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No product had such a fast transition from novelty to "omg i never want to interact with a human again". I feel about 100% less stressed and happier using a way

No product had such a fast transition from novelty to "omg i never want to interact with a human again". I feel about 100% less stressed and happier using a waymo or riding motorbike or bicycle next to a waymo than with human drivers. I hope this next phase will bring availability and prices down. We need this in europe.

locknitpicker 9mo ago
> No product had such a fast transition from novelty to "omg i never want to interact with a human again". I still recall when taxi services were the only offering, and Uber et al were marketed as ride sharing services instead of ride hailing services. It's hard to put into words the transformative effect that ride hailing services had throughout the world. Overall rides are now far safer and more reliable, to the point where the old days feel like the dark ages.
lazarus01 9mo ago
Im fortunate to live in an area dense with traditional taxis and Ubers, no Waymo yet. I rarely take taxis, the exception is when I have to haul my gear to the studio for a jam session. I always take a taxi, because it’s cheaper and faster than using an app to call an uber. On 80% of the trips, I end up having a nice chat with the driver and learn something new about humanity or myself. I really enjoy these interactions, but I feel for the drivers, it’s a very tough job where most taxi drivers have to scramble to find places to urinate or do so in an empty bottle between their legs. There is not much dignity in the job. I feel a negligible segment enjoy it as a reliable career. I wonder what will happen to the drivers if a large representation of the 1 million+ daily trips are displaced by automation?
- dmd 9mo ago
  God, yes, and someone think of the gong farmers and pole men.
  - nananana9 9mo ago
    That's a pretty dismissive attitude for ~100 million professional drivers worldwide, making a living doing actual useful work on a forum where the vast majority of users do not do any useful work.
    - strulovich 9mo ago
      I personally find that fighting dismissive attitudes is better done by not being dismissive towards other things (or people in this case) It’s healthier for the discussion culture here as well.
    - seanmcdirmid 9mo ago
      There is also a demographic cliff most of the world is currently going off, declining birth rates and labor shortages. Would you rather have a human nurse in your very old age retirement, or a human driver. Because we don’t have enough young people now for both.
      - malfist 9mo ago
        Maybe the better option is to not be so anti immigration
        xnx 9mo ago
        Birth rate is declining almost everywhere
        seanmcdirmid 9mo ago
        So let's poach these people from the third world and...what about the third world? People can't just be made in factories like robots and self driving cars can. It seems inevitable that either we will have really sucky retirements (please die early grandpa, we can't take care of you!) OR (hopefully) automation will come to the rescue despite luddite protests.
        9mo ago
- josu 9mo ago
  >I wonder what will happen to the drivers if a large representation of the 1 million+ daily trips are displaced by automation? If it happens gradually enough, they will just find other jobs. After the transition, society will be producing more with the same labor force, and thus the aggregate utility will increase.
  - buellerbueller 9mo ago
    And the median wage will continue to decline, as the productivity gains are scooped up by fewer and fewer.
    - Ajedi32 9mo ago
      US median household income is at an all time high.[1] The pandemic caused a decline for a few years but it's recovered now. [1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/200838/median-household-income-in-the-united-states/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/200838/median-household-...
  - bluecheese452 9mo ago
    And homo economist lived happy ever after with his field of spherical cows.
  - tbossanova 9mo ago
    In the past when automation displaced many jobs, we did things like raise the age kids could stay in school. There used to be huge numbers of e.g. 14 year olds who previously would be expected to go to work that would now have the opportunity to stay in school. Kind of like a mini UBI as in the transition period they would usually get given food, healthcare etc at least minimally. What’s the equivalent now?
- spookie 9mo ago
  Honestly same thing, taxis seem to be polite and up to have a chat about anything here. So, not that hyped about these things really.
- mschuster91 9mo ago
  > I really enjoy these interactions, but I feel for the drivers, it’s a very tough job where most taxi drivers have to scramble to find places to urinate or do so in an empty bottle between their legs. Public toilets, their condition and their non-existence are an often-overlooked issue! It's not just highly problematic for taxi drivers, but also for parcel and postal delivery people... and it's not just relevant for workers either, it's also (IMHO) a violation of anti-discrimination laws. Imagine you're old and don't have much bladder control or volume, or you're a woman who recently has given birth, or you got one of the variety of bowel related diseases, or you've got a child who is still dependent on diapers. Your range of free unimpeded movement is basically limited to where you have easy and fast access to a toilet or at the very least a place to take care of yourself/a child.
