> "the resulting congestion required law enforcement to manually manage intersections"
Does anyone know if a Waymo vehicle will actually respond to a LEO giving directions at a dark intersection, or if it will just disregard them in favour of treating it as a 4 way stop?
How is this mode not a standard part of their disaster recovery plan? Especially in sf and the bay area they need to assume an earthquake is going to take out a lot of infrastructure. Did they not take into account this would happen?
> While we successfully traversed more than 7,000 dark signals on Saturday, the outage created a concentrated spike in these requests. This created a backlog that, in some cases, led to response delays contributing to congestion on already-overwhelmed streets.
We established these confirmation protocols out of an abundance of caution during our early deployment, and we are now refining them to match our current scale. While this strategy was effective during smaller outages, we are now implementing fleet-wide updates that provide the Driver with specific power outage context, allowing it to navigate more decisively.
Sounds like it was and you’re not correctly understanding the complexity of running this at scale.
If the onboard software has detected an unusual situation it doesn't understand, moving may be a bad idea. Possible problems requiring a management decision include flooding, fires, earthquakes, riots, street parties, power outages, building collapses... Handling all that onboard is tough. For different situations, a nearby "safe place" to stop varies. The control center doesn't do remote driving, says Waymo. They provide hints, probably along the lines of "back out, turn around, and get out of this area", or "clear the intersection, then stop and unload your passenger".
Waymo didn't give much info. For example, is loss of contact with the control center a stop condition? After some number of seconds, probably. A car contacting the control center for assistance and not getting an answer is probably a stop condition.
Apparently here they overloaded the control center. That's an indication that this really is automated. There's not one person per car back at HQ; probably far fewer than that. That's good for scaling.
Seriously. People are outraged about the theoretical potential for human harm while there is a god damn constant death rate here that is 4x higher than every other western country.
I mean really. I’m a self driving skeptic exactly because our roads are inherently dangerous. I’ve been outraged at Cruise and Tesla for hiding their safety shortcomings and acting in bad faith.
Everything I’ve seen from Waymo has been exceptional… and I literally live in a damn neighborhood that lost power, and saw multiple stopped Waymos in the street.
They failed-safe, not perfect, definitely needs improvement, but safe. At the same time we have video of a Tesla blowing through a blacked out intersection, and I saw a damn Muni bus do the same thing, as well as a least a dozen cars do the same damn thing.
People need to be at least somewhat consistent in their arguments.
On the contrary, I would prefer HN detach all threads expressing "concern." That way we don't have to make a subjective call if a comment is "concern" or "concern trolling" at all - they are equally uninteresting and do not advance curiosity.
I suspected this. They were moving, but randomly to an observer. I’d seen about 2 out of maybe 20 stopped Waymos navigating around Arguello and Geary area in SF Saturday at 6PM. What was worse was that there was little to no connectivity service across all 3 main providers deeper in the power outage area as well - Spruce and Geary or west of Park Presidio (I have 2 phones, with Google Fi/T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon).
Interesting that some legacy safety/precaution code caused more timid and disruptive driving behavior than the current software route planner would've chosen on its own.
Do Waymo’s have Starlink or another satellite based provider backup? Otherwise, what do they if cell service goes down and they need to phone home for confirmation?
If Waymos "request a confirmation check", i.e. contact a remote human, they are not autonomous. Yet, even in this analysis of an event where Waymos severely disrupted traffic they maintain the "autonomous" label.
It is simply false advertising at this point.
EDIT: The brutal Waymo shill serial downvoting begins. If one delivers a dorky product that blocks traffic, redefining words and censoring opposition is the only option for success. We are at -4 and the car is still dorky!
People downvoting you may think that this is an uninteresting quibble: we may not find it very surprising that sometimes Waymo asks for human guidance, and we don't necessarily think "autonomous" is an all or nothing designator.
Definition in the Oxford dictionary: "Of, pertaining to, or characterized by autonomy; self-governing, independent; free of external influence or control."
Self-driving car advertisers like Musk or Waymo just want to co-opt this term because it sounds cool. The term also deliberately hides the fact that these vehicles surveil and track you.
