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> 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'

> 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 ago
  Waymo operates in a very limited scope and area. I would not attempt to extrapolate anything from their current performance.
  - deleted 1y ago
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  - mastax 1y ago
    If 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
      I'm just curious to see how they handle highways more broadly which is where the real danger is and where Tesla got in trouble in the early days. Waymo avoided doing that until late last year, and even then it's on a very controlled freeway test in Phoenix, not random highways https://waymo.com/blog/2024/01/from-surface-streets-to-freeways-safely-expanding-our-rider-only-testing https://waymo.com/blog/2024/01/from-surface-streets-to-freew...
      - lclarkmichalek 1y ago
        Highways are pretty safe. The road is designed from start to finish to minimise the harm from collisions. That’s not true of urban streets
      - thechao 1y ago
        They drive on highways here, in Austin, all the time. They do just fine. My kids love to wave to Waymo.
  - seanmcdirmid 1y ago
    > Waymo operates in a very limited scope and area. I would not attempt to extrapolate anything from their current performance. This is less and less true every year. Yes, it doesn't drive in the snow yet, no, I don't drive in the snow either, I'm ok with that.
  - andoando 1y ago
    Very limited scope and area is now the whole of a few major cities. https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9059119?authuser=1 https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9059119?authuser=1 This is actually the one technology I am excited about. Especially with the Zoox/mini bus /carpool model, I can see these things replacing personal cars entirely which is going to be a godsend for cost, saftey and traffic
  - kelnos 1y ago
    I absolutely would, since operating in a slowly growing limited scope and area is a part of the safety strategy.
- warkdarrior 1y ago
  Waymo operates in San Francisco, Phoenix, Los Angeles, Austin, and Atlanta so I am sure they encountered school buses by now and learned from those encounters.
programjames 1y ago
The human traffic code is also written in blood. But humans are worse at applying the patch universally.
- hamdingers 1y ago
  We don't even try. In the US you demonstrate that you know the rules at one point in time and that's it, as long as you never get a DUI you're good. For instance, the 2003 California Driver's Handbook[1] first introduced the concept of "bike lanes" to driver education, but contains the advice "You may park in the bike lane unless signs say “NO PARKING.”" which is now illegal. Anyone who took their test in the early 2000s is likely unaware that changed. It also lacks any instruction whatsoever on common modern roadway features like roundabouts or shark teeth yield lines, but we still consider drivers who only ever studied this book over 20 years ago to be qualified on modern roads. 1. https://dn720706.ca.archive.org/0/items/B-001-001-944/B-001-001-944.pdf https://dn720706.ca.archive.org/0/items/B-001-001-944/B-001-...
  - Natsu 1y ago
    Some places will dismiss a traffic ticket if you attend a driver's education class to get updates, though you can only do this once every few years. So at least there have been some attempts to get people to update their learning.
    - hamdingers 1y ago
      This only happens if you get a traffic ticket, which is rare and getting rarer. Ironically this means the people with the cleanest driving record are least likely to know the current ruleset.
      - Detrytus 1y ago
        Which, ironically, would mean that knowing the current rule set is not needed to drive safe.
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MindSpunk 1y ago
> You have to know what you're fixing first. You're going to write a lot of code in blood this way. This is exactly how the aviation industry works, and it's one of the safest ways to travel in the world. Autonomous driving enables 'identify problem -> widely deployed and followed solutions' in a way human drivers just can't. Things won't be perfect at first but there's an upper limit on safety with human drivers that autonomous driving is capable of reaching past. It's tragic, but people die on roads every day, all that changes is accountability gets muddier and there's a chance things might improve every time something goes wrong.
- fendy3002 1y ago
  But you still don't have autonomous flying, even though the case is much simpler than driving: take off, ascend, cruise, land. It isn't easy to fix autonomous driving not because the problem isn't identified. Sometimes two conflicting scenario can happen on the road that no matter how good the autonomous system is, it won't be enough Though I agree that having different kind of human instead will not make it any safer
  - inetknght 1y ago
    > But you still don't have autonomous flying, even though the case is much simpler than driving: take off, ascend, cruise, land. Flying is actually a lot more complicated than just driving. When you're driving you can "just come to a stop". When you're flying... you can't. And a hell of a lot can go wrong. In any case, we do have autonomous flying. They're called drones. There are even prototypes that ferry humans around.
    - Dylan16807 1y ago
      Being unable to abort a flight with a moment's notice does add complication, but not so much that flying is "a lot more complicated" than driving. The baseline for cars is very hard. And cars also face significant trouble when stopping. A hell of a lot can go wrong with either.
    - fendy3002 1y ago
seanmcdirmid 1y ago
I haven't dealt with a school bus in....maybe 20 years, and it would definitely be an exception if I had to deal with one tomorrow. I kind of know what I should do, but it isn't instinct at this point. A waymo, even if it drove in urban Seattle for 20 years where school buses aren't common, it would know what to do if it was presented with the exception tomorrow (assuming it was trained/programmed correctly), it wouldn't forget.
kelnos 1y ago
> You're going to write a lot of code in blood this way. Maybe? In this particular case, it sounds like no one was injured, and even though the Waymos didn't follow the law around stopping for school buses, it exercised care when passing them. Not great, certainly! But I'd wager a hell of a lot better than a human driver intentionally performing the same violation. And presumably the problem will be fixed with the next update to the cars' software. So... fixed, and no blood.
krisoft 1y ago
> You have to know what you're fixing first. In this case the expected behaviour is clearly spelled out in the law. > You're going to write a lot of code in blood this way. Do note that in this case nobody died or got hurt. People observed that the autonomous vehicles did not follow the rules, the company got notified of this fact and they are working on a fix. No blood was spilled to achieve this result. Also note that we spill much blood on our roads already. And we do that without much of any hope of learning from individual accidents. When George runs over John there is no way to turn that into a lesson for all drivers. There is no way to understand what went wrong in George’s head, and then there is no way to adjust all driver’s heads so that particular problem won’t happen again.
- jfoster 1y ago
  And "much blood" is (globally) to the tune of ~1.2 million lives lost, and many more injuries. Compared to that, autonomous vehicles have barely harmed anyone. Also they will probably save most of those lives once they become good. The "least harm" approach is to scale autonomous vehicles as quickly as possible even if they do have accidents sometimes.
  - Earw0rm 1y ago
    That's true at least once they surpass human drivers in collisions per driver mile under equivalent conditions. It seems like we're pretty close to that point, but the numbers need to be treated with care for various reasons. (Robotaxis aren't dealing with the same proportions of conditions - city vs suburban vs freeway - and we should probably exclude collisions caused by human bad-actors which should have fallen within the remit of law enforcement - drink/drugs, grossly excessive speed and so on).
    - sdenton4 1y ago
      Why should we exclude the cases of human bad-actors? That's explicitly a major case solved by getting rid of the human behind the wheel...