- amccollum 9mo ago
  I used to feel this way. In the early days of "ride sharing," I preferred Lyft and would sit up front so I could have a conversation with the driver, which they encouraged. It was really fun for a while, and I enjoyed meeting people from different walks of life. Over time, though, transportation became much more functional for me, and now when I take non-autonomous rides, it's more irksome than enjoyable when drivers strike up conversations. Why the change? I think a big part of your experience is the fact that you "rarely take taxis." Once you're doing it daily or near-daily, the amount of smalltalk becomes more tiresome. Also, with kids and a busy life, I'm usually either looking to get things done or enjoy a rare moment to myself as I'm moving from place-to-place. I agree with OP that Waymo is a huge step up on those dimensions. There's no other human in the same space to feel awkward around. The fact that they drive more safely and smoothly is a huge improvement, as well. Ironically, I thought this was going to be something I would hate about Waymo. "You mean it drives the speed limit and follows all the traffic laws? It will take forever to get anywhere." It took approximately one ride for my perspective to completely flip. It's so much nicer to not feel the stress of a driver who is driving aggressively or jerking to a stop/start at every intersection. It's not like you can tell them to just ease up a bit, either. When we ride with our kids, we feel massively safer in Waymos. Yes, it will be disruptive, and I don't particularly love the dominance that big tech has in all of our lives, but I do think Waymo is a marvel, and I hugely appreciate it as an option. As soon as they can take kids alone to all their various activities, it will be yet another massive unlock for parents.
  - direwolf20 9mo ago
    Taxis daily! In a country without trains, is that normal?
    - tfehring 9mo ago
      Driving to work is the most common way of commuting everywhere in the US except NYC. So in that sense, no, taking a taxi to work daily is not normal, just as walking, biking, and taking public transit aren’t normal. When I worked in San Francisco I took Caltrain to the city, but I took Waymo from the train station to the office. San Francisco, like almost all US cities, has poor local transit coverage. In my case there was a bus that took a similar route, but it only ran every 20 minutes even during commute hours and wasn’t coordinated with the train, so if everything was running on time it would have been a 17 minute wait (plus an extra 5 minutes walking). I was busy and well paid enough that spending the extra $10 to save ~20 minutes of travel (and the uncertainty of when the bus would arrive, and how strongly it would smell like piss) was well worth it.
- biztos 9mo ago
  I’m surprised they don’t have opt-in LLM-based “chatty mode” where you can talk to the AI personality of your choice while riding. Obviously shouldn’t be the same AI that’s deciding whether to run over the child or crash into the oncoming train. [edit: riding not driving]
  - LargeWu 9mo ago
    > LLM-based “chatty mode” where you can talk to the AI personality of your choice I'm genuinely baffled that people would want to do this.
    - biztos 9mo ago
      I've been mercilessly downvoted for the suggestion, so at least on HN we can assume it's not what people want. :-)
    - 0x457 9mo ago
      Some people, not me, just can't go a second without conversation.
  - christkv 9mo ago
    Jhonny Cab from Total Recall
  - socalgal2 9mo ago
    why would anyone need this when then can pull out their phone and use their LLM of choice, if they wanted. I expect some large percentage of social users will just facetime chat with their friends during the ride
  - rsynnott 9mo ago
    This sounds like something from The Good Place, tbh.
- dyauspitr 9mo ago
  I think there will still be delivery services where you need someone to go into the restaurant and then up to the customers door. That’s going to stick around unless we get to a point where the restaurant is responsible to load up the Waymo and the customer is responsible for getting it out which probably won’t happen anytime soon. The whole delivery market was also mostly created overnight from something that didn’t exist before.
  - 6keZbCECT2uB 9mo ago
    In Miami, there are several competing companies like Coco Robotics which employ human "pilots" to monitor a small fleet of robot delivery boxes where the restaurant deposits the food in the box and the box unlocks with integration into the app. Just figured you'd want to know anytime soon was at least a year ago.
    - GuinansEyebrows 9mo ago
      these things are all over the city i live in, too. absolute menace and an abuse of the commons. i've had them literally run into me more than once and i've started physically moving them out of my way when they stop in the middle of the sidewalk.
    - dyauspitr 9mo ago
      I’m aware of those but those only go 2-3 miles so they don’t work for the majority of suburban and rural Americans. Also they don’t have the convenience of delivery to your door unless they can start using elevators.
- scyzoryk_xyz 9mo ago
