On self-driving, Waymo is playing chess while Tesla plays checkers

https://lemmy.world/post/15700968

On self-driving, Waymo is playing chess while Tesla plays checkers - Lemmy.World

So the article repeats, several times, “waymo relies on remote operators”. I don’t think the author knows what “self-driving” means.

“self-driving”

Someone else, forreal - driving

The author is very well aware of this dilemma, in fact that topic is the center of his article, and he is making some good points about why real autonomous driving might still take a long time until achieved.

Besides that the cars are constantly getting around without a designated driver. For the technology and for the industry that is a huge breakthrough.

I’m generally the one defending Tesla in these threads but on Waymo’s defence; the remote operators aren’t actually controlling the car. Instead when faced with a challenging situation the car “calls home” for assistance basically asking a human to take a look at the situation and help it to decide what to do. This might be a car partially blocking the lane of traffic cones placed in a weird manner so the car justs asks for assurance that it’s okay to proceed. In the most difficult situations the remote operator can suggest a route for the vehicle to take but the decision on what to do is ultimately on the vehicle itself.

The author addresses this.

He notes Tesla drivers are expected to be able to intervene at any time. Both companies rely on human intervention. But his argument is Tesla doesn’t have the infrastructure to learn from all its data with the accuracy necessary to account for edge cases, which are mortally important for safety.

Tesla, per the author, will need to go through exactly the staging Waymo is doing to move to driverless, but is years behind. That’s the argument.

I’m making a prediction right now that real self driving will eventually rely on people from impoverished countries remotely operating the cars of wealthier countries. Sort of like how AI training data is combed through.
Yeah Waymo has been silently ticking away over here for years. On the east side they are all over the place. It will take longer to get to freeway speeds but I think Waymo’s approach is far safer. But fuck Google too
Both are risking the lives and safety of the non-consenting public as they beta test 2-ton vehicles on public streets. Damn them both.

They may not be perfect yet, but if their track record is safer than a human driver they aren’t any worse than any of the other assholes on the road.

Millions of human drivers are risking the lives and safety of the non-consenting public, too, but we aren’t advocating for stronger driving tests to keep bad drivers off the road. We’re just bitching about someone else trying to solve the problem because it isn’t a perfect solution on day 1.

Their track record isn’t safer than a human driver… because their system is a mechanical turk.

If their track record is better it’s because it’s a record at a much lower scale, under more controlled conditions, and kept by companies with a vested interest in it appearing good. If Boeing can hide flaws in flying vehicles carrying hundreds of people per trip I think these companies can hide flaws in cars.

we aren’t advocating for stronger driving tests

Why aren’t you? Wouldn’t that be the most logical answer?

My country has had a very bad traffic safety record, among the worst in the EU, and that was one of the things we used to improve things, along with harsher consequences.

There’s also another solution, reducing people’s need to drive. Public transportation could be improved by a fraction of the money that goes into these self-driving endeavors.

Just adding “AI” to something may look cool and even make sense at small scale but ultimately completely fail in real life. “Sometimes knives kill people, let’s put AI in knives that will retract the blade instead of cutting someone”. Does that sound plausible too?

I wonder what you then think about people who drive after heavily drinking or taking drugs. To be honest, I have more faith in technology than in humans.

Not to mention that self driving can probably solve some other problems too, like traffic jams caused by erratic driving behavior of humans, etc.

If you have vehicle to vehicle communication, it is possible to adapt the speed of all the vehicles on the street to avoid them being stuck in a traffic jam.

Driving while inebriated is illegal, self driving is not.

Traffics jams and erreactic behaviour could be fixed if everyone is in a self driving car, but at that point it woild be far more energy effecient, environmentally friendly and cheaper for society to build electrified transit instead.

If you prioritize the street so that only self driving cars are on it and they need wireless communications to function, how do other road users like cyclists and pedeatrians safely use the street?

Self driving cars are not here to make your life better, they are here to make a handful of people rich.

I tend to disagree here. For example if you have vehicle to vehicle standardized communications, vehicles can communicate between themselves the location of cyclists, some road obstacles, etc. generally making the roads safer and reducing the number of fatalities.

