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Comment by simondotau | Hacker News Reader

I'm confident that once driverless cars are good enough, blind pedestrians will be far safer than they ever were with drivered cars. But we're not there yet. Right now driverless cars should be banned from our roads.

Cruise and Waymo are inviting catastrophe by having their embryonic systems practising on public roads without a human in the driver's seat. None of these systems are anywhere near good enough to be let loose unmonitored. I know it's unpopular to praise Tesla here, but in my view they deserve some credit for sitting pretty at SAE L2 while everyone else seems obsessed with quickly impressing investors with a half-baked rush to L3 or L4.

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It seems that Waymo has a command center where a human is monitoring the cars and can immediately issue commands.

Having taken Waymo a number of times in SF now, I have experienced this once. The car stopped and an unsolicited call from customer support came into the car to check on things.

While subjective my experience in Waymo has been positive and feels surprisingly safe.

The car drives conservatively but naturally. It shows a great understanding of other cars and people and cones from LIDAR on its HUD. It takes safe routes and picks safe side streets and alleys for pick up and drop off. There is a real-time support team watching things.

I doubt it’s ready for every city — SF is well equipped for public transportation with lots of well mapped local taxi routes and loading zones in the city.

And there will be surprises and accidents.

But it’s absolutely wild that we’ve reached this level of self driving, and it will be transformative for human kind as it continues to improve.

“Rush” is subjective. Waymo have been driving around with human drivers for years before let loose and they are still highly restricted to city limits and local routes. And I was taking design courses in self driving control systems taught by General Motors back in uni in 2005.

> I'm confident that once driverless cars are good enough, blind pedestrians will be far safer

I can’t reconcile the industry’s assertion that safety is the penultimate objective with our testing these things, uncontrolled, in densely populated urban areas.

At some basic level it will always just be about profit. Their safety “just” needs to be good enough to not get shut down. Cynically, talk of drunk drivers etc., is marketing to sell the story to regulators and the public.

More optimistically, at least it’s possible to diagnose these mistakes and work to mitigate them. The fact that we could now start treating auto collisions as seriously as plane incidents might be reason to hope.

Money may be the medium of business— it’s how resources get distributed and how businesses gauge their success— but the primary structure of our society is humanity, not money. The way businesses or any other entity affects people is the only measure we should use to judge their usefulness and appropriateness of their behavior. That might be complicated to assess, but “oh well, you know, money” strikes me as the wrong place to land. While it may seem quaint to many, i won’t accept that some powerful group’s pursuit of wealth is more important than any non-wealthy person’s right to not get mangled by a pseudo-sentient taxi driver robot. If that’s the way it works out, as it obviously has, I’m pretty sure we should concentrate on making things closer to the way they should be rather than bemoaning the way things are.

Waymo tested for years in sparsely populated desert suburbs before expanding to SF.

The main criticism has always been that they were developing at a glacial pace.

What alternative path to deployment would you propose?

Development at a glacial pace. Their product timeline and finances are not my concern, and it’s not everybody else’s responsibility to mitigate the risks of their product development. Lots of things in industry would develop much more quickly if we decided to set the product safety bar low enough— I’m glad we at least recognize when we screwed up by taking away the operating licenses of companies like this. What happened here was exactly what I envisioned happening when the slick, CYA-first, blame-everyone-else, ethics-are-negotiable attitude endemic to the software (and other) industries entered this safety-critical field. The Therac-25 fried multiple people before the industry acknowledged enough culpability to trash a design that would never have been released if they had used proper design and engineering discipline in the first place. It was just a whole lot cheaper to let a developer check his own work and blame everyone else.

> I know it's unpopular to praise Tesla here, but in my view they deserve some credit for sitting pretty at SAE L2 while everyone else seems obsessed with quickly impressing investors with a half-baked rush to L3 or L4.

My concerns with Tesla are primarily about the safety implications of how it's automation capabilities get marketed, rather than the hardware itself… I also don't "get" the obsession over the "vision only" approach, which seems like an unwarranted compromise to me.

"Tech culture" intersecting with safety critical products and services indeed needs to be reckoned with.

There's the issue of whether people get complacent with sufficiently good assistive driving systems. (Many will.) Up to and including driving in circumstances they would not have otherwise trusted themselves to drive.

Of course, not that long ago, a fair number of people were looking forward to a near-future when they'd have a personal robo-taxi at their beck and call. And it's pretty clear that's not happening anytime soon.

You can't ever fully stop wilful abuse of technology by end users (humans keep looking down at their smartphones) but you can mitigate the problem of complacency with increasingly better human monitoring. IMHO Tesla should be restricting FSD to vehicles where the car can visually monitor the driver's attention.

Predictions of the future have always been poor, but ML/AI has thoroughly fucked up any prior intuitions we had around the rate of advancement. So many things progressing more rapidly than we thought possible, while others being an endless slog of local maxima after local maxima.

The local maxima associated with machine learning/deep learning (plus hardware acceleration) led a lot of people--even before generative AI--caused a lot of people to assume broader tasks couldn't be that hard. Especially given early successes that seemed pretty impressive. At one level, the state of self-driving cars is pretty impressive. On the other hand, it's nowhere ready to take little Sally to soccer practice by itself which is what a lot of people really wanted.

At this point, even some relative skeptics like Rodney Brooks are probably looking overly optimistic in terms of timelines.

I suspect that current approaches only take us so far and some other things from cognitive science and so forth will need to be pulled in.

> once driverless cars are good enough

Sure, but that once can be still pretty far away for general conditions.

Agreed, and it doesn't matter how far away it is. If it takes ten years, it takes ten years. There should be no cars without humans in the driver's seat until the statistics bear out a level of safety at least one order of magnitude greater than human drivers.

Cruise could already be an order of magnitude safer than a human driver. We have enough milage data on Cruise to guess that it's comparable to a human driver, but to be assured that it's at least an order of magnitude safer requires a lot more data.

And you can't get that data with a safety driver in the car. A safety driver should always override in emergency situations, whether necessary or not.

So what if a few pedestrians have to die along the way, the business model must not be disrupted.

But the 40,000 who die every year to human drivers are OK? We already know that Waymo is at least roughly comparable to a human driver.

We do not know that. We have some data about how they perform in idealized situations rather then general ones. And we have next to no independent data.

Also, we could lower amount of people who die to human drivers too and I am all for it. Speed limits, regulations about car design, higher driving age, better public transport, there is a lot that could be done.

Legislators are putting people like me at risk for the sake of innovation. And nobody cares since our demographic is so small. Its horrifying.

It is. I'm sorry.

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