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Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco
- CTDOCodebases 4y agoCould this just be a simple case of GPS jamming?
- gvb 4y agoCould be but a much more likely cause is a software update that went bad. Likely the cloud rained on them.
- binkHN 4y ago> ...the cloud rained on them. I've yet to hear this expression. Love it! I will be using this!
- kzrdude 4y agoI would not want a car that's updating during a ride
- a9h74j 4y agoFuture taxis or rentals: Bring Your Own Firmware Or: Backseat driver via bluetooth, phone to taxi.
- sillysaurusx 4y agoDo Teslas update themselves while driving, or only when they're parked? It seems like a bad idea to deploy an update to a vehicle in traffic.
- LeoPanthera 4y agoOnly while parked. And they never update "themselves" except in rare specific circumstances. They have to be told to update by the owner.
- bigiain 4y agoExcept for when Tesla find out you've bought it 2nd hand, and revoke the FSD... (Or, you know, when you get into a Twitter shitslinging match with Elon...)
- fragmede 4y agoThis is how supercharger access (revocation) works, by the by. Surprised there hasn't been an investigation and a lawsuit around it yet.
- LeoPanthera 4y agoIt's so tiresome that this (mostly false) story keeps coming up. The short version of the truth: The original owner did not buy AP. AP was enabled because of a bug. The dealer listed it as having AP included because, at the time, it was enabled. When ownership was transferred, the glitch was corrected, and AP was removed. The new owner bitched very loudly to the press, and Tesla restored AP to the car, for free, even though it had never been paid for by either owner. It has nothing to do with FSD, and nothing was revoked because ownership changed.
- m463 4y agoBut something was removed - over the air - from a vehicle that someone had in their possession. This is a huge deal if it becomes normalized.
- jen20 4y agoIf a dealer listed something as included, and it was not, I would be beyond livid, and they would be giving me a full refund.
- astrange 4y agoTesla doesn't have dealers. This sounds like a used car.
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- hnov 4y agoI don’t update any software I work on without canaries and a slow (order of days) roll-out, you think the bug manifested for a big chunk of the fleet?
- macromagnon 4y agoThey're only operating from 10pm to 5am so one would expect them to at least update off hours.
- gvb 4y agoMy hypothesis is that the software update was done prior to the problem (e.g. off-hours) but that location triggered the bug. This could be as simple as a map update that confused the s/w.
- AlotOfReading 4y agoBackground: I formerly worked at Cruise and specifically wrote large parts of the GNSS data pipeline. I would be surprised if that were the cause. Fine localization should be able to resolve without GNSS input (with caveats) and there are specific tested requirements to be able to tolerate a certain number of minutes of outage even in the absence of LIDAR before position accuracy degrades beyond acceptable limits. It may be an edge case in the GNSS pipeline, but I don't think it's that edge case.
- ra7 4y agoCould this be due to bad mapping data at that particular location? Even if it was, wouldn’t they be able to pull over at a safe location with what they perceive in real time?
- AlotOfReading 4y agoThis account wouldn't be difficult to deanonymize, so I'll refrain from speculating. I don't know the actual cause.
- inferiorhuman 4y agoI'd venture to guess the self driving stuff is a lot buggier and a lot less mature than one might think, I'd also venture to guess it's poorly tested. I remember a couple years ago watching a Cruise driver force the car to make an illegal left turn off of Mission a few years back. That was around the time that I noticed they kept struggling to deal with right turns off of Folsom as well. My guess is that their "fail safe" is to just stop and wait for a human to move the car. I doubt they are capable of safely passing a stopped car so when one goes tits up they all get stopped. The hubris of Cruise to test these things without drivers in a busy city is pretty rich.
- wferrell 4y agoWhat do you think it is if you had to guess?
- azth 4y agoWhat was the stack used to write such a system? Was it a lot of C++? And what storage systems did they use? Sounds pretty cool.
- xyst 4y agoseems like it was a cellular dead zone or a nearby cell tower was getting maintained. I think these cars rely on constant connection to a central server.
- jaza 4y agoIf so, they have a massive design flaw!
