Carl wants to live in the world where traffic is safe, no accidents happen, but wants AI that can drive in human-like aggressive manner. Carl's expectations are a bit too high, I'd say...
It’s mind blowing that even skilled software engineers were fooled into thinking that self driving cars were only months away. The hype was blinding.<p>The amount of complexity involved in a self driving car is unfathomable. They can’t even get the thing to work on simple trips in mega-sprawl Phoenix with perfect weather and solid lane markings. We are decades out, and maybe only if they ban human drivers.
Living in Phoenix for several years and working in Chandler (the headquarters for the self driving car division where my office was actually on the initial training route before they allowed passengers) I can say the cars suffer from being overly conservative. I don't think this is a bad thing for self driving cars, in contrast Ubers cars (before they were banned from the state for disabling collision detection and killing someone) drove aggressively. Ubers cars needed to be taken over to stop from hitting pedestrians crossing at intersections and continually drove at least 5mph above the speed limit.<p>In Phoenix everyone drives fast on the highway, but Waymo cars drive 5-10mph under the speed limit. There are some unprotected left turns across 4 lanes they may try but being conservative they crawl across and eventually get stuck in the middle. This is probably a good thing for now and as confidence with the engineering team on the hardware and software goes up it can likely be tuned.
I think a lot of people in this thread are underestimating the possibility of safety drivers going remote and how that could be a solution to these edge cases.<p>When making decisions or coming across strange situations the AI has a confidence level, and when that falls below a threshold it can notify a remote person to potentially handle the situation. Right now Waymo has problems merging on a freeway with asshole drivers... but what's the big deal? It's maybe 1 minute out of a 30 minute drive.<p>If you only need a human operator to take over the vehicle 2 minutes out of every hour of autonomous travel, then you could probably get by with 10 remote operators monitoring a fleet of 200 vehicles. That could translate into way better profit margins than any current ride-share service.
On a side note, I'd like to lament the dystopia of reading articles online, where every 4 paragraphs your attention is hijacked by a video ad. Fuck that. Fuck futurism.com.
If that's the entire list of shortcomings it sounds they re in pretty good shape. There are audiences for which this car is an essential, and hopefully drivers will adapt to robocars , just like horsecars adapted to autos.
I like to think of autonomous vehicles like trains rather than cars in the general sense. They can operate on pre-existing tracks that were previously unexploited. A lot of track exists out there, and as the technology gets better, they can utilize a higher percentage of what's available.
I like these pieces for tempering the hype around driverless cars.<p>But it's also true it is still early and the technology will improve.<p>I personally don't believe it will become as reliable as people think. The last percent are always the hardest — but to make a driverless car better than a human, they're crucial.<p>But who cares what I (or others) think? We shall find out the truth of the matter soon enough. I just hope whoever mispredicted will take a note of it and keep that in mind the next time they make a prediction.
It's interesting to consider how much money is required to validate this idea -- there are multiple companies, many investors, and focused engineers trying to solve this problem. Are those resources emotionally driven to a short-term outcome that is proving to be far away (how far, and can this push result in a non-linear jump somewhere?). What is the real hypothesis here that bridges the idea and valuation creation?
I'm only about halfway through, but what are the chances 'Carl' doesn't get identified through this story? It seems like it'd be very easy for them to cross check this story with ride history to figure out the person, especially since it's a closed beta kind of thing it sounds like.<p>What kind of consequences will 'Carl' face by speaking to the press about this? Do you just get dropped from the program or are their real consequences? (It doesn't sound like 'Carl' is a Google employee at least)
Off topic: Is it just me or is the font on this site completely unreadable? I had to copy and paste it into a text file so I could actually read what was written. It's like medium but 80x worse.
> it would seem Waymo programmed its autonomous vehicles to treat turn signals as an indicator that the car is about to execute a turn or merge, not an indicator that it is looking for the opportunity to do so.<p>Well, here's one, if not the issue... I do not know the precise wording of trafic Laws in each state, but in many if not all, turn signals should _not_ be used as "an indicator of opportunity".<p>Now, it is already difficult to build a law abiding autonomous car; expecting the car to also break the law in day-to-day cases (not just an emergency) will be downright impossible -- and I'm not even considering the media storm that would be created by a company saying "we program our cars to break the law all the time"...
Seemed like it fairly good from what I heard. It didn't crash which is the bar they are going for. Driving past a place not only is ok I'd be more than comfortable having the car do so. The issue opponents are going to have in the future is when waymo actually has a chance to go to the general public in one of these cities and doesn't crash. The number of riders will easily outstrip the people screaming. Just like the scooters they will leave for a while but the damage will have been done. There are no fans currently that depend on this but thats easily going to not be true.
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