DTurtle posted:

See the video posted above - there is no specialist sitting in the car.

quote:

Those vehicles were supported by a vast operations staff, with 1.5 workers per vehicle. The workers intervened to assist the company’s vehicles every 2.5 to five miles, according to two people familiar with is operations. In other words, they frequently had to do something to remotely control a car after receiving a cellular signal that it was having problems.

DTurtle posted:

Well but now the goalposts have been moved several times (admittedly by different people):
Teriyaki Hairpiece: Never, ever, no qualification.
Neito: Probably not in our lifetime with a vision or hybrid vision/lidar system.
You: Not in the foreseeable future with a general purpose vehicle.

Note that I objected to Teriyaki Hairpiece. Especially because they are likely to be wrong with their claim this year.

Edit: Oops, actually they are already wrong. Waymo already offers a service (driverless without specialist) to the airport. The new service that started is directly to the terminal, while the old service was to two of the airport sky train stations.

VitalSigns posted:

I had multiple "self-driving" cars go past me with no one in them when Cruise rolled out its robotaxi service, and I was impressed until it turned out they were just lying neglecting to mention how much human assistance was needed

So it's going to take more than a video to make me believe at this point. If it's a solved problem why didnt Cruise use the solution, are they just stupider than these other guys? Probably not, probably it's a harder problem than the hype-men want us to think.

Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice ya you can't get fooled again.

Professor Beetus posted:

I will say 2.5 to 5 miles isn't actually that bad if you're talking about say, taking a little zip from your hotel to the airport or something, but it sounds like the ideal use case for these things would be in places where good transit already exists to get people from x thing to train/bus station or something, particularly if you have difficulty walking a mile.

December 2016 posted:

And we don't need all the jobs to go away for it to be a big problem. Ignore any even remotely futuristic ideas and just look at self-driving cars, which are at most 5 years away from being on the roads everywhere. Moving things on roads from point A to point B accounts for roughly 15% of all the jobs in the country. And that's ignoring other 'moving things around' jobs on smaller scales, like say warehouse work, which to a bot is just an easier version of the already solved self-driving car problem. The worst unemployment of the recent great recession was at 10%. The Great Depression peaked at 27%. From the video in the OP, if you look at all the jobs that could reasonably be expected to be automated in the near future, you get to about 45% unemployment. Without doing something to avert it, those are end-of-the-world, rioting in the streets kind of numbers.

VitalSigns posted:

Oh I agree it's technically impressive. It just...aint what the PR videos were claiming. It also got shut down because a car hit a pedestrian (which may not have been the computer's fault since a human driver would probably have been unable to avoid an accident in that same situation) and then dragged them 20 feet (not acceptable). So still some obvious problems.

Although the fact that it required 1.5x as many operators as cars means it's not really a replacement for Taxis. The savings then is basically the ability to offshore it to cheaply paid workers in India. (And then...couldn't you save money on sensors and programmers by just having full-time remote drivers? But I guess that's not sexy enough to get VC money)

It is kinda funny skimming back through the tech threads and seeing what the futurists were saying before

"Already-solved self driving car problem." Automated vehicles "everywhere" by 2021 at the latest. 45% unemployment. Riots. End of the world.

Dameius posted:

Well there were riots. Just a little different reasons.

April 9, 2016 posted:

You are 100% wrong on this. I have talked with product planners from the Big 3 US Automakers and they all plan on having a high-end self-driving car for 2020, and expect the technology to be throughout their product lines by 2025.

Self-driving cars will be like the iPhone, they will break the logjam and the technology will be everywhere very quickly, leaving people wondering how they ever lived without it.

April 8th, 2016 posted:

Yeah, I'll take this bet. there'll be a publicly available self-driving car that can handle a majority of car trips for your average person in the states with no human intervention* within 10 years.

* beyond obvious setup type things like telling it where to go, maybe some state info relevant to where it's legal to park (e.g. whether you have a handicapped placard), etc.

edit: now to add this to my calendar. Hope google calendar and gmail both still exist 10 years from now.

VitalSigns posted:

If it's a solved problem why didnt Cruise use the solution, are they just stupider than these other guys? Probably not, probably it's a harder problem than the hype-men want us to think.

Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice ya you can't get fooled again.