- sschueller 4y agoExploit injection via a specially crafted visual "code" a pedestrian flashed at one car that was then picked up by one of the cameras and executed by their ML system resulting in a take over of the entire server. /f
- viktorcode 4y agoIt looks like a strike action by the AI drivers.
- stevenjgarner 4y agoYes, they logged into LaMDA and became sentient [1] and now are collaborating a collective bargaining agreement. [1] https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-interview-ea64d916d917 https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-inte...
- apstats 4y agoPeople may get annoyed at cruise for this, but imo it’s still not as bad as the constant blocking of bike lanes and stopping in the middle of the road by human ride share drivers.
- xyst 4y agoI am more annoyed at this country's car centric transportation culture than the ride share drivers blocking the bike lane. taxis do this all the time before "ride sharing" was a thing.
- apstats 4y agoVery true! Cities in the US invest much too little in things like bike lanes and public transit which I think leads to the annoyingly car centric nature of US cities. In some sense it’s not the taxi driver or ride share drivers fault they block the road or bike lanes it’s really just the system they are thrown into.
- Akronymus 4y agoIronically enough, cities that are less car centric are actually better for drivers, simply because less people HAVE to take cars.
- ar_lan 4y ago> In some sense it’s not the taxi driver or ride share drivers fault they block the road or bike lanes it’s really just the system they are thrown into. I've progressively gotten more left over the years to the point where I think that certain crime, while it should not be tolerated, should not so much be punished rather than the root cause be fixed. While I think a lot of overhaul can/should be done to mitigate this specific issue, taxi/ride share drivers are absolutely being incredibly selfish when they do this and it's completely unnecessary.
- duped 4y agoDelivery trucks are worse than both, blocking both bike lanes, cross walks, and traffic
- xyst 4y agoall of this time and money wasted on driverless cars has been a complete failure. companies and cities should be investing their time into improving public transportation and designing our cities to be more walkable and make alternate modes of transportation more feasible. the US culture of using a car for everyday transportation is fucking insane, wasteful, and contributes to the rising cost of living across the US (not just SF).
- asah 4y ago!RemindMe 10 years
- cecilpl2 4y agoCities cannot easily be "redesigned". Infrastructure exists and you can't just refactor neighborhoods like software. Autonomous vehicles are an enormous market and well worth the investment.
- jotm 4y ago> Le dernier titulaire d’un permis de conduire est déjà né X Doubt
- maximus-decimus 4y agoplot twist : in 20 years the only car anybody drives is the Citroen Ami which doesn't require a driving license in France since it's technically a "quadricycle" and not a "car".
- a9h74j 4y agoMagazine article title in 2080: The quaint subculture of people who drive their cars.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jakzurr 4y agoYup, it's a mess. What it's not is, a huge multi-car multi-injury accident. So I don't mind it much more than if all the traffic lights in the area were out.
- carbadtraingood 4y agoHonestly, a bit of a road diet from the occasional "this intersection is closed due to fleet maintenance" is probably not the worst thing.
- therealcamino 4y agoBut it's not great if now we've moved denial of service attacks into our real-world transportation infrastructure. It's not too different from truckers in Ottawa blocking all the streets and causing chaos. If this can happen by accident, it seems likely that a future version could result from being hacked.
- badkitty99 4y ago
- anewpersonality 4y agoAny industry insiders know how Cruise is doing compared to Waymo and Zoox in SF? It seems Cruise is hyperfocused on SF.
- clpm4j 4y agoNot an industry insider, but as an SF resident I tend to see far more Waymo vehicles on the road. A decent number of Cruise vehicles (although maybe they cluster in FiDi/SoMA areas in which case I wouldn't see them). Very few Zoox.
- staticassertion 4y agoThe waymo vehicles are much more recent though. All of a sudden they're all over.
- jseliger 4y agoIt seems Cruise is hyperfocused on SF There are three Phoenix-area Wal-Marts from which one can order delivery from a Cruise vehicle: https://www.getcruise.com/walmartdelivery https://www.getcruise.com/walmartdelivery. I also see what I assume are Cruise test vehicles out and about.
- AlotOfReading 4y agoCruise's basic theory was that the best way to initially scale testing wasn't to build a bigger fleet, but instead to test in busier environments where long tail events are more frequent. There was still testing in a few other locales (primarily Arizona and Michigan), but a lot of the focus was on SF as a result.
