[sidibe]

There is definitely something that doesn't add up between the recent surge in pessimism about the progress on self driving cars and the fact that Waymo is about to start taking passengers without backup drivers. Either they are recklessly competitive or confident that the cars can handle any situations they might run into in the area they're releasing them. If it were some independent startup with less to lose I'd lean more to the former, but theyre not.

[jdminhbg]

> Either they are recklessly competitive or confident that the cars can handle any situations they might run into in the area they're releasing them.

I don't think these are the only two possibilities. A third might be that they're confident that if a car finds a situation it can't handle, it'll gracefully degrade. If 1 out of 10,000 rides ends in a crash, that's a problem. If 1 out of 10,000 rides ends in needing to call a human driver for a pickup, it's not.

[tyingq]

Hard to say. Waymo has way more miles than everyone else, but the layman's observation is "yeah, but in environments you control with an iron hand and travel over and over on the same rough, predictable routes, albeit with your very rich suite of data points."

A bazillion miles on the same track isn't necessarily as impressive as a magnitude fewer miles on varied uncontrolled/unmapped snowy, icy, narrow, unlit, flooded, unplanned etc, routes.

So, how do I compare Google's/Waymo's vast number of sensor rich planned miles versus Tesla's much lower, much less rich (no lidar) but much more diverse and real-world miles? And everyone else's (Uber/Lyft) in-between play?

It's pretty unclear, for a layperson, right now, who is ahead of the pack.

[lambdasquirrel]

Do we need driverless to handle all the corner cases? I’m starting to think this is just the wrong way to look at it. Most of the time we commute home it’s just the same dumb stuff.

We can make an analogy to Starcraft AI-assisted here. What if instead of having a fully automated AI, instead you could train your car to take you home, by driving your route a couple of times? Kind of like how you might train the computer to go harass your opponents expansion and then just call up that subroutine everytime that it’s apropos (still waiting on Blizzard to make this game).

Don’t try so hard to replace the human. Make the human less busy, more powerful.

[YokoZar]

The open source Spring RTS interface allows for player-made AIs to execute inside the game engine. You can play alongside your bots (and turn certain behavior off/on with the interface).

[tyingq]

Interesting perspective, and your view seems to favor Tesla. Honestly, I just don't know, and expert opinions seem to vary right now. It's hard to remember a time when it was harder to see the ultimate winner in such an important space.

[Fricken]

The goal is a car that can drive itself, empty, or without a licensed passenger on board, that has disruptive potential. Being able to do the whole job in a limited geo-fenced area is better than being able to do half the job anywhere. There are hypothetical safety benefits to partially autonomous vehicles, but it's not a game-changer, it won't transform mobility.

Waymo was doing partial autonomy pretty well back in 2012, before self driving cars were even a twinkle in Elon's eye, and before anyone had ever taken seriously the notion of utilizing deep learning in autonomous vehicles. The real challenge is in fully validating the safety and reliability of these systems to the extent that a commercial robotaxi service becomes feasible.

I recall having conversations back in 2012 wondering *what if these things get pretty good, reliable enough that they can be counted on to be safe, but still subject to getting hung up or confused in any of the myriad situations drivers can get into where some sense of contextual awareness, creativity, and higher level reasoning is required, and there were big debates about whether Remote control, or remote guidance would be viable as a solution for tricky situations. It turns out that Both Waymo and GM are doing this. I'm not sure yet what the ratio of remote monitors to operational vehicles is expected to be for initial pilot deployments. It could be 1:100, or 1:10, or something else.

What's fascinating is that Analysts have estimated about $100 billion (not counting China) have been invested in the emerging self driving car industrial ecosystem that includes software development, chips, sensors, fleet management service, mapping, logistics and everything else. I don't think there's an historical analogue for something like that, where so much effort and value has been placed in an as-of-yet unproven technology.

For me the interesting thing is that it's all playing out according to a script (it's needed some revision, but not much) I wrote as thought experiment in 2010 just by asking myself "Well, what would happen if this technology actually came to fruition?" I've been following the development of Autonomous vehicles since the Darpa days, but at that time I never took it very seriously as something that might actually work in the real world, it was just a neat science experiment.

[mehrdadn]

> Waymo has way more

Well-put!

[tyingq]

I didn't notice the alliteration at first, accidental. But thanks anyway :)