
After 48 hours we haven't seen any sign people are using Waymo's service - YeGoblynQueenne
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/12/waymos-lame-public-driverless-launch-not-driverless-and-barely-public/
======
djsumdog
Autonomous cars are a very difficult problem, more than I think most people
anticipate. There's been a lot of tax breaks/money that goes into these
programs too, and that's the tragic thing, since that funding should be going
to known solutions: public transportation (trains, trams and express buses).

Even if you had a full-autonomous only Interstate where each car could be
fully loaded and ride bumper-bumper at over 100kph, it wouldn't even begin
reach the carrying capacity of currently existing fully autonomous subways
systems like those in Singapore.

[https://penguindreams.org/blog/self-driving-cars-will-not-
so...](https://penguindreams.org/blog/self-driving-cars-will-not-solve-the-
transportation-problem/)

These driverless cars would be great in Europe where they can solve the last
leg problems in countries that already have strong public transport
infrastructure. In places like America, the existing infrastructure has a long
way to go before autonomous cars won't lead to the same gridlock as normal
cars .. and an even longer way to go before they're ready for mass
consumption.

~~~
rootusrootus
Everywhere and everyone is different, obviously, but I would _love_ to see
autonomous electric vehicles become our future. I really don't care for public
transportation, I find it uncomfortable in many ways, and I don't see any way
that it will ever _not_ be about half the speed of a private point-to-point
transport.

So a highway filled with self driving cars zipping along bumper to bumper may
not technically be able to carry as much as a fully loaded subway train, but
it's so much more _useful_. Take away the casualties and pollution, and it's
as close to perfect as we are likely to get.

~~~
codyb
Can you explain to me how it's more useful than a train that carries more
people with less energy?

Because, to me, it sounds like you just don't want to be uncomfortable, and
that's fine, nobody does, but it doesn't make something more useful.

~~~
rootusrootus
How do I get from my house to the train? Do I have to make transfers? How long
will they take? What if I have to carry groceries, or take young children with
me, or my elderly grandma?

If I have a car, I load everyone and everything up, and we go. We get to our
destination and unload, ta-da! Is this not an order of magnitude more useful
than taking a train?

Sometimes I think HN is filled with young people with uncomplicated lives :).

~~~
Barrin92
>Sometimes I think HN is filled with young people with uncomplicated lives :).

No, if these are big issues for you, you likely live in an American low
density area where public transportation is scarce. In large metropolitan
areas (which is after all, where most of the world already lives, and will
live), getting on and off public transport is usually not a problem.

I have relocated to Tokyo for example about a year ago, and for me, a trip to
the grocery store is usually done by foot (same is true for other appliances),
and multiple forms of public transport are in walking distance.

~~~
rootusrootus
I live in a city with about 700,000 residents inside the official limits, and
3,000,000 residents in the metro. The nearest bus stop is approximately a
quarter mile away.

With all due respect, the number of people who live in cities as dense as
Tokyo are the minority, most of us don't.

~~~
Barrin92
No offense but if you think walking a quarter mile is a hindrance to access
public transport then the car culture has done even more damage than I
thought.

~~~
rootusrootus
On the contrary, I think a quarter mile is perfectly reasonable for a public
transit stop in my city. Sorry to suggest otherwise.

However, when I think about loading up my young children with all of their
stuff, loading me up with everything I need, etc, and then dragging that down
the street a quarter mile, then waiting for the bus, boarding it, riding to
the transit center, transferring, riding another bus to the light rail
station, riding that downtown, and then doing it all again the other
direction... well, I'm pretty confident in my original point that the car is a
hell of a lot more useful. Sure, you can exist with only the public transport
option, but I was not asserting otherwise. But a lot of people on HN seem to
think that not only is it possible, but that it is the superior choice.

So, no offense taken, in fact I appreciate you affirming my original comment
about so many folks on HN commenting from the viewpoint of someone with a
young, uncomplicated life :-).

~~~
grey-area
Many people with kids do what you describe in cities. It's far better for
everyone, and even if it's not the superior choice for an individual (though
I'd contend it is when you adjust your lifestyle), it is the superior choice
for everyone together as it avoids pollution, traffic gridlock and huge fuel
inefficiencies.