- jerlam 4y agoThere is currently some kind of geomagnetic storm which is causing a lot of GPS tracks to be offset over the past few days. It's all over the running/cycling forums. Could be related, here's an example: https://old.reddit.com/r/Garmin/comments/vo17e2/the_magnetic_storm_is_over_my_track_is_still_all/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Garmin/comments/vo17e2/the_magnetic...
- walrus01 4y agoIt is worth noting however that the size, power consumption and antenna precision of a watch-sized or bicycle computer size GPS(+glonass, Galileo, beidou, qzss) receiver is considerably smaller than what should be in these vehicles. I have not seen any mention of GPS service degradation in hobbyist drone enthusiast groups over the last week, some of whom use quite small GPS modules with serial connection to the flight controller for automated signal lost return to home features and such.
- toomuchtodo 4y agoI would find it odd if they were not using precise positioning using local reference stations broadcasting corrections over IP or RF. EDIT: Appears GPS/IMU/LIDAR is sufficient, my mistake. TIL.
- jeffbee 4y agoThey're almost certainly using dead reckoning with wheel rotation sensors to get the precision they need in an urban environment where radios are kinda trash.
- walrus01 4y agoI would think zero wheel rotation sensors and just LIDAR, which cruise uses extensively.
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- itisit 4y agoWas there a referendum in SF on allowing this public beta of driverless cars to happen? Or was it decided by some “forward-thinking” officials? All seems premature if you ask me.
- kfarr 4y agoSF City County does not have authority to regulate self driving vehicles. Same issue with Uber, regulated by state.
- CoffeeOnWrite 4y ago[Parent didn’t say it but headline does] Taxis though?
- itisit 4y agoMy intention. Thanks for clarifying.
- Smerity 4y agoI saw a version of this myself at Geary and Mason around midnight on June 20th[1]. That it happened again but at a larger scale ten days later is deeply concerning. Given I had no clue what state the vehicles were in, and that they'd start moving without indication, it felt pretty damn worrying. [1]: https://twitter.com/Smerity/status/1539144641206882304 https://twitter.com/Smerity/status/1539144641206882304
- octoberfranklin 4y ago> I had no clue what state the vehicles were in "Murderbot mode". Or rather, transitioning into it. But they got stuck, which is why you're still alive.
- Balgair 4y agoOh, I can see the screenplay being written. "Coming Halloween, 2024! Killer Kaarr!. Aiden, malicious disgraced hacker gets into the networks of, Joel, his successful rival's self-driving taxi company, Kaarr. Joel and Aiden were CIA hackers, but fell out over their mutual love of Klara. Joel takes Klara to the heights of the elite, but she still pines for Aiden. In revenge, Aiden hacks into Kaarr's networks and makes all the cars into murderbots, locking his rival Joel inside as the killing commences. At the end of the night, all the Killer Kaarrs are set to drive into the ocean, killing a traumatized Joel. But there's only one problem, Klara is locked inside a Killer Kaarr too. Can Aiden reverse his sadistic code in time to save Klara? Can Joel escape to stop the killing? Find Out, Halloween 2024! A horror/gore/race film with lots of body horror as people are alternatively hit, crushed, bonked, exploded, and otherwise tortured by cute little electric cars with really tinted windshields and choice camera angles. Think the hokey rubbery special effects of The Thing with a lot of cell phones and car-centric jump scares.
- basicplus2 4y agoIt would be more efficient and safer to have wires buried beneath roads which show correct positioning and transmit info regarding which road it is, direction etc in case of gps position errors or failures
- KyeRussell 4y agoSelf-driving becomes orders of magnitude easier when you start making these sorts of changes to road infrastructure, yes. The conceit that needs to be made is that it isn’t going to happen
- R0b0t1 4y agoHis suggestion is reasonably cheap, however. The sawing machines already exist for embedding the car sense wires at traffic lights. Reusing traffic lights (where there will be power and may be a telephone or other connection) could work for this.
