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GM's Cruise alleged to rely on human operators to achieve "autonomous" driving
- mlinhares 3y agoThe title isn't news at all as every single trustworthy autonomous driving solution MUST HAVE human operators somewhere to take over but the actual article is a good summary of Cruise's current situation and I'd guess the competition as well.
- dventimi 3y agoWhere is the article does it even support the title? I'll reread it but I didn't see anything about human operators.
- potatolicious 3y ago> "Half of Cruise’s 400 cars were in San Francisco when the driverless operations were stopped. Those vehicles were supported by a vast operations staff, with 1.5 workers per vehicle. The workers intervened to assist the company’s vehicles every 2.5 to five miles, according to two people familiar with is operations. In other words, they frequently had to do something to remotely control a car after receiving a cellular signal that it was having problems." Title of the post should be edited though since it's not the headline of the piece and this information, while interesting, isn't the main thrust of the article.
- Animats 3y agoThat's a terrible disengagement rate. Cruise claimed in 2020 "Cruise, for comparison, clocked 831,040 miles with a disengagement rate of 0.082 (per 1000 miles)" [1] Something's not right here. [1] https://www.engadget.com/2020-02-27-waymo-disengagement-california-self-driving-criticism.html https://www.engadget.com/2020-02-27-waymo-disengagement-cali...
- AlotOfReading 3y agoCompanies measure multiple disengagement rates for different purposes. The DMV numbers are usually safety rate numbers, as in "if a human hadn't intervened there may have been an accident or near miss". The specifics vary company-to-company, and they'll have a large document somewhere laying out exactly what the criteria are. The numbers in the article are some other metric, though I have no idea what. I'm a bit skeptical that it's the average over their entire ODD, given that it's much higher than my own experiences and most of their vehicles were running around the outer city at night, where they seemingly did okay. It could reflect some particular ODD (e.g. downtown at rush hour) where the vehicles didn't do nearly as well, or something else entirely.
- creer 3y agoIt's buried pretty deep all the way at the end.
- KennyBlanken 3y agoI thought HN very strictly required the title to be the original article's title unless the title was really, really bad?
- donsupreme 3y ago> staff intervened to assist Cruise's vehicles every 2.5 to five miles
- dventimi 3y agohttps://archive.ph/2023.11.04-050448/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/technology/cruise-general-motors-self-driving-cars.html https://archive.ph/2023.11.04-050448/https://www.nytimes.com...
- haltist 3y agoIt's not an allegation. It's the same as using human feedback for tuning large language models. There are no autonomous cars currently regardless of what is written on the marketing brochures. In various "emergency" situations the cars phone home and ask a human operator to take over the controls.
- throwaway5959 3y agoThe latency on that has to be massive.
- jonhohle 3y agoWhy? UAVs are piloted remotely, video games are played remotely with sub-100ms latency. Getting a remote driver connected might a while, but afterwards it seems like a mostly solved (in practice) problem.
- notahacker 3y agoUAVs don't have to deal with traffic (the thought of driving a vehicle with the latency and intermittent connectivity of my drone horrifies me) and when someone dies in a video game they respawn...
- pests 3y agoNo lag compensation. Extremely server-authoritative.
- throwaway5959 3y agoI wasn't talking about signal latency, I was talk about the time it took for an operator to sign on and take control.
- haltist 3y agoIt's good enough for the routes that Cruise uses in the city.
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- RobotToaster 3y agoRelevant XCKD https://xkcd.com/1897/ https://xkcd.com/1897/
- batmansmk 3y agoHaving to be remotely operated every 2.5 to 5 miles seem to defeat most of the economics of self driving cars. Back of the napkin math, cars drive at an average of 18mph in cities, so every 10-20min. Let’s assume it takes over for 1min, and that you need remote drivers not too far for ping purposes, so at the same hourly rate. To guarantee you’ll be able to take over all demands immediately, due to the birthday paradox, you end up needing like 30 drivers for 100 vehicles? It’s not that incredible of a tech…
- spondylosaurus 3y agoYeah, the driver-to-passenger ratio is still way less efficient than a train or even a bus.
