8 ms·

Waymos choose the routes, right? The issue with self-driving is (1) how it generalises across novel environments without "highly-available route data" and prov

• thaumasiotes 2y ago
  > The issue with self-driving is (1) how it generalises across novel environments without "highly-available route data" and provider-chosen routes; (2) how failures are correlated across machines. Why is (1) an issue? Route data never gets worse.
  • bluefirebrand 2y ago
    Route data gets worse all the time Any time there is a detour, or a construction zone, or a traffic accident, or a road flooded, or whatever else your route data is not just "worse" it is completely wrong
    • zmmmmm 2y ago
      it's true, but if the scenarios are rare you can treat them as outliers and have the vehicle switch to a "safety mode" or similar. Even human drivers effectively do that (or should!).
  • ceejayoz 2y ago
    > Route data never gets worse. Construction? Parade? Giant tire-crunching pothole in the middle of the freeway?
    • virtue3 2y ago
      Oddly enough Waymo does a solid job of avoiding those.
      • Animats 2y ago
        There was a problem in SF with a Waymo not avoiding a parade. Somebody didn't enter the parade in SF MUNI's list of street closures. Nobody was hurt; it was just embarrassing.
  • mjburgess 2y ago
    Consider London: a series of randomly moving construction sites connected by patches of city. Waymo, as far as I recall, relies on pretty active route mapping and data sharing -- ie., the cars arent "driving themselves" in the sense of discovering the environment as a self-driving system would.
    • bsder 2y ago
      Huh? All the Waymo cars in Austin have lots of LIDAR spinny bits and are driving around all the active construction zones downtown and near campus. I'm pretty sure that counts as "discovering the environment".
      • mjburgess 2y ago
        Sure, my understanding is that they collectively share data, and this is combined with central mapping. On net, yes, they are sensitive to features of the environment and via central coordination maintain a safe map of it. The mechanism there heavily relies on this background of sharing, mapping, and route planning (and the like) -- which impacts on the ability of these cars to operate across all driving environments.
    • AlotOfReading 2y ago
      Waymo's map data is a prior, not an authoritative reference to the world. The cars report update when the map data is wrong, and a lot of what they use it for (e.g. traffic light identification, fine localization) degrades gracefully when there's new information in the environment.
• jrussino 2y ago
  I wonder if you can decrease the impact of (2) with a policy of phased rollout for updates. I.E. you never update the whole fleet simultaneously; you update a small percentage first and confirm no significant anomalies are observed before distributing the update more widely.
  • timschmidt 2y ago
    Ideally you'd selectively enable the updated policy on unoccupied trips on the way to pick someone up, or returning after a drop-off, such that errors (and resultant crashes) can be caught when the car is not occupied.
  • nukem222 2y ago
    Presumably management would also be highly regional. Functionality in san francisco doesn't imply anything about functionality in oakland, etc.
  • mjburgess 2y ago
    One measure of robustness could be something like: the ability to resist correlation of failure states under environmental/internal shift. Danger: that under relevant time horizons the integral of injury-to-things-we-care-about is low. And then "safety", a combination: that the system resists correlating failure states in order to preserve a low expected value of injury. The problem with machines-following-rules is that they're trivially susceptible to violations of this kind of safety. No doubt there are mitigations and strategies for minimising risk, but its not avoidable. The danger in our risk assessment of machine systems is that we test them under non-adversarial conditions, and observe safety --- because they can quickly cause more injury than they have ever helped. This is why we worry, of course, about "fluoride in the water" (, vaccines, etc.) and other such population-wide systems... this is the same sitation. A mass public health programme has the same risk profile.
• seper8 2y ago
  Does waymo also choose the times of driving, and conditions? Or do they always drive, even at night and in heavy rain?
  • maxerickson 2y ago
    Correctly estimating capability is pretty safety positive. Meaning, humans choosing to drive in more difficult conditions probably means they sometimes drive in conditions that they shouldn't.
  • a2128 2y ago
    I was waiting for a Waymo in Austin during the weekend storm and the Waymo suddenly cancelled on us right after a power outage that lasted a second or two. According to local news the vehicles had stopped and were blocking traffic. https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/tech-companies/waymo-vehicles-block-traffic-in-downtown-austin-during-weekend-storm/ar-AA1BEjOh https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/tech-companies/waymo-ve...
