Right now it's the most exciting tourist attraction in San Francisco.
The first few minutes are pretty terrifying... but the ride is so smooth that you very quickly settle into it. It's absolutely worth experiencing.
It was so cool to see them diving around.
Interestingly, when I showed the clips to some of my senior family members, they didn't seem interested at all. I think they couldn't comprehend what was going on, even after I explained.
Their (several independent trials) reaction was similar to showing them some AI-generated image of something which clearly can't exist. It was so absurd that it was just filtered out with a comment "yeah, yeah - nice car".
What happens to the developers/manufacturers of a driverless car that kills a passenger or a pedestrian?
> how do you overcome the slight powerless feeling
There is no such alignment on a driverless car, plane or boat. No engineer or executive will get punished in case the car gets double parked, let alone if it runs over a pedestrian crossing the street.
I agree that it's a slightly more vulnerable feeling than driving myself, but I still feel far less vulnerable than taking public transit or walking. And when you factor in risk of a crash, it's also safer than Uber or driving myself.
I don't think Waymos will often be targeted by criminals for anything besides vandalism, with 20+ cameras and potential remote monitors the risk:reward ratio is much worse than other options.
This sounds incredibly dystopian. What hellhole do you live? What are the dangers you have from taking public transit?
I still ride the bus/trolley/tram/subway, especially when the streets are busy, but late at night I'll opt for a Waymo, depending on the circumstance.
https://www.tokyoweekender.com/japan-life/news-and-opinion/w...
> What hellhole do you live?
Do a search for women and public transit. This isn't just Japan, or Europe, or the USA. It's a real problem being discussed. Honestly, I feel like this is fairly common knowledge at this point.
The US I guess.
I do think you need to be aware of the environment generally and, while there is always some risk (anywhere), you can alleviate a lot of it.
I'm very familiar with a large northeast metropolitan complex and there are places/times I wouldn't go but lots of places/times I would.
ADDED: Probably unfair. Some are willing to tradeoff safety for culture etc. so long as they can essentially buy their way out of some of the potentially uncomfortable urban aspects (which is presumably what's being discussed here). This is a perfectly understandable attitude--as it probably was in NYC in the 80s or so.
Then of course there's differences in opinion on actual risk. I don't generally feel comfortable around variables i don't understand. I grew up around addicts and found them to be very unpredictable, and so my reaction may be biased. Nonetheless it's true for me personally.
edit: Conversely though, i think humans have a tendency to get used to nearly anything. We then can downplay the risks of things we've become accustomed to. Even if the risk of violence is low, risk of general unpleasant interactions would be enough to make me avoid the bus/etc.
I was in Detroit for an event a couple years ago. A number of us didn't really feel safe after dark and there were a couple incidents that other attendees experienced. Part of it was the general reputation but we also just didn't really know.
Whereas I'll walk down 5th avenue in Manhattan at two in the morning with no real concerns though I'm being more alert than if it were noon.
As you say, it also wouldn't take many bus/subway incidents to make me go: "That's a nope from now on."
Also, because you may have family and ties to the area.
Relatively recently (maybe 5 years ago), a work colleague got an AirBnB "bargain" on a house in the Roxbury area of Boston for a group of people for a conference and told me there was a shooting down the street. I was, like, IDIOT, you might have asked a local why it might have been such a bargain. (To be clear I'm not sure how objectively dangerous it was but I wouldn't have been staying there and walking at night.)
Not sure most of Manhattan was unsafe generally but you were certainly careful. Not sure that accidentally taking the express subway up to 125th street was actually a guarantee to walking out to a hail of bullets but you were definitely careful to a degree you probably aren't today. I never a foot in Brooklyn until much later. And I remember a somewhat scary drive from LaGuardia to the Port Authority late at night along 42nd Street because of some confusion around schedules.
I don't think this is unique to SF. Even in very safe cities there's surely a higher chance of being mugged walking down a dark street than riding in a 5000 lbs vehicle with tinted windows.
Please account for the danger of being struck by other people riding in 5000 lb vehicles with tinted windows!
I think they seem good now because you're not riding with randos. Although, randos can still trivially stop the car. But this model is unsustainable, eventually you will be riding with randos.
If you ride the subway at night, with almost nobody on it, you get the same effect.
>It's hard to coordinate, say, 20 people to rob you (one guy).
It's unsafe when there's lots of people, it's unsafe when there's no people. Basically they're saying it's unsafe no matter what, which just isn't true. Subway systems are an everyday part of life in many cities.