Yes, they will make some people more rich, but is this a legitimate reason to obstruct technological advancements? I am sure people were thinking the same way at the cusp of electrification, or automation of some factories, where machines were augmenting the human labor and in the process making those people redundant.

If we think the same way we should never abandon coal power plants and mines because miners might lose their job, right?

There are greener, more energy effecient and more socially fair ways to get the same results than selling everybody a high tech steel box.
What do those options matter if nobody is developing them and they only work in dense cities? You might as well be arguing for Star Trek-like transporter technology here.

This is literally the only way we’ll ever get self-driving cars. You have to test them in real life. Simulations and tests tracks can only take you so far. Yeah it’ll probably cost the lifes of some number of people but this will be greatly outnumbered by the amount of lives saved when the technology actually starts working as intented. It’s not like human driven vehicles are exactly safe for pedestrians either.

Also, when a self-driving vehicle fails it almost always means it ends up getting stuck somewhere or blocking the road. It’s extremely rare for it to cause an accident, though that does happen aswell.

I don’t think public deaths is a valid cost for creating self driving cars. We could be builidng safer and more effecient transportation systems. Some billionaire is going to make even more money because they were allowed to use the general public and city streets as a testing ground for their product. This is not fair to the family or the people who are injured or killed by self driving cars.

There are currently 80+ people dying every single day just in the US alone because we don’t have self-driving cars. Not developing that technology is just as much of a choise to let people die than going forward with it. I’d argue it’s the moral thing to do. People are awful at driving. As a fan of cars I like to go sit by the freeway watching them passing by several times a week and the number of people driving 120kph while staring at their phones is mind boggling.

Not only that but virtually all of those vehicles are going to be electric as well so that also means less people dying because of air pollution. Then there’s also the fact that it’ll bring down the cost of taxies immensely as well as allowing private individuals to let their vehicle go do ride sharing for the day instead of sitting on the parking lot of their work place unused. There’s just too many upsides to it. Also it’s not like passengers getting killed by rogue self-driving vehicles is a particularly common occurance despite the technology still being at it’s infancy. This is the worst they’re ever going to be.

The same problem could be fixed with electrified transit and walkability. Transit would also be even more environmentally friendly.

Plus we could still develop self driving cars but do a lot more testing before we set the public as the guinea pigs to see if they are safe.

Id also argue that we cannot claim this is the worst self driving will get since self driving cars are only used in a few areas right now.

Like I said; there’s only so much you can test on a closed track. At some point you must start doing that in the real world. Pedestrians getting killed by experimental self-driving vehicles is not an actual issue we’re dealing with right now but more like a theoretical possibility of what could happen in the future. There are only a couple of such incidents recorded ever. That’s not a good enough reason to not continue with it.

What I mean by them now being the worst they’ll ever be is the self-driving technology itself. It’s constantly improving and the trend is towards better. The technology we have right now is the worst it’s ever going to be.

Yeah it’ll probably cost the lifes of some number of people

Easy to say when those values doesn’t include yours or anyone you love/care about.

How could anyone know that? It just as well might.

It’s a fallacy to think we can build a perfect world where all bad things can be avoided. With all new technology comes downsides. We’re already losing 80+ a day in the US alone because we don’t have self driving cars. It’s far more likely for someone close to me to get killed by a human driver.

So you’d rather more people die in avoidable traffic accidents because we weren’t allowed to develop this technology?
I’d rather have people avoiding using cars at all, adopting mass transit solutions instead.
Great that’s admirable, but that isn’t going to happen because it doesn’t work for most people and there is no political capital to make it happen, so what then?
And Cruise is playing bumper cars
Elon ripped out the LiDAR, I don’t have any faith at all in Tesla’s FSD.
But the self driving taxi fleet is coming anytime now /s

Elon ripped out the LiDAR

No he didn’t…He never even installed it in the first place.

I had to look this up, but you’re mostly right. They never really did use LiDAR. They did use other types of radar, which were removed or disabled. In any case, they (Elon) asserted that neither radar nor LiDAR was really necessary.

