Comment by RationPhantoms
3 days ago
I will posit something that guides my own thinking about this; robotaxis will never drink and drive. I'll take whatever flavor of mistake they conjure over that. I can deal with stupidity, I cannot (and don't want to) deal with malice.
Many people don't drink and drive either. You can drive defensively, choose your own route.
Even on two lane roads: if an idiot overtakes into oncoming traffic there is usually just enough space for three vehicles next to each other. Can a Waymo move sharply to the right so there are two cars on each side with the overtaking idiot in the middle and all just fit on the road? I had to do that maneuver at least twice.
Can a Waymo prevent a carjacking when someone places traffic cones in front of it?
Can you open the Windows and get out if the thing decides to drive into a lake?
I don't know, currently defensive driving is the better option.
Its funny because (at least years ago) accidents would get posted on /r/idiotsincars , and like clockwork everyone would pile on the idiot in the car.
However sometimes the dashcam would be from a motorcyclist, and the video would get posted over in the motorcycle sub as well. There, no one would talk about the idiot, and everyone would shred the motorcyclist for poor defensive driving.
The takeaway is that most regular drivers think that they are totally powerless on the road, and have no ability to avert any situation arising from someone else.
Motorcyclists die if they don't learn this skill, so they tend to be pretty sharp defensive drivers.
> Many people don't drink and drive either. You can drive defensively, choose your own route.
Few people drive defensively. I try to, but I'm human: I get distracted. I sometimes forget to follow the rules that I know well. I have no clue what new rules might have been added/changed since I took drivers ed years ago. Just like everybody else.
I can't do anybody about the guy who tailgated me today until there was just barely enough of a gap to get around and then he swerved over, but one mistake on his part... At least I was in a newish car which would protect me, if it wasn't supposed to rain today I'd have been on my bike in that area...
> Can a Waymo prevent a carjacking when someone places traffic cones in front of it?
Yes, actually, that's an advantage of a Waymo over a regular car. I believe they have a perfect record against carjackings despite several theft attempts. The Waymo computer isn't easily intimidated at gunpoint.
What do regular drivers do during a carjacking? They get carjacked. There are about 30,000 incidents per year in the US.
The option that doesn't exist in America is to get the bus.
Before the pandemic I was commuting by bus and this meant an early start to the day, but not as early as what the bus driver had.
The bus had its own community, so I had my 'bus buddies' and the journey would always be quick because of the social aspect to it. The bus drivers knew the customers and their needs. What the bus drivers had that is absent in robotaxis is working class pride. Working class pride means a job well done, with certainly no drinking, looking at texts or navigating the route.
We had economy of scale, with dozens on the bus, about 80% occupancy. Getting a robotaxi every day would be too expensive for most of us on the bus, plus the traffic would be hell.
Getting the bus out the depot on a freezing cold winter morning was a challenge, with much to de-ice. Our bus drivers didn't dissapoint.
There were a couple of incidents, we had some tree hit the upper deck, taking out the upper 'windscreen'. We also had a car driver pull out on the bus, for his car to be cast aside like a toy. Again, our bus drivers stepped up and made sure everyone was okay.
Could the AI magic have prevented both incidents?
Maybe. But maybe not.
The elderly driver that pulled out on the bus should have been on the bus and not driving. As for the tree that 'pulled out on the bus', that was a highway maintenance issue.
There were other niceties about the bus, for example, thanking the driver. I am sure I always did that, and it always felt good to do so. If I was late and 'our' bus driver saw me running for the bus, he or she would wait. Another reason to be thankful.
At the time I thought I was reasonably well paid. However, our bus driver was on the same money as me, if not more. His or her salary stayed in the community, it wasn't as if Silicon Valley venture capital was leeching away what we all spent on bus fares.
One frustration of a bus is that you are stopping a lot to pick people up. Having wifi (or bus buddies or a good book) made that okay. However, it wasn't the scheduled bus stops that bothered me, it was the stops from 'traffic', as in the hordes of single occupancy cars. Inching forward is no fun at all, whether in a robotaxi or a bus. However, for the final stretch into town, we had a dedicated bus lane.
I think that a lot of human potential is wasted by people spending half their lives sat in traffic and robotaxis go some way to solve that. However, give me the bus, with a driver that has working class pride, any day.
You lost me here. It is too much virtue signalling to bear. Did we also "lose working class pride" when factories became (largely) automated? We did not.
Perhaps there is a better way to phrase it? One that does not sound so weird.
Still, in the case of the robotaxi (or robobus :)), the pride can potentialy be felt by the people who are responsible for their autonomous programming, right?
Though obviously not when they drive into floods en masse. :)
Sounds to me that you have never worked in your life. Virtue signalling, my arse!
"No DUI" is a big part of why even the current, flawed and markedly subhuman, self-driving cars casually beat human drivers on road safety.
A self-driving car AI pays less attention than a human driver at his best. It isn't as aware as a human driver at his best. It doesn't have the spatial reasoning, the intuitive understanding of physics and road dynamics that matches that of a human driver at his best.
Human drivers still fall behind statistically, because human drivers are rarely at their best. And the worst of human drivers? It's really, really bad.
AI is flawed, but a car autopilot doesn't get behind the wheel after 3 beers and a pill of benadryl. It doesn't get tired, doesn't get impaired, doesn't lose sleep or succumb to road rage. It always performs the same.
Until it gets a software update, that is. The road performance of an average car AI only ever goes up. I don't think that's true for human drivers, frankly.
Yep, on the money.
It's not too dissimilar from the Figure demo that was done on X/Twitter recently. Everyone was pointing out what a lackluster demo that was and here I was thinking the total opposite, it worked for 8 hours with no sexual harassment training, KPIs, management oversight, breaks or co-worker chatting. That's the worst job it'll likely ever do. We just witnessed the floor of it's capabilities.
My hope/vision with robotic cars is we make cities more human-friendly/accessible. I want revitalized/bustling downtowns of bikes/bodies and not, what some cities are, which are glorified parking lots. I want to be less alone as an american. I would a physical sense of community injected back into my veins.
> Until it gets a software update, that is. The road performance of an average car AI only ever goes up.
Aren't there stories about certain car companies where their self-driving-at-some-level cars got worse after an OTA update?
Tesla's self driving will pull over if it detects the human driver has fallen asleep.
> "No DUI" is a big part of why even the current, flawed and markedly subhuman, self-driving cars casually beat human drivers on road safety.
Citation needed. I have never seen independent analysis of the data. You might be right - I've even suggested similar before. However you might be wrong.