As it is those with cars push off these negative externalities onto those who
choose not to have them, or can't afford them. So your comfort does have a
cost, which you don't pay directly.

------
paganel
> In late September, a Waymo spokeswoman told Ars by email that the Phoenix
> service would be fully driverless and open to members of the public—claims I
> reported in this article.

> We now know that Waymo One won't be fully driverless; there will be a driver
> in the driver's seat.

This reminds me of this famous Radio Yerevan joke:

> Q: Is it true that Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov from Moscow won a car in a lottery?

> A: In principle yes, but:

> it wasn't Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov but Aleksander Aleksandrovich Aleksandrov;

> he is not from Moscow but from Odessa;

> it was not a car but a bicycle;

> he didn't win it, but it was stolen from him.

Because smart people have invested billions of dollars into this technology
and because even smarter people work on this technology the general public
must pretend that it's all going according to plan, that everything is damn
serious and that the emperor still has his clothes on.

~~~
pmoriarty
The chairman of a local chamber of commerce had to introduce the speaker at
the organization's annual black-tie dinner...

"The man who I am about to introduce," he said, "is someone I know you'll
enjoy listening to. He is the most gifted businessman in the country. He has
made one hundred million dollars in California oil."

The speaker, embarrassed, came to the podium. "Thank you for your kind
introduction, Mr. Chairman," he said.

"However, the facts need some clarification. It wasn't oil; it was coal. It
wasn't California; it was Pennsylvania. It wasn't one hundred million; it was
one hundred thousand. It wasn't me; it was my brother. And he didn't make it;
he lost it."

------
woah
> "Lane changes appear to be a problem for the cars," Randazzo says in the
> video. When trying to move into a crowded lane, a Waymo car seemed to lack a
> human driver's ability to anticipate other drivers' actions and squeeze into
> an open spot. Instead, the vehicle would turn on its turn signal and wait
> for a few seconds for an opening to appear. If one didn't appear, it would
> turn the turn signal off and wait for a while before trying again.

This makes sense, because a lot of times merging into a lane is a game of
chicken. You've got to make the drivers in that lane believe that you're going
to merge anyway and that they'll need to slow down to avoid hitting you.

~~~
the_clarence
In the video you can actually see the waymo car do that. Faking to move in,
then stopping, then faking, ...

~~~
klyrs
Classic AI... no sense of continuity

Me: it's really sunny today

AI: I love sunny days

Me: me too, maybe that's why I'm so happy today

AI: why do you think you're so happy today?

------
zaroth
I’ll be happy when my TM3 can even recognize stoplights and stop signs on
autopilot, and the adaptive cruise will stop at an intersection and continue
on when it turns green. Next they can work on left and right turns.

But in all seriousness, IMO the biggest challenge to AI driving is not object
recognition or modeling instantaneous state, but the full hierarchy of
“statefullness” which humans keep effortlessly, but which seems to be almost
totally missing from the driving AI.

Understanding the current state, the upcoming state, and the expected
transitions in between... are crucial to how I am able to turn left with
oncoming traffic, smoothly cruise through a 4-way intersection which happens
to be on a curve, zipper merge with entering cars coming off an on ramp into
my highway lane during rush hour, change lanes to avoid a bad driver, and not
slam on the brakes when a stopped car is in the process of turning left up
ahead.

When driving on a two lane undivided road, and a left turn lane appears ahead,
suddenly an AI finds itself driving in between two lanes and makes a random
choice to veer left or right to try to stay in lane. Without the stateful
understanding of how and why this new lane came into existence the AI is
clueless. The AI can’t solve the problem just by identifying lanes at t=0, or
trying to read signs or markings on the road. Us humans know intuitively (or
from memory) which lane is for onward travel and which lane is for turning.
Any AI driving system built in the next 5-10 years will need an annotated map
which tells it which lane to choose.

This all adds up, in my estimation, to a metric fuck-ton if metadata required
per mile in order for an AI to operate. It cannot be done “statelessly” (like
a human can do it) without an AI at least 5 orders of magnitude “smarter” than
what we have today.

------
ilaksh
To me it sounded like they basically just gave people the option of getting
out of the NDA if they wanted to start paying for rides. I assume to most of
the early riders, it's just not worth it when they can continue just getting
free rides.

------
buboard
for some people, waymo-like cars are not an optional luxury/curiosity but a
necessity (elderly people, disabled). It would be nice if they focused on
those groups early, instead of leaving it as an afterthought. The oddities of
the cars are not going to be a show-stopper, as long as the cars are safe.
Human drivers will learn to adapt their way around the "roomba cars" over
time.

