That ~1000 drivers on the road are all better trained on what to do in the next power outage is incredible.
There will always be unexpected events and mistakes made on the roads. Continual improvement that is locked in algorithmically across the entire fleet is way better than any individual driver's learning / training / behaviorior changes.
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.
Can't just program it to be all "when confused copy others" because it will invariably violate the letter of the law and people will screech. So they pick the legally safe but obviously not effective option, have it behave like a teenager on day 1 of drivers ed and basically freeze up. Of course that most certainly does not scale whatsoever, but it covers their asses so it's what they gotta do.
But over here in the reality of the world that we have to interact that, this concept of perfect rule-following will never, ever happen -- unless something first manages to wipe the last of the stain of humanity off of the earth's face.
Imagine I created a magic bracelet that could reduce bicycling related deaths and injuries from 130,000 a year to 70,000. A great win for humans! The catch is that everyone would need to wear it, even people that do not ride bikes, and those 70,000 deaths and injuries would be randomly distributed among the entire population. Would you wear it?
Safe vs Unsafe isn’t as simple as who gets a 10/10 on the closed course test. Humans are more predictable than random chance would allow, and often even when drunk or distracted. I can’t count how many times I’ve seen someone wobbling on the road and knew to stay back. You can also often tell when someone might yank over into your lane based on them flying up in the other lane, getting just in front of you in that lane then wiggling a bit, clearly waiting for the first chance to pull in front of you and take off. There are lots of other little ‘tells’ that, if you’re a defensive driver, have avoided countless accidents.
Being a prudent defensive driver goes out the window when the perfect speed limit adhering driver next to you goes to straight to -NaN when someone drives past it with Christmas lights on their car, or the sun glares off oversized chrome rims, or an odd shaped vehicle doesn’t match “vehicle” in the database, or, or, or.
* I’m very much not saying that the example I mentioned above is reason enough, I’m saying that I’m not sure enough thought is being put into how many more pages I could go on, and I’m just some schmuck that worked for some number of years on the underlying technology - not the guy watching it fail in imaginative ways on the road.
Something said earlier that really overestimated what’s happening: it doesn’t get smarter, it gets another “if” statement.
That's just what getting smarter is though. I mean, we want to see the human "if" as somehow better than the machine "if" due an obvious bias, but mechanically, what's the difference?
https://old.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1pem9ep/hm...