EDIT: It is the full definition in the printed Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (which is a large two volume publication). It is understandable that morons downvote it.
Most things aren't absolutes. This is no exception. The vehicles can operate on their own the majority of the time. That is a form of autonomy, albeit incomplete.
You are subject to road signs, traffic, police directions, etc while driving. In the event of a natural disaster it seems feasible that you could end up in a situation where you don't know how you ought to proceed. So neither are you "free of external influence or control" in an absolute sense.
A human driver does not have to call a remote operator if the traffic lights are off.
This situation does not require a sophistic argument that we are not autonomous because we rely on the sun. If a child walks alone to school without asking for directions, it walks autonomously. If it has to call its parents or uses a GPS phone, it is not autonomous. This is really not that hard.
In this context, I think I prefer to use this definition from the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary: "(of a vehicle) that has the technology to drive itself without a person in control"
That is a sad state of affairs, I hope it does not make it into the printed edition.
The same applies to "autonomous drones", which are the most remote assisted machines imaginable.
But of course the advertising departments want to evoke an image of the Marlboro man saddling his horse rather than a GPS tracked, surveillance riddled, face scanning, remote assisted contraption.
Does anyone know if a Waymo vehicle will actually respond to a LEO giving directions at a dark intersection, or if it will just disregard them in favour of treating it as a 4 way stop?
Sounds like it was and you’re not correctly understanding the complexity of running this at scale.
Waymo didn't give much info. For example, is loss of contact with the control center a stop condition? After some number of seconds, probably. A car contacting the control center for assistance and not getting an answer is probably a stop condition. Apparently here they overloaded the control center. That's an indication that this really is automated. There's not one person per car back at HQ; probably far fewer than that. That's good for scaling.
It's approximately one 9/11 a month. And that's just the deaths.
Worldwide, 1.2m people die from vehicle accidents every year; car/motorcycle crashes are the leading cause of death for people aged 5-29 worldwide.
https://www.transportation.gov/NRSS/SafetyProblem
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-traffi...
I mean really. I’m a self driving skeptic exactly because our roads are inherently dangerous. I’ve been outraged at Cruise and Tesla for hiding their safety shortcomings and acting in bad faith.
Everything I’ve seen from Waymo has been exceptional… and I literally live in a damn neighborhood that lost power, and saw multiple stopped Waymos in the street.
They failed-safe, not perfect, definitely needs improvement, but safe. At the same time we have video of a Tesla blowing through a blacked out intersection, and I saw a damn Muni bus do the same thing, as well as a least a dozen cars do the same damn thing.
People need to be at least somewhat consistent in their arguments.
Harvesting outrage is about the only reliable function the internet seems to have at this point. You're not seeing enough of it?
That would be like every traffic incident ever? I don't think US has public cars or state-owned utilities.
I doubt they have more than that.
Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46342412
It is simply false advertising at this point.
EDIT: The brutal Waymo shill serial downvoting begins. If one delivers a dorky product that blocks traffic, redefining words and censoring opposition is the only option for success. We are at -4 and the car is still dorky!
https://brx-content.fullsight.org/site/binaries/content/asse...
Self-driving car advertisers like Musk or Waymo just want to co-opt this term because it sounds cool. The term also deliberately hides the fact that these vehicles surveil and track you.
EDIT: It is the full definition in the printed Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (which is a large two volume publication). It is understandable that morons downvote it.
You are subject to road signs, traffic, police directions, etc while driving. In the event of a natural disaster it seems feasible that you could end up in a situation where you don't know how you ought to proceed. So neither are you "free of external influence or control" in an absolute sense.
This situation does not require a sophistic argument that we are not autonomous because we rely on the sun. If a child walks alone to school without asking for directions, it walks autonomously. If it has to call its parents or uses a GPS phone, it is not autonomous. This is really not that hard.
I think it fits the state of affairs well-enough.
https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/eng...
The same applies to "autonomous drones", which are the most remote assisted machines imaginable.
But of course the advertising departments want to evoke an image of the Marlboro man saddling his horse rather than a GPS tracked, surveillance riddled, face scanning, remote assisted contraption.