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From John Ripley on Mastodon: “Thought of the day, and I wish there were a way to get this to legislators: Come the next Big One earthquake, all of San Franci
by MBCook 10mo ago
From John Ripley on Mastodon:
“Thought of the day, and I wish there were a way to get this to legislators:
Come the next Big One earthquake, all of San Francisco’s emergency services will be blocked by Waymos.”
I’m AMAZED they’re not designed to handle this better. This does indeed seem like a massive problem. “Oops we give up” right when things get the worst? How is this OK?
I’ve been very impressed by Waymo’s more cautious approach. Perhaps they haven’t fully thought through the ramifications of it though.
https://mastodon.social/@jripley/115758725115731454 https://mastodon.social/@jripley/115758725115731454
- JumpCrisscross 10mo ago> Come the next Big One earthquake, all of San Francisco’s emergency services will be blocked by Waymos Were any emergency vehicles actually blocked? We have an actual failure here–step one is identifying actual failures so we can distinguish what really happened from what hypothetically could.
- MBCook 10mo agoI don’t know. But if human drivers are having to go around them, they’re not doing the right thing. They need to drive or pull over. Never just stop there in the road and wait.
- JumpCrisscross 10mo ago> if human drivers are having to go around them, they’re not doing the right thing They're not. But it's also not a disaster. Pretending it is on Twitter is pandering, not policymaking. > They need to drive or pull over. Never just stop there in the road and wait Agreed. Waymo has a lesson to learn from. Sacramento, and the NHTSA, similarly, need to draw up emergency minimums for self-driving cars. There are productive responses to this episode. None of them involve flipping out on X.
- gavmor 10mo agoNo, it's not a disaster, but with a little imagination it could be a hormetic innoculation.
- MBCook 10mo ago> But it's also not a disaster Because it’s a power outage. If we instead learned about this during a real disaster people could have died because these things were let on the road without planning what they should do in abnormal circumstances. We’re lucky it’s not a disaster.
- JumpCrisscross 10mo ago> If we instead learned about this during a real disaster people could have died This is universally true. The question is how bad could it have been, and in which cases would it have been the worst? > We’re lucky it’s not a disaster This is always true. Again, the question is how lucky? We have an opportunity to count blocked emergency vehicles and calculate a hypothetical body count. This lets us characterize the damage. But it also permits constraining hysteria.
- SR2Z 10mo ago> We’re lucky it’s not a disaster. I'm sure that if this was something predictable like a cyclone or wildfire, Waymo would still have 100% of their nightly traffic on the road, right? And SFFD would not be able to do what they normally do when they can't get support, which is hop into the car and use the controls to manually move it? Or... maybe Waymo HAS considered what their cars should do in abnormal circumstances and this kind of outcome was considered acceptable for the number of cars and the nature of the "disaster"?
- ailurooo 10mo agowaymos shouldn't exist, and san francisco shouldn't just be a experimentation lab for tech companies
- crooked-v 10mo ago> They're not. They are. I did myself yesterday because one was sitting at the front of a turning lane at a dead light, just waiting there forever with the blinker on.
- SoftTalker 10mo agoA fire truck can simply push the waymo out of the way.
- JumpCrisscross 10mo ago> A fire truck can simply push the waymo out of the way Sure, but it would be notable if one had to. If none had to, we have a problem to solve, not a catastrophe.
- MBCook 10mo agoIt can do that with a normal driver too. Doesn’t make it ok for there to ever be a situation where they need to when the target vehicle/driver is just fine and capable of doing it themselves.
- justin66 10mo agoIt can’t push a block of gridlocked traffic that cannot move because of the dead waymos present out of the way.
- SR2Z 10mo agoUnless a few Waymos have gridlocked traffic, I'm not sure you can still blame them for this.
- kylehotchkiss 10mo agoI would just push them all out of the way with my fire truck, I mean one fire truck could probably clear 6-8 Waymos at a time, right?
- malfist 10mo agoFire trucks are very expensive to be playing bumper cars with
- w-ll 10mo agoTrue, but in a 'Big One' event i dont think we would care.
- moregrist 10mo agoYou care because it takes valuable time to move things out of the way and in an emergency time is often the one resource you don’t have.
- estebank 10mo agoIn an emergency, if the only options are taking time moving things out of the way or not being able to move, you move things out of the way.
- MBCook 10mo agoGP’s point is that’s a false dichotomy. Yes that’s the correct decision when those are the only options, like if a car has stalled or the driver just got out and ran away. In this case there’s a third option: the computer that’s still perfectly functional should have been able to get out of the way on its own. And legally all drivers are required to. I assume that applies to robots as well, if it doesn’t it absolutely should.
- quesera 10mo agoModern fire trucks, and police cars usually, are built to be able to push vehicles out of the way. It's a very common need. (Not an argument against Waymo doing better in this situation though!)
- sefrost 10mo agoSurely if the Big One hits then all of the metropolitan areas on the West Coast would be gridlocked in scenes reminiscent of zombie apocalypse movies anyway? I guess we won't know until it happens for sure, but I can't imagine it would be easy for emergency services to get around with or without Waymo.
