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To be honest. I think this is one of the strengths of autonomous cars. With humans when they do this at max we can punish that individual. To increase populati
by krisoft 1y ago
To be honest. I think this is one of the strengths of autonomous cars.
With humans when they do this at max we can punish that individual. To increase population wide compliance we can do a safety awareness campaign, ramp up enforcement, ramp up the fines. But all of these cost a lot of money to do, take a while to have an effect, need to be repeated/kept up, and only help statistically.
With a robot driver we can develop a fix and roll it out on all of them. Problem solved. They were doing the wrong thing, now they are doing the right thing. If we add a regression test we can even make sure that the problem won't be reintroduced in the future. Try to do that with human drivers.
- trollbridge 1y ago… assuming the GiantCorp running the robotaxis cares about complying with the law, and doesn’t just pay a fine that means nothing to them.
- xbar 1y agoWaymo seems more interested in delivering a true solution than I have seen elsewhere.
- daseiner1 1y ago> a fine that means nothing to them Yes, this is often the case. In this instance, though, endangering children is just about the worst PR possible. That's strong leverage.
- tanseydavid 1y agoThis^^^ -- the impact of positive vs negative PR is unusually huge with this type of tech.
- bluGill 1y agoThe first fines should be meaningless to the company. If the issue isn't fixed the fines should get higher and higher. If the company fixes one issue but there is a second discovered quickly we should assume they don't care about safety and the second issue should have a higher fine than the first even though it is unrelated. Companies (and people) have an obligation to do the right thing.
- AlotOfReading 1y agoWhat do you mean by "second issue"? A second instance of the same underlying problem, or a different underlying problem? The way you phrase it as unrelated suggests the latter to me. It's pretty wild to jump straight to "they don't care about safety" here. Building a perfect system without real world testing is impossible, for exactly the same reason it's impossible to write bug-free code on the first try. That's not a suggestion to be lax, just that we need to be realistic about what's achievable if we agree that some form of this technology could be beneficial.
- bluGill 1y agoThe courts get to decide that. Often it is a "I know it when I see it". The real question is did they do enough to fix all possibly safety issues before this new one happened that was different. If they did "enough" (something I'm not defining!) then they can start over.
- lawlessone 1y ago>The first fines should be meaningless to the company. Why?
- platevoltage 1y agoFines are completely useless if they are small enough to be considered "the price of doing business".
- lawlessone 1y agoI agree.
- Dylan16807 1y agoBecause 100 million dollars isn't a reasonable fee for a traffic violation.
- hyghjiyhu 1y agoThe goal should be to make them appropriately cautious. Not careless but also not paralyzed by fear. Escalating fines have the property that they are self-tuning. They basically say "go ahead and try it! But if there are issues you have to fix them promptly"
- whimsicalism 1y agothe discourse around “corporations” has gotten absolutely ridiculous at this point, especially on this website.
- d4mi3n 1y agoIt’s not an unreasonable take given historic behavior. Rather than decrying the cynicism, what steps can we take to ensure companies like Tesla/Waymo/etc are held accountable and incentivized to prioritize safety? Do we need hasher fines? Give auto regulators as much teeth as the FAA used to have during accident investigations? Genuinely curious to see how addressing reasonable concerns in these areas can be done.
- terminalshort 1y agoWhy isn't allowing people to sue when they get hurt and general bad PR around safety enough? Did you see what happened to Boeing's stock price after those 737 crashes?
- d4mi3n 1y agoI’d counter that with the Equifax breach that raised thei stock prices when it became clear they weren’t being fined into oblivion. Suing is also generally only a realistic option if you have money for a lawyer.
- trollbridge 1y agoRight. We have a precedent for how to have an ridiculously safe transportation system: accidents are investigated by the NTSB, and every accident is treated as an opportunity to make sure that particular failure never happens again.
- varenc 1y agoIt's ironic given this forum began as a place for aspiring startup (Delaware C-Corp) founders.
- 1y ago
- themafia 1y ago> we can develop a fix and roll it out on all of them. You have to know what you're fixing first. You're going to write a lot of code in blood this way. It's not that people are particularly bad at driving it's that the road is exceptionally dynamic with many different users and use cases all trying to operate in a synchronized fashion with a dash of strong regulation sprinkled in.
- jefftk 1y ago> You're going to write a lot of code in blood this way. Waymo has been doing a lot of driving, without any blood. They seems to be using a combination of (a) learning a lot from close calls like this one where no one was hurt even through it still behaved incorrectly and (b) being cautious so that even when it does something it shouldn't the risk is very low because it's moving slowly.
- themafia 1y agoWaymo operates in a very limited scope and area. I would not attempt to extrapolate anything from their current performance.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- mastax 1y agoIf you were trying to evaluate that code deployed willy nilly in the wider world, sure. But that code exists within a framework which is deliberately limiting rollout in order to reduce risk. What matters is the performance of the combined code and risk management framework, which has proven to be quite good. Airbus A320s wouldn’t be very safe if we let Joe Schmo off the street fly them however he likes, but we don’t. An A320 piloted within a regulated commercial aviation regime is very safe. What matters is the safety of the entire system including the non-technological parts.
- dmix 1y ago
- dangus 1y agoAs a counterpoint, a large fine or jail time as a deterrent actually has meaning.to an individual. For a company, it's a financial calculation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimshaw_v._Ford_Motor_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimshaw_v._Ford_Motor_Co. (Add the period to the end of the link, HN won't do it)
- 05 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimshaw_v._Ford_Motor_Co%2E https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimshaw_v._Ford_Motor_Co%2E
- 1970-01-01 1y agoIt's a strength if you catch the bug and fix it before it injures anyone. If anything, this proves edge-cases can take years to manifest.
