Comment by ACCount37
3 days ago
The "responsible adults" know that chasing perfection gets you nowhere fast. A part of growing up is learning to put up with "good enough".
A car that only fails in a road conditions edge case is good enough for the vast majority of cases. You accept that, and issue a manual override for when that edge case pops up. Then you add that edge case to your training sets. Then the issue never comes up again.
If you think that "flooded roadway" is a case that's handled gracefully by every human driver, and it's the AI that's uniquely prone to failure, I have news for you.
Multiple cities with uncommonly flooded roadways get surges of "water flood engine damage" cars at the repair shops in the wake of extreme weather events. Human drivers underestimate just how flooded a roadway is, try to push through it, and have their car choke, die, and float there, waiting for some good samarithan with a snorkel and a long rope to pull it out. Then someone gets to play the fun game of "is this ICE toast or will it run once you get the water out".
Yeah, while the "average" person might be able to gracefully handle these situations there's still a lot of people who do things that to me seem obviously silly and avoidable.
Locally there's a bridge that is regularly hit by human drivers. A bridge! Not a rare weather pattern, not some temporary and surprising change in conditions. A physical structure that has literally been there for over 100 years. The approach has numerous warnings, flashing lights, and swinging poles that will hit your vehicle and alert you that you're too high to clear the underpass if you continue. And yet... it's so common that there's websites and instagram tags and all manner of things to track and laugh at the people that continue to do it anyway.
FYI, 59 days since the last incident apparently: https://howmanydayssincemontaguestreetbridgehasbeenhit.com
> The "responsible adults" know that chasing perfection gets you nowhere fast.
I wouldn't call being prepared for very common life threatening events experienced by drivers "chasing perfection". The people with stalled cars are the lucky ones. Most of the drowning deaths in floods come from people who drove right into them.
I'll give them credit for over-correcting before deciding to pull out until they figure out how to handle floods even though it left people stranded on the road because of a small harmless puddle. Better to do that than take the risk and drive into a dangerous situation. Even still, this is something they should have fully tested before the cars ever hit a public street.
I wouldn't call floods "very common"
"Floods are the most common and widespread of all weather-related natural disasters...Flooding occurs in every U.S. state and territory, and is a threat experienced anywhere in the world that receives rain." (https://www.nssl.noaa.gov/education/svrwx101/floods/)
If they were going to plan for any kind of dangerous weather, flooding should have been very high up on that list.
People tend to take flash flood warnings way less seriously than tornado or severe thunderstorm warnings. I guess that people think of dangerous floods as being something much more obvious and dramatic than a street puddle just one foot deep, but flooding is no joke.
"Turn Around Don't Drown" PSA (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eI6mIlHKrVY)
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Any given person might only experience a single flooded roadway or two in their lifetime. But that doesn't mean that there aren't tens of thousands of people exposed to flooded roadways every year. Something can be individually uncommon and yet frequent in absolute terms.
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Maybe not in California but anywhere like Atlanta that gets 50 inches of rain a year has quite a few flooded roadways.
The false equivalence of emotional maturity with being able to chase production is really telling.
When people think of autonomous driving as a solved problem it evokes something very specific. It means vehicles can drive on their own, without guidance. Until you solve AVs you don’t have a claim to present whatever you actually have as such. There’s no “good enough” for AVs, you’ve either solved them or you haven’t.
Floods might be an edge case in the Bay Area, but if you're trying to drive along the Gulf of Mexico it's probably something you're going to want to plan for. I'm not sure that adding an override will help by the time your car is submerged in six feet of water.
> You accept that, and issue a manual override for when that edge case pops up. Then you add that edge case to your training sets. Then the issue never comes up again.
This mindset seems a bit dubious when you're dealing with moving vehicles. Sure flooding is pretty harmless, but how are you going to add a "manual override" for the car failing to stop for something unexpected when driving at highway speeds? Or a bunch of other plausible scenarios, who knows what the developers have thought of or not in their quest for "not chasing perfection". That the issue never comes up again seems like a pretty weak consolation for the guy that got hit.
Well its not that simple. In the same way that throwing an LLM into a process will always have a risk of blowing up spectacularly.
In this case it failed open. It didnt recognize that it was in an edge case (which itself is an edge case). So what are you proposing to be the solution to that? If the car itself does not recognize that its in an abnormal situation that needs intervention then how do you intervene?
