Look at Waymo, not Robotaxi. Waymo is essentially the self driving vision I had as a kid, and ridership is growing exponentially as they expand. It's also very safe if you believe their statistics[0]. I think there's a saying about overestimating stuff in the short term and underestimating stuff in the long term that seems to apply here, though the radiologist narrative was definitely wrong.
Even though the gulf between Waymo and the next runner up is huge, it too isn't quite ready for primetime IMO. Waymos still suffer from erratic behavior at pickup/dropoff, around pedestrians, badly marked roads and generally jam on the brakes at the first sign of any ambiguity. As much as I appreciate the safety-first approach (table stakes really, they'd get their license pulled if they ever caused a fatality) I am frequently frustrated as both a cyclist and driver whenever I have to share a lane with a Waymo. The equivalent of a Waymo radiologist would be a model that has a high false-positive and infinitesimal false-negative rate which would act as a first line of screening and reduce the burden on humans.
I've seen a lot of young people (teens especially) cross active streets or cross in front of Waymos on scooters knowing that they'll stop. I try not to do anything too egregious, but I myself have begun using Waymo's conservative behavior as a good way to merge into ultra high density traffic when I'm in a car, or to cross busy streets when they only have a "yield to pedestrian" crosswalk rather than a full crosswalk. The way you blip a Waymo to pay attention and yield is beginning to move into the intersection, lol.
I always wonder if honking at a Waymo does anything. A Waymo stopped for a (very slow) pickup on a very busy one lane street near me, and it could have pulled out of traffic if it had gone about 100 feet further. The 50-ish year old lady behind it laid on her horn for about 30 seconds. Surreal experience, and I'm still not sure if her honking made a difference.
I like Waymos though. Uber is in trouble.
Simultaneously, Waymo is adopting more human-like behavior like creeping at red lights and cutting in front of timid drivers as it jockeys for position.
I still think that Google isn't capable of scaling a rideshare program because it sucks at interfacing with customers. I suspect that Uber's long-term strategy of "take the money out of investors' and drivers' pockets to capture the market until automation gets there" might still come to fruition (see Austin and Atlanta), just perhaps not with Uber's ownership of the technology.
On the other hand Google has been hard at work trying to make its way into cars via Android automotive so I totally see it resigning to just providing a reference sensor-suite and a car "Operating System" to manufacturers who want a turnkey smart-car with L3 self-driving
>Simultaneously, Waymo is adopting more human-like behavior like creeping at red lights and cutting in front of timid drivers as it jockeys for position.
So before it was a 16yo in a driver's ed car. Now it's an 18yo with a license.
I'm gonna be so proud of them when it does something flagrantly illegal but any "decent driver who gets it" would have done in context.
I honestly don't think we will have a clear answer to this question anytime soon. People will be in their camps and thats that.
Just to clarify, have you ridden in a Waymo? It didn't seem entirely clear if you just experienced living with Waymo or have ridden in it.
I tried it a few times in LA. What an amazing magical experience. I do agree with most of your assertions. It is just a super careful driver but it does not have the full common sense that a driver in a hectic city like LA has. Sometimes you gotta be more 'human' and that means having the intuition to discard the rules in the heat of the moment (ex. being conscious of how cyclists think instead of just blindly following the rules carefully, this is cultural and computers dont do 'culture').
Waymo has replaced my (infrequent) use of Uber/Lyft in 80% of cases ever since they opened to the public via waitlist. The product is pretty good most of the time, I just think the odd long-tail behaviors become a guarantee as you scale up.
You have to consider that the AVs have their every move recorded. Even a human wouldn't drive more aggressively under those circumstances.
Probably what will happen in the longer term is that rules of the road will be slightly different for AVs to allow for their different performance.
> Waymos still suffer from erratic behavior at pickup/dropoff, around pedestrians, badly marked roads and generally jam on the brakes at the first sign of any ambiguity.
As do most of the ridesharing drivers I interact with nowadays, sadly.
The difference is that Waymo has a trajectory that is getting better while human rideshare drivers have a trajectory that is getting worse.