- tehjoker 1y agoWhy accept the company's say so without any proof being offered or even a description of the fix? If it's been years and this kind of thing, described in regulations so clearly some attention was paid by engineers, still happens, then maybe fixing it isn't trivial.
- kelnos 1y agoSure, perhaps we shouldn't accept the company's say-so, but this seems like a fairly easy thing for a third party to verify. If that's not being done, that's not Waymo's fault; lobby the local regulatory body or legislature to get that sort of thing required.
- tehjoker 1y agoMaybe verifying isn't trivial either? Sometimes bugs only appear with a lot of interactions.
- Spooky23 1y agoI disagree about the fixing, because ultimately self driving services will have political power to cap their liability. Once they dial in the costs and become scaled self sustaining operations, the incentive will be reduced opex. I think the net improvements will come from the quantitative aspect of lots and lots of video. We don’t have good facts about these friction points on the road and rely on anecdotal information, police data (which sucks) and time/morion style studies.
- bobthepanda 1y agoeven if we had good data, the major problem in the US is that the funding liabilities of transportation agencies generally massively outweighs revenues, particularly if legislators keep earmarking already limited funds for yet more road expansion in their districts.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> ultimately self driving services will have political power to cap their liability You're fighting an objectively safer future on the basis of a hypothetical? Also, we already have capped liability with driving: uninsured and underinsured drivers.
- Spooky23 1y agoThe real cap is the operator ultimately is accountable. When a software defect kills a bunch of people, the robot operator’s owners will subject to a way lower level of liability. Airlines have international treaties that do this. An objectively safer future is common carriers operating mass transit. Robot taxi will creating a monster that will price out private ownership in the long term. Objectively safer remains to be seen, and will require a nationwide government regulatory body that won’t exist for many years.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> real cap is the operator ultimately is accountable Which is in practice lower than what a large operator would pay, particularly if they also write the software. > will require a nationwide government regulatory body It doesn’t require any such thing. That would be nice. But states are more than capable of regulating their roads.
- userbinator 1y agoWhat a dystopian view.
- tgv 1y ago> With a robot driver we can develop a fix and roll it out on all of them. Problem solved. I find that extremely optimistic. It's almost as if you've never developed software. I am curious about Waymo's testing. Even "adding a regression test" can't be simple. There is no well defined set of conditions and outputs. > Try to do that with human drivers. At least where I live, the number of cars and car-based trips keeps increasing, but the number of traffic deaths keeps falling.
- krisoft 1y ago> It's almost as if you've never developed software. I do develop software. In fact I do develop self driving car software. Yes it is not easy. Just talking about this particular case. Are the cars not remaining stationary because the legally prescribed behaviour is not coded down? Or are they going around school busses because the "is_school_bus" classifier or the "is_stop_arm_deployed" classifier having false negative issues? If we fix/implement those classifiers will we see issues caused by false positives? Will we cause issues where the vehicles suddenly stop when they think they see a stop arm but there isn't one actually? Will we cause issues if a bus deploys a stop arm as we are overtaking them? What about if they deploy the stop arm while we are 10 meter behind them? 20? 30? 40? 100? And that's just one feature. How does this feature interact with other features? Will we block emergency vehicles sometimes? What should we do if a police person is signalling us to proceed, but the school bus's stop arm is stopping us? If we add this one more classifier will the GPU run out of vram? Will we cause thread thrashing? Surely not, unless we implement it wrong. In which case definitely. Did we implement it right? Do we have enough labeled data about stop arms of school buses? Is our sensor resolution good enough to see them far enough? Even in darkness? What about fog? Or blinding light? Do every state/country uses the same rules about school busses? > I am curious about Waymo's testing They do publish a lot. This one is nice overview but not too technical: https://downloads.ctfassets.net/sv23gofxcuiz/4gZ7ZUxd4SRj1D1W6z3rpR/2ea16814cdb42f9e8eb34cae4f30b35d/2021-03-waymo-safety-report.pdf https://downloads.ctfassets.net/sv23gofxcuiz/4gZ7ZUxd4SRj1D1... Or if you want more juicy details read their papers: https://waymo.com/safety/research/ https://waymo.com/safety/research/
- heavyset_go 1y agoUnless there is one car that everyone drives, it will never be this easy. And if there is one car that everyone drives, it's equally easy for a single bug to harm people on a scale that's inconceivable to me.
- falcor84 1y agoWell, maybe not "this easy", but if we can all agree on an extensive test suite that all autonomous cars have to follow to be allowed on the road, it'd be almost like that, without the risk of a single bug taking down all of them.
- goobatrooba 1y agoMaps and routing errors would likely lead to masses of deaths, an entire motorway population rather than individuals not paying attention.. Like the various "unfinished/broken bridge" deaths that have happened with Google maps involved (not saying to blame.. but certainly not innocent either) https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66873982 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66873982 https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly23yknjy9o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly23yknjy9o
- manwe150 1y agoGranted having all warning signs and barricades removed by vandals seems like the more major issue there, which drivers usually do pay attention to
- kiba 1y agoRoad designs play an important role as well, it's not just enforcing the law. Some roads are going to be safer simply because drivers don't feel safe driving fast. Others are safer simply because there's less opportunities to get into a collision. Wide street in cities encourage faster driving which doesn't really save a lot of time while making the streets more dangerous, for example.
- stuaxo 1y agoMost US roads do not have pedestrian safety in mind at all.
- quickthrowman 1y agoAfter seeing how road design calmed traffic speeds in multiple areas in my city by reducing lanes and using medians that ‘narrow’ the apparent width of the roadway, and in some places just with road paint (it’s weird but it works). I believe that road design is the only way to control how fast people drive. Speed limits are useless for controlling speed, people drive the speed the road is designed for.