[judge2020]

> It is a complete Black Box to them.

If you think it's a black box to the Tesla drivers, how is it not a black box to the Waymo customers in the back seat of these cars? Or how are you evaluating Tesla vs Waymo if not by how how humans subjectively feel each system is performing?

If you mean to the teams, you cannot assume that Waymo's systems are any less of a black box than Tesla's systems. And even then, they're not much of a black box at all, besides the actual object detection, as both Waymo and Tesla still have most decision-making in regular logic-based code, not machine learning algorithms; and when they do, such as with "do I need to get over now to make the next turn", it's still fed back into the "business logic" that decides what to do and thus logged and audited when it's sent back to HQ.

[Veserv]

Waymo customers in the back seats of cars are not testers or operators; they are cargo. These are fundamentally different roles with fundamentally different requirements with respect to the safety lifecycle.

[judge2020]

So are we just as much in the dark about how much progress Waymo could be making? given "Videos and personal experiences can only reveal safety issues, never positive progress" is the argument and yet Waymo doesn't exactly give us access to their bigquery to perform our own qualitative analysis.

[Veserv]

Yes. As a member of the general populace you have no idea how much progress Waymo is making and are unqualified to "test" their systems. However, you are not being asked to "test" their systems and you are not involved in the operation of the systems, so the point is moot. This is in contrast to Tesla where you "are" both of those things which is the problem.

Also, I just realized that the systems safety engineer you responded to has also posted a reply, so you should look to their statement for a more in-depth analysis as they are a expert on the subject.

[judge2020]

I think it’s unfair to say that you’re not testing Waymo’s systems when they allow people to get in them to take trips. And while if it has a problem, it’ll try to pull over on the side of the road, it can also stop in the middle of the road if it doesn’t think it can pull over, which can be a safety problem on even 35/45mph zones.

[adamjcook]

> If you think it's a black box to the Tesla drivers, how is it not a black box to the Waymo customers in the back seat of these cars?

The general public (as a vehicle occupant) only interacts with a Waymo vehicle as a passenger with no vehicle control responsibilities.

That is in stark contrast from the integral human-machine relationship that exists in a Tesla vehicle.

> If you mean to the teams, you cannot assume that Waymo's systems are any less of a black box than Tesla's systems.

True.

Waymo's internal processes are a Black Box to me (and anyone external to Waymo) because we are not read into their systems safety lifecycle, whatever it may be.

Hopefully and presumably, Waymo is maintaining a Safety Management System (SMS) with their test operators and other internal teams, as they have claimed in the past.

Of course, since there is little-to-no regulatory oversight of this in the US (at the moment, perhaps)... Waymo's "word" is really the only thing the public has to go by.

That is not acceptable, in my view, in constructing a novel transportation system that ultimately relies on public trust to be economically viable... but that is the regulatory reality right now.

In the case of Tesla, it is definitive that they are not maintaining a SMS, in large part, because Tesla's (untrained) customers utilizing the system cannot be sufficiently read into a lifecycle. There is simply no way to do that without maintaining a highly-controlled, continuous relationship with the test operator.

For example, the "release notes" (sprinkled with some Tweets from Musk) that Tesla issues with some of the FSD Beta updates are simply too puny relative to the complexity of not only the vehicle system, but the larger complexity of the roadway.

> And even then, they're not much of a black box at all, besides the actual object detection, as both Waymo and Tesla still have most decision-making in regular logic-based code, not machine learning algorithms; and when they do, such as with "do I need to get over now to make the next turn", it's still fed back into the "business logic" that decides what to do and thus logged and audited when it's sent back to HQ.

As I stated elsewhere, these are physical safety-critical systems where the totality of the systems safety components cannot be expressed in software alone.

Remote vehicle telemetry is valuable of course, but as a tool to serve the validation process... not the validation process itself.

Vehicle telemetry cannot be a complete accounting of all of the interacting systems safety components involved here.

For that, like all other safety-critical systems, one needs exhaustive, controlled and physical validation.