So the article repeats, several times, “waymo relies on remote operators”. I don’t think the author knows what “self-driving” means.
“self-driving”
Someone else, forreal - driving
A couple years ago, we used to joke around the shop “Of course they used AI - An intern.”
I’m generally the one defending Tesla in these threads but on Waymo’s defence; the remote operators aren’t actually controlling the car. Instead when faced with a challenging situation the car “calls home” for assistance basically asking a human to take a look at the situation and help it to decide what to do. This might be a car partially blocking the lane of traffic cones placed in a weird manner so the car justs asks for assurance that it’s okay to proceed. In the most difficult situations the remote operator can suggest a route for the vehicle to take but the decision on what to do is ultimately on the vehicle itself.
The author is very well aware of this dilemma, in fact that topic is the center of his article, and he is making some good points about why real autonomous driving might still take a long time until achieved.
Besides that the cars are constantly getting around without a designated driver. For the technology and for the industry that is a huge breakthrough.
And he forgets to mention the precise mapping required too. He also left out the terrible experiences Waymo has had with revoked permits, cars disabled by traffic cones, and multiple traffic stopping glitches where intersections were blocked for hours.
Yeah but the waymo ceo doesn’t shitpost on Twitter so people here don’t get front page hyped up stories every single time things aren’t perfect
I’m making a prediction right now that real self driving will eventually rely on people from impoverished countries remotely operating the cars of wealthier countries. Sort of like how AI training data is combed through.
Elon ripped out the LiDAR, I don’t have any faith at all in Tesla’s FSD.
Elon ripped out the LiDAR
No he didn’t…He never even installed it in the first place.
I had to look this up, but you’re mostly right. They never really did use LiDAR. They did use other types of radar, which were removed or disabled. In any case, they (Elon) asserted that neither radar nor LiDAR was really necessary.
However, that was mostly a couple years ago. In the past month or two they actually have begun buying up tons of LiDAR.
Also, they were sued over FSD in court and their lawyers are now arguing that customers should’ve known that cars without LiDAR are not capable of reliable FSD.
But the self driving taxi fleet is coming anytime now /s
Humans can drive just fine without lidar aswell. Road infrastructure is designed for vision. The car not being able to see is not the issue. It’s teaching the car to understand what it sees and how to deal with it. Lidar doesn’t help you solve this issue.
Unlike human eyes Tesla’s inconveniently do not come with a supercomputer installed that is able to interpret the optical data reliably. With the compute power we have available Radar based navigation is the only one that produces reliably safe results.
It depends on your definition of “super computer”, it used to be any computer with performance over 1 gigaflop, which today would probably include most smart phones and the built in car computer in the Tesla.
But regardless of semantics, I think your point holds, humans are a special case and computers can’t do that yet.
Atleast Model S and X with hardware 4 do have radars in them.
Huh, guess they came around in the end then.
aswell
Never a word, my dude.
I’ll try to remember that!
Yeah Waymo has been silently ticking away over here for years. On the east side they are all over the place. It will take longer to get to freeway speeds but I think Waymo’s approach is far safer. But fuck Google too
And Cruise is playing bumper cars
More like GTA
Google En Passat
I’m starting to get the feeling that “X is playing chess while Y is playing checkers” is an indicator species for a terrible take.
Much like everytime you see “nothing burger”
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I just watched a video of one of these going down the wrong side of the road yesterday
And still Mercedes is the car company with the highest autonomy level of any car manufacturer. And no one talks about that.
Mercedes Drive Pilot only works on a handful of hand-picked highways is California and Nevada. It must have a car in front of it to follow. It can’t go over 40mph. It can’t navigate thru interchanges. It can’t be used in inclement weather. It doesn’t work around flashing lights. It doesn’t work on construction sites. It doesn’t work in night time. It cannot change lanes and it doesn’t work on roads without lane markings.
It’s effectively a train except train can take you to more places. Also, it must have a driver who can take over when needed. That’s level 3 self driving. Waymo is level 4.
Here’s what happens when you put Mercedes Driver Assist (Not Drive Pilot) against Tesla’s FSD. Tl;dw: It’s completely useless.
Both are risking the lives and safety of the non-consenting public as they beta test 2-ton vehicles on public streets. Damn them both.
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If their track record is better it’s because it’s a record at a much lower scale, under more controlled conditions, and kept by companies with a vested interest in it appearing good. If Boeing can hide flaws in flying vehicles carrying hundreds of people per trip I think these companies can hide flaws in cars.
we aren’t advocating for stronger driving tests
Why aren’t you? Wouldn’t that be the most logical answer?
My country has had a very bad traffic safety record, among the worst in the EU, and that was one of the things we used to improve things, along with harsher consequences.
There’s also another solution, reducing people’s need to drive. Public transportation could be improved by a fraction of the money that goes into these self-driving endeavors.
Just adding “AI” to something may look cool and even make sense at small scale but ultimately completely fail in real life. “Sometimes knives kill people, let’s put AI in knives that will retract the blade instead of cutting someone”. Does that sound plausible too?
Their track record isn’t safer than a human driver… because their system is a mechanical turk.
I wonder what you then think about people who drive after heavily drinking or taking drugs. To be honest, I have more faith in technology than in humans.
Not to mention that self driving can probably solve some other problems too, like traffic jams caused by erratic driving behavior of humans, etc.