VitalSigns posted:

Oh I agree it's technically impressive. It just...aint what the PR videos were claiming. It also got shut down because a car hit a pedestrian (which may not have been the computer's fault since a human driver would probably have been unable to avoid an accident in that same situation) and then dragged them 20 feet (not acceptable). So still some obvious problems.

Although the fact that it required 1.5x as many operators as cars means it's not really a replacement for Taxis. The savings then is basically the ability to offshore it to cheaply paid workers in India. (And then...couldn't you save money on sensors and programmers by just having full-time remote drivers? But I guess that's not sexy enough to get VC money)

It is kinda funny skimming back through the tech threads and seeing what the futurists were saying before

"Already-solved self driving car problem." Automated vehicles "everywhere" by 2021 at the latest. 45% unemployment. Riots. End of the world.

DTurtle posted:

Are you seriously asking why Cruise didn’t use the tech made by Waymo?

DTurtle posted:

Yes, Waymo is much further with regards to autonomous driving than Cruise, Tesla, Mobileye, or anyone else in that area.

VitalSigns posted:

No, I'm skeptical that their tech is any better, and a video of someone taking a ride in it isn't enough to convince me because people made videos of themselves in Cruise cars too. It was all really gee-whiz cool on the surface. Then some journalists dug into it a bit and well... they weren't actually running without human intervention.

Hey if you've got a good independent source that backs this up I'd love to read it. What's the difference? More money? More people? They're just smarter?

quote:

It’s important to note that Cruise has logged more than four million miles in San Francisco, so Cruise’s crash reports represent roughly twice as many miles as Waymo’s. Once you adjust for that, Waymo and Cruise seem to have been involved in low-stakes crashes at similar rates.

quote:

In short, Waymo has invested more time and resources into its technology. It would be surprising if all that extra work didn’t yield superior performance. With that said, I don’t want to be too negative about Cruise. Because while the company’s technology doesn’t seem to be as good as Waymo’s, it’s still pretty good.
...
Still, it’s important to remember that access to public roads is essential for testing and improving self-driving technology. This is not a technology Waymo or Cruise can meaningfully test “in the lab.” The companies need exposure to the full complexity of real public streets in order to make progress. And given that both companies are likely to eventually develop products that are much safer than human drivers, slowing down the development of the technology could easily cost more lives than it saves.

So while the DMV’s decision to cut the size of Cruise’s fleet in the wake of the August 17 crashes was understandable, I hope the decision is short-lived. Ultimately the only way for Cruise to improve its technology is by testing it on public roads. And we’ll all benefit from the widespread availability of self-driving cars that are dramatically

DarkHorse posted:

Multicopter drones are already pretty far along the flying car route, the biggest issue (as it's been for ages) is battery energy and power density

VitalSigns posted:

Well the question was about whether Waymo cars were taking people to the airport "without human intervention" and it seems that Waymo does not disclose how much or how often human intervention is required, and it's probably not because the numbers look too good. It was prett-ty embarrassing for Cruise when their numbers got out, and there isn't any evidence that I've seen that Waymo's are better which I guess is why you shifted the goalposts to crash statistics.

Which, idk, maybe Waymo's software is better at safety (again, not what we were talking about), but anyway that article in particular isn't very rigorous so it's hard to conclude anything. It's comparing accident rates from automated cars in a geofenced area in a couple of cities with human drivers all over the country in all conditions. So that's trash. The author does attempt to adjust for stuff like miles driven when comparing Waymo and Cruise to each other, which is good, but also that analysis shows accident rates are about the same.

They go on to say they like Waymo better... based mainly on their subjective impression of a handful of accidents by Cruise that quote "strike me as more serious", and of course these impressions don't correct for number of miles driven. Oh and on some statements from Waymo about why they're better.


And it's also a bit too cheerleader-y. The end of the article is pretty amusing in hindsight

Just a few weeks after this was published a Cruise car hit and dragged a pedestrian and the company lied to regulators about what happened and tried to cover it up.

quote:

Yes, Waymo is much further with regards to autonomous driving than Cruise, Tesla, Mobileye, or anyone else in that area.

quote:

To sum up, Waymo’s driverless fleet has experienced:

17 low-speed collisions where another vehicle hit a stationary Waymo
9 collisions where another vehicle rear-ended a Waymo
2 collisions where a Waymo got sideswiped by another vehicle
2 collisions where a Waymo got cut off and wasn’t able to brake quickly enough
2 low-speed collisions with stationary vehicles
7 low-speed collisions with inanimate objects like shopping carts and potholes

...