  As a former Lyft driver in SF I felt kinda weird when saw the bit about urination. Like, that's just not a problem. As a driver you just plan ahead as in any other job out there where you're not allowed to disengage at a whim. Pilots and surgeons don't pee in bottles, why would drivers? It's kinda funny when people try to empathize but come up with these creative scenarios of what's challenging. The parts that are bad are same as any other thing done for a living: money and dealing with other people. The job was shit when people were shit and/or when the money was shit. I enjoyed it as a job, not a career. But that was in 2015.
  - elijaht 9mo ago
    Pilots and surgeons surely have easily accessible bathrooms as a part of their workplace, no? They’re also compensated significantly more and (IMHO) given a lot more dignity In my city public bathrooms are extremely rare and it’s not trivial to find one. I’m sure taxi drivers are a bit more in tune with where they are out of necessity but even then it’s no guarantee they can find convenient parking/be in the right place/etc.
    - nradov 9mo ago
      No. Not for some surgeons at least. Once you start cutting you may have to stay until the job is done so get good at holding it. In the The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe podcast episode Dr. Rahul Seth talks about doing 12 hour surgeries. No breaks, no bathroom, constantly on his feet working. https://www.iheart.com/podcast/867-the-way-i-heard-it-with-mi-27463840/episode/340-dr-rahul-sethmy-happy-place-121557796/ https://www.iheart.com/podcast/867-the-way-i-heard-it-with-m... Commercial pilots flying airliners generally have it a bit easier. As for military pilots flying tactical aircraft, well this song might give you an idea of what they face. https://genius.com/Dos-gringos-12-inch-penis-lyrics https://genius.com/Dos-gringos-12-inch-penis-lyrics
      - scyzoryk_xyz 9mo ago
        Yep. This is a really weird thread. The no bathroom piss in bottle thing is not a thing I encountered in my IRL XP. Never felt this imaginary problem, never affected my dignity. Funny enough, I did later work on surgical training tech and went into O.R.'s. And yeah, everyone in the room stays until the work is done, no easy pee pee breaks. Back to back procedures. But then also nobody ever complained about that there either. It's a fun job. Idk. I'd reiterate a point I was getting at: what makes any job less dignified is dealing with shit people and/or shit pay. Fwiw Bathrooms you can plan for same as you plan for getting hungry by packing a lunch.
- 93po 9mo ago
  try talking to young attractive women on their experiences and you'll maybe appreciate this somewhat forced interaction less. my partner has been literally kidnapped multiple times (refused to take her to her destination and refused to let her out for over an hour), had drivers refuse to unlock doors until she gave them her number at least once every two months, and constantly has drivers take detours and longer routes to force conversation for longer. the sooner we can stop subjecting people to having to interact with strangers in a semi-private setting just for basic needs like getting around, the better off vulnerable people will be
- metalcrow 9mo ago
  > I always take a taxi, because it’s cheaper and faster than using an app to call an uber. I'm really surprised to hear that. Are you in a large city where taxies are common? Or do you have a local taxi service and app that is very good?
nvch 9mo ago
For me, this is the major selling point to own a car. I may drive a few times a week, and taxis might be much cheaper, but no way I'm going to deal with human taxi drivers if I have a choice.
- catlover76 9mo ago
  Taxis are not a replacement for having a car for commuting for like 99% of people
- bandofthehawk 9mo ago
  This seems weird to me, maybe it's a generational thing. Is it really that bad to share a car with someone? You don't have to talk to them the whole time.
  - minwcnt5 9mo ago
    "Yes it is that bad" - every woman I've ever talked to.
  - robcohen 9mo ago
    Personally, I find it odd to have interactions with anyone just based of transactionality. I want to interact with people because I have relationships with them. I've always found it hard to figure out exactly how nice to be with someone you don't know. I don't think this is a maladjustment on my part, I think you probably shouldn't be overly nice to people before you establish trust with them... and that takes time.
  - seanmcdirmid 9mo ago
    The human driver could be nodding off because they didn’t bother sleeping last night, or maybe they just had some food with lots of garlic, or…ya, this has all happened to me before. I’ll take the Waymo over uber.
    - socalgal2 9mo ago
      I've had one driving while reading their phone and checking stocks and looking up for about 1/2 a second of every 4 seconds.
askl 9mo ago
> We need this in europe. No we don't. Your github says you're from Berlin, why the hell would you ever need a taxi in your life? Someone should just find a cure for for the fear techbros have of being near poor people.
- jFriedensreich 9mo ago
  I don't live in Berlin, but even if: have you ever taken public transport in less mainstream lines? Apart from nothing working and connections taking forever and operations stopping at night, horrible signage that lets you stress even more, you sit next to human excrements, hooligans coming from football games, nazis wanting to beat you up, stink, rude music and beggers. I sometimes miss it for sentimental value, but compared to a world of robots driving us with relaxing music in a clean and safe space i know what future I want.
