This article makes the further error of assuming “AI” is required for self-driving cars, rather than just a shitload of code.
Waymo is doing better than almost everyone else, a testament to their skill and their rigor, but they are still a long distance away from truly autonomous vehicles. The temptation is to say "well, they are so close, I'm sure they'll finish up the niggling details", but the reality is that the stuff they are failing at are some of the hardest remaining problems and will probably require at least as much work as they've put in already, if not significantly more, to tackle. I think we'll end up with self-driving cars eventually but probably not on a time scale of within the next 5-10 years, more likely it'll take that long or longer for the technology to reach maturity and then yet another decade plus for it to start seeing practical application.
I am willing to assume that waymo/Tesla etc have found the holy Grail, and made a driverless car safer than the average current human driver on the road. I'm not convinced that we should still allow these driverless cars on the road with no human backups. Not because of expectations or liability, but because the benchmark is wrong. We should compare them to a human assisted by the same driverless technology being used passively to prevent accidents. And it's not clear if a driverless car with no human backup is safer than a human assisted by the same technology.
This is the sad realization I had about brain-computer interfaces towards the end of my research. 99.9% is NOT good enough when the stakes are life and death and the factors within events that the environment throws at you are basically independent and continuous.
At least with self driving cars we can enforce some hard boundaries. In BCIs implementing boundaries is tantamount to denying the user of their free will.
see
>A select group of Arizonans has been shuttling around the Phoenix area in self-driving cars for the past year, providing insight into the future of the technology. http://ktar.com/story/2105890/waymo-early-rider-program-prov...
Nobody knows because it has yet to happen. We have all seen demos and studies but that doesn't convince anyone not involved in the tech. Cars will be capable of driving themselves when I see one, sans humans, ask to merge in front of me on the highway. It will happen when I see one navigate the lineup to the ferry I take every week. It will happen when I see one accurately obey hand signals from a human directing traffic. Not youtube vids. It will happen when I see it with my own eyes. Just like electric cars, we will have to see them on the roads playing the game we all play every day. Until that tipping point, driverless remains a myth that happens in a faraway place.
So put them on the road. Let's give it a try. Maybe it works. Maybe it doesn't and people die and they sue. That's been part of driving since day one. Roll the dice. I'm sick of the endless debates.
I've been driving next to these cars for the past 7 years. A number of my friends & former coworkers have ridden in them; a couple of them work on them. They've stopped for me at pedestrian crosswalks. I've gotten stuck behind them, driving 25mph on El Camino. I've waved them on to make a left in front of me (I'm still not entirely sure how they do that, but I think that if they detect that the driver at the intersection is stopped and has not gone within any reasonable time period, they creep out and eventually go if no movement is detected). I saw one last week attempt to switch lanes, find that the car behind it had sped up and it was no longer safe to make the lane change, turn off its blinker, pull ahead in its own lane, and then make the lane change safely several cars up.
They are on the road, and they work pretty well. I trust them a lot more than cars that say "Student Driver Onboard", or even the average Californian driver.
Well I'd certainly hope that there is a high level of confidence that they don't kill people BEFORE they're put on the road with other people.
So it's all a numbers game. What's acceptable, and what we can improve on.
I’m not saying I want the highways to be a Wild West for self driving cars, but it’s worth admitting it would probably accelerate the pace of innovation.
Don't. Cost isn't stopping people today from ridesharing. Carpooling won't become cool just because there is no driver, in fact I could see it becoming less cool as you will be much more alone with strangers. Many people today would be uncomfortable on a bus at night without a third party present (ie the driver, or at least many other strangers).
Think about all the extra traffic from autodriver cars doing jobs that today are too expensive. And the double-commute possibility. Your car takes you to work, drives itself home to park/recharge, then drives back to pick you up at the end of the day. Any 2-way trip could become 4-way, doubling the per-trip traffic. Or, rather than pay for parking while you shop downtown, you ask your car to drive around in circles until you are ready to go home.
