Comment by scoofy
3 days ago
A fail-safe is EXACTLY blocking roads at intersections without power, not proceeding through intersections without power. It's much safer to be stopped than to keep going. I honestly wish the humans driving through blacked out intersections without slowing down in my neighborhood last night actually understood this.
It’s not a fail-safe. It’s a different failure mode. Jamming up traffic, including emergency traffic, creates systemic problems.
It’s a bit like designing an electronic lock that can’t be opened if the power goes out. If your recourse to exiting a dangerous situation becomes breaking the door, then the lock is unsafe.
Fail-safe means "in a situation where the function fails, fail in a way that doesn't cause injury" -> the cars didn't know how to proceed, so they stopped, with their lights on, in a way that any attentive driver could safely navigate... which is a failing safe.
The alternative here, is a protocol that obviously hasn't been tested. How on earth are you going to test a Waymo in blackout conditions? I would rather have them just stop, than hope they navigate those untested conditions with vulnerable pedestrians and vehicles acting unpredictable.
> Fail-safe means "in a situation where the function fails, fail in a way that doesn't cause injury"
In a very local sense, this is true. In terms of the traffic system, this can create a systemic problem if the stoppage causes a traffic jam that creates problems for emergency vehicles.
Thus it is a _different_ failure mode.
If someone stops in the middle of traffic because they’re lost, their GPS went out, or they realized that they’re unsafe to drive, we don’t celebrate that as the driver entering a fail-safe mode. We call that “bad judgment” and give them a ticket.
If it precipitates a larger problem where lives are lost, they may be in considerable legal or financial trouble.
I don’t see why we should treat Waymo any differently.
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Simulate them on a test course? There are absolutely places with street lights and everything that you could test something. Hell since they don’t need to work you can just have some put up in a parking lot to test with. Who cares.
You don’t need to wait for a city blackout to actually test this kind of scenario.
The thing still has cameras. And LIDAR. It should be fully capable of pulling over on its own safely. Why would not having a traffic light prevent that?
Humans are expected to negotiate this. The robots should be too. That’s part of driving. If the lights fail, the law tells you what you’re supposed to do. And it is not stop the intersection.
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An intersection without power is just a 4-way stop.
An intersection without power is supposed to be treated as a 4-way stop. An unfortunately high, nontrivial number of drivers last night were not following that rule.
And yet the humans managed.
Even at a normal four-way stop with stop signs people sometimes blow through it. The Waymo has to handle it.
That’s part of driving.
It can creep through at 3 miles an hour if it thinks that’s what’s safe. All it has to do is get out of the intersection.
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