~~~
datguacdoh
They did focus on these early though. Literally their first fully autonomous
drive on public roads was with a blind individual, explaining how the
technology was going to be transformative.

Video: [https://youtu.be/ArYTxDZzQOM](https://youtu.be/ArYTxDZzQOM)

~~~
buboard
that was a promo video, but i have not seen anything specific to disabled
people since then

~~~
jonas21
They've been working with the guy in the video for over 6 years [1], and he's
the former CEO of the Santa Clara Valley Blind Center, which has aims for "a
future where awareness, legislation and technology meet at a crossroads to
provide individuals who are blind and visually impaired the same opportunities
as their sighted peers" [2].

It sounds like they're taking this seriously.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdgQpa1pUUE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdgQpa1pUUE)

[2] [http://www.visionbeyondsight.org/About-
MissionVision.htm](http://www.visionbeyondsight.org/About-MissionVision.htm)

------
cjmcqueen
I would think the general climate of fear in the country would make it
frightening to launch an ambitious product like this. There's really no hope
of a second right now when things go wrong.

Disclosure, I work for Google, but have no connection to Waymo.

I hope the team can keep pushing on; Waymo is one of the most important
"moonshots" to the country. It really could save lives. But, one mistake and
people won't trust it even though hundreds of automobile accidents happen
every day.

~~~
buboard
are other countries interested?

------
ars
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: There will _never_ be fully
driverless cars until we have true AI.

The only thing we might have are dedicated lanes on interstates for driverless
cars, like railroad tracks.

In city driving will never happen without AI.

This is a strong claim, but I'm sticking to it.

~~~
Lxr
What is “true AI” in your opinion?

~~~
jon_richards
Any sufficiently misunderstood computer program is indistinguishable from AI.

~~~
arbie
Then I've been writing true AI all my life!

------
popotamonga
Honestly looks to me like the AI translation problem, always 5 years away from
being perfect, still mostly crappy, only good enough to have a rough idea of
what is being said and with glaring mistakes.

~~~
nostrademons
AI translation has gotten _massively_ better in the last 10 years. I can read
a foreign news site in Chrome, pop "translate this page", and get a reasonable
sense of what the article is about and the factual content it contains. The
grammar will be off and some sentences will be non-sequitors, but getting to
this point is a massive leap forward compared to 15 years ago.

~~~
mikeash
I feel like a lot of AI problems move directly from “this is so terrible that
it’s completely useless” to “this capability is a fact of life that I no
longer think about” without ever passing through a conscious “this doesn’t
suck so much anymore” stage. Speech recognition and translation both did this.
They’re far from perfect but they’re good enough to get a lot of real-world
use, but somehow they still have a reputation for being worthless junk.

~~~
arbie
Biometric authentication and banking fraud detection are two more areas where
there has been a step-function improvement in accuracy with little pomp.

------
jfoster
Of course they're not going to unload hundreds of people onto it all at once.
Would you?

Of course safety drivers are going to be there for a while. Was the perception
really that they would test a bunch and then just pull all of the drivers
immediately after? Why would they take such a risk when they can afford to
have the drivers monitoring for a while?

~~~
arbie
Exactly right.

It's almost like the tech press _wants_ Waymo to aggressively pursue a very
public failure.