  - dmoy 9mo ago
    Is there really that much poop on Berlin public transit? Seattle has some of the highest per capital homeless in the US, and a dearth of public toilets, and yet there's not that much poop on our public transit. I am also skeptical that y'all's violent crime rate is higher than ours. Granted I haven't taken Berlin public transit in 20 yrs, so I don't know.
    - dmoy 9mo ago
      > I am also skeptical that y'all's violent crime rate is higher than ours. Ok well I am wrong. Berlin's violent crime rate is 2-4x higher than Seattle? Huh. The homicide rate is within touching distance. That was not what I expected, ok.
      - mikestew 9mo ago
        It wouldn't take much to have more violent crime in Seattle, according to my gut (yeah, I know, "show me the numbers"). Granted, it's probably gotten worse since we moved here 25 some years ago, but coming from places like my old hometown of Indianapolis, Seattle didn't have any place I wouldn't feel comfortable walking at night. Again, it's changed a lot since (there are some areas I would avoid at 2 a. m. now), but I still feel much safer in Seattle than other large cities.
belter 9mo ago
Waymo is not solving driving, it is closer to a sophisticated Disney Parkland ride. It is running inside a tightly constrained Operational Design Domain: - Geofenced areas - HD pre-mapped roads - Curated infrastructure - Remote ops fallback This is not general autonomy, it is highend automation inside a controlled distribution. The system degrades exactly where humans do not: construction, unmapped lane shifts, police manually directing traffic, chaotic mixed behavior. A cop overriding a light is not an “edge case”, it is a semantic and social reasoning problem that current perception stacks still do not robustly solve. It works because the world is pre modeled, not because the car understands driving. Scaling that beyond a few mapped US suburbs into Europe is a totally different problem. Dont get fooled by Wall Street stock pumping.
- guiomie 9mo ago
  Am I in the Tesla stock subreddit? "Scaling that beyond a few mapped US suburbs into Europe is a totally different problem." If you consider SF and LA suburbs, than Europe is a suburb.
  - belter 9mo ago
    Would you address my other technical comments on what Waymo really is?
    - deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
    - nradov 9mo ago
      From a consumer perspective, no one cares what Waymo really is. If customers can pay and get from point A to point B reliably and safely then it doesn't matter how the sausage is made. Regardless of technical challenges and limitations they're obviously going to expand coverage to more areas.
      - belter 9mo ago
        If you put human lives on the line, both on the shared public road and inside the Waymo then how the sausage is made totally matters, as directly applies to what the failures modes are. Safe from A to B only holds in ideal conditions and limited zones. The hard problems like rare edge cases, weather, unpredictable humans, are precisely why it cant scale easily. If the tech was truly solved, Waymo would not be geo fenced or expanding so slowly.
noncoml 9mo ago
My anecdote: My wife had to literally have two drinks before here first Waymo ride. Now she doesn't want to use anything else other that Waymo when we can't drive ourselves, and totally agree with her Having said that, Uber was amazing experience when it started too, now it's on par with cabs.
pixelready 9mo ago
Yeah, this is one of my guilty automation pleasures alongside self-checkout. I hate that I am displacing a human, and I mourn for the handful of really pleasant taxi / Uber experiences I’ve had over the years, but damn is Waymo such a better default experience right now. I really hope there’s enough viable competition over time to keep costs down or I worry this will evolve into robo-limos rather than a nice cheap default option for areas without good public transit infrastructure. The DUI prevention alone is such a huge win. There is the matter of surveillance though. I don’t love that I have to take their word on not abusing the cabin recordings, but I guess that’s pretty much all modern vehicles (via onStar and the like) not just robo-taxis. Pretty much every Sci-fi dystopian with urban infrastructure has that scene where the corrupt authorities have someone’s self-driving car pulled over remotely, that seems important as well given the state of things lately.
socalgal2 9mo ago
I do too, except for the fact that Waymos constantly break traffic laws.
balgg 9mo ago
>We need this in europe. I'm not against automated driving at all, but in my experience we actually don't have that much use for stuff like this in most (big) European cities, since almost all of them have good public transport options already. I think trams especially fill the hole of "low-friction transport in a city" perfectly. I think having less vehicles on the road is a benefit to us all, but I understand some cities are not as tightly packed for public transport to work that well. Either way, less human drivers is better.
dietr1ch 9mo ago
I just want a fucking bus with a professional driver in it. Or even better, a subway
PacificSpecific 9mo ago
Wait until you try a good train system. It's sublime.

