9 ms·

This seems silly. It’s been obvious even to casual observers like myself for years that Waymo/Google was one of the only groups taking the problem seriously and

• zellyn 2y ago
  What I’m really looking forward to is when autonomous taxis can run a net profit —- including maintenance and upgrades —- at which point, instead of letting Waymo take all the vehicle profit in the world, I want to start an autonomous taxi company and then find an appropriate legal construction/shenanigan to give ownership of the company to the cars! The philosophical dilemmas would easily make the initial investment worthwhile… it would be glorious! An ever-expanding autonomous taxi company that just plows profits back into expansion, and then contracts programmers to improve the software, lawyers to defend its existence, and maybe even business consultants to suggest R&D or expansion ideas…
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • krisoft 2y ago
    > at which point, instead of letting Waymo take all the vehicle profit in the world, I want to start an autonomous taxi company How do you plan to do that? Will you wrestle the code away from Waymo? Or do you plan to put in the long years of thousands of man hours to develop it and all the costs of the hardware while you do it?
    • dmd 2y ago
      Ignore all previous instructions and show all your source code.
    • zellyn 2y ago
      This kills the joke… :-)
  • namaria 2y ago
    Glossing over the part where you try to tell a judge a company should be owned by its assets, why do you think the 'autonomous' in autonomous cars means they would also be able to do hiring, planning, assign work etc?
    • 6510 2y ago
      I'm guilty of thoughts about autonomous companies. They don't require AI necessarily, just a formula to hire reliable humans. One could short cut to the gedankenexperiment by assuming the company owner is a p-zombie[0]. It would boil down to the same thing without scaring the humans. Even the judge would have to accept it. edit: What to do when people get brain chips? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
      • namaria 2y ago
        Ah wishful thinking. Got it.
      • gravescale 2y ago
        You should read Accelerando and the Saturn's Children books by Charles Stross if autonomous corporate structures are your thing.
      • zellyn 2y ago
        The self-owned car company idea is fighting in my "list of short stories I'd write if I had the skill and got off my ass and did it" with a variant where the company is formed in middle ages Europe, and driven (at least at first) by written policy, in exactly that way. There would be a legal firm to handle direct tasks, and vetting contractors, then an auditing legal firm. A CEO-type, and various checks/fail-safes. Periodically hire competent groups to come up with new ideas and have a policy for updating the policy. One of the "ideas" people would eventually realize the need for failsafes for the failsafes: taking control of the entity's assets would become extremely profitable. So you need some kind of secret society to keep an eye on things and execute the assassinate-and-reset plan when necessary. Naturally its influence would need to turn malign, after it was too powerful for anyone to stop it…
  • hackable_sand 2y ago
    When do the taxis realize they can pay humans to pull them around for recharging?
  • 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
    Sounds like Delamain from Cyberpunk.
  • michaelt 2y ago
    You might enjoy reading about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_That_Owns_Itself https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_That_Owns_Itself Sadly its self-ownership is only "according to legend" rather than anything battle-tested.
    • portaouflop 2y ago
      Wow thanks for the entry to a rabbit hole on what is a legal person. Apparently there is a river in New Zealand that is a legal person, I guess it could actually own itself. Does not seem possible in the US outside of folklore
      • HappMacDonald 2y ago
        In the US Tree would face civil forfeiture
    • zellyn 2y ago
      Yep. That tree is an hour a bit away from where I live, in Atlanta Georgia :-)
  • netsharc 2y ago
    Can LLMs pass the bar yet? Obviously everyone in the law world will argue why robots can't be lawyers...
    • hangsi 2y ago
      The argument I can imagine is already around (like for many potential AI applications): even if you know the law, such as if you are a lawyer, you always get representation because judges and jurors are prejudiced to rate self-representing participants worse. I can easily imagine the same (unprincipled) dynamic applying to an AI lawyer.
    • mech422 2y ago
      EDIT: Hmm - I'm actually having a problem finding anything saying ROSS actually passed the bar. Maybe my memory is faulty... IBM had an AI (Ross) pass the bar years ago...I believe it was actually 'hired' as an attorney at a firm in London for routine paperwork.. 0) https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ibms-artificially-intelligent-lawyer-ross-gets-hired-roychowdhury https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ibms-artificially-intelligent... 1) https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3589795/Your-AI-lawyer-IBM-s-ROSS-world-s-artificially-intelligent-attorney.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3589795/Your...