  • qgin 2y ago
    This is good to know, but we should note that humans choose also.
• tonyhart7 2y ago
  Yeah but that's the point no??? machine don't make mistake when they are get perfected in certain route, sure human drive would be better in dynamic areas but you dnt need machine to be perfect either just want (80% scenario)
• kccqzy 2y ago
  I don't agree with this novel environment argument about routes. As a human, there are a limited number of roads that I have driven on. A taxi driver drives better than me because none of the routes are considered novel: the taxi driver has likely driven on every road in a city in his/her career. The self-driving machine has most definitely driven on every single road in the city, perhaps first as testing with human backup, then testing with no passengers, and finally passenger revenue miles.
• arghwhat 2y ago
  > The issue with self-driving is (1) how it generalises across novel environments That's also an issue with humans though. I'd argue that traffic usually appears to flow because most of the drivers have taken a specific route daily for ages - i.e., they are not in a novel environment. When someone drives a route for the first time, they'll be confused, do last-minute lane changes, slow down to try to make a turn, slow down more than others because because they're not 100% clear where they're supposed to go, might line up for and almost do illegal turns, might try to park in impossible places, etc. Even when someone has driven a route a handful of times they won't know and be ready for the problem spots and where people might surprise they, they'll just know the overall direction. (And when it is finally carved in their bones to the point where they're placing themselves perfectly in traffic according to the traffic flow and anticipating all the usual choke points and hazards, they'll get lenient.)
  • mjburgess 2y ago
    People have eyes, ears, a voice, hands, etc. You've a very narrow definition of novel, which is based soley on incidental features of the environment. For animals, a novel situation is one in which their learnt skills to adapt to the environment fail, and have to acquire new skills. In this sense, drivers are rarely in novel environments. For statistical systems, novelty can be much more narrowly defined as simply the case where sensory data fails a similar-distribution test with historical data --- this is vastly more common, since the "statistical profile of historical cases, as measured, in data" is narrow.. whilst the "situations skills apply to" is wide. An example definition of narrow/wide, here: the amount of situations needed to acquire safety in the class of similar environments is exponential for narrow systems, and sublinear for wide ones. ie., A person can adapt a skill in a single scenario, whereas a statistical system will require exponentially more data in the measures of that class of novel scenarios.
    • arghwhat 2y ago
      I have a very wide definition of novel - any exact environment you have not yet traversed. First time taking that right turn? Novel route. Out eyes, ears, voice and hands are quite useless when operated consciously.
• npunt 2y ago
  Generalizing across novel environments is optimal, but I'm not sure the bar needs to be that high to unlock a huge amount of value. We're probably well past the point where removing all human-driven vehicles (besides bikes) from city streets and replacing them with self-driving vehicles would be a net benefit for safety, congestion, vehicle utilization, road space, and hours saved commuting, such that we could probably rip up a bunch of streets and turn them into parks or housing and still have everyone get to their destinations faster and safer. The future's here, even if it still has room for improvement.
  • floxy 2y ago
    >congestion I'd think congestion would go up as AVs become more popular, with average occupancy rates per vehicle going down. Since some of the time the vehicle will be driving without any passengers inside. Especially with personally owned AVs. Think of sending a no-human-passenger car to pick up the dog at the vets office. Or a car circling the neighborhood when it is inconvenient to park (parking lot full, expensive, whatever).
    • npunt 2y ago
      Up to 30% of cars on city streets at any given time are looking for parking [1]. Cars are also the least utilized asset class, being parked 95% of the time [2]. AVs, by virtue of being able to coordinate fleet-wide and ability to park anywhere rather than only one's home or destination, would be able to gain incredible efficiencies relative to status quo. Atop those efficiencies, removing both the constraint of having a driver and the constraint of excessive safety systems to make up for human inattentiveness means AVs can get drastically smaller as vehicles, further improving road utilization (imagine lots of 1- and 2-seaters zipping by). And roads themselves can become narrower because there is less room for error with AVs instead of humans. Finally, traffic lights coordinating with fleets would further reduce time to destination (hurry up and finish). Self-driving vehicles give us the opportunity to rethink almost all of our physical infrastructure and create way more human-friendly cities. [1] http://shoup.bol.ucla.edu/PrefaceHighCostFreeParking.pdf http://shoup.bol.ucla.edu/PrefaceHighCostFreeParking.pdf [2] https://senseable.mit.edu/unparking/ https://senseable.mit.edu/unparking/
• KoolKat23 2y ago
  I think you underestimate how many novelties the car will encounter on existing routes and how adept these cars are at navigating novel routes. I imagine this route data is an extra extra safeguard which allows them to quantify/measure the risk to an extent and also speed up journey's/reduce level of interventions.
