5 ms·

I'm surprised that either: 1. Nobody at Waymo thought of this, 2. Somebody did think of it but it wasn't considered important enough to prioritize, or 3. The

• add-sub-mul-div 10mo ago
  Everyone should have understood that driving requires improvisation in the face of uncommon but inevitable bespoke challenges that this generation of AI is not suited for. Either because it's common sense or because so many people have been shouting it for so long.
  • raldi 10mo ago
    But a citywide blackout isn’t that uncommon.
    • pacifika 10mo ago
      I think that statement is regional. I’ve never seen one.
    • Tade0 10mo ago
      It isn't? To me that's the main problem here, as this should be an exceptionally rare occurrence.
    • lelanthran 10mo ago
      > But a citywide blackout isn’t that uncommon. I think too many people talk past each other when they use the word common, especially when talking about car trips. A blackout (doesn't have to be citywide) may not be periodic but it's certainly frequent with a frequency above 1 per year. Many people say "common" meaning "frequent", and many people say "common" meaning "periodic".
      • yen223 10mo ago
        Even among people who mean "common" as in "frequent", they aren't necessarily talking about the same frequency. That's why online communication is tricky!
      • NetMageSCW 10mo ago
        I think your power company needs to be replaced if the frequency is above 1 per year.
  • srdjanr 10mo ago
    I'd say driving only requires not to handle uncommon situation dangerously. And stopping when you can't handle something fits my criteria. Also I'm not sure it's entirely AI's fault. What do you do when you realistically have to break some rules? Like here, I assume you'd have to cut someone off if you don't want to wait forever. Who's gonna build a car that breaks rules sometimes, and what regulator will approve it?
    • eurleif 10mo ago
      In practice, no one treats it as a four-way stop, which makes it dangerous to treat it as one.
      • edbaskerville 10mo ago
        Drove through SF this evening. Most people treated it as a four-way stop! I was generally impressed.
    • StanislavPetrov 10mo ago
      If you are driving a car on a public street and your solution to getting confused is stopping your car in the middle of the road wherever this confusion happens to arise, and sitting there for however long you are confused, you should not be driving a car in the first place. That includes AI cars.
  • slavik81 10mo ago
    What improvisation is required? A traffic light being out is a standard problem with a standard solution. It's just a four-way stop.
    • A1kmm 10mo ago
      In many versions of road rules (I don't know about California), having four vehicles stopped at an intersection without one of the four lanes having priority creates a dining philosophers deadlock, where all four vehicles are giving way to others. Human drivers can use hand signals to resolve it, but self-driven vehicles may struggle, especially if all four lanes happens to have a self-driven vehicle arrive. Potentially if all vehicles are coordinated by the same company, they can centrally coordinate out-of-band to avoid the deadlock. It becomes even more complex if there are a mix of cars coordinated by different companies.
    • array_key_first 10mo ago
      That only works if everyone else also treats it as a four way stop. Which they don't, unfortunately.
      • aag 10mo ago
        Yes, especially in a city like San Francisco where so many cultures come together: the Prius culture, the BMW culture, the Subaru culture, etc.
  • onetokeoverthe 10mo ago
    [dead]
  • Nasrudith 10mo ago
    To be fair 'common sense' and 'many people have been shouting it' about technical matters have a long history of being hilariously wrong. Like claims that trains would cause organ damage to their riders from going at the blistering speed of either 35 or 50 mph, IIRC. Or about manned flight being impossible. Common sense would tell you that launching a bunch of broadcasting precise clocks into orbit wouldn't be usable to determine the distance, and yet here we are with GPS.
• dzhiurgis 10mo ago
  Clearly cars can navigate themselves, it's the lack of remote ops that halted everything
• confidantlake 10mo ago
  Likely 2. Not something that will make it into in their kpis. No one is getting promoted for mitigating black swan events.
  • cjsplat 10mo ago
    Actually that is specifically not true at Google, and I expect it applies to Waymo also. People get promoted for running DiTR exercises and addressing the issues that are exposed. Of course the problem is that you can't DiRT all the various Black Swans.