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Disclosure: I work at Waymo, but not on the Safety Research team. The Ars article linked to the Waymo blog post [1], but the underlying paper is at [2] via way
by boulos 3y ago
Disclosure: I work at Waymo, but not on the Safety Research team.
The Ars article linked to the Waymo blog post [1], but the underlying paper is at [2] via waymo.com/safety . A lot of folks are assuming this wasn't corrected for location or surface streets, but all of the articles do attempt to mention that. (it's easier to miss in the Ars coverage, but it's there). The paper is naturally more thorough on this, but there's a simple diagram in the blog post, too.
[1] https://waymo.com/blog/2023/12/waymo-significantly-outperforms.html https://waymo.com/blog/2023/12/waymo-significantly-outperfor...
[2] https://assets.ctfassets.net/e6t5diu0txbw/54ngcIlGK4EZnUapYvAjyf/7a5b30a670350cc1d85c9d07ca282b0c/Comparison_of_Waymo_Rider_Only_Crash_Data_to_Human_Benchmarks_at_7_1_Million_Miles_arxiv.pdf https://assets.ctfassets.net/e6t5diu0txbw/54ngcIlGK4EZnUapYv...
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 3y agoThis is the first time I’ve seen an AV PR push that is remotely apples-to-apples. Props to y’all for that.
- choppaface 3y agoDo you know why Waymo didn’t include the dog they killed in this report? https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/06/a-waymo-self-driving-car-killed-a-dog-in-unavoidable-accident/amp/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/06/a-waymo-self-driving-car-k...
- minwcnt5 3y agoI believe this study was about rider-only miles. The dog incident had a safety driver monitoring.
- choppaface 3y agoSure but the news outlet headline is ‘only three minor incidents’ when in fact they killed a dog. It’s an act of not including all the information in a report about safety.
- persolb 3y agoThat's an issue with the headline; not Waymo. The Waymo blog post is clear they are comparing their robo-only-driver with human-only-drivers.
- choppaface 3y agoThe Waymo blog post goes so far as to talk about human under-reporting of crashes, so it's only fair that Waymo call out their under-reporting of fatalities. It's suspect to claim the AI is better than the human when a notable fatality happened with a human behind the wheel of the exact same vehicle. Waymos have also hit people / bikers but magically the safety driver was always at fault.
- mlyle 3y agoThere's good reasons to count robo-only miles. The other measure is confounded in both directions: - Safety drivers prevent incidents - Safety drivers cause incidents Since the human+robo isn't the intended deployment mode, the only reason to count its numbers would be if there wasn't statistical power any other way. And that's no longer true.
- choppaface 3y agoA robo-only study is fine, but it’s misleading to hide that the human-supervised treatment has injuries and fatalities.
- bombcar 3y agoI’m also unsure how a safety driver affects the robo driving unless it’s an entirely separate program or the safety driver is pressing the “damn the dogs full speed ahead” button. In my perhaps naive view a safety driver failing to act and a robo driver should be identical.
- 3y ago