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One of the issues that companies like Waymo will have to face is that it's not going to be enough to be better than a human driver, you actually have to be better than a human driver with lane assist, blind spot checkers, adaptive cruise control, etc. As self driving technology matures, so does driving assistance technology. The 100 Million miles that a human driver will have to drive on average to die in a crash will be pushed to a billion miles+ before L5 is achieved, effectively moving the goal post further.

Ultimately self driving technology has to be better not than a human, but than human intervention. It has to be so good that it recognizes when a human incorrectly intervenes to override L4 decisions and then be able to override that human's overriding. Only then will autonomous vehicles overtake humans.

One real issue is that as automated systems, assist or full driving take over, human skill will decrease.

Yes, there are people with poor coordination, spatial perception, the list goes on. Genetics makes a difference. Yet also, training makes a difference. So for those with normal or above normal genetic bounds for the above, training helps immensely.

And driving, responding quickly to issues, is often about training. Hence all the driving ed programs now mandated in many localities, prior to obtaining a license.

Still, it goes beyond that. One becomes more skillful, better at driving, as time progresses. At least, those capable of that. Meanwhile, we're moving humans further and further from direct learning experiences, and with each 'crutch', reducing training scenarios as well.

Of course, we're on a path here. The goal is ultimately to move more towards safety. However I suspect that "things will get worse", before better, as drivers will be less trained on manual tasks.

Edit:

My main point is, we're going to get to a point of 'AI drives, you monitor/intervene" eventually, as the mainstay.

Yet new drivers, will be less able to intervene. They won't have developed, or trained, via the same number of "close calls", and direct driving experiences.

Eventually, asking drivers to "intervene", will be asking for the least skilled to take over, to monitor, to watch.

And there are a lot of areas that are very high bar to handle with AI. Think on this ; all current driving tech is literally 'low hanging fruit'.

It's been a lot of work, I grant that. Yet it's been a lot of work for just that low hanging fruit!

For example, most AI driving is urban, in the southern US.

How about:

- In rural Canada

- In the middle of a snow storm

- With ice, and white-out conditions on the road

- on rural dirt backroads, which are 20 or 30 km long, comprised of potholes and other such irregularities

- with zero mapping

- at -40C

I have extremely strong doubts that AI can even remotely handle that well currently. I'd trust a 5 year old to handle this task far better.

Now, what of drivers who never really drive, end up on this side road, and get 'stuck', with the AI unable to handle things?

When all of the above is normal in the winter. For example, often schools do not close in rural Quebec, for such typical, and normal, conditions.

Yes, I cover that in Why Tesla Autopilot ought to be awful, until it’s perfect

https://jperla.medium.com/why-tesla-autopilot-ought-to-be-aw...

Hmm, you definitely also cover the low hanging fruit aspect a bit, as well.

In my opinion, AI has to be better than the average professional driver. Who is in turn significantly better than the average texting, sleepy, angry, drunken idiot. My uncle had a plaque for a million miles driving his bus without an accident.

Yes, and I write about that and Tesla's active safety features here https://jperla.medium.com/tesla-saves-lives-waymo-gambles-pa...

I hope by human intervention you mean someone saying: "car please turn around and take me to Rio." and then car says "did you mean Rio de Janeiro?" And they say: "Sim, por favor, vá em frente" and the car says: "you wont be able to charge me on that route, but I can take you to nearest airport. O que você acha?"

GPT-3 does not pass the Turing test. The Turing test is not about making a person think they're talking to another person while, in fact, they are talking to a machine. The reason is that such a result may depend on the expectations people have of machines' capabilities. Rather, the Turing test, in the "standard" interpretation (rather than Turing's original formulation) has an interrogator interviewing two subjects via text messages, knowing that one of them is a machine and the other a human, trying to distinguish which is which. The machine passes the test if it can trick interviewers sufficiently often.

> the Turing test, in the "standard" interpretation (rather than Turing's original formulation)

Goalposts: moved!

This is exactly my point.

> Goalposts: moved!

No, the original formulation is just a little unclear and some interpret it as an even more elaborate test, involving yet another stage. Most versions of the test include at least three participants [1]. Many people forget the details and remember just that it's about recognising a machine through text communication.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test

This is a very important distinction. The Turing Test can be passed only by something that is indistinguishable from a conscious, thinking being.

I am the author, and I am a self-driving car engineer too! Waymo is an inspiring project, many friends work there, and it literally inspired me to work on self-driving cars.

I wrote this to help people in the industry have the right context in the right way.