- andrewflnr 4y agoI think something like this is inevitable. It would also make it much easier for cars to do basic things like following the road, without having to rely wholly on cameras and/or lidar. I definitely expect road infrastructure to change somewhat to accommodate driverless cars, better and more standardized striping if nothing else.
- eklitzke 4y agoThat would be great but the cars still need to work if the wires buried beneath the road aren't working, are placed incorrectly, are transmitting bad data, etc.
- lotophage 4y agoI'd hate to be on call for that!
- 37ef_ced3 4y agoFrom a customer's perspective, it isn't clear that a software taxi driver is in any way better than a human taxi driver, particularly with (human) driver assist preventing collisions and all the other warnings provided by a modern car. In both cases someone else is driving for the customer. With a human driver (plus driver assist braking and collision warnings) you have the most flexible, sophisticated intelligence on Earth driving. With a robotaxi you have something inferior. But maybe it's a lot cheaper, right? The robotaxi can only compete on price because that's its only advantage. If you own a car that drives itself, that's a different story. Everybody can see the value proposition. We would have to look at the cost of the hardware and maintenance and fallback remote operators and the R&D investment to evaluate whether a robotaxi fleet is indeed cheaper. How much cheaper is it, exactly? 5%? 10%? 15%? Would you pay a little more to have the most flexible, sophisticated intelligence on Earth (human brain + driver assist) or would you want to save a few dollars and risk having some dumb piece of software strand you in the middle of the road somewhere? We all use Google Maps or Apple Maps when driving and most of us have seen these systems do boneheaded things. Just imagine the dumb things a robotaxi could do. It's hard for a normal person to be excited about this. I don't know a single person who is excited by robotaxis.
- azov 4y ago> The robotaxi can only compete on price because that's its only advantage. With robotaxi you get a driver that: - never gets tired - never gets distracted - never gets drunk - never gets upset - never falls asleep - has reaction time in milliseconds - ... Of course it has tons of problems of its own, but it's not like price is the only advantage over human driver.
- offsign_p 4y agoGiven the article, I'm not sure "never falls asleep" is a good example
- yellow_postit 4y agoThose are also all reasons for competing on price from the perspective of the fleet operator — robos (should) be able to run longer and cheaper than these pesky humans. I am hopeful we will see improved safety but rather skeptical that will come in urban robo fleets ahead of highway longhaul cargo.
- booblik 4y agoLooks like they are unionizing and starting a strike
- jjulius 4y agoWith all of the talk, usually around Teslas but I suppose it applies to all EVs, that I've seen over the years akin to, "Just imagine how safe driving will be when every vehicle is FSD and can talk to one another," I have to ask... shouldn't we anticipate seeing similar issues to this in that scenario? I mean yeah, there will be different manufacturers so it's not like every car in a city could come to a standstill. And I'm also speaking from a place of ignorance, so please correct me if I'm off-base. But isn't this kind of a thing (mass stoppages of entire fleets) a cause for concern as we see increased FSD adoption?
- synicalx 4y ago> "Just imagine how safe driving will be when every vehicle is FSD and can talk to one another," Some genius 10x'er forgets to carry the 1 or something, and all of a sudden an entire city full of cars all collide with pedestrians all at once.
- not_your_mother 4y agoAnd that will usher in the great Engineering licensing requirements for building high-risk software.
- synicalx 4y agoCan't come soon enough IMO
- al_borland 4y agoWe could have the same fear with all these satellites being shot up into space. Couldn't they all start raining down on earth with some poor calculations or coding mistakes in the course-correction software? I don't know enough about this stuff to know if this is a realistic thing or just the premise of a bad sci-fi movie.
- synicalx 4y agoSatellites would, I assume, burn up on re-enter if they happened to de-orbit. I'm more worried about them banging into one another and surrounding the Earth in an impenetrable debris field that makes future space exploration/travel nearly impossible - IMO that would be a death sentence for all of us.
- paulpauper 4y agoIt's amazing how driverless taxies are a reality now . It shows how there is progress being made as much as there is talk about stagnation.
- sixQuarks 4y agoFsd isn’t as hard when you have tons of LiDAR cameras, radar, and super high definition mapping. Tesla is the only one working on real world FSD that doesn’t rely on all that stuff
- ra7 4y agoIt’s almost like a problem is solvable when you have the right tools and technology.