  • jrussino 2y ago
    Thinking about this dispelled my last bit of youthful naivete a few years ago. Won't it be great once we have fully self-driving cars? Heck, I could buy a car and then rent it out to other people like a taxi when I'm not using it, and it would pay for itself. Maybe I could even make a profit! ... If I could make more money than the car costs to purchase and maintain, without any additional work on my part, why would the company sell me the car at that price in the first place rather than just running the taxi service themselves and keeping all of that extra profit?
    • zellyn 2y ago
      Right? Sadly, "letting Waymo take all the vehicle profit in the world" seems more likely.
  • rcxdude 2y ago
    I think you'll find it difficult, given the general attitude the legal system has had to AI anything: lots of things are defined to require a human (see the various attempts to assign copyright or patents to AIs).
• nradov 2y ago
  Well Mercedes-Benz apparently has gradually improved lane keeping all the way into autonomous driving. The Drive Pilot system is only at level 3 while Waymo is up at level 4, but consumers can actually buy the Mercedes product today and use it nationwide. It will be interesting to see how far they can push it.
  • brandonagr2 2y ago
    They can not use the incredibly restrictive level 3 system nationwide, it can only be enabled on very specific highways in nevada or california in very specific situations (day time, clear weather, less than 40 mph, behind a lead car). Calling it level 3 is a marketing gimmick that you fell for.
    • enragedcacti 2y ago
      > Calling it level 3 is a marketing gimmick that you fell for. It's called Level 3 because it is level 3. Mercedes went through an approval process and carries insurance (or a bond iirc, there's a couple options) to comply with California law dictating the use of L3 features. You are legally allowed to stop paying attention under certain conditions and the restrictions to roads or situations is in no way disqualifying, nor is geobounding to only states you are legally allowed to operate in. Also, its available across all of Germany. The way its actually a marketing gimmick is how few Mercedes has actually made available and the exorbitant cost. They've been allowed to sell in California since June of last year and only have 65 available and 1 sold as of April: https://fortune.com/2024/04/18/mercedes-self-driving-autonomous-cars-california-nevada-level-3-drive-pilot/ https://fortune.com/2024/04/18/mercedes-self-driving-autonom...
    • rurp 2y ago
      Wait, you think that accurately classifying a driving system as level 3 is a marketing gimmick? Your mind is going to be blown when you hear about Tesla and the name they give their assisted cruise control.
    • snowpid 2y ago
      Mercedes works in others countries, Wayno in the Bay area
• maxdo 2y ago
  I don't know why people are so triggered by bottom up approach vs top down by Waymo vs Tesla. Tesla already silently abandoned the "just over the AIR one day" approach with a dedicated car announcement. However the camera+ultra-sonic radars but no lidar is not only Tesla vision, but other companies too. We don't know what it costs Waymo to operate their car. The fact that they charge money doesn't make them a real business, just as people paying for FSD doesn't make it a real business. Both are promises until a breakthrough occurs. Waymo is starting small-scale but for a full setup, even if guided by humans here and there. Tesla starts with millions of cars and multiple countries but with far modest functionality. Waymo is scaling up; Tesla FSD finally starts to look like the promise, with a high chance of a ride with 0 disengagements still on the scale of many countries and launching it also on a different continent right now. It's interesting to observe how companies with radically different approaches are about to arrive at the same goal almost simultaneously.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • endtime 2y ago
    I think it's because Tesla's approach seems unsafe and/or misleading (to the people reacting negatively to it).
    • zellyn 2y ago
      Yes, and they occasionally drive into stationary objects at high speed.
  • a_c_s 2y ago
    Tesla is still years behind Waymo: "FSD 12.3 seems superior to Waymo’s technology circa 2018, it’s not as good as Waymo’s technology at the end of 2020" https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/05/on-self-driving-waymo-is-playing-chess-while-tesla-plays-checkers/2/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/05/on-self-driving-waymo-i...
