

35fbe7d3d5b9 5y ago
What does that say about capitalism?
- q-big 5y ago
  "Capitalism" means that the customer decides which company gets the money by his buying decisions. So, it says about capitalism that few customers actually care about safety when they do their buying decisions (the market then delivers according to these chosen priorities); customers rather complain when their conscious buying decisions turn out to be bad ideas (instead of accepting these as consequences of their buying decisions).
  - jessaustin 5y ago
    Again, we see a conflation of "capitalism", in which rich people decide everything, with "free markets", in which consumers have some autonomy. In USA, where cheap at-home Covid tests are still not widely available, guess which one we have? https://slate.com/technology/2021/09/covid-rapid-antigen-testing-fda-approval.html https://slate.com/technology/2021/09/covid-rapid-antigen-tes...