Society accepts that humans make mistakes and considers it unavoidable, but there exists a much higher bar expected of computers/automation/etc. even if a waymo is objectively safer in terms of incidents per miles driven, one fatality makes headlines and adds scrutiny about “was it avoidable?”, whereas humans we just shrug.
I think the theme of this extends to all areas where we are placing technology to make decisions, but also where no human is accountable for the decision.
> Society accepts that humans make mistakes and considers it unavoidable, but there exists a much higher bar expected of computers/automation/etc.
There are a horde of bicyclists and pedestrians who disagree with you and are hoping that automated cars take over because humans are so terrible.
There are a horde of insurance companies who disagree with you and are waiting to throw money to prove their point.
When automated driving gets objectively better than humans, there will be a bunch of groups who actively benefit and will help push it forward.
> there exists a much higher bar expected of computers/automation/etc. even if a waymo is objectively safer in terms of incidents per miles driven, one fatality makes headlines and adds scrutiny about “was it avoidable?”
This doesn’t seem to be happening. One, there are shockingly few fatalities. Two, we’ve sort of accepted the tradeoff.
It does happen:
https://sfist.com/2024/05/14/waymo-now-under-federal-investi...
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/us-closes-probe-int...
Similarly for Cruise: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-05-16/woman-ge...
Sure. It happened. Folks moved on. Car companies are constantly being sued and investigated.
Cruise was outrageous because it fucked up in a way a human never would. (More germane: GM doesn’t have Google’s cash flow.)
Society only cares about the individual and no one else. If Uber/Lyft continue to enshittify with drivers driving garbage broken down cars, drivers with no standards (ie. having just smoked weed) and ever rising rates, eventually people will prefer the Waymos.
I am a long time skeptic of self-driving cars. However, Waymo has changed that for me.
I spend a lot of time as a pedestrian in Austin, and they are far safer than your usual Austin driver, and they also follow the law more often.
I always accept them when I call an Uber as well, and it's been a similar experience as a passenger.
I kinda hate what the Tesla stuff has done, because it makes it easier to dismiss those who are moving more slowly and focusing on safety and trust.
Yeah we don't need to compare robots to the best driver or human, just the average, for an improvement.
However, like railroad safety is expensive heavily regulated, self driving car companies have the same issue.
Decentralized driving decentralizes risk.
so when I have my _own_ robot to do it, it'll be easy and cheap.
> Yeah we don't need to compare robots to the best driver or human, just the average, for an improvement.
Sure, in theory. In practice, nobody is going to give up control on the basis that the machine is "slightly better than average". Those who consider the safety data when making their decision will demand a system that's just as good as the best human drivers in most aspects.
And speaking of Waymo, let's not forget that they only operate in a handful of places. Their safety data doesn't generalize outside of those areas.
> And speaking of Waymo, let's not forget that they only operate in a handful of places. Their safety data doesn't generalize outside of those areas.
Yeah, I'm curious in seeing how they function in environments that get snow.
I agree with both comments here. I wonder what the plausibility of fully autonomous trucking is in the next 10-30 years...
Is there any saying that exists about overestimating stuff in the near term and long term but underestimating stuff in the midterm? Ie flying car dreams in the 50s etc.
I remember Bill Gates said: "We overestimate what we can do in one year and underestimate what we can do in ten years".
Not Musk. He promised full autonomy within 3 years about 10 years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...
Musk and Gates have very different philosophies.
Gates seems more calm and collected having gone through the trauma of almost losing his empire.
Musk is a loose cannon having never suffered the consequences of his actions (ie. early Gates and Jobs) and so he sometimes gets things right but will eventually crash and burn having not had the fortune of failing and maturing early on in his career(he is now past the midpoint of his career with not enough buffer to recover).
They are both dangerous in their own ways.
If it were about the costs for employees, you could ship it with the railway. That simply isn't the reason.
> ... but underestimating stuff in the midterm? Ie flying car dreams in the 50s etc.
We still don't have flying cars 70 years later, and they don't look any more imminent than they did then. I think the lesson there is more "not every dream eventually gets made a reality".