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 ago
Waymo 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 ago
  If 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
    I'm just curious to see how they handle highways more broadly which is where the real danger is and where Tesla got in trouble in the early days. Waymo avoided doing that until late last year, and even then it's on a very controlled freeway test in Phoenix, not random highways https://waymo.com/blog/2024/01/from-surface-streets-to-freeways-safely-expanding-our-rider-only-testing https://waymo.com/blog/2024/01/from-surface-streets-to-freew...
    - lclarkmichalek 1y ago
      Highways are pretty safe. The road is designed from start to finish to minimise the harm from collisions. That’s not true of urban streets
    - thechao 1y ago
      They drive on highways here, in Austin, all the time. They do just fine. My kids love to wave to Waymo.
- seanmcdirmid 1y ago
  > Waymo operates in a very limited scope and area. I would not attempt to extrapolate anything from their current performance. This is less and less true every year. Yes, it doesn't drive in the snow yet, no, I don't drive in the snow either, I'm ok with that.
- andoando 1y ago
  Very limited scope and area is now the whole of a few major cities. https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9059119?authuser=1 https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9059119?authuser=1 This is actually the one technology I am excited about. Especially with the Zoox/mini bus /carpool model, I can see these things replacing personal cars entirely which is going to be a godsend for cost, saftey and traffic
- kelnos 1y ago
  I absolutely would, since operating in a slowly growing limited scope and area is a part of the safety strategy.
warkdarrior 1y ago
Waymo operates in San Francisco, Phoenix, Los Angeles, Austin, and Atlanta so I am sure they encountered school buses by now and learned from those encounters.

programjames 1y ago

The human traffic code is also written in blood. But humans are worse at applying the patch universally.