His point is that humans are prone to the same error. The flooded engine damage doesn't come from humans recognising the danger of a flooded road and choosing not to attempt it.
Im responding to the implication that you "have to be ok with good enough" and that somehow this will be a mostly fine autonomous experience with this
> A car that only fails in a road conditions edge case is good enough for the vast majority of cases. You accept that, and issue a manual override for when that edge case pops up
But its just like LLMs. They will never be perfect, and so if you arent actively paying attention and steering the behavior then there is always a risk of spectacular failure. Because if you arent paying attention to "needing to [apply a] manual override" then all of a sudden the AI has `rm -rf /` and you had it in "bypass permissions" mode.
No one cares about flooded engines that Google has to pay for. They care about a taxi that might kill them.
You have to compare this to the number of taxi and Uber drivers who will drive into moving water with passengers on board while a passenger is telling them to stop.
That isn’t being a "responsible adult." That is an irresponsible adult shifting the blame and calling it practical.
> A part of growing up is learning to put up with "good enough".
"I feel content with good enough in this case." - quote from child whose body got folded in half by a Tesla
Your growing up and adulthood sounds a lot like settling for mediocrity from those who push shit on us without asking if we ever wanted it. Floods aren't a special edge case, they happen all the time. The people making these are so stupid and blind to reality they didn't think about the most basic 101 case of "what if it isn't a perfectly dry and sunny California day" because thinking isn't on the to-do list for these people. This shit is ass. Get it off the streets.
What a silly comment. Waymo is operating in San Francisco, Houston, and Orlando. All of those get lots of rain. Specifically, SF gets lots of "small rain" and Houston and Orlando are more likely to get short bursts of heavy rain.
The irony of people who are against self-driving cars for safety reasons: They are already much safer than regular drivers -- accidents and deaths per millions of kilometers driven. Also, the software is continuously improving. Are regular drivers also continuously improving at the same rate? If anything, they probably get modestly better from 20s into middle age (40s/50s), then begin to decline with age.
Well, they've clearly done a good job of learning how to deal with the weather in those places, so it's unfortunate that Florida never has any severe weather that can cause flooding for them to have learned from before rolling out to Atlanta
... which is different from the child whose body got folded in half by someone looking at their phone?
I think "good enough" ends up being okay. I _like_ driving. I would do manual mode often still just because I enjoy it. But I'd be completely fine with the option of autopilot in good conditions. Reality is that 99% of the time, my commute is boring and in good conditions. I don't need a self driving mode that can handle a blizzard when I'm in stop and go traffic and it's 20c outside.
This is much harder for Waymo since there isn't as easy of a manual override mode... But in my car? rip it.
Luckily I basically already have it. Adaptive cruise covers most of my cases well enough, but I wouldn't mind something with a bit more control (turning, etc.)
I'm waiting for independent analysis of the data. According to those with access to data - but also with reason to lie with statistics - waymo is enough better overall than humans that I'm not comfortable with any human driving on any public road. If you like to drive then do it on a private track/course where your mistakes won't kill other people.
Of course the real data is hidden from me and nobody I trust to be independent has seen it and is talking.
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> ... which is different from the child whose body got folded in half by someone looking at their phone?
Fair enough, we can apply the same standard: just like the humans who drive like that aren't allowed to drive anymore, the autonomous software that drove the car like this also should be forbidden from operating vehicles. I'm sure you agree that a vehicle operator that's this reckless shouldn't be allowed back on the road just for taking a few classes or being taught a few specific techniques like "killing children or drowning passengers is bad!", so we'll be much safer going forward by just keeping off the road indefinitely. It's for the children, of course!
If a child is "folded in half" by someone looking at their phone, no one accepts that as "good enough", and there is a direct action: the driver responsible will lose their licence and likely end up in prison. If it happens often enough, laws are changed.
What happens when a Tesla does the same thing? Besides them lying and hiding information I mean. What remedial action is taken to reduce that specific risk from reoccurring?
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It's funny how people take this perspective for Waymo, but when it comes to Tesla FSD, they are much less forgiving, even though I think Tesla's performance is at least as good, if not better.
I'd say the same about Tesla FSD. In fact, I favor Tesla's AI-centric approach in general.