I love how we've gone from "Taxis are gross and dirty, that's why I love Uber!" to"Ubers are gross and dirty, that's why I love Waymo!" in the span of 5 years.
What do you think comes next? These cars are literally unsupervised.
What do you think comes next? These cars are literally unsupervised.
Unsupervised in what sense? There's internal cameras that are periodically checked. Weight and seatbelt sensors that give alerts if a passenger is or puts objects in the drivers seat, or if too many individuals get in the car.
I'd be shocked if a similar or greater level of observability doesn't also exist outside the car.
I'd be curious to know how this monitoring scales over time.
https://www.forrester.com/blogs/no-amazon-isnt-killing-just-...
I’m not sure how you could make that work. People that eat Indian food step in and it might get set off, so people will cry racism. You drive next to a particular industrial plant, etc..
If not, what are you expecting to be prohibitive?
Unsupervised in the sense that there's no driver there to clean the car when it gets dirty. At the same time, presumably part of the odor of an uber comes from the driver, so that helps. I wonder if waymos roll down the window (weather permitting) between riders, to air it out. Might be dangerous at a red light, since people could throw stuff in or even dive in through open windows.
What do you think is more likely to get vandalized - a room with a human sitting in it, or a room with a camera watching it?
I worked as a house attendant in an upscale hotel for years. Let me tell you from experience: a shockingly high percentage of people trash and damage their rooms. Not the majority, but enough to keep staff busy every day.
Why do you think they need to? These cars go to a centralize location every night, I would assume, and cleaning at scale can happen. How often do you think an Uber driver cleans their car in comparison?
The main problem with Uber/taxi quality is that the responsibility for cleanliness is on individual drivers, with widely varying results as a natural outcome. In fact a lot of problems with Ubers and taxis is downstream from the ownership and responsibility model.
The advantage of something like Waymo is that the responsibility is now on Waymo itself.
Worth noting that this is a problem in other lines of business: it's harder to ensure quality in franchises vs. stores operated directly by the brand. The more independent parties you have in the mix the more incentives become misaligned and the fewer levers you have available to ensure compliance to some standard.
This also isn't impossible to solve with human drivers, because ultimately this isn't a technological problem but an organizational one. Livery car services where drivers are employees (as opposed to independent owner-operators contractors) can centralize cleaning and training, and have more means to ensure compliance to a standard.
The "downside" of such a model is that there are many more laws to ensure you can't shovel your own expenses onto the employee.
This sometimes leads to in-car vomiting.
There are also still smokers among us.
I assume there are sensors available suitable for Waymo taxis.
Not appealing for me personally.
But I'm completely with you on the unsupervised part. People doing all sorts of things back there that an ML might not identify. Now if they hire an army remotely to monitor, I guess that could scale because of wage disparities.
Quickly going through CCTV footage from a ride to catch "unusual things" takes much less time than driving. Even if somebody had to watch the entire ride at 1x speed and just one ride at a time, there's no need to do it when the car is idle or driving to pick up the next passenger. You can also hire a lot less watchers than you have drivers, because a surge in demand in one city can be serviced by watchers in many other cities. There's no need for night shifts either, you can make everybody work 9-to-5 in whatever timezone they're at.
This problem is orthogonal to selfdriving.
trash car (or don't)
report trashed car
ride for discount
I know, I know. We can dream.
For more see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
"We collect usage data that includes trip history, buttons or links you click on our mobile app, in-vehicle interfaces, wait times for our vehicles, and other actions you take with our products and services"
"We collect information about your location in a few different ways. When you take a trip, we collect the pickup and drop-off location and details about the vehicle’s route."
"We may also use your information to personalize services, advertisements, content, and features, communicate with you including marketing (which you can opt out of), service, and account messages, or communicate other information we think will be of interest to you "
"We will retain information we associate with your Waymo account, such as name, email and trip history, while your account remains active."
"Waymo will not disclose your personal information with a third party unless one of the following applies: ...
- We're involved in a merger, acquisition, reorganization or sale or transfer of some or all of our assets
- In some cases to help us tailor ads and offers to your interests as detailed in the U.S. state law requirements section
- Comply with any applicable law, regulation, legal process, or governmental request ... "
https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9184840#zippy=%2Cinf...
Public transport, hopefully.
Maybe if they re-invent trains or buses again
You joke, but I've heard more than one argument about how self-driving cars will drastically improve traffic because, for inter-city travel, they will be able to drive very close together on the highway in a long convoy, leaving almost no space between cars...
Leaving proper gaps (which next to nobody reading this will be familiar with!) allows for cars to cross, or even merge.
If you're driving long distance, you get the advantages of a train, but door-to-door, with no scheduling conflicts and no egregious stop times. If your destination is 5 minutes away, it's still a car.
Every car in a train-caravan is schlepping along its own engine, crumple zones, airbags....and with rubber tires...
...its frankly idiotic.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/d...
The future will be a combination of trains, a more extensive robotaxi network for the last mile, which can be cars or vans, and a much smaller percentage of personal vehicles compared to today. Buses as they are today will decline.