Lessons from the PG&E outage

I often see humans drivers being confused with the police officers gesturing more and more until the person figures it out.

Waymo said they normally handle traffic light outages as 4-way stops, but sometimes call home for help - perhaps if they detect someone in the intersection directing traffic ?

Makes you wonder in general how these cars are designed to handle police directing traffic.

They do follow hand signals from police. There are many videos documenting the behaviour. Here is one from waymo: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/03/scaling-waymo-one-safely-acro...

Look for the embed next to the text saying “The Waymo Driver recently interpreting a police officer’s hand signals in a Los Angeles intersection.”

Or here is a video observing the behaviour in the wild: https://youtu.be/3Qk_QhG5whw?si=GCBBNJqB22GRvxk1

Do you want confirmation about something more specific?

From my understanding the reason the Waymos didn't handle this was because humans were breaking traffic rules and going when they shouldn't have been. If most humans navigated it correctly, then waynos would have handled this better.

I mean really. I’m a self driving skeptic exactly because our roads are inherently dangerous. I’ve been outraged at Cruise and Tesla for hiding their safety shortcomings and acting in bad faith.

Everything I’ve seen from Waymo has been exceptional… and I literally live in a damn neighborhood that lost power, and saw multiple stopped Waymos in the street.

They failed-safe, not perfect, definitely needs improvement, but safe. At the same time we have video of a Tesla blowing through a blacked out intersection, and I saw a damn Muni bus do the same thing, as well as a least a dozen cars do the same damn thing.

People need to be at least somewhat consistent in their arguments.

Also, that still doesn't excuse Waymo blocking roads. These are two different, independent problems. More people die in care crashes than they do in plane crashes but that doesn't mean we should be replacing all cars by planes either.

Imagine that when smartphones were first coming out they could only function with recent battery-tech breakthroughs. Mass-adoptions was pretty quick, but there was scattered reporting that a host of usage patterns could cause the battery to heat up and explode, injuring or killing the user and everyone in a 5-10ft radius.

Now, the smartphone is a pretty darn useful device and rapidly changes how lots of businesses, physical and digital, operate. Some are pushing for bans on public usage of this new battery technology until significant safety improvements can be made. Others argue that it's too late, we're too dependent on smartphones and banning their public use would cause more harm than good. Random explosions continue for decades. The batteries become safer, but also smartphone adoption reaches saturation. 40,000 people die in random smartphone explosions every year in the US.

The spontaneous explosions become so common and normalized that just about everyone knows someone who got caught up in one, a dead friend of a friend, at least. The prevailing attitude is that more education about what settings on a phone shouldn't be turned on together is the only solution. If only people would remember, consistently, every time, to turn on airplane mode before putting the phone in a pocket. Every death is the fault of someone not paying sufficient attention and noticing that the way they were sitting was pressing the camera button through their pants. Every phone user knows that that sort of recklessness can cause the phone to explode!

You as an engineer know how people interact with the software you deploy, right? You know that regardless of education, a significant portion of your users are going to misunderstand how to do something, get themselves in a weird state, tap without thinking. What if every instance in your logs of a user doing something strange or thoughtless was correlated with the potential for injury? You'd pull your software from the market, right? Not auto-makers. They fundamentally cannot reckon with the fact that mass adoption of their product means mass death. Institutionally incapable.

The only responsible thing to do is to limit automobile use to those with extensive training and greatly reduce volume. The US needs blue collar jobs anyway, so why not start up some wide-scale mass-transit projects? It's all a matter of political will, of believing that positive change is possible, and that's sorely lacking.

We all know we can die when we drive poorly or ignore shocks and tires. But we don't like the idea of dying because of someone else.

The fact this backlog created issues indicates that it's perhaps Waymo that doesn't understand the complexity of running at that scale, because their systems got overwhelmed.

Almost certainly no - you don’t want the vehicle to enter a tunnel, then stop half way through due to a lack of cell signal.

Rather, areas where signal dropouts are common would be made into no-go areas for route planning purposes.