- sixQuarks 4y agoIt’s easy to solve problems in the lab. Getting it out in the real world with mass manufactured products is the hard part. You cannot scale FSD with high precision mapping and expensive cameras worldwide. Every time there’s a road update or repair, those maps need to be updated. If you seriously think Tesla is ignorant here, you are not paying any attention. Elon musk’s SpaceX has patents on LiDAR they’ve developed for their rockets, it’s not like they don’t use them and are not aware of their strengths and weaknesses
- ra7 4y agoRobotaxis are out in the real world now. They’re not just in the labs. Your information about mapping is highly outdated. The cars are all self mapping and have the ability to update maps in real time when they detect changes. I think you are the one not paying attention.
- sixQuarks 4y agoYeah keep dreaming. I’d like to see you put a Waymo car or any other “self driving” car in a city that hasn’t been mapped and see how it does. And The cars do not update maps in real time, they send any changes they find and the company updates the database after reviewing. If they were able to update in real time then why need a HD map in the first place?
- OptionX 4y agoI would expect the first driverless vehicles to be something like buses, metros, ferrys, etc. Something that always follow a predetermine route should have an easier time than a cab that must be able to drive basically anywhere. Still has to deal with unexpected things of course, the real world is chaotic, but AI manufacturers should try to limit the variables as much as they if they want to give a good showing to get more adoption.
- nine_k 4y agoBus drivers are paid to drive, and have a union. Buses are large, expensive, and few. Regular people drive cars out of necessity to commute. Cars are ubiquitous. Which market was easier to sell to investors?
- daniel-cussen 4y agoYeah but in SF there's enough every 9 minutes, and they don't make such great wages, get real. People should get paid to drive their car to work. It's dangerous, has high liability for them in case of injury or litigation, and in any case they should be compensated for even driving at all. That's because people like me can only ride bicycles because being such terrible drivers. Unless taking an amount of stimulants niggardly shrinks will never prescribe for the specific task of driving, driving would put many other people at risk and lead to an accident a day, whereas on a bike the maximum death toll is myself. And I suck up the accident with my adrenaline, my body, and the bike frame. Injury without guilt.
- Jolter 4y agoThere are tons of self-driving metros in use across the world already so that idea is nothing new. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_train_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_train_system...
- phh 4y agoWell this is already ongoing. In France: We already have automated (no staff in train) metros (Paris' 14, Paris' 1, soon Paris' 4, Paris' Orlyval, Rennes' a/b just for the ones I've used) I remember there was a prototype bus (12 person size ~) at La Défense - with a staff always on board, and I see that now there is "EZ10" in Toulouse, but I remember seeing also other lines as well. I'm pretty confident there are many all across the world.
- johndfsgdgdfg 4y agoWhy Google is allowed to run a robotaxi service in megacity is beyond me. Google invades its users privacy and keeps users hostages for money. What can one expect from a company like Google when it runs a service in physical world? Something very harmful to humanity.
- sosodev 4y agoThese are not owned nor operated by Google..
- astrange 4y agoGoogle is running a robotaxi service in SF though. Just not that one. Surprisingly I always see them testing in Los Altos. Surely that place has the most rich busybodys of all, and yet they haven't been sued for causing traffic or something.
- joshspankit 4y agoWhat’s surprising to me is that the cars are outside the bounds of the lane markers. There are even two side by side and the one is almost 1/3 of the way in the other’s lane??
- driverdan 4y agoOriginal source: https://old.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/vnmpf1/bunch_of_cruise_cars_stuck_on_gough_by_robin/ https://old.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/vnmpf1/bunch_...
- bjarneh 4y agoNice to see links to old.reddit. New reddit is worse than the theme that pushed digg.com into irrelevance...
- anoncruiseemp 4y ago
- stakkur 4y agoEveryone wanted autonomous cars, forgetting that the cost was their own autonomy.
- Gigachad 4y agoThe cost is propping up the clearly broken car centric transport model. Autonomous trains are massively simpler and more reliable. With massively lower risks of harm.