As to Waymo's driverless testing, it's dangerous! See here what I wrote about why: https://jperla.medium.com/tesla-saves-lives-waymo-gambles-pa...

One of the key things that Self Driving Vehicles need to learn from humans is how to predict other humans/vehicles. Predicting which vehicle is going to drive unsafely, or even with excessive caution is not just responding to the position (speed and acceleration) of a vehicle, but how it acts relative to predictions (and how well it is predicting your actions), and fits into a type of driver model. And then knowing that all of that will change when a traffic cop is visible or not, the start of a rain, sunset, kids/pets acting up.

That's why driving in different cities for an experienced driver can be so nerve wracking... it's hard to predict what all those vehicles will do! Meanwhile they are also predicting what you will do so you're dangerous as well (don't stop in traffic just because a pedestrian walks into the middle of a busy street in Delhi or Naples, you'll cause an accident).

Why is the self driving ecosystem trying to solve every driving challenge, which is very hard, rather than focussing on highway driving, ideally reserved lanes, high speed and close cars. And progressively expand those areas "reserved to self driving card" over time. It feels like it would bring a lot of value while reducing complexity a lot. If this is a silly question, please let me know why.

Been a bit mind boggling to me as well. There seems to be an obsession with the most challenging problems (which is fine), but it seems like there are much lower hanging fruit that is easier to grab like long distance travel. I would love to have vehicles that took care of long distance/interstate driving situations.

One of the few rationales I can summon is that when you look at driving and travel as a whole, the total time/mileage that falls in the distribution of long distance may be significantly lower than that of the total time/miles spent in the more difficult inner city driving situations. Moreover, since we're looking at businesses not trying to do humanity a favor but pursing a profit motive, the driving spent in inner city travel is deemed more profitable than the longer haul travel, likely because you have to compete with rail systems, air transit, and so forth. That's all guesswork though, curious if data exists on this.

>I would love to have vehicles that took care of long distance/interstate driving situations.

I'm the same way. Sure, I'll take full self-driving if it's on offer. But TBH, if you can handle the 2-4 hour parts of a typical weekend drive to the mountains, that's a big win for me. Ditto for handling most of the 70 minute or so drive to the nearest major city.

It's not as exciting and doesn't open up the shared vehicle use cases and so forth. But full autonomy under most conditions on limited access highways still seems like a great feature a lot of people would love to pay for. But the driving around my neighborhood and environs actually isn't something I generally find to be a particular burden,

I've wondered this too. Also start with commercial vehicles instead of consumers.

The hard problem with commercial vehicles is that they are even safer than the random consumers (teenagers, drunks, etc), so the bar is even higher (1 in a billion miles? 10 billion?) and has very quantifiable business metrics and insurance liabilities!!

I would like to see a computed stat, but I don't know, I see a lot of overturned semis often at these very specific places (elevation drop + turn) - always knocking them over. It's the wind or the speed the driver was going.

Maybe iteration 1 of all this should be detectors that help drivers do better:

1. Unsafe driving speed alarms (given conditions)

2. Notification of areas that are historically unsafe

3. Baby in the back-seat!

4. Alcohol in the driver's seat detection (even if you don't have an existing DUI/setup)

Any 1 of those implemented en-masse would likely reduce accidents/deaths world more than Full self driving AI (in its current form), and if that was truly the goal, I don't understand why these aren't the top little buggers to fix and release in 2021.

Is your proposal that we should take the most dangerous classes of drivers and make them more dangerous by giving them imperfect autonomous technology in order to improve the technology?

No need to put words and strawmen in mouth.

> It's worth doing because we drive a remarkable amount. Even at human safety level, more than a million people die every year in car crashes.

I'm not sure. Why is this so? To save time? Sure, but I think the self-driving proponents that I have seen have not addressed the new problems that will be brought by self-driving cars. I don't think reducing crashes is anything but a marketing ploy because the real goal of self-driving is to make companies a lot of money. I think accidents will simply be transposed and not reduced.

One problem is the initial rollout period where there is a non-homogeneous mix of human and automated drivers. This impedance mismatch will be problematic and likely lead to more accidents and congestion.

In general, it's my belief (I don't have facts or research, just a hunch) that automated driving will actually increase congestion and traffic. We saw this with Uber and Lyft, where these things plus accidents were increased where these services were deployed. I've seen it first hand that the cars causing issues are likely to be Uber or Lyft. I will be very surprised if this is not the case with automated drivers. For example, consider the case of an automated car dropping someone off in a busy area, probably one of the most wanted use cases for automated car. This is because it could notionally drop the person off and then drive off and find parking. But that seems like an insanely hard problem because such a maneuver is actually difficult for humans and very tricky in busy areas.