[Description of various low speed collisions with Cruise vehicles]

One is significant crashes where Cruise was clearly at fault. I saw three examples of this:

A Cruise AV mistakenly thought the vehicle ahead of it was starting to turn left. The Cruise ran into the other vehicle when it turned right instead.
A Cruise AV changed lanes when there wasn’t enough space to do so, cutting off another vehicle and leading to a crash.
A Cruise AV ran into the back of a city bus. Cruise subsequently determined that its software got confused because it was an articulated bus (the kind with an accordion joint in the middle) and Cruise’s software couldn’t handle two parts of a vehicle moving in slightly different directions.

Each of these mistakes strikes me as more serious than any of Waymo’s mistakes (recall that all of Waymo’s clearly at-fault crashes were low-speed collisions with inanimate objects or parked vehicles).

...

Cruise’s other trouble spot is intersections. Cruise says two bicyclists have run stop signs and crashed into Cruise vehicles. And there have been five vehicles that ran red lights and crashed into Cruise vehicles:

This Mercedes sedan
This Volkswagen hatchback
This Infinity Q60
This Dodge Charger
This fire truck with its sirens blaring

Perhaps all of these crashes (with the possible exception of the fire truck) were the fault of the other drivers (and cyclists). Still, it’s interesting that over two million miles of driverless operation, [b]no Waymo AVs got hit by cars running red lights or bicycles running stop signs.

DTurtle posted:

I never claimed that Waymo has fewer human interventions per mile driven or operators per car or anything like that, because as far as I can tell that information isn't out there. My claim - that you asked about, and that I answered with a good faith effort was that:

DTurtle posted:

You can do that right now in Phoenix, Arizona. You can order a car. A car will come to you. You get into the car on the side of the road. It will take you across the normal city streets to the airport. It will then drop you off at the airport. At no point in any of this will you have had any interaction with any other human being.

That is NOT an automatic tram riding on rails.
Here, you can even have a video of it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbL0gcsEbAs

DTurtle posted:

I think that the incidents described clearly support the author's opinion that Cruise's incidents were more serious than Waymo's.

VitalSigns posted:

DTurtle posted:

I am done with this discussion.

LonsomeSon posted:

goddrat, finally, next time you want to simp for ‘self-driving’ cars please consider not posting instead

DTurtle posted:

Who are you again? How were you involved in this discussion? Have you added anything of value at all?

I made a total of ten posts with information supporting my claims. Since the whole discussion is now threatening to continue going around in circles and not showing any signs of being productive or informative, and this is not some tech thread, but the crazy email thread, I don’t see any value for anyone in continuing this discussion here.

That you feel the need to jump in at that point without having been involved in the discussion at all, accusing me of being a "simp" is just a tiny bit weird.

Medullah posted:

The crazy political emails are coming from inside the house

Panfilo posted:

Some Facebook racists showing off their gotchas


These folks seem to think fbi.gov statistics are the be all end all. You know, the same group of people who hate the fbi and want it abolished? Well according to them they are dead right about per capita statistics.

Medullah posted:

Medullah posted:

Brawnfire posted:

There's gotta be more recent causes to generational poverty and disenfranchisement, it's not like the wealth and opportunities your ancestors had have any bearing on your current well-being! Come on!

And by ancestors I of course mean "your still living parents and grandparents"

Panfilo posted:

Some Facebook racists showing off their gotchas


These folks seem to think fbi.gov statistics are the be all end all. You know, the same group of people who hate the fbi and want it abolished? Well according to them they are dead right about per capita statistics.

PhazonLink posted:

they should be more angry that plastic toys suck today, so thin and weak, like even if its not Nintenido , old stuff is tougher and better.

well atleast the stuff that survives to this day.

Scholtz posted:

A lot of the stuff that survives to this day has lead paint, so maybe we should go back to that

the_steve posted:

Also, Water Blaster sounds cooler.
Squirt Gun sounds wimpy, but Water Blaster makes my 5 year old brain think that I'm going to pull the trigger and a loving tidal wave is going to crash over my target.