locknitpicker 9mo ago

> No product had such a fast transition from novelty to "omg i never want to interact with a human again". I still recall when taxi services were the only offering, and Uber et al were marketed as ride sharing services instead of ride hailing services. It's hard to put into words the transformative effect that ride hailing services had throughout the world. Overall rides are now far safer and more reliable, to the point where the old days feel like the dark ages.

lazarus01 9mo ago

Im fortunate to live in an area dense with traditional taxis and Ubers, no Waymo yet. I rarely take taxis, the exception is when I have to haul my gear to the studio for a jam session. I always take a taxi, because it’s cheaper and faster than using an app to call an uber. On 80% of the trips, I end up having a nice chat with the driver and learn something new about humanity or myself. I really enjoy these interactions, but I feel for the drivers, it’s a very tough job where most taxi drivers have to scramble to find places to urinate or do so in an empty bottle between their legs. There is not much dignity in the job. I feel a negligible segment enjoy it as a reliable career. I wonder what will happen to the drivers if a large representation of the 1 million+ daily trips are displaced by automation?

dmd 9mo ago
God, yes, and someone think of the gong farmers and pole men.
- nananana9 9mo ago
  That's a pretty dismissive attitude for ~100 million professional drivers worldwide, making a living doing actual useful work on a forum where the vast majority of users do not do any useful work.
  - strulovich 9mo ago
    I personally find that fighting dismissive attitudes is better done by not being dismissive towards other things (or people in this case) It’s healthier for the discussion culture here as well.
  - seanmcdirmid 9mo ago
    There is also a demographic cliff most of the world is currently going off, declining birth rates and labor shortages. Would you rather have a human nurse in your very old age retirement, or a human driver. Because we don’t have enough young people now for both.
    - malfist 9mo ago
      Maybe the better option is to not be so anti immigration
      - xnx 9mo ago
        Birth rate is declining almost everywhere
      - seanmcdirmid 9mo ago
        So let's poach these people from the third world and...what about the third world? People can't just be made in factories like robots and self driving cars can. It seems inevitable that either we will have really sucky retirements (please die early grandpa, we can't take care of you!) OR (hopefully) automation will come to the rescue despite luddite protests.
        9mo ago
josu 9mo ago
>I wonder what will happen to the drivers if a large representation of the 1 million+ daily trips are displaced by automation? If it happens gradually enough, they will just find other jobs. After the transition, society will be producing more with the same labor force, and thus the aggregate utility will increase.
- buellerbueller 9mo ago
  And the median wage will continue to decline, as the productivity gains are scooped up by fewer and fewer.
  - Ajedi32 9mo ago
    US median household income is at an all time high.[1] The pandemic caused a decline for a few years but it's recovered now. [1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/200838/median-household-income-in-the-united-states/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/200838/median-household-...
- bluecheese452 9mo ago
  And homo economist lived happy ever after with his field of spherical cows.
- tbossanova 9mo ago
  In the past when automation displaced many jobs, we did things like raise the age kids could stay in school. There used to be huge numbers of e.g. 14 year olds who previously would be expected to go to work that would now have the opportunity to stay in school. Kind of like a mini UBI as in the transition period they would usually get given food, healthcare etc at least minimally. What’s the equivalent now?
spookie 9mo ago
Honestly same thing, taxis seem to be polite and up to have a chat about anything here. So, not that hyped about these things really.
mschuster91 9mo ago
> I really enjoy these interactions, but I feel for the drivers, it’s a very tough job where most taxi drivers have to scramble to find places to urinate or do so in an empty bottle between their legs. Public toilets, their condition and their non-existence are an often-overlooked issue! It's not just highly problematic for taxi drivers, but also for parcel and postal delivery people... and it's not just relevant for workers either, it's also (IMHO) a violation of anti-discrimination laws. Imagine you're old and don't have much bladder control or volume, or you're a woman who recently has given birth, or you got one of the variety of bowel related diseases, or you've got a child who is still dependent on diapers. Your range of free unimpeded movement is basically limited to where you have easy and fast access to a toilet or at the very least a place to take care of yourself/a child.
amccollum 9mo ago
I used to feel this way. In the early days of "ride sharing," I preferred Lyft and would sit up front so I could have a conversation with the driver, which they encouraged. It was really fun for a while, and I enjoyed meeting people from different walks of life. Over time, though, transportation became much more functional for me, and now when I take non-autonomous rides, it's more irksome than enjoyable when drivers strike up conversations. Why the change? I think a big part of your experience is the fact that you "rarely take taxis." Once you're doing it daily or near-daily, the amount of smalltalk becomes more tiresome. Also, with kids and a busy life, I'm usually either looking to get things done or enjoy a rare moment to myself as I'm moving from place-to-place. I agree with OP that Waymo is a huge step up on those dimensions. There's no other human in the same space to feel awkward around. The fact that they drive more safely and smoothly is a huge improvement, as well. Ironically, I thought this was going to be something I would hate about Waymo. "You mean it drives the speed limit and follows all the traffic laws? It will take forever to get anywhere." It took approximately one ride for my perspective to completely flip. It's so much nicer to not feel the stress of a driver who is driving aggressively or jerking to a stop/start at every intersection. It's not like you can tell them to just ease up a bit, either. When we ride with our kids, we feel massively safer in Waymos. Yes, it will be disruptive, and I don't particularly love the dominance that big tech has in all of our lives, but I do think Waymo is a marvel, and I hugely appreciate it as an option. As soon as they can take kids alone to all their various activities, it will be yet another massive unlock for parents.
