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Waymo illegal overtake into wrong-way driving
- botanical 3y agoGoogle's AI is just as bad as the rest. I remember when it couldn't get past a traffic cone after not being in an accident for "countless hours": https://youtu.be/zdKCQKBvH-A?t=742 https://youtu.be/zdKCQKBvH-A?t=742 These companies should be fined hefty amounts and barred from beta testing out in public and putting people in danger. Governments should carry out comprehensive tests on a self-driving car's capabilities, same as cars without proven passenger safety (Euro NCAP) aren't allowed to be on roads carrying passengers. And now this great AI company is also providing AI services to pariah states like Apartheid Israel to be used on people. That's scary.
- randunel 3y agoI now expect a new recaptcha challenge to be added by Google, identifying unicycles. We already have bicycles and mopeds, but it would appear that unicycles confuse their cars.
- tinco 3y agoYou would expect a captcha that shows you two yellow lines, and asks you on which side of the yellow lines a car should be driving. Wether there are unicycles present is totally irrelevant.
- csunbird 3y agoAs always there is a relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1897/ https://xkcd.com/1897/
- dagw 3y agoJust make sure no one in the UK, Ireland, Australia or Japan gets asked to solve those captchas.
- alchemist1e9 3y agoYeah I’m wondering if they accidentally have training data from those places and plus that data might be more likely to have groups of cyclists.
- defrost 3y agoOr people randomly playing cricket in the middle of the street. For real. Not /s. Not in downtown Melbourne, but a definite possibility in suburban streets.
- dagw 3y agoIn parts of North America you have to deal with street hockey, so I imagine dealing with street cricket looks basically the same.
- defrost 3y agoIn London they have runaway horses .. that's gotta be a bit of a challenge. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-68887800 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-68887800 They smashed up a bus and a regular taxi en route to Freedom!
- arethuza 3y agoActually, by looking at the behaviour of the unicycles I could infer that this was a country where people drive on the right and therefore the car was probably doing something wrong?
- unhammer 3y agoIt's the humans fault for not being lawful and considerate to the AI murderbot: > a former Baidu executive, Drive.AI board member, and one of the industry’s most prominent boosters — argues the problem is less about building a perfect driving system than training bystanders to anticipate self-driving behavior. In other words, we can make roads safe for the cars instead of the other way around. As an example of an unpredictable case, I asked him whether he thought modern systems could handle a pedestrian on a pogo stick, even if they had never seen one before. “I think many AV teams could handle a pogo stick user in pedestrian crosswalk,” he told me. “Having said that, bouncing on a pogo stick in the middle of a highway would be really dangerous.” > “Rather than building AI to solve the pogo stick problem, we should partner with the government to ask people to be lawful and considerate,” he said. “Safety isn’t just about the quality of the AI technology.” https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/3/17530232/self-driving-ai-winter-full-autonomy-waymo-tesla-uber https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/3/17530232/self-driving-ai-w...
- Dyac 3y agoReminds me of the jaywalking law in the US, brought about by the auto industry. This law that sets the default of it being illegal to be in the road doesn't exist in much of the world. It's really up to the self driving cars to respect other road users at least as well as a human driver would, not expect to be able to mould the laws around the world to fit their limited capabilities. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26073797 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26073797
- fallingknife 3y agoThis is what we do for cars now
- everyone 3y agoYeah there was a PR big and legal campaign in the 20's from the auto industry to promulgate the idea of jaywalking and take the streets from the people.
- aftoprokrustes 3y agoI agree that the citation does sound cold and coercitive, but actually this is already kind of how streets and urban developments are designed. Human drivers are limited, so if you allow cars to go fast, you restrict or remove the right to be walking close to the road (highways). Conversely, if you want to give more room to pedestrians, you decrease the speed limit, reduce lane width, etc. such that they are able to react accordingly. Nothing wrong with that in principle. Now, this does not say anything about the Waymo incident. In that case, the car performed an illegal maneuver, which cannot be blamed on other street users.