- code_runner 3y agoInfrastructure cost could be considered as well. Like it or not but not every part of the world has the same desire nor infrastructure for mass public transport. Not saying it’s right or wrong, just stating the other half of the equation
- pj_mukh 3y agoJust FYI, Most autonomous car companies have backup drivers. Its the disengagement rate that drives the number of operators you need per driver and therefore the economics. Theoretically, this rate should be improving steadily at all these companies. Cruise seems to have a bad disengagement rate right now (<5miles seems really low), but methinks nytimes might be partaking in some obfuscation here. Waymo's should be much better already. Curious by how much though.
- cheriot 3y agoWages can fall off a cliff within modest distances. To use unemployment rate as a proxy for driver pay, Bakersfield, CA 7.5% and San Francisco, CA 3.5%. Go a little farther to Los Vegas 5.7% and one can avoid California's minimum wage.
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- alex_young 3y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20231104212102/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/technology/cruise-general-motors-self-driving-cars.html https://web.archive.org/web/20231104212102/https://www.nytim...
- causality0 3y agoI thought being a social media moderator and being constantly exposed to violence, racism, and child pornography was bad. Having your whole day being a series of "quick, don't let these people die!" moments seems like the worst tech job on earth.
- evbogue 3y agoThis is the same whacky theory I've been spreading about Tesla self-driving for a year or so. "Imagine Tesla self-driving is like some dude driving your car via videogame on the other side of the world." Most people are pretty sure my theory is wrong. I have absolutely no evidence this is true, it's just some crazy idea that popped into my head one day.
- cheeselip420 3y agoLike some sort of fucked up Ender's Game situation.
- evbogue 3y agoYah, exactly. Even if it isn't real, the sci-fi stories you can think of are endless. Like imagine there's some industrial block in Da Nang where there are thousands of guys and gals who think they're RL for some AI model somewhere. X takes a bathroom break and forgets to turn over the controls to another specialist and when he gets back he discovers the model has crashed. Next he reads on the news that there's been a fiery Tesla crash somewhere near Oakland, and he realizes that something is horribly wrong in his world. We could use multiple predictive language models to determine what direction the story line takes next, but I imagine he quits his job right then and there and is determined to find out the truth behind the program. What will happen next? Better yet, base the story off-world so that we aren't so close to the horrible reality of it -- if this is true and it's probably not.
- wolverine876 3y ago> Two months ago, Kyle Vogt, the chief executive of Cruise, choked up as he recounted how a driver had killed a 4-year-old girl in a stroller at a San Francisco intersection. “It barely made the news,” he said, pausing to collect himself. “Sorry. I get emotional.” ... > Cruise’s board has hired the law firm Quinn Emanuel to investigate the company’s response to the incident, including its interactions with regulators, law enforcement and the media. / The board plans to evaluate the findings and any recommended changes. Exponent, a consulting firm that evaluates complex software systems, is conducting a separate review of the crash, said two people who attended a companywide meeting at Cruise on Monday. After the first [edit: the first performative charade, about little girl in a stroller], why should we trust the second isn't also a performative charade? What independence or credibility does some hired law firm have, that the company itself does not? How about using an independent third party?
- wmf 3y agoIndependent third parties don't work for free and if you pay them (by your logic) they're no longer independent. The best you can probably hope for is a government investigation.
- wolverine876 3y agoThere are ways to do it. Non-profits don't need payment, always, and their mission isn't profit. For example, companies have worked with environmental non-profits on internal climate change and other issues.
- raldi 3y agoCan you explain what you mean by “after the first”?
- simonw 3y agoPresumably they meant that the first paragraph they quoted looked to them like a "performative charade".
- cheeselip420 3y agoCruise is leveraging human-in-the-loop to expand faster than they otherwise would, with the hope that they will solve autonomy later to bring this down. I don't think this is a viable strategy though given the enormous costs and challenges involved. There doesn't exist a short-term timeline where Cruise makes money, and the window is rapidly closing. They needed to expand to show big revenues, even if they had to throw 1.5 bodies per car at the problem. Prediction: GM will offload cruise, a buyer will replace leadership and layoff 40% of the company. The tech may live to see another day, but given the challenges that GM has generally (strikes, EVs, etc), they can no longer endlessly subsidize Cruise.