hamdingers 1y ago
We don't even try. In the US you demonstrate that you know the rules at one point in time and that's it, as long as you never get a DUI you're good. For instance, the 2003 California Driver's Handbook[1] first introduced the concept of "bike lanes" to driver education, but contains the advice "You may park in the bike lane unless signs say “NO PARKING.”" which is now illegal. Anyone who took their test in the early 2000s is likely unaware that changed. It also lacks any instruction whatsoever on common modern roadway features like roundabouts or shark teeth yield lines, but we still consider drivers who only ever studied this book over 20 years ago to be qualified on modern roads. 1. https://dn720706.ca.archive.org/0/items/B-001-001-944/B-001-001-944.pdf https://dn720706.ca.archive.org/0/items/B-001-001-944/B-001-...
- Natsu 1y ago
  Some places will dismiss a traffic ticket if you attend a driver's education class to get updates, though you can only do this once every few years. So at least there have been some attempts to get people to update their learning.
  - hamdingers 1y ago
    This only happens if you get a traffic ticket, which is rare and getting rarer. Ironically this means the people with the cleanest driving record are least likely to know the current ruleset.
    - Detrytus 1y ago
      Which, ironically, would mean that knowing the current rule set is not needed to drive safe.

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MindSpunk 1y ago

> You have to know what you're fixing first. You're going to write a lot of code in blood this way. This is exactly how the aviation industry works, and it's one of the safest ways to travel in the world. Autonomous driving enables 'identify problem -> widely deployed and followed solutions' in a way human drivers just can't. Things won't be perfect at first but there's an upper limit on safety with human drivers that autonomous driving is capable of reaching past. It's tragic, but people die on roads every day, all that changes is accountability gets muddier and there's a chance things might improve every time something goes wrong.

fendy3002 1y ago
But you still don't have autonomous flying, even though the case is much simpler than driving: take off, ascend, cruise, land. It isn't easy to fix autonomous driving not because the problem isn't identified. Sometimes two conflicting scenario can happen on the road that no matter how good the autonomous system is, it won't be enough Though I agree that having different kind of human instead will not make it any safer
- inetknght 1y ago
  > But you still don't have autonomous flying, even though the case is much simpler than driving: take off, ascend, cruise, land. Flying is actually a lot more complicated than just driving. When you're driving you can "just come to a stop". When you're flying... you can't. And a hell of a lot can go wrong. In any case, we do have autonomous flying. They're called drones. There are even prototypes that ferry humans around.
  - Dylan16807 1y ago
    Being unable to abort a flight with a moment's notice does add complication, but not so much that flying is "a lot more complicated" than driving. The baseline for cars is very hard. And cars also face significant trouble when stopping. A hell of a lot can go wrong with either.
  - fendy3002 1y ago

seanmcdirmid 1y ago

I haven't dealt with a school bus in....maybe 20 years, and it would definitely be an exception if I had to deal with one tomorrow. I kind of know what I should do, but it isn't instinct at this point. A waymo, even if it drove in urban Seattle for 20 years where school buses aren't common, it would know what to do if it was presented with the exception tomorrow (assuming it was trained/programmed correctly), it wouldn't forget.

kelnos 1y ago

> You're going to write a lot of code in blood this way. Maybe? In this particular case, it sounds like no one was injured, and even though the Waymos didn't follow the law around stopping for school buses, it exercised care when passing them. Not great, certainly! But I'd wager a hell of a lot better than a human driver intentionally performing the same violation. And presumably the problem will be fixed with the next update to the cars' software. So... fixed, and no blood.

krisoft 1y ago

> You have to know what you're fixing first. In this case the expected behaviour is clearly spelled out in the law. > You're going to write a lot of code in blood this way. Do note that in this case nobody died or got hurt. People observed that the autonomous vehicles did not follow the rules, the company got notified of this fact and they are working on a fix. No blood was spilled to achieve this result. Also note that we spill much blood on our roads already. And we do that without much of any hope of learning from individual accidents. When George runs over John there is no way to turn that into a lesson for all drivers. There is no way to understand what went wrong in George’s head, and then there is no way to adjust all driver’s heads so that particular problem won’t happen again.

jfoster 1y ago
And "much blood" is (globally) to the tune of ~1.2 million lives lost, and many more injuries. Compared to that, autonomous vehicles have barely harmed anyone. Also they will probably save most of those lives once they become good. The "least harm" approach is to scale autonomous vehicles as quickly as possible even if they do have accidents sometimes.
- Earw0rm 1y ago
  That's true at least once they surpass human drivers in collisions per driver mile under equivalent conditions. It seems like we're pretty close to that point, but the numbers need to be treated with care for various reasons. (Robotaxis aren't dealing with the same proportions of conditions - city vs suburban vs freeway - and we should probably exclude collisions caused by human bad-actors which should have fallen within the remit of law enforcement - drink/drugs, grossly excessive speed and so on).
  - sdenton4 1y ago
    Why should we exclude the cases of human bad-actors? That's explicitly a major case solved by getting rid of the human behind the wheel...