- infecto 3y agoIts obviously in the wrong but I do wonder if it somehow misidentified the lane it was supposed to be in as a bike lane?
- fabian2k 3y agoI would be curious to know what the car thought the situation was, something must have gone really wrong here. It ignored the double lines and crossed them to overtake and then stayed in the wrong lane for a really long time. If the car understood the state of the world around this, this is kind of a huge mistake in behaviour. And if it didn't it is concerning as well as it would mean it can end up in the opposite lane without knowing it. I would suspect maybe a bit of both, that it misunderstood the world when it started to overtake, and then was unable to abort the process safely. In that case I probably would have expected it to stop driving forwards and put on hazard warning lights as long as it is in the wrong lane.
- axpy 3y agoEveryone seems to be an expert on what to do in this situation. I would argue that it's not as trivial as it seems. Yes the waymo cars seems to be on the wrong side of the road for far too long but when surrounded with erratic uniwheeler, stopping is not necessarly the right thing to do either. As a human driver, i got into some strange situation where I had to play damage control because of an early bad decision. In a big city, not crossing the double yellow line mean you will probably end up stuck every block. I personally see this as a good example to learn from but not necessarly a reason to stop testing. I would also restrain from making any decision before seeing the actual data from the car cameras/lidar/radar system.
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- Timshel 3y agoWhat I find revealing is it utter inability to reset to a safe position. It stays in the wrong lane; is it because it can't rejoin because the lane is occupied by the unicyclist (looking at the video it does not appear to make efforts to go back) ? or because it has already forgotten the context and is now driving happily in a lane ... It only stopped when its path is blocked ...
- gus_massa 3y agoMy guess is that the police car in the wrong lane confused the system. If a car is going in a direction, 99% of the time it's safe to follow the car and go in the same direction.
- underdeserver 3y agoNo idea what the Waymo car was thinking, but what are these kids riding? Maybe it thought they were on a bike lane? Where I'm from it's illegal to ride like that in a group outside of police-sanctioned events - you're supposed to ride one after the other and keep right.
- datadeft 3y agoWhen are we going to admit that the current level of understanding and technical capabilities are not sufficient for safe autonomous driving?
- fallingknife 3y agoFirst we need to admit that the current level of human capabilities are not sufficient for safe driving.
- arethuza 3y agoTo be fair, I've seen many human drivers doing equally stupid things.
- Timshel 3y agoYes tired, drunk or raging people do stupid shit. But the goal is not exactly to have autonomous driving at their level ...
- danielbarla 3y agoThere are a few more categories of people who often do stupid shit, many of which are fairly mundane and far less easy to disregard (such as: momentarily distracted / semi-permanently fiddling with their phone / dangerously incompetent). I don't think it's unfair to point out that humans, quite often, also suck quite badly at driving.
- Timshel 3y agoIn general, I don't think human sucks at driving, but there are many times when any driver can be extremely dangerous for many reasons. Many of those reasons are illegal (alcohol, fiddling with your phone) so it's not a question of fairness an automated program was supposed to be better than that. I don't see anything unfair in requiring that automated driving which is supposed to not be afflicted from our human failing to not perform illegal and dangerous driving ... Especially since autonomous driving might bring more car not less (similar to Uber and Lift impact https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00678-z#Sec8 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00678-z#Sec8 )
- cj 3y agoThis is kind of cute, in a dystopian way. "Waymo you're going the wrong way!" and the human uni-cyclist steers in front of Waymo, knowing that it will brake, in an attempt to force it back into the correct lane.
- jojobas 3y agoWhat if something was coded/learned to recognize the "people on the road surrounding the vehicle" situation, so that the car could try to get away or even ram them.
- GJim 3y ago> the human uni-cyclist steers in front of Waymo, knowing that it will brake That's a level of optimism I don't have.... ...on the same level as a bloke I saw advertising a food blender on the shopping channel, sticking his fingers into the thing to prove the safety mechanism would stop the blades.