- chaostheory 3y agoGM actually spun off Cruise in 2018. Honda now has shares in Cruise. SoftBank used to own some as well, but GM bought out their share last year
- cheeselip420 3y agoGM had FOMO and now it's time for FAFO.
- dontblink 3y agoSo Waymo/Google winning here in your opinion?
- cheeselip420 3y agoWaymo will have challenges scaling rapidly, but they may be able to get some sort of favorable unit economics and expand more slowly. Tesla has the scale and for some reason regulators give them a pass. I wouldn't bet against Elon, but we aren't there yet...
- orwin 3y agoWriting off lidar that early is killing Tesla's chances imho. The exec who took that decision should hate himself.
- wolverine876 3y agoIf humans need to remotely intervene for a car in motion, that implies it could impact safety. If that's correct, then the remote signaling of a problem and the human's response and control must have flawless availability and low latency. How does Cruise achieve that? Cellular isn't that reliable. Maybe I misunderstand something.
- mwint 3y agoAppears Cruise isn’t giving these remote drivers a steering wheel and gas; rather they make strategic decisions: Go around this, follow this path, pull over, etc. The car is able to follow a path on its own. Determining the correct path is where it gets hard.
- MagicMoonlight 3y agoAnd what if the man in india says to go around it, and this results in someone’s death. Who pays out?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- xyst 3y agoI get a feeling Cruise is going to get sold off within the next 5 yrs. Waymo will likely be the leading provider for “autonomous vehicle” software/hardware. Government Motors can only sustain such a loss on their books for a short time. This is probably why Vogt has been pushing so hard for market dominance.
- tempsy 3y agoI wonder if there are rails to prevent a bad actor Cruise worker from remote driving erratically…
- neilv 3y ago> Company insiders are putting the blame for what went wrong on a tech industry culture — led by the 38-year-old Mr. Vogt — that put a priority on the speed of the program over safety. [...] He named Louise Zhang, vice president of safety, as the company’s interim chief safety officer [...] I hope Chief Safety Officer isn't just a sacrificial lamb job, like CISO tends to be. Is the "interim" part hinting at insufficient faith, and maybe future blame will be put on how the VP Safety performed previously (discovered after the non-interim person is hired)? > [...] and said she would report directly to him. Is the CSO nominally responsible for safety? Does the CSO have any leverage to push back when their recommendations aren't taken, other than resigning?
- KennyBlanken 3y ago@dang title not the same as original
- ProAm 3y agoCruise came out of YC if I recall?
- ooterness 3y agoThis was a plot point in Captain Laserhawk: All the self-driving cars and flying drones were actually being remotely piloted by prisoners in a massive VR facility. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Laserhawk:_A_Blood_Dragon_Remix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Laserhawk:_A_Blood_Dra...
- sroussey 3y agoFully remote driven cars is another company (can’t recall their name).
- tibbydudeza 3y agoThere is a movie where the border wall has been built and they pay Mexicans to remote operate drones and other equipment north of the border.
- DelightOne 3y ago> Having to be remotely operated every 2.5 to 5 miles Regarding Cruises' suspension, how likely is it that the backup driver restarted the car to drive again after the car stopped with the pedestrian below?
- kvogt 3y agoCruise CEO here. Some relevant context follows. Cruise AVs are being remotely assisted (RA) 2-4% of the time on average, in complex urban environments. This is low enough already that there isn’t a huge cost benefit to optimizing much further, especially given how useful it is to have humans review things in certain situations. The stat quoted by nyt is how frequently the AVs initiate an RA session. Of those, many are resolved by the AV itself before the human even looks at things, since we often have the AV initiate proactively and before it is certain it will need help. Many sessions are quick confirmation requests (it is ok to proceed?) that are resolved in seconds. There are some that take longer and involve guiding the AV through tricky situations. Again, in aggregate this is 2-4% of time in driverless mode. In terms of staffing, we are intentionally over staffed given our small fleet size in order to handle localized bursts of RA demand. With a larger fleet we expect to handle bursts with a smaller ratio of RA operators to AVs. Lastly, I believe the staffing numbers quoted by nyt include several other functions involved in operating fleets of AVs beyond remote assistance (people who clean, charge, maintain, etc.) which are also something that improve significantly with scale and over time.