However, that was mostly a couple years ago. In the past month or two they actually have begun buying up tons of LiDAR.

Also, they were sued over FSD in court and their lawyers are now arguing that customers should’ve known that cars without LiDAR are not capable of reliable FSD.

Humans can drive just fine without lidar aswell. Road infrastructure is designed for vision. The car not being able to see is not the issue. It’s teaching the car to understand what it sees and how to deal with it. Lidar doesn’t help you solve this issue.
Unlike human eyes Tesla’s inconveniently do not come with a supercomputer installed that is able to interpret the optical data reliably. With the compute power we have available Radar based navigation is the only one that produces reliably safe results.
Atleast Model S and X with hardware 4 do have radars in them.
Huh, guess they came around in the end then.

It depends on your definition of “super computer”, it used to be any computer with performance over 1 gigaflop, which today would probably include most smart phones and the built in car computer in the Tesla.

But regardless of semantics, I think your point holds, humans are a special case and computers can’t do that yet.

Bro he was talking about your brain And there is no supercomputer on earth able to even approach it, and regardless supercomputer is a rather relative term tbh

Bro he was talking about your brain

Yeah, I caught that… Obviously.

and regardless supercomputer is a rather relative term tbh

That was essentially my point. Keep up.

Except we don’t have reliable radar navigation, what are you smoking? Are you just making things up you think should be true?

aswell

Never a word, my dude.

I’ll try to remember that!
I’m starting to get the feeling that “X is playing chess while Y is playing checkers” is an indicator species for a terrible take.
Ha, I just posted this as well. It should really be chess vs tictactoe or something.
Much like everytime you see “nothing burger”

It really is an insult for checkers as a game. It is a common misconception that it’s simple. The game has surprising amount of depth, and the saying “x is playing chess while y is playing checkers” should really die.

X is playing chess while Y is playing tictactoe would be a better analogy.

I usually take the chess/checkers idiom to be more like “the left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing” Not that one is smart and one is dumb, but that they’re going in completely different directions and playing by different rules.
Hmm, maybe I’ve learned the meaning wrong. English isn’t my first language :)
No, you have the meaning right.

Chess has roughly 10^44 positions. Checkers has roughly 10^20.

That means under that metric, chess is roughly 24 orders of magnitude more complex as checkers.

Tic tac toe has roughly 10^3 positions, or 17 orders of magnitude simpler than checkers.

In other words, the complexity gap between chess and checkers is larger than the gap between checkers and tic tac toe.

Agree. Checkers has been solved, Tic tac toe has been solved on xkcd. Chess has not been solved
Tic-Tac-Toe

xkcd

Maybe the should compare playing chess with playing Go.

The number of legal board positions in Go has been calculated to be approximately 2.1×10^170, which is far greater than the number of atoms in the observable universe, which is estimated to be on the order of 10^80.

My point is that checkers actually still is very mich complex. Tictactoe is not and every board position can reasonably be managed by a human.

With checkers, that is unfeasable. That’s why I am of the opinion that checkers is unfairly treated as “the simple game” when for humans it is far from simple.

Are you saying Teslas are simple?
I just watched a video of one of these going down the wrong side of the road yesterday
Maybe they accidentally outsourced one of the remote drivers from the UK
Google En Passat
Jesus Fucking Christ what are you fucking stupid? Read the god damn pinned mod comment on every post on r/chessbegginers, read the god damn wiki, read the god damn info button that pops up on chess.c0m, here’s a thought just google it your god damn self. What do you think you’re the first person in fucking history to experience this “weird pawn move?” You must be fucking stupid because it was only invented back in 1561. But I’m sure you thought “oh wow I know chess.c0m is a company valued in the hundreds of millions but I’m sure me, 100 ELO shit tier chess beginner, has found a bug in their program.” It boggles my god damn mind that you just blindly post your stupid fucking questions on reddit without trying to research them first. Because you must be the first person in fucking history to ever experience a problem, and logically reddit, the source of all fucking factual information, is the only god damn place you can look for an answer. So here’s a fucking thought the next time you’re about to make a god damn post stop and google e-n p-a-s-s-a-n-t.
Lol. Google en passat