That it's 70 remote assistance people for 3,000 cars is pretty good counter-evidence to the "they're not driverless, they're remote controlled" claims.
Although then it says they drive about 4m miles per week, which works out to 57,000 miles per active RA agent per week. A person driving ~25 mph on average 24/7 would do ~4000 miles in a week (and we can assume 24/7 here because they reported active agents, so we assume a team of ~3 people swapping out as driver in this hypothetical).
So that gives you a car/operator ratio of at least 14, and probably more since I bet the average speed is less than 25 mph.
Also, the average speed is way less than 25 mph, considering it may take 30 minutes to go 3-4 miles in city traffic.
An AV company can also tune how proactive vehicles are in reaching out to RA for confirmation, which is a balancing act between incident rate, stoppages, RA availability, and rider metrics. There's other ways to tune RA rate by also adjusting when and where the vehicles operate, which comes down to standard taxi fleet management tools (e.g. price and availability).
Waymo chooses a target that they're comfortable with and probably changes it every so often, but those numbers aren't the only possible targets and they're not necessarily well-correlated to the system's "true" capabilities (which are themselves difficult to understand).
I've mentioned to a friend that humans are monkeys, but which are capable of building an Internet. But maybe plenty of us are closer to monkeys...
> Our vehicle-to-RA connection is also as fast as the blink of an eye. Median one-way latency is approximately 150 milliseconds for U.S. based operations centers and 250 milliseconds for RA based abroad.
That's still not fast enough for remote control, but are they implying they only send the RAs screenshots, since sending video would take seconds, not milliseconds?
I wouldn't be surprised if actions required agreement between decisions by two independent RAs.
Their earlier blog post has screenshots (?) of the UI that the "fleet response" people have access to. It seems to be a video feed combined with yes/no questions, along with some top-down UI to direct where the vehicle should go.
That said, I would argue that their focus on one-way latency is misinformation meant to make the picture look rosier than it actually is. Round-trip latency is what matters here -- the video feed needs to get to the assistant, then the assistant needs to react, then their response needs to get back to the car. If one-way latency is 250ms, then round-trip latency would presumably be 500ms, which is a very long time in the context of driving. At highway speeds, you'd travel ~44 feet / 13 meters in that time.
Right, which is why the blog post is titled "Advice, not control ..." and goes to explain that they're not relying on the "remote assistance" people to make split second judgements.
Further the cars need to safely stop in an emergency without human intervention. There’s no way for the car to first notice a problem, then send a message to a call center which then routes to a human, and for that human to understand the situation, all fast enough to avoid a collision. Even 50ms is significant here let alone several seconds.
I'm just saying that "it avoids a collision" by not ramming into people or cars is table stakes and it makes us look incompetent if we tout it as a flagship feature.
Not failing due to a software or hardware issue is way more complicated than just usually working.
Avoids a collision is similarly way more difficult than just detecting a stopped car. What needs to happen when a car blows out a tire at speed isn’t just slam on the breaks for example. At scale cars need to adapt to the conditions and drive defensively not just watch what’s directly in front of them.
And latency to small towns in the middle of nowhere is not significantly better than latency to Philippines.
You can expect something in the ballpark of 70ms in both cases.
Well, more so than it already is.
A factory in the US* staffed entirely by humanoid robots has the same impact on US employment opportunities regardless of if the robots are controlled by AI in the sense of software or in case where the "Actually Indians" meme still applies.
It's just that in the latter case your "illegal aliens" who are "stealing our jobs" are managing to do so without actually crossing the border, making it very difficult to deport them, and denying them access suddenly becomes a freedom of speech issue.
* I'm in Europe, I don't think we'll be tolerating "new" "exciting" "opportunities" from Musk any time soon. I don't think China or Russia will be either. Or indeed more than half of the G20 nations. He'll be told to prove it, and get told "no" a lot because experiments based on his rhetoric and vision are no longer worth the downsides without solid proof both that it works as advertised and that he won't cut things off when he has a hissy fit.
Not nearly fast enough for real-time highway remote operation IMHO, but surprisingly fast. That's what I get for underestimating how fast light and electric fields can go.
Anyone who has experience with apps, permissions, or even basic reverse engineering or network activity monitoring would realize that this couldn't be true without someone having found evidence.
Yet even on HN you find die-hard believers that it's true. I think these stories tickle the conspiracy theorist part of some people's brains and they want to believe it's true. If it's true, it means they were smart enough to see through the facade unlike the other sheep in the world.
It's more than just that, there's also the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon, i.e. we talk about something and then notice it mysteriously suggested to us on YouTube or whatever. And then assume this was causal rather than coincidence.
I got that yesterday, though I can't even remember now what the video or the topic of discussion was.
I've pointed out that these vehicles are quickly become more prevalent, here and (especially) in China. To which the counter is that there plenty of Indonesians to go around.
I know Google and Amazon aren't the same company, but their incentives are.
E.g. 450,000 trips/week * 15 min/trip / 0.56 loaded:empty miles / (24760) ~= 1200.
If an airplane did not have a human inside the airplane and they only "dialed in" for extraordinary events, then yes I do think we'd call them pilotless.
Anyway Waymo, to my knowledge, doesn't use the terms "driverless" nor "autopilot." They claim that they are creating an artificial driver or that their cars are autonomous. There's something driving the car, it's just not a human driver, ergo it's not "driverless."
The aeronautic equivalent of Waymo is a fully autonomous UAV. A human might be needed to set high-level goals, but all of the actual flying/driving is done by the machine.
Takeoff is probably easier to automate than an emergency landing.
https://newatlas.com/aircraft/airbus-attol-autonomous-airlin... (2020)