- throwaway1104 3y agoKeep it up, Kyle! All new tech will have hiccups and opposition. Really enjoyed my ride experience when I visited SF.
- monero-xmr 3y agoHuge cojones on the CEO to risk public statements given the enormous legal and regulatory pressure being applied. I certainly wouldn’t recommend this tactic!
- averageRoyalty 3y agoI would. This is the correct step forward to building public trust, which is incredibly essential to this industry and onboarding a critical mass.
- pj_mukh 3y ago"The stat quoted by nyt is how frequently the AVs initiate an RA session. Of those, many are resolved by the AV itself before the human even looks at things, since we often have the AV initiate proactively and before it is certain it will need help." Hoo boy, sure wish the NYT had clarified that. That changes things significantly.
- dreamcompiler 3y agoHere we go again with a CEO who proclaims "autonomous cars are safer than human-driven cars." And their definition of "safer" conveniently ignores that autonomous cars create new failure modes which do not exist in manually-driven cars. It may be true that statistically fewer fatalities per mile happen with autonomous cars than with human-driven cars. But that's irrelevant. If the car kills one person because it did something utterly stupid like driving under a semi crossing the highway or dragging a pedestrian along the ground, the public will not accept it. This is another example of the uncanny valley problem: Most "smart" devices are merely dumb in new ways. If your "smart" gizmo is only smart in how it collects private information from people (e.g. smart TVs), or it's merely smarter than a toggle switch, that's not what the public considers smart. It has to be smarter than a reasonably competent human along almost all dimensions; otherwise you're just using "smart" as a euphemism for "idiot savant." Self-driving cars are a particularly difficult "smart" problem because lives are at stake, and the number of edge cases is astronomical.
- bookofjoe 3y agoI've said this here before and I will repeat it: An overwhelming majority of Americans will choose 45,000 deaths in car crashes annually (last year's number) in human-driven cars over 450 deaths/year with all self-driving cars. In the American (and probably ALL) mind(s), human agency trumps all.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago"That is a rare level of talent," said Sam Altman, head of the Y Combinator startup incubator. "I can see Kyle being the next CEO of GM." https://www.vox.com/2016/3/11/11586898/meet-kyle-vogt-the-robot-guru-who-just-sold-his-second-billion-dollar https://www.vox.com/2016/3/11/11586898/meet-kyle-vogt-the-ro...
- neonate 3y agohttp://web.archive.org/web/20231105193346/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/technology/cruise-general-motors-self-driving-cars.html http://web.archive.org/web/20231105193346/https://www.nytime...
- AmigoCharlie 3y agoLook, isn't remotely assisted driving something unbelievably stupid? Why should I rely, when I am on my "driverless" car, rely on someone else who is remote, need to be updated at all times about the situation (when things can go wrong in a matter of tenth of seconds, while driving), and needs to react, and it's not as much motivated as me (as I am risking my life, while he is sitting somewhere without having as much skin in the game as me)? It makes a lot more sense, then, to have just an assisted driving car, or a semi-autonomous car where the "assistant" to the AI it's me and not someone else.
- genewitch 3y agoIn my estimation, the 1/10th of a second thing isn't what the remote drivers are for. The car should just stop and avoid getting rear-ended, or dodge, or whatever. charitably, the remote drivers are aiding where a human would need assistance too, like "what hand signal is that cop making? do they mean go, or are they telling me to stop?" or "this light appears to be broken, is it safe to treat it as a 4 way stop?" my subaru can avoid accidents, it can even avoid things that 100% would not be an accident, even on black ice; so i don't think this is what the remote drivers are doing.
- lacker 3y agoIt sounds like there are a lot of people working at GM who don't like Cruise and are willing to complain to the NYT about it. One of those frustrating "we're a startup inside a large company" things. Cruise employees worry that there is no easy way to fix the company’s problems. Company insiders are putting the blame for what went wrong on a tech industry culture. What, because car companies with car company culture are doing such a great job building self-driving cars? I'm rooting for both Cruise and Waymo here. Self-driving cars would be great for humanity. Good luck to the teams working hard to make them happen.
- chrisgd 3y agoCan we just admit that this likely isn’t possible in our lifetime and put more money into early childhood education, better healthcare and geriatric care?