Even one disengagement every 5000 miles without human backup will be perceived
as apocalyptic when your fleet drives thousands of trips a day.

~~~
oldgradstudent
They've "launched" a "commercial" service, and claimed that their some of
their early riders moved to the new service with no NDA.

Where are those social media posts?

Waymo's PR is getting more and more divorced from reality with every
announcement.

~~~
jfoster
Their announcements do seem to be a certain amount of time ahead of reality.
They announced the early rider programme having started at least a few
weeks/months before the evidence of it started showing up, and it looks the
same this time.

My take on that is that it's okay. They're being cautious.

------
blhack
Just an anecdote here, but I live in Phoenix, near their service area, and I
see these cars all over the place. I'd say I probably see at least one on each
journey I take in my own car.

~~~
kiwijamo
Do you see any with actual passengers in them?

~~~
arbie
Driverless passengerless cars.

------
gambiting
"In another incident, a Waymo car was part of a line of cars approaching an
intersection where a car crash was blocking the right lane. The human drivers
saw the issue far ahead and began shifting to the left lane. The Waymo car
continued straight and only began trying to merge left when it was a few car
lengths away from the traffic cones"

So the car actually behaved correctly then? It's called a zipper merge.

------
gniv
I'm not as pessimistic. I think Google is taking its time since a bad accident
would be a PR disaster. Given how big a deal this is, it makes sense for them
to take it slowly, and I don't think we can read much into this in regards to
the state of their self-driving tech.

~~~
mactrey
I think I agree with this take. Do we really think Waymo cars would be so
cautious with merging if a Waymo crash were received with the same level of
fanfare and financial repercussions as an ordinary commuter crash? I.e. a
$1,000 financial hit and literally nobody cares.

Most of the "mistakes" in the video looked to me more like a hyper-cautious
grandmother than an A.I. that fundamentally doesn't know how to drive.

------
wtf42
It seems they have some 'safety level' constant they can control during their
training process, so about half a year ago when they were preparing for public
release they decided to change safety level constant from 0.99 to 0.999 and
something went wrong, like it's completely unable to do some unsafe actions
(unprotected left turns, merges, and other tricky situations). And because of
that they need additional training with safety drivers for this kind of
situations.

~~~
orangecat
_so about half a year ago when they were preparing for public release they
decided to change safety level constant from 0.99 to 0.999_

That's my theory as well. Remember, Uber killed a pedestrian earlier this
year. Fortunately that didn't result in self-driving cars being banned or
regulated out of existence, but they may not a get a third chance, so it makes
sense to be even more cautious after that.

------
sophistication
Related question: Is the AI bubble smaller or larger than the dot-com bubble?

[https://i.imgur.com/q7whaio.png](https://i.imgur.com/q7whaio.png)

~~~
avinium
As far as I know, there are no "AI" companies listed on the NASDAQ.

Of course, there are listed companies with significant AI investments. But I'd
argue their valuations are driven by their existing/conventional/ad-driven
scale, not their AI arms.

Whether or not they're overvalued remains to be seen. The era of cheap money
seems (?) to be coming to an end, so it will be an interesting few years.

~~~
sophistication
Were "dot-com" companies listed on the NASDAQ back then, or only companies
with significant dot-com investments?

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
Wow, this makes me feel old. Tons of .com companies (very common to actually
have .com in the company name) were listed on the NASDAQ back then.

------
ausbah
It feels like many of these problems could be overcome if every car on the
road was also autonomous, and every such car communicated with each other in a
network of sources to coordinate traffic, signal important information, etc.

------
sonnyblarney
Nobody cares that much about the tech, they care about getting from a to b at
a reasonable price, at a reasonable speed, in safety.

~~~
why_only_15
Well without the tech they won't be able to get from a to b at a reasonable
price, at a reasonable speed, in safety.

~~~
sonnyblarney
Yes, it's called 'drive yourself' or 'take a cab' or 'ride a bus' or 'ride a
bike'.

------
cachvico
Are there any US municipalities that already allow fully driverless cars at
all?

------
bsaul
When i think about the rumours i’ve heard that waymo chief made a 500 millions
$ bonus last year... at the time i thought this was because he was the only
guy in the world truely capable of transforming the whole industry...