> than the average sober, careful and experienced human driver
But ultimately we do accept the fatality rates caused by all drivers and not just the good ones as a cost of having individual transportation. If we didn't only teetotalers would be allowed to operate cars to remove one risk factor. And we also accept the risk of inexperienced drivers because we have to teach them eventually, the same reasoning can be applied to autonomous cars (just substitute teaching with data gathering)
The total distance driven also does not just depend on technology alone but on urban planning. AVs may change that dramatically over time.
> But ultimately we do accept the fatility rates caused by all drivers and not just the good ones as a cost of having individual transportation. If we didn't only teetotalers would be allowed to operate cars to remove one risk factor. And we also accept the risk of inexperienced drivers because we have to teach them eventually, the same reasoning can be applied to autonomous cars (just substitute teaching with data gathering)
We don't accept the fatality rates caused by all drivers; we confiscate the licenses of or jail bad drivers on a regular basis, and we certainly don't permit drivers being taught to operate commercially. Driver accountability for accidents is part of the social contract that permits individual transportation despite its cost; an corollary of that is that the accident rate is higher than we believe it should be, and that some degree of negligence is involved in the current level of accidents which it would seem unreasonable to exonerate corporations from if they were to replicate them using software. And on a purely practical basis, if you estimate SDV safety based on narrowly beating the mean accident rate across all drivers in tests, and then early commercial adoption tends to be replacing experienced commercial drivers who drive the most miles with the fewest incidents first, you're certainly going to push that accident rate up in the short run even without additional miles driven.
Uber could be skewing statistics in similar ways.
Anyway, this is all handwavy speculation. What I'm trying to get at is that the overton window for AV behavior may be surprisingly large, especially if they exhibit their worst behavior in the learning years when the fleets are still small. For some metrics possibly even larger than that for humans.
Everyone else performs a tradeoff along multiple axes including price, convenience and safety. Not needing a driver, freeing up time and lowering prices increase utility which could even justify a slight increase in risk. But even if we don't want to increase risk then a self-driving system still only has to be as good as humans on average to result in no net-increase of deaths per passenger mile while still increasing overall utility.
And more simply, it is silly to expect the maximum possible value to be the minimum requirement.
If the software is in active control pretty much everything that goes into that is different from software that is deciding if and when to emergency brake.
To put it another way, a self-driving system will become safer than human drivers, not because it knows how/when to emergency brake really well, but because it won’t have to emergency brake as frequently as a human does.
Jesus... Let's kill people because you're sick of the debate on whether self driving cars will work.
Waymo estimates about 50 trips per day will be served per vehicle. At that rate, 80k robotaxis is enough to displace most of the taxi/rideshare services in the southwestern United States, though I'm not expecting to see all of them on the roads until 2022 or so. Waymo has a ton of work ahead of them. Mapping and validating in the ~100 square mile area of Chandler has taken them about 18 months so far, and supposedly they are on the verge of a commercial launch. Every city they hope to deploy in has differing signage, differing driving habits, and many funky intersections and road anomalies that need specific attention.
Why?
I see comments like this constantly. But does anyone ever do even a basic spreadsheet to explain the unit economics of this argument?
Low skilled people who can drive are pretty cheap and plentiful. Even if self-driving tech is flawless (spoiler: it's not and won't be soon) it still only replaces part of their responsibilities. Someone will still have to clean the cars for example. Presumably there will be some required level of human monitoring, etc.
Conversely, capital and highly reliable technology isn't free. You can calculate pretty easily the rate at which it's profitable to substitute technology for labor, this is a trade-off we've literally been making for centuries.
One one side you have plentiful cheap low skilled labor. On the other you have lasers, fast computers, graphics cards, cameras, and the associated programming inspection and maintenance costs.
Why do we think the latter side is going to be cheaper in anything remotely like the near term?
A company deploying large mostly-homogenous autonomous fleets may be able to benefit from:
- we probably don't need to tip AVs
- economies of scale on obtaining vehicles, fuel, maintenance, and cleaning
- tuning maintenance/cleaning schedules across a fleet towards keeping vehicles in service for longer
- may be able to perform cleaning/maintenance during off-hours, vs owners who'll often have to trade
working hours to do these tasks
- autonomous systems may drive (and be tuned towards) in ways that also help preserve long-term vehicle
value and minimize costs
- lower insurance, legal, and PR costs if they outperform human drivers, don't molest/murder
passengers, etc.
