Waymo gets green light in California to pick up passengers in self-driving cars

I still think marketing it as a safety issue was the wrong approach this early in their development. Say "safety" and "cars" in the same sentence and people think of seat belts, air bags, and anti-lock brakes. All things to protect you from an accident on unpredictable situation.

That isn't just a question of the safety of the autonomous systems though, it also includes consideration of which drivers end up using them. Some drunks will use auto taxis, lots won't.

Ultimately it will come down to, who is safer?

Kind of off-topic, but do these minivans have insurance policies? Or is there some Alphabet subsidiary that allows them to act as insurance for themselves?

If they do basically insure themselves, they will already be paying out insurance whenever their AI fails to follow/obey laws, so the only issue with placing blame is in the public/media's eye.

minor nitpick but it's about from which pocked compensation comes out, not really punishment.

Are you talking about bugs in artificial intelligence, or bugs in regular 'ol human intelligence?

Because that statement rings true for both, lol.

Here in Australia, with a population of 25 Million there where 1,140 road deaths in 2018.

The USA with it's 327 million population had some 40,000 road deaths on 2018.

I find it hard to imagine the av will end up doing any worse a job driving than the humans currently on the road.

And since, even with the occasional bug, the av would be doing a better job of it, that means they will end up saving lives (and lots of them).

Meanwhile 1.25 million people die in human caused car accidents every year and somewhere around an additional 30 million are injured. But that’s “just the world we live in.” Or that’s “your choice to take a risk when you choose to drive a car.” Or whatever.

A lot of criticism of our industry is well-deserved if overly broadly applied. Most companies do not operate with the total lack of ethics that Uber and Facebook do. But they are so big and so well-known, they’ve come to symbolize a culture of amorality, deception, manipulation, and a willingness to do anything for growth and fresh injections of VC funding.

What would be really useful for everyone is to throw out that narrative for a while and focus on the task at hand. Self-driving cars will be regulated. There’s no getting around that. And tech companies could help themselves out a lot by accepting that and coming to the table with regulators with an actual plan instead of whining about having their innovation stifled.

There is a reasonable compromise. You can’t start by saying the error rate must be at zero. That will never get anywhere and people will keep dying a million a year. Where is the right number and what does it measure? I don’t know. It should probably be tiered by population density and average driving conditions and weighted by number of annual deaths in that city/region.

Highways are an easier problem to solve than, say, Manhattan. But highway deaths are more likely to be fatal. So the standards ought to apply differently.

The challenge here is really to get regulators to think a little bit like problem solvers rather than enforcers for a change. To get them to realize that “regulate self driving cars” is a problem so big and mushy that it’s pretty much meaningless. But “establish safety standard for interstate travel for autonomous trucks” is something you can work with. Maybe it’s 100x as a safe as a human driver in that scenario. I don’t really know.

Tech companies could probably turn on a lot of positive PR if they promoted milestones for certain communities. Maybe even offered incentives for cities to improve road markings. Like if Waymo said, “We want to target Brooklyn, and our goal is 10x as safe as human drivers in Brooklyn with an additional target of 1000x fewer cycling accidents. But we need you to mark the bike lanes better and put them between the parked cars and the curbs where it’s feasible, and here’s a pile of money you can use to do it.” That would generate a lot of good will, positive pr, and maybe even genuine enthusiasm that they can use to open up that market for their taxis ahead of schedule.

The car companies will get a lot better treatment from regulators if they chunk the problem into small pieces and go to the negotiating table without a victim chip on their shoulder.

I guess this is your informed opinion that comes after reading about Tesla's autopilot crashes. And I share that opinion.

But I have the feeling that Waymo's system is much more mature than Tesla's. Let's see.

We all know that the fastest and most reliable way to find and fix bugs is to implement the thing in production and see what happens. As you point out, it exposes problems that testing and design just can't.

I see people here obsessing over how much will change if we had fleets of AVs. Maybe shaving five years off the wait time is worth N number of human lives. Especially if N < the number of lives will ultimately be saved if the technology is perfected years earlier.

Of course I wouldn't want myself or my loved ones to make that sacrifice. I don't want to die in a regular car accident either. Given the upside, speeding up AV development may be worth the risk?

Cabs are SO convenient, and public transportation has all kinds of issues world-wide. Buenos Aires, for example, has subsidized metro (about 0.50U$S per ticket) vs a non-subsidized uber (5U$S per ride~) and still the experience is so much better and convenient and reliable that 5U$S is really worth it.

I think that the ride-hailing revolution is a classic case of great microeconomics.

In other words, it's still more like a better cruise control: it makes the easy part of driving easier, but doesn't help with the hard parts (and may make them even harder.)

Granted, you're still much more likely to die of heart disease. But if we're going to care about any non-disease causes of death or injury at all, automobile accidents are near the top of the ones to worry about. It's a much bigger cause of both deaths and injuries than violent crime is, for example.

  I don't really understand how this
  meme gets so much traction.

For example, tell someone "cars kill as many people as twelve September-11th attacks every year" and they might wonder where the trillion-dollar war on road deaths is.

