I love the corpospeak. why say "crashed into" when you can use "made contact" which sounds futuristic and implies that your product belongs to an alien civilization?
this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2024
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By "made contact", it means that they "smashed".
it means that they "smashed".
So are we gonna have some baby robotaxi trucks driving around in a few month's time?
Now that's how you get a true generative ai.
You smash, you make "babies", babies are slightly different and maybe better.(probably worse)
Make contact with that like button!
Next they're going to add passive voice to further confuse the issue. "A pickup truck was made contact with by two vehicles..."
The company says the truck was being towed improperly
Shit happens on the road. It's still not a great idea to drive into it.
The company developed and validated a fix for its software to prevent similar incidents
So their plan is to fix one accident at a time..
Rules are written in blood. Once you figure out all the standard cases, you can only try and predict as many edge cases that you can think of. You can't make something fool proof because there will always be a greater fool that will come by.
Unexpected or not, it should do its best to stop or avoid the obstacle, not drive into it.
An autonomous vehicle shouldn't ever be able to actively drive forward into anything. It's basic collision detection that ought to brake the car here. If something is in the position the car wants to drive to, it simply shouldn't drive there. There's no reason to blame the obstacle for being towed incorrectly..
In this case it thought the vehicle had a different trajectory due to how it was improperly set up.
The car probably thought it wasn't going to hit it until it was too late and the trajectory calculation proved incorrect.
Every vehicle on the road is few moments away from crashing if we calculate that incorrectly. It doesn't matter if it knows its there.
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Just like Tesla! And people wonder why they are a hated company.
Honestly, I think only trial and error will let us get a proper autonomous car.
And I still think autonomous cars will save many more lives than it endangered once it become reliable.
But for now this is bound to happen...
To be clear, they still are responsible of these car and the safety of others. They didn't test properly.
They should be trying every edge case they can think about.
A large screen on the side of a truck ? What if a car is displayed on it ? Would the car sensor notice the difference?
A farmer dropped a hay bale on the road ? It got flattened by rain ? Does the car understand that this might not be safe to drive on or to brake on ?
There is hundreds of unique situations that they should be trying before an autonomous car gets even close to a public road.
But even if you try everything there will be mistakes and fatalities.
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So their plan is to fix one accident at a time…
Well how else would you do it?
You drive a car and can't quite figure out what is happening in front of you.
Do you:
- A: Turn up the music and plow right through.
- B: Slow down (potentially to a full stop) and assess the situation.
- C : Slow down, close your eyes and continue driving slowly into the obstacle
- D: Sound the horn and flash the lights
From the description offered in the article the car chose C, which is wrong.
Given the millions of global road deaths annually I think B is probably the least popular answer.
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Hmm, so it’s only designed to handle expected scenarios?
That’s not how driving works… at all. 😐
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The description of an unexpected/(impossible) orientation for an on road obstacle works as an excuse, right up to the point where you realize that the software should, explicitly, not run into anything at all. That’s got to be, like, the first law of (robotic) vehicle piloting.
It was just lucky that it happened twice as, otherwise, Alphabet likely would have shrugged it off as some unimportant, random event.
Billionaires get to alpha test their software on public roads and everyone is at risk.
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I didn't read it as them saying "therefore this isn't a problem," it was an explanation for why it happened. Think about human explanations for accidents: "they pulled out in front of me" "they stopped abruptly". Those don't make it ok that an accident happened either.
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I'm getting tired of implementing technology before it's finished and all the bugs are worked out. Driverless cars are still not ready for prime time yet. The same thing is happening currently with AI or companies are utilizing it without having any idea what it can do.
I'm against driverless cars, but I don't think this type of errors can be detected in a lab environment. It's just impossible to test with every single car model or real world situations that it will find in actual usage.
An optimal solution would be to have a backup driver with every car that keeps an eye on the road in case of software failure. But, of course, this isn't profitable, so they'd rather put lives at risk.