They are also claiming that Waymo will have compulsory ride sharing for some reason, and therefore wont be safe (I dont agree with this part)
The situation you want to avoid on a train or car is being trapped in a shared space with only a crazy person.
It might also be that Waymo and co have decided that the additional risk involved in putting strangers in a car together without a driver to keep an eye on them isn't worth taking on.
Are there other cities where public transit is much more dangerous? I want to give GP the benefit of the doubt, but part of me wonders if this is an irrational fear fueled by media.
I think perception and experience (direct or indirect) makes a bigger difference than just "where do you live". Some people might be scared by the media, sure, but we have both been personally assaulted several times on the train, and many more times simply freaked out and scared by weird people, and we know lots of others who have had similar experiences or worse, so based on that, no I don't think it's an irrational fear for everyone.
If you have ever been trapped in a box with an angry psychotic, you would want to avoid it.
It’s also predictable. Uber and Lyft have been so desperate for drivers they’ve accepted people who drive dangerously, cancel at the last minute or plain can’t follow driving directions. You skip that with Waymo.
I expect this to go away over time as people realize driverless =\= witnessless
You can quickly call for human assistance on one of the big support buttons.
Watching a couple hundred of them try to get out of a parking lot was comical.
Is that a common thing? I wouldn't be surprised honestly. I heard of the traffic cone thing but not this.
I hope very strenuously that the implication is not that you would run over people who are blocking you if you were in control of the car.
I would rather take many lives than be subjected to this sort of injury
Right now those robocars are widely and openly hated by many people who live in San Francisco
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1gi8cyf/wa...
I bet if you did polling the vast majority of people would either like them or be ambivalent.
We're certainly in the thick of it right now. Recent high profile ones: LLMs, port automation, other types of AI for media production, I'm sure the list goes on and on.
The reason I'm asking is not to advocate for technology, but rather to understand if there have been successful efforts in the past to stifle tech. If there haven't been noteworthy ones, then my gut says we ought to be focused on how to get those people to not be left behind (so so incredibly difficult) rather than preserving something solely for the sake of people making money off of it. Like I said, so easy to say, but incredibly difficult to achieve in practice. Not sure there are great examples of people not being left behind.
Don't worry. Once the novelty has worn off, the cost will probably be on par with Uber and Lyft with real human drivers --- if not higher.
The acquisition, maintenance and supervision costs for the self driving vehicles will probably consume any difference in cost.
I'm not sure there's ever this magical transition where a car you use a few times a day (and is specific to your needs) is ever replaced by an on-demand service to a significantly greater degree than today.
>Some say that we have imprisoned thousands, but the reality is that we have freed millions.
Waymo is very much like this. It inconveniences a few people, but it also saves a lot more from accidents, or even worse.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
Also, you are not accounting for externalities. Get the suburbanites to pay for all the extra costs they incur on the roads, power/water/waste distribution, healthcare costs incurred by air and environmental pollution from all the cement for roads and parking lots... Quickly they will change their tune and will be willing to become "city dwellers".
Light rail has all the disadvantages of a bus and all the disadvantages of a train, if you’re gonna build rail you might as well spend a bit extra to build elevated, you’re gonna have to fight knuckle draggers in court anyways
The only exception to this was Japan's transit system. But even then, a bunch of fellow Americans were essentially chimping out, playing music at high volume and screaming obnoxiously. I have to say that I was pretty ashamed of being American that day.
I think self driving will be a massive, massive boost to human productivity as it gets better, but we shouldn't use it as an excuse not to continue pursuing other means of transport. It doesn't really fix any of the scaling problems with car transport regardless.
But the investors are not saying that, and they won't be around when everyone else gets stuck with the bill in the future.
The key point of the video is less about AV itself, but the idea of betting on car-centric infrastructure. Did you see the part where Jason talks about the municipalities justifying cuts to investments in public transit because "people can just go ahead and take a uber anyway?"
Municipalities using it as an excuse to malinvest seems like a bit of a red herring to me - how many places actually did that? And honestly in some low-population towns it might well be the most sensible solution.
Any large city though needs alternatives, and the fact that cars are kinda crap at mass transportation still isn't something that has hit most US cities even without self driving cars. They plow billions into expensive, inefficient highway infrastructure anyway.
That is reversing the logic a bit. The reason that low-population towns don't get to develop their own robust economy is very correlated to its lack of in public transit and fast connections to larger centers.