- minimizing costs around acquiring and managing a human workforce
- there are probably many small ways to optimize the positioning and functioning of an AV fleet that
just won't work with a large contractor fleet
To give an example, my favorite coffee shop is about 7 minutes (+wait) from my apartment by car either way, and around 18-26 minutes (+wait) by bus (shorter there, longer back). Without a ride pass and with tip, it's probably around $7-8 to Uber this one way, vs. $1.25 for the bus.
At this price, I'll usually only Uber if heat or rain make getting to and from the bus miserable. I have a ride pass atm that knocks this down to around $6-7 with tip, which makes me marginally more likely to take Uber, but it isn't my default. I took the bus this past Sunday morning, planning to get some open source work done, but I'd forgotten my laptop wasn't in my bag. The time/sweat cost of the bus round trip and the money cost of the Uber round trip were high enough that I just sat and read a book instead.
I'm not sure exactly where, but somewhere between ~$2-5 total, I'd probably default to taking Uber both ways. Down at the low end of that range, I even would've gone back for the forgotten laptop.
The number of hours per day the car needs cleaning will be drastically lower than the hours it needs driving.
Yes, that cost will be offset by the cost of the extra hardware, but that can be amortized over tens (possibly hundreds) of thousands of miles. Likewise, the investment in software (programmers) will eat into profits, but once again, you can spread that cost out over hundreds of thousands or millions of cars. Besides, an awful lot of the latter is a sunk cost at this point.
That's a weird thought to have. Humans need on the order of ~15K a year in the US. On the other hand, even an ultra high end SDC computer costs only around ~12K in production and much, much less to actually make since Waymo will no doubt use their own TPUs. Lasers are cheap, compact and efficient fiber lasers. Cameras are mass produced in immense volume and are dirt cheap for very high quality. The only other factor is software development costs which is mostly a fixed cost.
Rental car companies show how few people it takes to maintain a very large fleet of vehicles and it will take even fewer if they can drive themselves (an autonomous car can go through a wash on its own, charge itself, show up at a detailing station on demand, etc).
Does that number reflect an analysis of the cost of the actual human work of driving the car only, or is that just the number for average actual remittances from Uber to the driver?
If so it includes assumption of capital risks, auto depreciation, gas, tire wear, broken glass, vandalism and cleaning, traffic tickets, maintenance, towing, and every other expense of physically delivering the ride.
Getting rid of the human driver only saves real money on driving labor. The payments to drivers have much more to them.
Because, other than inspection and maintenance costs, everything on your list has been getting much cheaper really quickly for a long time.
A truck still needs to be able to drive in cities, and if you figure out how to automate all the other thing a trucker does you can replace 3 million of them. Big whoop. Robotaxis stand to challenge the economics of personal vehicle ownership, the potential market is many orders of magnitude larger.
That's plausible and incremental. No cleaning problems, no homeless people living in them, no need for remote monitoring, a far simpler liability and insurance situation, and so on.
My assumption is we'll start talking seriously about robotaxis on the day this scenario is practical and battle tested. The idea of starting with taxis seems ludicrous in comparison.
These are all solved problems, I mean when was the last time you saw a homeless person camped out in a Zip Car? BMW's ReachNow vehicles are all over Seattle and they are clean, insured, fueled/charged and exactly 0 people live in them.
I have yet to hear a compelling reason why I would give up my car, and if I did why public transit isn't a better option.
The very fact that those things do need specific attention tells me they don't have true autonomy yet; they just have a way to fake it using detailed maps of known areas.
I don't see how an autonomous vehicle can handle all the corner cases of real-world driving (construction zones, etc.) until it can also work reliably using only available sensor data, so that detailed mapping is no longer necessary.
Which must be worrisome for competition.
Google is buying a couple thousand Pacificas in the near future. That's it. It's more or less a commitment to keep buying a couple thousand a year for the next however-many years, in exchange for a discount.
It is NOT the case that Google is going to open a big box and find 62,000 vehicles inside in late 2018.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet_Inc.