- direwolf20 9mo ago
  Taxis daily! In a country without trains, is that normal?
  - tfehring 9mo ago
    Driving to work is the most common way of commuting everywhere in the US except NYC. So in that sense, no, taking a taxi to work daily is not normal, just as walking, biking, and taking public transit aren’t normal. When I worked in San Francisco I took Caltrain to the city, but I took Waymo from the train station to the office. San Francisco, like almost all US cities, has poor local transit coverage. In my case there was a bus that took a similar route, but it only ran every 20 minutes even during commute hours and wasn’t coordinated with the train, so if everything was running on time it would have been a 17 minute wait (plus an extra 5 minutes walking). I was busy and well paid enough that spending the extra $10 to save ~20 minutes of travel (and the uncertainty of when the bus would arrive, and how strongly it would smell like piss) was well worth it.
biztos 9mo ago
I’m surprised they don’t have opt-in LLM-based “chatty mode” where you can talk to the AI personality of your choice while riding. Obviously shouldn’t be the same AI that’s deciding whether to run over the child or crash into the oncoming train. [edit: riding not driving]
- LargeWu 9mo ago
  > LLM-based “chatty mode” where you can talk to the AI personality of your choice I'm genuinely baffled that people would want to do this.
  - biztos 9mo ago
    I've been mercilessly downvoted for the suggestion, so at least on HN we can assume it's not what people want. :-)
  - 0x457 9mo ago
    Some people, not me, just can't go a second without conversation.
- christkv 9mo ago
  Jhonny Cab from Total Recall
- socalgal2 9mo ago
  why would anyone need this when then can pull out their phone and use their LLM of choice, if they wanted. I expect some large percentage of social users will just facetime chat with their friends during the ride
- rsynnott 9mo ago
  This sounds like something from The Good Place, tbh.
dyauspitr 9mo ago
I think there will still be delivery services where you need someone to go into the restaurant and then up to the customers door. That’s going to stick around unless we get to a point where the restaurant is responsible to load up the Waymo and the customer is responsible for getting it out which probably won’t happen anytime soon. The whole delivery market was also mostly created overnight from something that didn’t exist before.
- 6keZbCECT2uB 9mo ago
  In Miami, there are several competing companies like Coco Robotics which employ human "pilots" to monitor a small fleet of robot delivery boxes where the restaurant deposits the food in the box and the box unlocks with integration into the app. Just figured you'd want to know anytime soon was at least a year ago.
  - GuinansEyebrows 9mo ago
    these things are all over the city i live in, too. absolute menace and an abuse of the commons. i've had them literally run into me more than once and i've started physically moving them out of my way when they stop in the middle of the sidewalk.
  - dyauspitr 9mo ago
    I’m aware of those but those only go 2-3 miles so they don’t work for the majority of suburban and rural Americans. Also they don’t have the convenience of delivery to your door unless they can start using elevators.
scyzoryk_xyz 9mo ago
As a former Lyft driver in SF I felt kinda weird when saw the bit about urination. Like, that's just not a problem. As a driver you just plan ahead as in any other job out there where you're not allowed to disengage at a whim. Pilots and surgeons don't pee in bottles, why would drivers? It's kinda funny when people try to empathize but come up with these creative scenarios of what's challenging. The parts that are bad are same as any other thing done for a living: money and dealing with other people. The job was shit when people were shit and/or when the money was shit. I enjoyed it as a job, not a career. But that was in 2015.
- elijaht 9mo ago
  Pilots and surgeons surely have easily accessible bathrooms as a part of their workplace, no? They’re also compensated significantly more and (IMHO) given a lot more dignity In my city public bathrooms are extremely rare and it’s not trivial to find one. I’m sure taxi drivers are a bit more in tune with where they are out of necessity but even then it’s no guarantee they can find convenient parking/be in the right place/etc.
  - nradov 9mo ago
    No. Not for some surgeons at least. Once you start cutting you may have to stay until the job is done so get good at holding it. In the The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe podcast episode Dr. Rahul Seth talks about doing 12 hour surgeries. No breaks, no bathroom, constantly on his feet working. https://www.iheart.com/podcast/867-the-way-i-heard-it-with-mi-27463840/episode/340-dr-rahul-sethmy-happy-place-121557796/ https://www.iheart.com/podcast/867-the-way-i-heard-it-with-m... Commercial pilots flying airliners generally have it a bit easier. As for military pilots flying tactical aircraft, well this song might give you an idea of what they face. https://genius.com/Dos-gringos-12-inch-penis-lyrics https://genius.com/Dos-gringos-12-inch-penis-lyrics
    - scyzoryk_xyz 9mo ago
      Yep. This is a really weird thread. The no bathroom piss in bottle thing is not a thing I encountered in my IRL XP. Never felt this imaginary problem, never affected my dignity. Funny enough, I did later work on surgical training tech and went into O.R.'s. And yeah, everyone in the room stays until the work is done, no easy pee pee breaks. Back to back procedures. But then also nobody ever complained about that there either. It's a fun job. Idk. I'd reiterate a point I was getting at: what makes any job less dignified is dealing with shit people and/or shit pay. Fwiw Bathrooms you can plan for same as you plan for getting hungry by packing a lunch.
93po 9mo ago
try talking to young attractive women on their experiences and you'll maybe appreciate this somewhat forced interaction less. my partner has been literally kidnapped multiple times (refused to take her to her destination and refused to let her out for over an hour), had drivers refuse to unlock doors until she gave them her number at least once every two months, and constantly has drivers take detours and longer routes to force conversation for longer. the sooner we can stop subjecting people to having to interact with strangers in a semi-private setting just for basic needs like getting around, the better off vulnerable people will be
metalcrow 9mo ago
> I always take a taxi, because it’s cheaper and faster than using an app to call an uber. I'm really surprised to hear that. Are you in a large city where taxies are common? Or do you have a local taxi service and app that is very good?