• ogogmad 2y ago
  > In safe driving failures are uncorrelated and safety procedures generalise. We do not yet know if, say, using self-driving very widely will lead to conditions in which "in a few incidents" more people are killed in those incidents than were ever hypothetically saved. Can you provide some examples of what you mean?
  • im3w1l 2y ago
    Volcanic eruption filling the atmosphere with ash. Acts of war or terrorism. Could be physical or cyberattack.
    • ogogmad 2y ago
      The only way for this to cause tens of thousands of death by self-driving alone is for people to suddenly need to drive the cars themselves, and not being able to do it well. Unless I'm missing something.
      • im3w1l 2y ago
        The system could go haywire and crash in such unexpected circumstances. They might also not. It's hard to know how they will behave.
• ozim 2y ago
  I can imagine whole city areas well known closed to manual drivers. Sure I would love to read a book while car is driving me to visit family in the countryside but practically I need city transportation to work and back, to supermarkets and back where I don’t have to align to a bus schedule and have 2-3 step overs but plan my trip 30 min in advance and have direct pick up and drop off. If that would be possible then I see value in not owning a car.
• shadowgovt 2y ago
  I usually think about it in the other direction: every time an accident occurs, a human learns something novel (even if it be a newfound appreciation of their own mortality) that can't be directly transmitted to other humans. Our ability to take collective driving wisdom and dump it into the mind of every learner's-permit-holder is woefully inadequate. In contrast, every time a flaw is discovered in a self-driving algorithm, the whole fleet of vehicles is one over-the-air update away from getting safer.
  • codr7 2y ago
    And it goes the other way too, one crappy update means complete chaos.
    • shadowgovt 2y ago
      There is already industry best-practice, in and out of self-driving cars, to avoid doing that.
      • codr7 2y ago
        Hey, I've written software for a living for 26 years. No best practice in the world is going to stop people from making mistakes.
• deleted 2y ago
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• timewizard 2y ago
  You would save more lives by harshly punishing drunk or influenced driving; however, most of the lives you save would be that of the drinker or the abuser. You would save more lives by outlawing motorcycles; however, it would just be the motorcyclists themselves. Another thing people don't consider is that not all seats in a vehicle are equally safe. The drivers seat is the safest. Front passenger is less safe but still often twice as safe as sitting in the backseat. If you believe picking up your elderly parents and then escorting them in your backseat is safer than them driving alone you might be wrong. This is a fatality mode you easily recognize in the FARS data. Where do most people in a robotaxi sit? Your biggest clear win would be building better pedestrian infrastructure and improving roadway lighting to reduce pedestrian deaths.
  • BalinKing 2y ago
    > Front passenger is less safe but still often twice as safe as sitting in the backseat Is there a good source for this? I was always under the impression that it was the exact opposite….
    • timewizard 2y ago
      We've been improving front seat safety systems for years while not adding much in the back seat. The result is obvious in the fatalities data and many institutions have involved themselves in this problem. Here's one: https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/new-crash-test-spotlights-lagging-protection-for-rear-passengers https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/new-crash-test-spotlights-l... There are _so many_ bad assumptions about vehicle safety it honestly drives me nuts. Especially on Hacker News. The data is available from NHTSA in a database called FARS. I encourage everyone to go look through the data. You almost certainly believe several wrong things about driving and fatalities. I think Elon Musk is exceptionally irresponsible for using these statistics in a flatly dishonest and misleading way. He wants to sell vehicles not truly educate you about safety. People should double check.
      • yolovoe 2y ago
        This is a really good link. Will definitely refer to this when making a car purchase in the future. Thanks! It seems like Volvo's reputation as one of the safest car is still well deserved after all. I don't own a Volvo--too expensive for me, but good to know.