On self-driving, Waymo is playing chess while Tesla plays checkers
On self-driving, Waymo is playing chess while Tesla plays checkers
“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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
Yeah, I caught that… Obviously.
and regardless supercomputer is a rather relative term tbh
That was essentially my point. Keep up.
aswell
Never a word, my dude.
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.
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.
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.