nvch 9mo ago

For me, this is the major selling point to own a car. I may drive a few times a week, and taxis might be much cheaper, but no way I'm going to deal with human taxi drivers if I have a choice.

catlover76 9mo ago
Taxis are not a replacement for having a car for commuting for like 99% of people
bandofthehawk 9mo ago
This seems weird to me, maybe it's a generational thing. Is it really that bad to share a car with someone? You don't have to talk to them the whole time.
- minwcnt5 9mo ago
  "Yes it is that bad" - every woman I've ever talked to.
- robcohen 9mo ago
  Personally, I find it odd to have interactions with anyone just based of transactionality. I want to interact with people because I have relationships with them. I've always found it hard to figure out exactly how nice to be with someone you don't know. I don't think this is a maladjustment on my part, I think you probably shouldn't be overly nice to people before you establish trust with them... and that takes time.
- seanmcdirmid 9mo ago
  The human driver could be nodding off because they didn’t bother sleeping last night, or maybe they just had some food with lots of garlic, or…ya, this has all happened to me before. I’ll take the Waymo over uber.
  - socalgal2 9mo ago
    I've had one driving while reading their phone and checking stocks and looking up for about 1/2 a second of every 4 seconds.

askl 9mo ago

> We need this in europe. No we don't. Your github says you're from Berlin, why the hell would you ever need a taxi in your life? Someone should just find a cure for for the fear techbros have of being near poor people.