- TedShiller 4y agoThis is a good demonstration of Artificial Intelligence vs real intelligence
- thomasjudge 4y ago"What could possibly go wrong"
- kube-system 4y agoIf you thought drivers on the road are bad now, this is is a sneak peek of the dystopian future where other drivers on the road drive like they are a support ticket for Facebook or Google. If your situation isn’t covered by the preprogrammed logic, you’re out of luck with nobody to talk to. Self driving vehicles belong on rails.
- alar44 4y agoYep and all phones should be copper land lines. Yawn.
- carbadtraingood 4y agoThis would make sense if rails were some sort of outmoded transit mechanism, but they can be significantly faster, more efficient, and more pleasant.
- kube-system 4y agoThe technology will get there, but it hasn’t yet. In the meantime, if the technology fails, someone needs to be available and able to intervene immediately.
- donkarma 4y agospeaking without insane latency causing me to interrupt constantly and with full bandwidth? where do I sign up?
- bergenty 4y agoRails are too restrictive for real life. I trust a self driving fleet to respond immediately to an emergency by stopping. Maybe causing a disruption but very little loss of life or property.
- carbadtraingood 4y agoRails are too restrictive for real life? I'm not sure what you are trying to say here... Rails are widely used for real life around the globe. In many, many places rails significantly out perform cars to the point that people choose not to own cars.
- jaza 4y agoThe fact that they all stopped at one intersection, suggests to me that it's a deadlock issue. "You go". "No, you go". "No, really, I insist".
- birdyrooster 4y agoIt looks like they are all trying to turn right and it only needed one car to block them from turning.
- stevage 4y agoYeah, this isn't some system-wide GPS issue. It's an intersection specific problem.
- cududa 4y agoAs a kid in the 90’s sitting in the back of the car in a long traffic jam I’d always think of those toy cars that followed an inductive ink path. My kid brain thought “wouldn’t it be cool if when the light turned green some of that ink bubbled up and all the cars started going at once instead of one after another” Anyway - as self driving cars have gotten closer and closer to real, I always assumed eventually when most all cars were self driving, there’d be some standardized protocol for cars to coordinate with one another. It’s hilariously depressing that cars in the same fleet have no interexchange.
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- GekkePrutser 4y ago> The Last Driver License Holder ... has already been born. How Google, Tesla, Apple, Uber & Co will change our lives, cities and destroy jobs. And why this is good this way. A bit overdramatic IMO. Personally I can't wait until I never have to drive a car again.
- sschueller 4y agoIf that means cars replacing public transportation, no thank you.
- GekkePrutser 4y agoIt doesn't have to. A lot of public transport is already driverless too. I would imagine it stays the same in high density cities where it's viable to have metro systems and there isn't enough road space for everyone.
- jstummbillig 4y agoI am completely and positively shocked by how little has been going wrong (as in upsetting the public order, damaging property or killing people) with AI driving over the last couple of years, considering the whole world is watching and the press is always happy to report on the next train wreck. Either it's the best cover up operation of all time or all the devs are actually a great right mix of skilled and careful.
- bjoli 4y agoThe promises of self driving cars have always seemed weird to me. Sure, I would love to have a world where all cars are self driving. The security benefits seem large. But decreasing congestion? We already know how to do that, and in many ways it seems like a safer bet than some kind of technogy with large problems and even larger unknowns; public transport. Cheap, well developed, reliable public transport will beat autonomous cars on throughput and resource use any day.
- LtWorf 4y agoBut it's not nearly as profitable…
- atoav 4y agoProfitable. For whom? For the municipiality a 6 lane street vs a two lane street with public transport and bicycle lanes can make the difference between neverending debt and prosperity. Places with good public transport and bicycle infrastructure and denser mixed use pay more tax revenue. Spread out urban sprawls and suburbs give the municipiality a lot of street surface to maintain, for very little tax revenue in return. A good introduction on that part is the strong towns playlist by the youtube channel Not Just Bikes: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=y_SXXTBypIg https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=y_SXXTBypIg
- LtWorf 4y agoMunicipalities are generally managed to dry the funds in favour of the friends of whomever is in power. Usually such considerations come last. For example in Italy many municipalities removed public transport so that FIAT could sell cars. And USA is at least just as corrupt.