------
ChrisSD
Is the problem with driverless cars that humans are, on average, absolutely
terrible drivers?

~~~
klyrs
No. It's that humans are remarkably adaptive and can convey intention through
body language -- even through a "puppet body" like a motor vehicle. Humans
can, by and large, adapt to "terrible" drivers -- swerving to avoid the aggro
asshats, honking at phone addicts to signalboost green lights, changing lanes
to avoid grandpa's leaden brake foot, etc.

Speaking as somebody who owns a classic car, drives carefully to baby said
classic and often rides shotgun... I gotta say: most drivers are pretty
decent. The people I hear complain about how awful everybody else is...
they're either old and drive dangerously slow, or they're super entitled and
drive aggressively. Since we're on HN, I'm gonna guess you're of the latter
camp. Do the world a favor: take Uber and don't write AI.

~~~
ChrisSD
Wow that'sa lot of assumptions to make about me from single statement.

While it is amusing, doesn't HN encourage people to be civil?

~~~
klyrs
You described the average driver as "absolutely terrible." Are you actually
offended that I painted you with a similarly broad brush?

~~~
ChrisSD
I'm not offended, I'm bemused that you couldn't resist attacking me while
making your point.

And no, talking about the avarage human being's ability to operate a specific
machine over the course of their life is not painting any individual with a
broad brush.

Also, an individual can be a good driver. People in general may not be. That's
not a contradiction or an insult. Heck even a "good" driver can drive badly.

------
KaoruAoiShiho
The problems that are reported in the article seems simpler than I imagined.
Is google really only gathering data via real world tests? If so then
something like NVIDIA simulator will completely crush waymo.
[https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2018/09/12/drive-
constellation...](https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2018/09/12/drive-
constellation-open-simulation/)

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
You'd think that simulation is useful for training machine learning
algorithms, but in practice, the differences between our best simulations and
the real world are such that training on simulations is next to useless.

Google AI blog explains why:

 _Simulating many years of robotic interaction is quite feasible with modern
parallel computing, physics simulation, and rendering technology. Moreover,
the resulting data comes with automatically-generated annotations, which is
particularly important for tasks where success is hard to infer automatically.
The challenge with simulated training is that even the best available
simulators do not perfectly capture reality. Models trained purely on
synthetic data fail to generalize to the real world, as there is a discrepancy
between simulated and real environments, in terms of both visual and physical
properties. In fact, the more we increase the fidelity of our simulations, the
more effort we have to expend in order to build them, both in terms of
implementing complex physical phenomena and in terms of creating the content
(e.g., objects, backgrounds) to populate these simulations. This difficulty is
compounded by the fact that powerful optimization methods based on deep
learning are exceptionally proficient at exploiting simulator flaws: the more
powerful the machine learning algorithm, the more likely it is to discover how
to "cheat" the simulator to succeed in ways that are infeasible in the real
world. The question then becomes: how can a robot utilize simulation to enable
it to perform useful tasks in the real world?

The difficulty of transferring simulated experience into the real world is
often called the "reality gap." The reality gap is a subtle but important
discrepancy between reality and simulation that prevents simulated robotic
experience from directly enabling effective real-world performance. Visual
perception often constitutes the widest part of the reality gap: while
simulated images continue to improve in fidelity, the peculiar and
pathological regularities of synthetic pictures, and the wide, unpredictable
diversity of real-world images, makes bridging the reality gap particularly
difficult when the robot must use vision to perceive the world, as is the case
for example in many manipulation tasks._

[https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/10/closing-simulation-to-
real...](https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/10/closing-simulation-to-reality-gap-
for.html)

~~~
KaoruAoiShiho
The simulator isn't intended to fully replace real world training, the reality
gap is a well known issue. However it's obvious that with *just real world
training that you will never be able to get sufficient data and fail on easily
predictable problems as described in the article. A lot of that post is spent
on saying how hard it is to build a good simulation, but what is hard for some
companies can be much easier for others.

[https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2018/12/03/physx-high-
fidelity...](https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2018/12/03/physx-high-fidelity-
open-source/)