Waymo is very impressive, but also demonstrates limitations of these systems. Waymo vehicles are still getting caught performing unsafe driving maneuvers, they get stuck alleys in numbers, and responders have trouble getting them to acknowledge restricted areas. I am very supportive of this technology, but also highly skeptical as long as these vehicles are directly causing problems for me personally. Driving is more than a technical challenge, it involves social communication skills that automated vehicles do not yet have.
I've seen a similar quote attribute to Bill Gates;
"We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten."
I think about this quote a lot these days, especially while reading Hacker News. On one hand, AI doesn't seem to be having the productivity and economic impacts that were predicted, but on the other, LLMs are getting gold medals at the Math Olympiads. It's like the ground is shifting beneath our feet, but it's still too slow to be perceptible.
Waymo still have the ability to remotely deal with locations the AI has problems; I'd love to know what type of percentage of trips need to do that now. Having that escape together with only doing tested areas makes their job a LOT easier. (Not that it's bad - it's a great thing and I wish for it here!)
It's limited to a few specific markets though. My bet is they aren't going to be able to roll it out widely easily. Probably need to do years of tests in each location to figure out the nuances of the places.
Yeah, I have no idea if Waymo will ever be a rural thing honestly, mostly for economic reasons. I'm skeptical it would get serious suburban usage this decade too. But for major cities where less than 80% of people own cars, test time doesn't seem to be making a difference. They've been expanding in Austin and Atlanta, seemingly with less prep time than Phoenix and San Fran.
Atlanta seems to be a bit contradictory to some of your other thoughts.
The city itself is relatively small. A vast majority of area population lives distributed across the MSA, and it can create hellish traffic. I remember growing up thinking 1+ hour commutes were just a fact of life for everyone commuting from the suburbs.
Not sure what car ownership looks like, and I haven’t been in years, but I’d imagine it’s still much more than just 20%
Austin is also a car city, everyone has a car there. Public transit in Austin is a joke, and Waymo can't get on the highway so it's only useful for getting back to your hotel from Rainey Street, and maybe back to your dorm from the Drag, but nobody is using Waymo to commute from Round Rock
> Not sure what car ownership looks like, and I haven’t been in years, but I’d imagine it’s still much more than just 20%
I said "less than 80% car ownership", not "80% do not own a car". Technically these are not mutually exclusive but I think you read it as the second one. I haven't really found much analysis about how public transit interfaces with self driving cars honestly.
They keep expanding in places where it doesn't snow.
They've got testing facilities in Detroit ( https://mcity.umich.edu/what-we-do/mcity-test-facility/ ) ... but I want to see it work while it is snowing or after it has snowed in the upper midwest.
https://youtu.be/YvcfpO1k1fc?si=hONzbMEv22jvTLFS - has suggestions that they're starting testing.
If AI driving only works in California, New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas... that's not terribly useful for the rest of the country.
If I were in charge of Waymo, I’d roll out in snowy places last. The odds of a “couldn’t be avoided” accident is much higher in snow/ice. I’d want an abundance of safety data in other places to show that the cars are still safe, and it was the snow instead of the tech that caused the accident.
They're testing in Denver and NYC so its coming.
Define the rest of the country?
If you refer to rural areas, thats 1/7 of the population and ~10% of GDP. They can be tossed aside like they are in other avenues.
Doesn't it snow in NYC?
I could see it taking off in the suburbs/rural areas if they start having a franchise model when it’s more mature.
I saw this timeline a while ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/waymo/s/mSm0E3yYTY that shows their timeline in each city. Shows Atlanta at just over a year. I think once they've handled similar cities it gets easier and easier to add new ones.
Honestly, once a traffic island city (like Singapore) or some other small nation state adopts self driving only within its limits and shows that it is much easier when all are self driving I think the opposition to the change will slowly reduce.
Rain, Snow etc. are still challenges but needs a bold bet in a place that wants to show how futuristic it is. The components are in place (Waymo cars), what is needed is high enough labor cost to justify the adoption.
> a saying about overestimating stuff in the short term and underestimating stuff in the long term
This is exactly what came to my mind also.