I always wonder if honking at a Waymo does anything. A Waymo stopped for a (very slow) pickup on a very busy one lane street near me, and it could have pulled out of traffic if it had gone about 100 feet further. The 50-ish year old lady behind it laid on her horn for about 30 seconds. Surreal experience, and I'm still not sure if her honking made a difference.
I like Waymos though. Uber is in trouble.
I still think that Google isn't capable of scaling a rideshare program because it sucks at interfacing with customers. I suspect that Uber's long-term strategy of "take the money out of investors' and drivers' pockets to capture the market until automation gets there" might still come to fruition (see Austin and Atlanta), just perhaps not with Uber's ownership of the technology.
On the other hand Google has been hard at work trying to make its way into cars via Android automotive so I totally see it resigning to just providing a reference sensor-suite and a car "Operating System" to manufacturers who want a turnkey smart-car with L3 self-driving
So before it was a 16yo in a driver's ed car. Now it's an 18yo with a license.
I'm gonna be so proud of them when it does something flagrantly illegal but any "decent driver who gets it" would have done in context.
Just to clarify, have you ridden in a Waymo? It didn't seem entirely clear if you just experienced living with Waymo or have ridden in it.
I tried it a few times in LA. What an amazing magical experience. I do agree with most of your assertions. It is just a super careful driver but it does not have the full common sense that a driver in a hectic city like LA has. Sometimes you gotta be more 'human' and that means having the intuition to discard the rules in the heat of the moment (ex. being conscious of how cyclists think instead of just blindly following the rules carefully, this is cultural and computers dont do 'culture').
Probably what will happen in the longer term is that rules of the road will be slightly different for AVs to allow for their different performance.
As do most of the ridesharing drivers I interact with nowadays, sadly.
The difference is that Waymo has a trajectory that is getting better while human rideshare drivers have a trajectory that is getting worse.
I think the theme of this extends to all areas where we are placing technology to make decisions, but also where no human is accountable for the decision.
There are a horde of bicyclists and pedestrians who disagree with you and are hoping that automated cars take over because humans are so terrible.
There are a horde of insurance companies who disagree with you and are waiting to throw money to prove their point.
When automated driving gets objectively better than humans, there will be a bunch of groups who actively benefit and will help push it forward.
This doesn’t seem to be happening. One, there are shockingly few fatalities. Two, we’ve sort of accepted the tradeoff.
Cruise was outrageous because it fucked up in a way a human never would. (More germane: GM doesn’t have Google’s cash flow.)
I spend a lot of time as a pedestrian in Austin, and they are far safer than your usual Austin driver, and they also follow the law more often.
I always accept them when I call an Uber as well, and it's been a similar experience as a passenger.
I kinda hate what the Tesla stuff has done, because it makes it easier to dismiss those who are moving more slowly and focusing on safety and trust.
However, like railroad safety is expensive heavily regulated, self driving car companies have the same issue.
Decentralized driving decentralizes risk.
so when I have my _own_ robot to do it, it'll be easy and cheap.
Sure, in theory. In practice, nobody is going to give up control on the basis that the machine is "slightly better than average". Those who consider the safety data when making their decision will demand a system that's just as good as the best human drivers in most aspects.
And speaking of Waymo, let's not forget that they only operate in a handful of places. Their safety data doesn't generalize outside of those areas.
Yeah, I'm curious in seeing how they function in environments that get snow.
Is there any saying that exists about overestimating stuff in the near term and long term but underestimating stuff in the midterm? Ie flying car dreams in the 50s etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...
Gates seems more calm and collected having gone through the trauma of almost losing his empire.
Musk is a loose cannon having never suffered the consequences of his actions (ie. early Gates and Jobs) and so he sometimes gets things right but will eventually crash and burn having not had the fortune of failing and maturing early on in his career(he is now past the midpoint of his career with not enough buffer to recover).
They are both dangerous in their own ways.
We still don't have flying cars 70 years later, and they don't look any more imminent than they did then. I think the lesson there is more "not every dream eventually gets made a reality".
"We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten."
I think about this quote a lot these days, especially while reading Hacker News. On one hand, AI doesn't seem to be having the productivity and economic impacts that were predicted, but on the other, LLMs are getting gold medals at the Math Olympiads. It's like the ground is shifting beneath our feet, but it's still too slow to be perceptible.
They've got testing facilities in Detroit ( https://mcity.umich.edu/what-we-do/mcity-test-facility/ ) ... but I want to see it work while it is snowing or after it has snowed in the upper midwest.
https://youtu.be/YvcfpO1k1fc?si=hONzbMEv22jvTLFS - has suggestions that they're starting testing.
If AI driving only works in California, New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas... that's not terribly useful for the rest of the country.
If you refer to rural areas, thats 1/7 of the population and ~10% of GDP. They can be tossed aside like they are in other avenues.
The city itself is relatively small. A vast majority of area population lives distributed across the MSA, and it can create hellish traffic. I remember growing up thinking 1+ hour commutes were just a fact of life for everyone commuting from the suburbs.
Not sure what car ownership looks like, and I haven’t been in years, but I’d imagine it’s still much more than just 20%
I said "less than 80% car ownership", not "80% do not own a car". Technically these are not mutually exclusive but I think you read it as the second one. I haven't really found much analysis about how public transit interfaces with self driving cars honestly.
Rain, Snow etc. are still challenges but needs a bold bet in a place that wants to show how futuristic it is. The components are in place (Waymo cars), what is needed is high enough labor cost to justify the adoption.
This is exactly what came to my mind also.