- bryanlarsen 3y agoI suspect this is human error rather than a computer error. Waymo is a supervised system -- from what I've heard while there's little remote driving by humans, there is occasional real-time human labelling and confirmation. So the car likely phoned home to ask "what the heck is this?", and a human clicked on the "overtake" button or something.
- Jevon23 3y ago>a human clicked on the “overtake” button Ok. So what are the consequences for this human operator and/or Waymo? Human drivers make mistakes all the time, it’s true. But there are consequences for those mistakes. If a human drives into the opposite lane that’s a big problem, especially if they end up causing property damage or bodily injury. Why are the same standards not being applied here?
- bryanlarsen 3y agoI've seen plenty of cars drive the wrong way down a one way street. I've done it myself by accident a couple of times. I've never seen any face any consequences other than being honked at. I've seen one pulled over, but they got away with just a warning since they were obviously just confused tourists. OTOH, I doubt the operator still has a job, and Waymo is going to face significant consequences. Likely formal consequences, but if not, the punishment by the court of public opinion is going to be massive.
- mannykannot 3y agoIf this is actually what happened, then regardless of the consequences, it would challenge the notion that human supervisors provide adequate protection of the public while these cars are being tested.
- flutas 3y ago> Ok. So what are the consequences for this human operator and/or Waymo? If you're Waymo apparently you can tell the car to run a red light, cause a moped to crash and not even need to report it to the state. https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2024/03/26/waymo-runs-a-red-light-and-the-difference-between-humans-and-robots/?sh=2d1912c13f34 https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2024/03/26/waymo-...
- bell-cot 3y agoOne really basic & important feature of (decent) autonomous systems might be called Situation Sanity Awareness. Human drivers are (overall) extremely good at that. And a car driving for any distance on the wrong side of a double yellow line is a very obvious SSA fail.
- sparrowInHand 3y agoSabotaging such a obvious dangerously vehicle could be seen as self defense?=
- gnfargbl 3y agoWaymo told the Chronicle in a statement that the robotaxi “detected that there may be a risk of a person within that crowd who had fallen down, and decided to carefully initiate a passing maneuver when the opposing lane was clear to move around what could be an obstacle and a safety concern.” “After starting that maneuver, out of an abundance of caution around these vulnerable road users, and to avoid getting too close or cutting them off, the Waymo remained in the oncoming lane for longer than necessary before returning to its original lane of travel,” the company said. -- https://archive.ph/24IDK https://archive.ph/24IDK
- timeon 3y agoWaymo car here like some drivers never consider option to slow down. They just have to overtake at all costs.
- fabian2k 3y agoThat statement is PR bullshit, I expected better from Waymo. Nobody fell, so it misidentified the situation. And there was nothing careful about the overtake maneuver here, there was no safe place to end the maneuver in sight. These kinds of mistakes will very likely happen with self-driving cars, the important part is to address them and improve the cars. I don't expect the cars to be flawless from the start (I do expect some fundamental safety mechanisms to work reliably from the start like the automatic braking before obstacles). Downplaying the issue here is a bad look for Waymo.
- gnfargbl 3y agoI'm not sure if it's entirely bullshit, but certainly the phrase "remained in the oncoming lane for longer than necessary" is doing some heavy lifting, feels like some key information has been omitted.
- Timshel 3y agoI love the : > before returning to its original lane of travel When it was only able to do so when someone started to block its path to force it to stop ...
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- oliwary 3y agoThis has to be one of the most scifi videos I have ever seen... The lights, the people on uniwheels, the self-driving car that misbehaves followed by people on unicycles surrounding the car to coax it back to the correct lane...
- everyone 3y agoSelf driving is a very difficult (and expensive to develop) engineering challenge.. I think it might end up being cheaper (and thus more likely) that the "solution" will be a legal one rather than an engineering one: Self driving vehicles will have a light and/or klaxon on them, if you see or hear it, it will be your responsibility to get out of it's way. Thats how the issues with automobiles vs other road users was resolved in the 1920's. The impetus is there, corporations want more and more robots for everything.