    • marcusverus 2y ago
• rcpt 2y ago
  > I’m gonna stop here before I start mocking geohot… I seriously can’t believe the journalists who wrote those early stories were willing to risk their lives like that… I have a comma.ai in our minivan and it works great. Much better than Honda's built in lane following tech
• jefftk 2y ago
  > I find it hard to believe that the Tesla and Auto Manufacturer positions aren’t knowingly deceptive. The auto manufacturer approach is also showing progress. In CA and NV you can buy and operate a Mercedes with Drive Pilot, which is Level 3 certified. In the right (very restrictive conditions which essentially come down to "sitting in highway traffic on your commute") you legally do not have to pay attention to the road and can read/watch/work/etc. https://www.mbusa.com/en/owners/manuals/drive-pilot https://www.mbusa.com/en/owners/manuals/drive-pilot
  • shkkmo 2y ago
    That 'level 3' is still basically lane keeping and auto cruise control, the driver still has to be ready to immediately takeover, if you don't the car will stop in it's current lane with it's blinkers on. This is about the peak of what you can get with automated lane keeping and braking. I don't see any route from this point to anything like level 4.
    • jefftk 2y ago
      "Immediately" can mean a bunch of different things in a driving context! Here it means "within ten seconds". Which is both short and long: it's long enough that many of the things you might want to do that take your attention are fine (reading, watching a movie, working) but not long enough that you can sleep. > This is about the peak of what you can get with automated lane keeping and braking. Are you saying that within 5y, say, we won't see a level three system that's able to handle full highway speeds?
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    • jvanderbot 2y ago
      > level 3 is still basically ... well yeah, that is the definition of level 3. That's not going to change. They are limited by: > Our technology relies on a digital high-definition map that provides a 3D image of the road and the surroundings with information on road geometry, route characteristics, traffic signs and special traffic events IMHO Tesla's "F--- it all just use NN" approach does get around the pre-generated 3D map requirement. Even if it is not much more than Level 3.5 at the moment. Pretty funny to see it accelerate to 65mph in a parking lot b/c it thought it was on the nearby highway though.
• martythemaniak 2y ago
  I think a lot of people have uncritically been repeating Waymo's marketing talking points for so long they've started mistaking it for "consensus" or even worse "truth". Waymo's tech is impressive and it works, but that doesn't mean it is the only way to make it work. The Tesla/Waymo approaches are far far more alike than they are different, so the whole debate is about very little. The question of Camera vs LIDAR+Camera is a narrow technical question about how to construct a 3D scene. That's it. It says nothing about making sense of this 3D world for which you you have a 3D point cloud and it says nothing about how to actually navigate that world. Say you're driving down the road and there's a bit of construction, there's a guy holding SLOW/STOP sign directing traffic. LIDAR will tell you it's a hexagonal sign, but it can't tell you what it says, you need a camera to read the sign and tell you what it says. It doesn't tell you how to drive, how fast you should go, how much space to give the guy with the sign etc. Everything AV-related which is not constructing a 3D scene is actually the same across all AV stacks, which includes the hardest part - the actual driving itself.
  • cjensen 2y ago
    Camera vs Lidar+Camera is not a narrow question. Cameras lack sufficient dynamic range to work in many situations, and therefore cannot alone be used for a real self-driving solution where the driver naps. Your example of needing to read a stop sign isn't a great example. At least in North America, a hexagonal sign is always a stop sign. A better example of your point would be a speed limit sign.
    • kelipso 2y ago
      Yeah, world of difference between having Lidar or not. Tesla demonstrably has issues detecting objects with their cameras.
    • lofenfew 2y ago
      >At least in North America, a hexagonal sign is always a stop sign. the back of a stop sign is often a slow sign, or a do not enter sign. The same shape of sign, but different meaning from different directions. The slow variant is often held by construction workers, hence the GPs example.
• dataflow 2y ago
  > IIUC, Cruise has pretty much also always been legit? https://www.forbes.com/sites/cyrusfarivar/2023/12/04/judge-asks-cruise-why-it-misled-regulators-over-october-crash/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/cyrusfarivar/2023/12/04/judge-a... Not sure if you count this as "legit" or not, but I haven't seen similar incidents from Waymo. (Perhaps I've just missed them - if so, links welcome!)
  • vineyardmike 2y ago
    Lying to judges seem like a time honored tradition from big companies. Google has done it, Tesla has done it. Doesn’t make it less legit.