If you have vehicle to vehicle communication, it is possible to adapt the speed of all the vehicles on the street to avoid them being stuck in a traffic jam.
Driving while inebriated is illegal, self driving is not.
Traffics jams and erreactic behaviour could be fixed if everyone is in a self driving car, but at that point it woild be far more energy effecient, environmentally friendly and cheaper for society to build electrified transit instead.
If you prioritize the street so that only self driving cars are on it and they need wireless communications to function, how do other road users like cyclists and pedeatrians safely use the street?
Self driving cars are not here to make your life better, they are here to make a handful of people rich.
I tend to disagree here. For example if you have vehicle to vehicle standardized communications, vehicles can communicate between themselves the location of cyclists, some road obstacles, etc. generally making the roads safer and reducing the number of fatalities.
Yes, they will make some people more rich, but is this a legitimate reason to obstruct technological advancements? I am sure people were thinking the same way at the cusp of electrification, or automation of some factories, where machines were augmenting the human labor and in the process making those people redundant.
If we think the same way we should never abandon coal power plants and mines because miners might lose their job, right?
There are greener, more energy effecient and more socially fair ways to get the same results than selling everybody a high tech steel box.
This is literally the only way we’ll ever get self-driving cars. You have to test them in real life. Simulations and tests tracks can only take you so far. Yeah it’ll probably cost the lifes of some number of people but this will be greatly outnumbered by the amount of lives saved when the technology actually starts working as intented. It’s not like human driven vehicles are exactly safe for pedestrians either.
Also, when a self-driving vehicle fails it almost always means it ends up getting stuck somewhere or blocking the road. It’s extremely rare for it to cause an accident, though that does happen aswell.
I don’t think public deaths is a valid cost for creating self driving cars. We could be builidng safer and more effecient transportation systems. Some billionaire is going to make even more money because they were allowed to use the general public and city streets as a testing ground for their product. This is not fair to the family or the people who are injured or killed by self driving cars.
There are currently 80+ people dying every single day just in the US alone because we don’t have self-driving cars. Not developing that technology is just as much of a choise to let people die than going forward with it. I’d argue it’s the moral thing to do. People are awful at driving. As a fan of cars I like to go sit by the freeway watching them passing by several times a week and the number of people driving 120kph while staring at their phones is mind boggling.
Not only that but virtually all of those vehicles are going to be electric as well so that also means less people dying because of air pollution. Then there’s also the fact that it’ll bring down the cost of taxies immensely as well as allowing private individuals to let their vehicle go do ride sharing for the day instead of sitting on the parking lot of their work place unused. There’s just too many upsides to it. Also it’s not like passengers getting killed by rogue self-driving vehicles is a particularly common occurance despite the technology still being at it’s infancy. This is the worst they’re ever going to be.
And in the news this just in… Tesla runs over checkered flag and flagman at Daytona. Shortly after, it burst into flames. As it burned it was discovered that the car’s emblems melted into the shape of Toyota emblems…
Am I remembering correctly that Tesla removed sensors for self driving?
Yuuup. Muskrat decided LiDAR was too expensive to include in every vehicle and scrapped it. Even disabled the sensors on the cars that have it.
My vacuum has LiDAR. That man is a cheap idiot.
The LiDAR you have on your vacuum isn’t going to cut it as a safety relevant component onboard your car. Automotive-grade LiDAR are on another price range. Development for such sensors is quoted separately from the part price, and it costs millions of $.
I still want to see someone slap an airplane grade INS suite into a car and load it up with some maps to see how far it can go without relying on GPS lol.
Not that it would functionally change much, but I find it annoying only self driving cars are still using dedicated navigation setups.
Google Maps has an aneurysm if you’re not going above 5mph even though the accelerometer really should have made this a non problem. Its even more dumb to be using your tiny phone receiver for vehicle navigation. GMaps still has to wait until you’re past a spot before finally deciding where you actually are.
“Caution terrain…Caution terrain…”
Pull up … Pull up … Pull up
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It really is an insult for checkers as a game. It is a common misconception that it’s simple. The game has surprising amount of depth, and the saying “x is playing chess while y is playing checkers” should really die.
X is playing chess while Y is playing tictactoe would be a better analogy.
Chess has roughly 10^44 positions. Checkers has roughly 10^20.
That means under that metric, chess is roughly 24 orders of magnitude more complex as checkers.
Tic tac toe has roughly 10^3 positions, or 17 orders of magnitude simpler than checkers.
In other words, the complexity gap between chess and checkers is larger than the gap between checkers and tic tac toe.
My point is that checkers actually still is very mich complex. Tictactoe is not and every board position can reasonably be managed by a human.
With checkers, that is unfeasable. That’s why I am of the opinion that checkers is unfairly treated as “the simple game” when for humans it is far from simple.
Maybe they should compare playing chess with playing Go.
The number of legal board positions in Go has been calculated to be approximately 2.1×10^170, which is far greater than the number of atoms in the observable universe, which is estimated to be on the order of 10^80.
Agree. Checkers has been solved, Tic tac toe has been solved on xkcd. Chess has not been solved
I usually take the chess/checkers idiom to be more like “the left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing” Not that one is smart and one is dumb, but that they’re going in completely different directions and playing by different rules.
Hmm, maybe I’ve learned the meaning wrong. English isn’t my first language :)