Politicians in the US keep talking about high speed rail and crazy projects, but a (relatively) easier to way to revitalize flyover states would be if they had "regular" passenger rail to connect with each other. Each station would become an opportunity to develop a local economic center, and each center that starts to grow would mean an opportunity for thousands of people to leave the big expensive coastal cities.
I'm as excited as you about self driving cars, but the vehicles are essentially driven remotely, maybe not by live video feed but nonetheless by remote operators, in the sense that matters. It is more tourist attraction than it is end-all be-all of technology, which was very deflating to find out.
All I am really saying Simon is that you are a highly educated guy: adopt a more nuanced take on this. According to the people I know who work in this space and are not trying to raise money for autonomous vehicles, and according to many journalists, there is a lot of consensus that Waymo has adopted a remote driving scheme that is working, and perhaps that is why they are operating a taxi service and others are not. It isn't clear if that growth story, as great as it is, will help them raise enough money to invent truly autonomous vehicles.
Another interesting statistic here is that Waymo apparently has only 700 vehicles in its fleet [1]. That would require only 700 supervisors.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/alphab...
As I said, theoretically viable if all employees were supervisors. But they're not.
However, I don't think this kind of math helps much in actually proving (or disproving) that. We don't know how many of the employees are supervisors. For all we know, Waymo hires dozens of external mechanical turks per vehicle and uses a simple majority voting algorithm to ensure safety. Unlikely, or even ridiculous, but apart from Waymo's press releases, and the accidental legislation report [1], there is little hard evidence.
[1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/auto...
> For years, companies like Waymo (owned by Alphabet, Google’s parent company) and Cruise (owned by General Motors) avoided any mention of the remote assistance they provided their self-driving cars.
> That is just how things work in Silicon Valley. By creating the illusion of complete autonomy...
https://archive.is/iPKWQ#selection-719.0-719.483
> While Zoox and other companies have started to reveal how humans intervene to help driverless cars, none of the companies have disclosed how many remote-assistance technicians they employ or how much it all costs. Zoox’s command center holds about three dozen people who oversee what appears to be a small number of driverless cars — two in Foster City and several more in Las Vegas — as well as a fleet of about 200 test cars that each still have a driver behind the steering wheel.
> ...the [Cruise] cars were supported by about 1.5 workers per vehicle
> Waymo and Cruise declined to comment for this story.
I don't know what to say. It's an "illusion of complete autonomy."
The energy of these replies is the same as, "When a parent does a kid's homework, it isn't cheating." The difference is we still have no idea if the child will grow up into an adult, and it's not guaranteed that Waymo will be the one to crack real autonomy, even if it looks that way today. Indeed the longer it takes them the more likely it's not going to be them.
I don't know dude. Simple question: is it fully autonomous? No. If you step inside the vehicle, does it feel that way? Yes. That is nearly the definition of an illusion.
Yes. If you understood how remote assistance works, you'd agree.
There are no autonomous systems that doesn't require some form on human help. The question is can the vehicle do all the driving tasks and when it does fail, it does so gracefully and achieves "minimal risk condition" on its own (because, of course, no one can intervene remotely in real time). Waymo certainly does this.
Just like there's a world of difference between doing your kid's homework, which is viewed as unacceptable, and helping your kid with their homework, which is viewed as good parenting.
Listen to yourself...
Anyway, you're getting it. I guess we have to be there and see for ourselves how the parent was involved in the kid's homework, right? If Waymo has nothing to hide, by all means, let in the press to their remote driving center. What are they going to do, steal the source code?
This isn't remotely feasible unless you think Waymo has invented new concepts in physics.
And then you say "an illusion complete autonomy."
Not being completely autonomous 100% of the time doesn't mean it's essentially driven remotely. Driven remotely means driven remotely. Not someone interjecting at one point on a ride, which seems to be what the articles are referring to.
So, pick a lane, you can't have both. Either someone is driving the vehicle, or there are support staff capable of intervening at points. And frankly, I would be horrified to think the second one wasn't happening. That would be moronic.
Edit: Oh, I see you doing a lot of goal post shifting in other comments replying to this. Good luck, driven remotely.
If there is more than 1.0 people running the vehicle, that's not good either.
I like Waymo! I just think that they aren't the only ones to figure out autonomous driving, and the crazy thing is that maybe they are specifically not trying to figure out autonomous driving, and that is maybe why only they have found success?