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_industry#By_year
[3] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/5aa16cd3-39a5-402f...
While some have projected how many traditional vehicles they can displace, I don't think anyone really knows how that'll play out. I doubt any of these companies will go making bets that obviously rival the scale of traditional vehicle sales/ownership at the time they're made, especially before they get a sense of how reliable AV transit affects the decisions individuals make about car ownership as they face major maintenance, repairs, and replacement.
I've read one projection that says each could replace 10 traditional vehicles. If that worked out, it seems like a bet on 10m vehicles, enough to replace all 100m sold worldwide, would be astonishingly bold. If you assumed an initial scope of the entire US, the equivalent bold bet would be 1.7m vehicles. If you reduced the scope to California, that bet would be about 200k vehicles. If we guess that the difference between "astonishingly bold" and "bold" is an order of magnitude, these would be reduced to 1m, 170k, and 20k...
Specifically, this section:
"According to the filing, Google and Motorola began discussions about Motorola's patent portfolio in early July, as well as the "intellectual property litigation and the potential impact of such litigation on the Android ecosystem".
Although the two companies discussed the possibility of an acquisition after the initial contact by Mr. Rubin, it was only after Motorola pushed back on the idea of patent sale that the acquisition talks picked up steam.
The turning point came during a meeting on July 6. At the meeting, Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha discussed the protection of the Android ecosystem with Google senior vice president Nikesh Arora, and during that talk Jha told Arora that "it could be problematic for Motorola Mobility to continue to exist as a stand-alone entity if it sold a large portion of its patent portfolio".
In connection with these discussions, the two companies signed a confidentiality and non-disclosure agreement that allowed Google to do due diligence on the company's patent portfolio."
Waymo supposedly processes their lidar signals to detect other cars with reasonable accuracy even in snow/rain(https://youtu.be/UrJ4-AUL4U0?t=9m41s). They only operate in pre-mapped areas so they should be able to follow lanes just fine even if the actual markings are obscured (by weather or by poor maintenance).
This kind of approach (mapping everything beforehand and using lidar for perception) is used by other players as well, and seems the most likely to work for short term level 4. Trying to do everything without the benefits of lidar and high-res maps (what e.g. Tesla are doing) is a more general solution, and cheaper hardware-wise, but will take longer to get right.
Personally, I'm long on the camera-based approach because I think reliable autonomy will require a generalized vision solution, and once you've achieved that, the Lidar is redundant.
I would hazard a guess that yes, that's pretty much the Southwestern US year round, if you include Southern CA. There are enough metro areas, and enough new sprawling development, to put those vehicles to work.
If you are buying 10,000 cars, what you are essentially doing is taking on that car manufacturer as a partner. You are betting that you will need the cars, and they are bettering that you will be around to pay for them. Everything remains speculative.
I think the real question is whether the big investors in self-driving cars will make progress creating virtual rails for their vehicles, e.g. roads where we can keep pedestrians out.
Aren't major roads pedestrian free in the US? Motorways and major roads are in the UK.
I've walked and cycled along multilane A-roads. It's not fun but it's legal.
So how do we get a determination of which disengagement events would have possibly lead to a crash? Plus I am still not convinced these numbers are even going to remotely similar over roads not heavily mapped and imaged. I think the hope many have for AV is that is allows for driving in the worst of conditions but in the end we will have AV for limited access or very tightly monitored road ways only. Which in itself is not a bad idea, rush hours could much safer and efficient with HOV/Express lanes redone to explicitly support AV.
We certainly aren't going to be able to get people to drive more lawfully when most think they are the better driver when compared to others.
Motorola?
I'd say many millions of miles, actually :)
https://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/waymo-7-million-test-mile...
If Waymo has truly solved the problem while everybody else is just trying to catch up and/or bluffing, I guess I wouldn't be that surprised.
Edited to add: The reason is that they've apparently ordered 10's of thousands of these cars. Can they really use that many only in good-weather places with perfect roads? It seems unlikely that they are just that stupid to spend that much money without being confident that their plan will work. One last option would be that they intend to put 10's of thousands of them on the road just to exponentially speed up the data collection that they've decided is necessary to truly get the system up to par.