- MBCook 10mo agoIt’s not gonna be good. But you want it to be a gridlock because the cars can’t get out fast enough because there’s too many cars on the road. Not because a bunch of cars that are perfectly capable of moving are just sitting there blocking things purposefully waiting for the driver in the sky to take over. And what if, due to $BIG_DISASTER they won’t be able to for a week?
- themafia 10mo ago> Perhaps they haven’t fully thought through the ramifications of it though. There is a chorus of voices here on HN that have tried to do this openly, obviously, myself included. It seems to be almost universally derided by people who apparently assume that we're just trying to hurt a start up out of anti-environmental sentiment and jealousy. There are more ways to get "self-driving cars" wrong than there are to get it right. Driving is far more complex than the hackers here on Hacker News seem to want to concede, and even if that wasn't the case, I'm not sure where the sentiment that a trillion dollar corporation is naturally going to implement this system with the best interests of society in hand comes from. It's a genuine frustration here.
- dmix 10mo agoWhat was the better solution here then? Assuming there's hundreds or thousands of self-driving cars suddenly driving in environment without any traffic lights. In the pictures you can see six Waymo cars at a single intersection. Assuming some of them had passengers should they all try to turn at the intersection anyway, when their LIDAR says the lane is likely free and pull over to the side? Is that the safest option? Should there be human police to direct the self driving cars through intersections? Or wait out the temporary electricity failure? I believe the answer is far more complicated than it seems and in practice having the cars stay still might have been the safest option any of the parties could agree on (Waymo's office, the city traffic people, state regulators, etc). There are people thinking this stuff out and those cars can 100% pull over automatically but an explicit choice was made not to do so for safety.
- pinnochio 10mo agoUh, how about having their remote driver staff take over? > but an explicit choice was made not to do so for safety. You know this how?
- MBCook 10mo agoThat’s what they usually do. The assumption here is that due to the blackout or some other related issue the human drivers were unavailable. However even if that’s not true if they have more cars than human drivers there’s gonna be a problem until they work through the queue. And the bigger that ratio, the longer it will take.
- MuffinFlavored 10mo agoWhat if there was a herd of people off-shore on-call willing to basically "RDP in" and take over control (human takeover) of the entire fleet when needed? I could see that being an attractive pitch.
- bombcar 10mo agoThis very scenario could involve no cell signal.
- Smoosh 10mo agoI suspect that in a large scale disaster/emergency the communications systems may be disrupted and it may not be possible to remotely control the vehicles. Perhaps in such cases they can pull over in a safe place, or if they have an occupant ask them if they wish to continue the journey or stop. Perhaps they already do this, I have no experience with autonomous vehicles.
- scottbez1 10mo agoLatency makes this hard even with local connections, it’s essentially impossible due to physics to do it offshore. And I believe Waymo remote access only allows providing high level instructions (like pull over, take the next right, go around this car, etc) precisely because full direct control with a highly and variably latent system is very hard/dangerous. And in an emergency situation you’re likely to have terrible connectivity AND high level commands are unlikely to be sufficient for the complexity of the situation.
- uqual 10mo agoWaymo may discover that heavy equipment (large fire trucks can easily push Waymo out of the way if it can find somewhere to push it to) WILL move the cars (at least if there is no one in them at the time) in such cases. I recall the scenes during recent wildfires where abandoned cars were blocking roads and a skip loader was just picking up the cars and dumping/pushing them to the side of the road/over the edge - causing extensive damage to some of them. Decades ago I recall talking to a fireman expressing a question of what happened if there was a car blocking their access in an emergency and he made it clear that the bumper on the front of the truck and the truck's healthy diesel engine would usually take care of the problem very quickly.
- animal_spirits 10mo agoDuring Japan's 2011 earthquake, many roads were gridlocked by human drivers.
- catlikesshrimp 10mo agoIt is acceptable when the situation is so dire that most human drivers can't handle the situation. It is not acceptable when the human can handle the situation but the machine is dragging the flow back.
- shuckles 10mo agoIn case of a natural disaster, it’s guaranteed that human drivers will abandon their cars on the road and cause gridlock. It happens all the time. Emergency vehicles are built to handle it.
- Natsu 10mo agoI'm surprised the don't know to treat it as a 4-way stop, either. This kind of outage is pretty common in Phoenix, too, which is another major Waymo market. It probably happens to at least some part of the city every monsoon season.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- nashashmi 10mo agoIn cases where the traffic signal is not working, it is known that the FSD has to take on a more challenging role of reading traffic agent gestures. I think they have that functionality built in. But not when neither traffic signal is working nor traffic agent is present. The basic thing is to treat everything like a four-way stop sign.
- johnnyanmac 10mo ago>I’m AMAZED they’re not designed to handle this better. This has been the MO for "tech companies" for the past 20 years. Meanwhile I'm told I'm paranoid when the industry of "move fast or break things" decides to move into mission/safety critical industries and use its massive wealth to lobby for deregulation to maintain its habits. We certainly have BS regulations done to constrain competition. But I'd wager a good 80% of them exist for good reason.
- NetMageSCW 10mo agoI wouldn’t wager past 50%, especially since laws don’t have expiration dates.