On the other hand, tell someone "heart disease kills 17 times as many people as cars every year" and you'll give them the opposite impression.

Besides we need solution that works for 80% of the people. there will always be some edge cases

The key with driverless is to stop assuming that it has to work everywhere in all conditions or else it's useless. What's actually happening is that the cars are being trained for and tested in specific conditions and locations where they will roll out first (dry, sunny, well-maintained modern roads, etc.), then as the technology improves, the envelope will expand until at some point in the future they do actually work everywhere all the time.

> That is a much lower bar to meet.

First, maybe.

I don't doubt that auto-autos will be able to handle anything that's "in the book", and that, if we set it up right, "the book" will be constantly expanding and becoming more comprehensive as each machine in the fleet shares its history in near-realtime and offline processors integrate the data into new stimulus-response patterns or whatever. Etc. Handwave.

But I also suspect that driving safely IRL requires GAI. (After all, we evolved GAI to deal with the world, eh? If the world were simpler we would be dumber, no?)

Anyhow, let's grant the point for the sake of discussion:

> We just need them to be safer than human drivers.

Okay, fine... How do you know when they pass that point?

Until we are sure that's the case, don't test them on the public roads with moms and dads and kids and old people and cats and dogs, eh? eh?

- - - -

And what about the nerf golf cart?

I would love to have a machine into which I could confidently place my mother, who is suffering from dementia and can no longer drive or even ride the bus by herself, and have it transport her safely to and from, say, an appointment with her doctor.

That machine doesn't have to travel more than 5-10 kph.

One of the basic principles of safe auto-autos is that they should never travel faster than they can stop. Meaning, whatever the conditions, the aa should be 100% "confident" that it could stop before a collision, even if that means traveling at a walking pace. (If this isn't the case then you have built a killer robot whatever else it is. And it won't even protect you from the Terrible Secret of Space.)

That's what I mean about self-driving cars being a techno-fetish. We could build something tomorrow that wouldn't be able to kill people and sell it, but we're obsessed with speed and don't even realize it. We're blinded by visions of driving Knight Industries Two Thousand.

In my considered opinion, yes, cars are an insane method of mass transport† which have killed and maimed more people than war. I call our traffic systems the "Mayhem Lottery".

> Road traffic accidents are the largest cause of injury-related deaths worldwide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car#Safety

We did it to ourselves, deliberately:

> The very word jaywalk is an interesting—and not historically neutral—one. Originally an insult against bumptious “jays” from the country who ineptly gamboled on city sidewalks, it was taken up by a coalition of pro-automobile interests in the 1920s, notes historian Peter D. Norton in his book Fighting Traffic. “Before the American city could be physically reconstructed to accommodate automobiles, its streets had to be socially reconstructed as places where cars belong,” he writes. “Until then, streets were regarded as public spaces, where practices that endangered or obstructed others (including pedestrians) were disreputable. Motorists’ claim to street space was therefore fragile, subject to restrictions that threatened to negate the advantages of car ownership.” And so, where newspapers like the New York Times once condemned the “slaughter of pedestrians” by cars and defended the right to midblock crossings—and where cities like Cincinnati weighed imposing speed “governors” for cars—after a few decades, the focus of attention had shifted from marauding motorists onto the reckless “jaywalker.”

https://slate.com/human-interest/2009/11/a-defense-of-jaywal...

So yeah, it doesn't make sense to let people pilot massive (often a ton or more) powerful (as a team of N horses) deadly machines down every freakin street (and can we talk about the paving of the world?) just to get from point A to point B at M mph. Not in a world that includes bikes and buses!

Here's the sick punchline: for all that death and mayhem, and all the other costs and externalities of car transport, you don't gain anything, you just break even.

In "Energy and Civilization A History" by Vaclav Smil he points out that, once you factor in all the time spent working to pay for the car you're doing no better than if you just walked everywhere. Cars literally are no better than walking, economically.

(†Although I really like the machines themselves.)

I doubt that self-driving car technology is even close to being interstate-ready, though.

I think it will take a lot of work but that it will happen rapidly.

Realistically speaking, how far away do you think we are from such an adventure being something that would be safer on average than having an average somewhat road-experienced human driving you to Boston?

In Australia we are teetering into our first recession in decades. Retail spending is down, property values are going backwards and increased defaults put the stability of the financial system at risk. Wages growth has stagnated, work has become casualised and the only people getting richer are those who were rich to begin with. In that context having public funds go towards technology instead of giving someone an income seems wrong. The people who made the self driving bus aren't spending at local shops like a driver would.

California may not have the same economic pressures but I would be surprised if people aren't asking some of the same questions. There is a massive number of people employed operating vehicles. They feed families and contribute to local economies. What happens when they lose their jobs?

Even today, the automation on BART is far from perfect, and the drivers are more involved than most people realize.

The trains still like to over-shoot the end of stations, requiring the driver to quickly initiate a manual stop. (The stop signal is RF based, and apparently sometimes the train misses it.)

On top of that, they often need to drop down to manual control for certain sections of track, for various reasons.

Sydney has a GoA 4 system already.