You do realize that your only source for this claim is an article that only mentions Waymo twice: once to say that Waymo had no comment, and once to blatantly lie about the remote operators being some kind of a shocking revelation rather than something they'd been open about for years.
This isn't complicated though. The car phones home for many reasons to have a human being make a decision, using whatever non-steering wheel interface, but an interface nonetheless. That is not autonomous driving. The Waymo is somewhere between a human driver and a people mover at SFO.
It is certainly a scientific triumph that the car can distill the decisions or whatever. We don't know what kind of decisions humans are being asked to make or how frequently. We can make some metrics, like how many people per vehicle or whatever, but I'm not an expert. I'm not going to be able to fart out a metric. I don't really trust a company that needs a bajillion dollars in capital to achieve its goals on its metrics, but of course, I would invest in Waymo - I would invest in all the self driving car companies, because if that's my job and I like making money, that's the best strategy!
So many questions that people can pose, many metrics, they do not get to the core of the meaning of autonomous driving. One of the strongest analogies I've heard is that someone was comparing Waymo's remote driving to Google Maps. Here's the thing - would you be as excited about Google Maps as a technology if there were a human being planning the journeys and sending them to you? Very different science.
I'm not sure why this is so controversial. I am really excited about Waymo and autonomous vehicles. It's more that the reality is closer to tourist attraction than triumph of science.
> the vehicles do not depend on remote operators to avoid crashing or hurting people
Then why do they have any remote operators at all? Don't tell me, to resolve rare problems or whatever, or other speculation. I mean strategically or intellectually, surely, the simple answer is that the cars are not capable of day to day navigation using only computer-made decisions 100% of the time. That isn't controversial. We don't have visibility into specifically what kinds of decisions humans are making, so you shouldn't make such strong absolute statements, but it stands to reason that considering how essential everyone in autonomous vehicles is saying human-in-the-loop operations are, the purpose is pretty important. I would assume that an important purpose is safety! This isn't complicated!
Waymo could clear this all up in an afternoon. Let a journalist visit their remote operations center, and show them a screenshot of the interface. Zoox did! It doesn't take a genius to understand that the illusion and excitement of autonomous driving is so important to their perception of being ahead, Waymo isn't going to do that.
I think the reality is that their remote operations are better than everyone else's, not necessarily the autonomous parts of their driving, and that's why they're operating a taxi service and Cruise isn't anymore.
Maybe the secret to all of this is very effective remote operations. That would also be a really big deal.
I mean, I don't know for sure what exact tasks they do and what exact capabilities they have. If I did know for sure, I wouldn't tell. But given you're doing nothing but speculating, demanding me to not speculate seems unreasonable.
So, let's speculate, but still be more concrete than "resolve rare problems". Let's say that a Waymo can't plot a path it believes is safe, for whatever reason. There could be hundreds of different reasons for that. Maybe it doesn't think there's enough room to get through somewhere. Maybe it can't identify an object. Maybe a sensor stopped returning data. Maybe it's surrounded by an angry mob of luddites looking to torch the car. Maybe the passenger isn't leaving the car at the end of the trip, because they're black-out drunk.
The car can't proceed on its own in these cases. If moving, it'll stop safely, and wait for the human operator to resolve the situation. Maybe they'll annotate the map, or give the car a hint on a possible route, or tell the car to hang tight and it'll be picked up by a service crew (while they order the passenger a replacement car), or route the car with the uncooperative passenger to a {hub,hospital,police station}. In none of these cases is the alternative to a remote operator "to crash or harm people", which you claimed. It's that the car won't move.
The reason the car will stop when it needs help is that a remote human simply can't resolve a hazard in time. Communications aren't reliable enough, the latency is too high, and it's unlikely that a remote operator would have enough context to make a safety critical decision in a split second.
If you knew from the start the cars are not being driven remotely, why claim there's a "remote driver"? If you knew this wasn't realtime remote driving, why claim the remote operation is safety critical?
> I'm not sure why this is so controversial.
Well, you're making an extraordinary statement and providing no evidence for it. Like, literally your only source was about a different company. And when called out on it, you move the goal posts, or pretend that words mean what you want them to mean. That kind of thing is catnip to internet forum posters.
> the technician can send the car a new route to follow around the construction zone
"Fleet response and the Waymo Driver primarily communicate through questions and answers. For example, suppose a Waymo AV approaches a construction site with an atypical cone configuration indicating a lane shift or close. In that case, the Waymo Driver might contact a fleet response agent to confirm which lane the cones intend to close."