Traffic cones confused a Waymo self-driving car. Then things got worse

Traffic cones and detours also confuse human drivers.

The safety standard for robots cannot be that they never make a mistake.

The safety standard should be that they're 10% or 100% or 300% less likely to make a fatal mistake than a typical human driver.

May 2021, article is over a year old

I think the extent of driver assistance i want in my vehicles, ever, is something already widely available: adaptive cruise control so i can say "hold 80 mph on the highway, i'll do the steering; if i'm about to rear-end the guy in front of me because he's doing 60, brake and match speed". Maybe some form of haptic alarm if cruise control is engaged and i change lanes, but no override.

That's it. That's all i want.

Honestly just something that can take me to any exit on a highway from my house would be an amazing improvement.

I don’t even need A to B, just give me A to A* where that distance is 90% of the trip.

> Waymo has remote workers who can provide information and directions to the self-driving vehicles.

And this tells you everything you need to know about the overall viability of self-driving cars. There's a human. There's always a human.

I've seen this in other "High quality AI" powered products too. One, for example, parsed the Twitter firehose for events that folks would pay to get notified about. But it had to be backed up by an entire call center worth of people - some of whom also monitored live feeds and others monitoring AI feeds - to make sure that the quality was acceptable.