
Fully driverless cars could be months away - tnash
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/10/report-waymo-aiming-to-launch-commercial-driverless-service-this-year/
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Zanni
I've always been a big proponent of self-driving cars, but only because I
imagined them as fully autonomous. A fleet of self-driving cars that rely on
being backed by, essentially, a call center, sounds like a nightmare.

"When Waymo tested in Phoenix earlier this year, drivers sometimes had to take
over the wheel to prevent the cars from holding up traffic because it took too
long for humans in the command center to answer the cars’ requests for help."

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Spivak
I guess the ability for a single person able to essentially 'drive' an entire
fleet of cars is an improvement but it's not exactly the utopia I imagined.

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vannevar
Fully driverless cars are here today, for that matter. But if you want want
tamperproof driverless cars that perform well under adverse conditions and are
thoroughly tested, then you're going to have to wait a lot longer than
"months".

I think this snippet is pretty telling: "Waymo chose the Phoenix area for its
favorable weather, its wide, well-maintained streets, and _the relative lack
of pedestrians_." (Emphasis mine.) Probably wise, but I'm sure they've already
carefully calculated the risk/return vs pedestrian fatalities and are coming
out ahead.

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shallot_router
How could a driverless car ever truly be tamperproof, though? At some point
we'll just have to accept it as a potential risk.

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vannevar
Good question. Tamperproof to me means they can't physically be spooked into
doing things, as well as being secure from hacking. In theory, they just have
to be as safe as human drivers, who manage to kill thousands of people each
year. But as a practical matter, people will probably demand that they be much
safer than humans. And it will take awhile to prove that out.

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Someone
…if ‘fully’ means ‘remotely operated, when the going gets tough’, such as, I
guess, in bad weather (rare in Phoenix), or when there is a lot of traffic in
one place, times when demand for taxis is highest.

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ocdtrekkie
This is something you should never hear about a product which is life critical
that it works correctly:

"Efrati reports that Waymo CEO John Krafcik faces pressure from his boss,
Google co-founder and Alphabet CEO Larry Page, to transform Waymo's impressive
self-driving technology into a shipping product."

Combined with releasing that product in the area with the least consumer and
safety protections:

"Another important factor was the legal climate. Arizona has some of the
nation's most permissive laws regarding self-driving vehicles."

So the TL;DR is that someone has been pressured to rush a product to release
in an area with few safety regulations that could cause a lot of harm if it
malfunctions.

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nieksand
On the flip side, the status quo is killing 40000 people per year in the US
alone:

[http://www.nsc.org/NewsDocuments/2017/12-month-
estimates.pdf](http://www.nsc.org/NewsDocuments/2017/12-month-estimates.pdf)

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na85
So we should push out half-baked solutions?

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nieksand
Depends on how half-baked.

From a PR perspective it's a definite "no". Even a single self-driving
fatality would lead to global news headlines and a lawyer feeding frenzy.

But from a protecting people perspective? If making it "live" quicker would
speed development and adoption... then maybe.

E.g. the first 5 year increase fatalities net by 1.1x. After that tech is
actually dialed in and fatalities drop to 0.5x. Holding off gives you 400K
fatalities whereas pushing earlier adoption gives you 320K. That would be 80K
lives saved. (Under the assumptions of this shoot-from-the-hip model).

~~~
Spivak
> Even a single self-driving fatality

It's more specific than that. It will be the first self-driving crash that
would be glaringly obvious to a human driver. Like the Tesla crash where the
sensors mistook a white semi for clouds and merrily plowed though it.

If the tech is adopted too soon it might face a death knell when computer
assisted driving proves to be much safer than fully autonomous. It's much
easier to fill a human's blind spots than replace the driver entirely.