jFriedensreich 9mo ago
I don't live in Berlin, but even if: have you ever taken public transport in less mainstream lines? Apart from nothing working and connections taking forever and operations stopping at night, horrible signage that lets you stress even more, you sit next to human excrements, hooligans coming from football games, nazis wanting to beat you up, stink, rude music and beggers. I sometimes miss it for sentimental value, but compared to a world of robots driving us with relaxing music in a clean and safe space i know what future I want.
- dmoy 9mo ago
  Is there really that much poop on Berlin public transit? Seattle has some of the highest per capital homeless in the US, and a dearth of public toilets, and yet there's not that much poop on our public transit. I am also skeptical that y'all's violent crime rate is higher than ours. Granted I haven't taken Berlin public transit in 20 yrs, so I don't know.
  - dmoy 9mo ago
    > I am also skeptical that y'all's violent crime rate is higher than ours. Ok well I am wrong. Berlin's violent crime rate is 2-4x higher than Seattle? Huh. The homicide rate is within touching distance. That was not what I expected, ok.
    - mikestew 9mo ago
      It wouldn't take much to have more violent crime in Seattle, according to my gut (yeah, I know, "show me the numbers"). Granted, it's probably gotten worse since we moved here 25 some years ago, but coming from places like my old hometown of Indianapolis, Seattle didn't have any place I wouldn't feel comfortable walking at night. Again, it's changed a lot since (there are some areas I would avoid at 2 a. m. now), but I still feel much safer in Seattle than other large cities.

belter 9mo ago

Waymo is not solving driving, it is closer to a sophisticated Disney Parkland ride. It is running inside a tightly constrained Operational Design Domain: - Geofenced areas - HD pre-mapped roads - Curated infrastructure - Remote ops fallback This is not general autonomy, it is highend automation inside a controlled distribution. The system degrades exactly where humans do not: construction, unmapped lane shifts, police manually directing traffic, chaotic mixed behavior. A cop overriding a light is not an “edge case”, it is a semantic and social reasoning problem that current perception stacks still do not robustly solve. It works because the world is pre modeled, not because the car understands driving. Scaling that beyond a few mapped US suburbs into Europe is a totally different problem. Dont get fooled by Wall Street stock pumping.

guiomie 9mo ago
Am I in the Tesla stock subreddit? "Scaling that beyond a few mapped US suburbs into Europe is a totally different problem." If you consider SF and LA suburbs, than Europe is a suburb.
- belter 9mo ago
  Would you address my other technical comments on what Waymo really is?
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - nradov 9mo ago
    From a consumer perspective, no one cares what Waymo really is. If customers can pay and get from point A to point B reliably and safely then it doesn't matter how the sausage is made. Regardless of technical challenges and limitations they're obviously going to expand coverage to more areas.
    - belter 9mo ago
      If you put human lives on the line, both on the shared public road and inside the Waymo then how the sausage is made totally matters, as directly applies to what the failures modes are. Safe from A to B only holds in ideal conditions and limited zones. The hard problems like rare edge cases, weather, unpredictable humans, are precisely why it cant scale easily. If the tech was truly solved, Waymo would not be geo fenced or expanding so slowly.

noncoml 9mo ago

My anecdote: My wife had to literally have two drinks before here first Waymo ride. Now she doesn't want to use anything else other that Waymo when we can't drive ourselves, and totally agree with her Having said that, Uber was amazing experience when it started too, now it's on par with cabs.

pixelready 9mo ago

Yeah, this is one of my guilty automation pleasures alongside self-checkout. I hate that I am displacing a human, and I mourn for the handful of really pleasant taxi / Uber experiences I’ve had over the years, but damn is Waymo such a better default experience right now. I really hope there’s enough viable competition over time to keep costs down or I worry this will evolve into robo-limos rather than a nice cheap default option for areas without good public transit infrastructure. The DUI prevention alone is such a huge win. There is the matter of surveillance though. I don’t love that I have to take their word on not abusing the cabin recordings, but I guess that’s pretty much all modern vehicles (via onStar and the like) not just robo-taxis. Pretty much every Sci-fi dystopian with urban infrastructure has that scene where the corrupt authorities have someone’s self-driving car pulled over remotely, that seems important as well given the state of things lately.

socalgal2 9mo ago

I do too, except for the fact that Waymos constantly break traffic laws.

balgg 9mo ago

>We need this in europe. I'm not against automated driving at all, but in my experience we actually don't have that much use for stuff like this in most (big) European cities, since almost all of them have good public transport options already. I think trams especially fill the hole of "low-friction transport in a city" perfectly. I think having less vehicles on the road is a benefit to us all, but I understand some cities are not as tightly packed for public transport to work that well. Either way, less human drivers is better.

dietr1ch 9mo ago

I just want a fucking bus with a professional driver in it. Or even better, a subway

PacificSpecific 9mo ago

Wait until you try a good train system. It's sublime.