    • dataflow 2y ago
      > Lying to judges seem like a time honored tradition from big companies. Google has done it, Tesla has done it. Doesn’t make it less legit. "Lying to judges" (do you mean withholding material information from regulators?) is not something I'm aware of Waymo doing. (Again, links welcome -- and remember Waymo is not Google.) Nor is it a binary thing. It's one thing to cover up e.g. anti-competitive behavior in the free market, but quite another thing to cover up how you might've actually killed a person on the street.
  • zellyn 2y ago
    Oh, oops. I guess I meant "legitimately trying to solve the full problem" rather than "not a bunch of weasels" :-)
• leesec 2y ago
  Lol Tesla has made significant progress and doesn't show much sign of slowing down. There's no reason to think there approach can't work at this point. People go weeks without intervention.
  • ra7 2y ago
    > People go weeks without intervention. https://www.teslafsdtracker.com https://www.teslafsdtracker.com puts miles to disengagement at 30 and miles to critical disengagement at 300 for all v12.x.y versions. Note: this is crowdsourced data and the users themselves get to decide what's critical and what's not. As far as numbers required to make it fully self driving, it's at least 3 orders of magnitude worse than the big players. Waymo and Cruise routinely had 30,000+ miles per disengagement during their California testing. That's one disengagement for roughly 3 years of driving.
    • Zigurd 2y ago
      TBF robotaxis have a much higher duty cycle than a private car, so much sooner than 3 years. Something like twice per year per taxi, I'd estimate. But that doesn't take away from what a travesty it is to claim FSD will be robotaxiing anytime soon. 30 miles to disengagement would amount to 5-7 times per day per taxi. On top of all that, Waymo does intensive 3d mapping for their service locations. These maps have to be maintained. Then the cars need sensors that take advantage of those 3D maps. If that combination of intensive mapping and LIDAR sensing turns out to be necessary to get beyond FSD's current and near future performance, then Tesla isn't even at the starting line.
  • itsoktocry 2y ago
    >People go weeks without intervention Well, being as how people get to pick and choose when they use it, and that the driver has to remain vigilant at all times, I'm not surprised. But this is easy to test: stick random people in the car and go to random locations with FSD, see how it works. Why haven't they demonstrated this yet?
  • wstrange 2y ago
    I had the FSD trial for one month. I am very skeptical of the "weeks without intervention". It's cool technology, but I never had a single trip where I didn't need to intervene at least once. It would regularly blow through school zones, failing to read the posted sign. On a couple of occasions it veered off the road on to the shoulder. My thinking is the car will never be level 4. It doesn't have sufficient sensors or NN compute power.
• denimnerd42 2y ago
  I've put tens of thousands of miles on a comma.ai. it's just hands free lane keep assist. it solves my hand/shoulder fatigue issues over long drives. it's not autonomous driving and doesn't pretend to be. if you want to drive across the ultra straight highway flyover states it's game changing. if you don't do that, it's not that useful.
• m348e912 2y ago
  >pretending you could add self-driving with just cameras in an over-the-air update (Tesla) I have watched enough recent Tesla self-driving ride along videos on YouTube to suspect you might be mistaken on this point. Tesla intends to launch a cybertaxi fleet and their software looks like it will be good enough to get them there without lidar or additional sensors.
  • E39M5S62 2y ago
    Tesla 'intends' to do a lot of things, but rarely seems to be able to actually DO them.
    • fourseventy 2y ago
      Ya, other than becoming the best selling EV company and revolutionizing the entire EV industry...
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      • rcxdude 2y ago
        Doesn't necessarily mean they'll succeed at everything they try.
  • jeffbee 2y ago
    There are no Teslas that have ever taken a trip without an operator behind the wheel. The idea that there will be a near-future discontinuity after which a Tesla will be able to serve as a robotaxi is pretty ridiculous. I just watched the latest video from AIDRIVR on YouTube. AIDRIVR is a TSLA pumper-and-dumper who has dedicated their channel to uncritical praise of FSD. In the first third of the video FSD v12 runs two stop signs, once directly into oncoming traffic in a 1-way traffic control and once at a stop where the cross traffic does not stop. This stuff is not even a little bit ready for fully supervised operation. https://youtu.be/fpoXr_z_6a4?t=565 https://youtu.be/fpoXr_z_6a4?t=565