I truly don't understand the actual need for self-driving cars. There is a lot of hype, for sure, but I personally see that it will generate more problems. Basically the only problem that it will solve is reduction in human time driving because I doubt it will be actually safer such that it's a major difference from now. I feel our society would gain much more benefit in concentrating on better transportation and urban design: planes, trains, automobiles, bicycles, and walking.

I'd like to offer another use case, one near and dear to my heart: grandma.

My grandmother, like many grandmothers, has no business being on the road. She is a wonderful person. She is also a horrible driver, a threat to herself and others by virtue of natural impairments (vision, reaction time, etc.)

Taking away her license would make all roads safer, but it would also obliterate her quality of life. The actual need for driverless cars, to me, is a means of retaining her freedom of movement with a far lower level of endangerment.

I think your predictions are 100% accurate, but I also think as the fleet becomes more self-driving and as streets and other public infrastructure are redesigned to accommodate the new paradigms I believe these problems around traffic, congestion, and safety will be solved eventually by automated vehicles.

That is to say I believe human-driving is at a local maxima and it will take accepting a negative dip if we want to progress on this front.

I think I agree in that as the balance tips towards more self-driving cars on the road that it will be safer for them, but I also think that although the numbers of human drivers will be lowered, the likelihood of accidents might also increase unless humans adapt toward driving with self-driving cars.

Transforming our roads towards better supporting automated vehicles through signs, markings, and other infrastructure does seem to be a natural conclusion to make it really work, but that all rests upon the assumption that these massive fleets of self-driving cars are required components of our future. We already have major issues maintaining the infrastructure on our roads. Fully transforming them will take a lot of time and money. I really think a more holistic approach is needed because self-driving cars will be solving a lot of problems, in hard ways, that are much more simply solved by (essentially automated) train, subway, trolley, and bus systems. Going all in on self-driving cars seems to be the wrong goal. We need to be thinking about how to transform our infrastructure and urban design to have the right solution in the right spot. I do think self-driving cars have a place in this, but simply slapping self-driving cars onto our existing car and road culture and design is not the right solution.

I really worry about the U.S.' nature about letting corporations dictate where society goes. We're in this mess to begin with because of car corporations destroying public transportation in cities and requiring the new city designs to be built around cars. I think we'll continue to see corporations create solutions that generate more problems.

> I don't think reducing crashes is anything but a marketing ploy

For what it's worth, I wouldn't be working at Waymo if I didn't believe self-driving cars are very likely to save lives.

> In general, it's my belief (I don't have facts or research, just a hunch)

Indeed.

Well I'd be appreciative of any data that shows that instead of just a curt response. You shouldn't call me out presenting my hunches honestly. If you have data that disagrees, show it. Otherwise, your hunch is as good as mine.

The data I've seen essentially shows the in vitro safety of self-driving cars. Yes, these cars are driving out in the real world, but they are singular in a sea of human drivers. The reports I've seen is that the cars are overly careful and just put along. The safety data of such trials will be skewed. You can't simply extrapolate that safety data out to where now you have say 25% self-driving and 75% human drivers and so on. It's a dynamic problem.

I've seen presentations by Waymo managers. Just as little as a year or two ago, the cars were basically incapable of handling snow or rain. You may be offended by the marketing comment, but until we see holistic data that supports what the marketing says, that's the reality.

The existing data on Uber and Lyft is clear. They increase accidents and congestion. How do self-driving cars approach this problem? Because there's clear precedence that the introduction of a new paradigm of driving causes problems, even ignoring the aspect of self-driving versus human driver.

I'm legitimately curious about whether a physical hard limit exists for what AI can accomplish. A few decades ago, people often assumed Moore's law would continue indefinitely, but now there's some doubt as to whether it is physically possible to keep up the pace without some amount of marketing tricks.

We don't believe AI would ever be able to solve some classes of "impossible" tasks, like breaking crypto. But at the same time, we say AI will just keep blowing past all hurdles in some slow singularity-like fashion. Those two ideas can't both be right. I'm curious where the lines converge at.

> I agree with the premise of the article. Humans are remarkably good at driving, and making a computer better will be hard.

The economic incentives for autonomous driving are interesting, for but just saving lives, collision avoidance is where to focus. If you have tech as good as Waymo, integrating that into a car so it intervenes when it's highly confident the driver doesn't know what they're doing and highly confident it knows the right thing to do would be huge.