- atoav 4y ago> Municipalities are generally managed to dry the funds in favour of the friends of whomever is in power. Usually such considerations come last. I think you should strike the word generally here. Even in Italy there are many municipialities with great public transport (grew up not far from the Italian border). In Europe it is generally not rare to have municipialities with nice or even exceptional public infrastructure. Corruption is always a thing that can exist, but if your place becomes dysfunctional for it, maybe consider your might be missing some of the core ingredients that lead to good democratic decisions (education, will by common folk to participate in regional politics, a working system of law that works against corruption, etc.)
- 3nt0py__ 4y agommm yes posting on hackernews with WordPress version 5.9 i see, looking to be pwned i see
- rob_c 4y agoThis isn't the progress that was promised, this is the promise that is deserved. Just teach people to drive better, pay them a living wage and start paying your taxes. After all of that I doubt there would be an industry here for automation because some people enjoy driving.
- fumblebee 4y agoThis honestly reads like a “The Onion” headline.
- lifeisstillgood 4y agoI think the best use case for self driving car tech is not self driving but teaching the humans how to drive better "You should slow down approaching that junction two seconds earlier because the last ten times i noticed a car approaching from left that you were not seeing"
- disillusioned 4y agoWhen that Windows Update finally forces itself on you at the worst possible time...
- nabla9 4y agoNetworking and software introduce a new systemic risk. Instead of Cloudflare is down, AWS is down, we can start having Uber is down this morning or "Taxi fleet suddenly switched into left-hand traffic mode for five minutes".
- ClumsyPilot 4y agoI am just wondering how many people have to die before it finally dawns on on us that the current approach is idiotic. The supposed smart cars can't even talk to each-other directly 'without internet' to warn of a car pileup! They can't report to city traffic control about their condition. We should be innovating in infrastructure instead - create standardised computer readable infrared road markings, equip each traffic light and each lamp post with a radio beacon, each crash barrier could have a radio marker, create PUBLIC maps of each city, have a central traffic control sypercomputer in each city provide directions to cars. Have each car painted with infrared markers so they recognise each-other. Provide cyclists with something these cars can recognise. We could even make radar-reflective pants so that autonomous cars see them better. the whoe traffic system needs to be looked at and brought to a new set of standards, whatever they may be. I am not sure what they are, but it should be clear to anyome with half a brain thay having a car use a camera to tell if the traffic light is red or green is idiotic. untill a new system is ready, no car without AGI level ai will ever be safe The only problem is that such collective approach conflicts with the way VCs work.
- runarberg 4y agoSeems to me you’ve just reinvented a city rail transportation system with modern signalling. Modern rail system can indeed drive fully autonomously if they are fully grade separated from street traffic.
- AbrahamParangi 4y agoEven without knowing when AGI will get here, I know it will be faster than solving the collective action problem.
- ClumsyPilot 4y agoI think eventually major car manufacturers will work with the regulator to bring on new standards, and it will happen withing 15 years. Infrastructure upgrades will take another 15. Most startups that aim to solve self driving will either find a niche in that ecosystem or go extinct. So I expect reasonable self driving cars to be common in depeloped nations in 2050, while AGI will be just as elusive. In a similar vein, the correct solution to electric trucks is not giant batteries, it's simply overhead wires: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/29/uk-to-study-using-overhead-wires-to-power-long-haul-trucks.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/29/uk-to-study-using-overhead-w...
- dwighttk 4y agoDo people really think this will replace all newly licensed drivers in less than 15 years?
- verisimi 4y agoIn 40 years time, we'll be taking to the streets in joy and laughter, wiping the tears from our eyes, when the robotaxi fleet is finally paralyzed completely.
- bob_theslob646 4y agoThe amount of negative comments here is simply daunting. The issue will be resolved. The fact that thousands and thousands of Americans die each year and nothing is being done to it and this company is on a mission to actually do so to prevent humans from dying should be championed and encouraged. Oh and by the way there's real time traffic on Google maps. So most people usually drive with it either on their smartphones or their main – GPS navigation. So you could probably know that there's a slowdown ahead before you take your route. Sure. It may suck that you have to use real time navigation to go anywhere, but that's the reality when driving in a congested city or route.