You're right there should be a minimum safety threshold before tech is deployed. Waymo has had pretty extensive testing (unlike say, Tesla). As I understand it their safety record is pretty good.
How many accidents have you had in your life? I've been responsible for a couple rear ends and I collided with a guard rail (no one ever injured). Ideally we want incidents per mile driven to be lower for these driverless cars than when people drive. Waymos have driven a lot of miles (and millions more in a virtual environment) and supposedly their number is better than human driving, but the question is if they've driven enough and in enough varied situations to really be an accurate stat.
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Why is an update called a recall?
Because Tesla was fixing significant safety issues without reporting it to the NHTSA in a way that they could track the problems and source of the issue. The two of them got into a pissing match, and the result is that now all OTA's are recalls. After this, the media realized that "recall" generates more views than "OTA", and here we are.
I think it's slightly more nuanced - not all OTAs are recalls, and not all recalls are OTAs (for Tesla). Depending on the issue (for Teslas), the solution may be pushed via an OTA in which case they "issue a recall" with a software update. They're actually going through this right now. For some other issues though, it's a hardware problem that an OTA won't fix so they issue a recall to repair the problem (ex: when the wiring harness for their cameras was fraying the cables).
This is 100% from the NHTSA shenanigans, though.
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aaaaand fuck this truck in particular.
After an investigation, Waymo found that its software had incorrectly predicted the future movements of the pickup truck due to “persistent orientation mismatch” between the towed vehicle and the one towing it.
Having worked at Waymo for a year troubleshooting daily builds of the software, this sounds to me like they may be trying to test riskier, "human" behaviors. Normally, the cars won't accelerate at all if the lidar detects an object in front of it, no matter what it thinks the object is or what direction it's moving in. So the fact that this failsafe was overridden somehow makes me think they're trying to add more "What would a human driver do in this situation?" options to the car's decision-making process. I'm guessing somebody added something along the lines of "assume the object will have started moving by the time you're closer to that position" and forgot to set a backup safety mechanism for the event that the object doesn't start moving.
I'm pretty sure the dev team also has safety checklists that they go through before pushing out any build, to make sure that every failsafe is accounted for, so that's a pretty major fuckup to have slipped through the cracks (if my theory is even close to accurate). But luckily, a very easily-fixed fuckup. They're lucky this situation was just "comically stupid" instead of "harrowing tragedy".
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That pickup truck was asking for it I tell ya. He was looking at me sideways, he was.
It said RAM om the side!
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"made contact" "towed improperly". What a pathetic excuse. Wasn't the entire point of self driving cars the ability to deal with unpredictable situations? The ones that happen all the time every day?
Considering the driving habits differ from town to town, the current approaches do not seem to be viable for the long term anyway.
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I still don't understand how these are allowed. One is not allowed to let a Tesla drive without being 100% in control and ready to take the wheel at all times, but these cars are allowed to drive around autonomously?
If I am driving my car, and I hit a pedestrian, they have legal recourse against me. What happens when it was an AI or a company or a car?
You have legal recourse against the owner of the car, presumably the company that is profiting from the taxi service.
You see these all the time in San Francisco. I'd imagine the vast majority of the time, there are no issues. It's just going to be big headlines whenever some accident does happen.
Nobody seems to care about the nearly 50,000 people dying every year from human-caused car accidents
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Do we have a fuck you in particular group yet?
In a blog post, Waymo has revealed that on December 11, 2023, one of its robotaxis collided with a backwards-facing pickup truck being towed ahead of it. The company says the truck was being towed improperly and was angled across a center turn lane and a traffic lane.
See? Waymo robotaxis don't just take you where you need to go, they also dispense swift road justice.
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They thought the truck was being driven by Sarah Conner.
https://sfstandard.com/2023/10/17/tech-layoffs-waymo-san-francisco-robotaxi/
I bet they were all QA.
Maybe it was a cybertruck and the super stealth design made it's signature very small.
It was in an orientation our devs didn't account for and we don't want liability.
"Towed improperly"
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