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Waymos crash less than human drivers

(www.understandingai.org)
345 points rbanffy | 1 comments | 26 Mar 25 20:57 UTC | HN request time: 0.23s | source
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mjburgess ◴[26 Mar 25 21:19 UTC] No.43487426[source]▶
Waymos choose the routes, right?

The issue with self-driving is (1) how it generalises across novel environments without "highly-available route data" and provider-chosen routes; (2) how failures are correlated across machines.

In safe driving failures are uncorrelated and safety procedures generalise. We do not yet know if, say, using self-driving very widely will lead to conditions in which "in a few incidents" more people are killed in those incidents than were ever hypothetically saved.

Here, without any confidence intervals, we're told we've saved ~70 airbag incidents in 20 mil miles. A bad update to the fleet will easily eclipse that impact.

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thaumasiotes ◴[26 Mar 25 21:23 UTC] No.43487464[source]▶
> The issue with self-driving is (1) how it generalises across novel environments without "highly-available route data" and provider-chosen routes; (2) how failures are correlated across machines.

Why is (1) an issue? Route data never gets worse.

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mjburgess ◴[26 Mar 25 21:26 UTC] No.43487510[source]▶
Consider London: a series of randomly moving construction sites connected by patches of city.

Waymo, as far as I recall, relies on pretty active route mapping and data sharing -- ie., the cars arent "driving themselves" in the sense of discovering the environment as a self-driving system would.

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1. AlotOfReading ◴[26 Mar 25 21:44 UTC] No.43487734[source]▶
Waymo's map data is a prior, not an authoritative reference to the world. The cars report update when the map data is wrong, and a lot of what they use it for (e.g. traffic light identification, fine localization) degrades gracefully when there's new information in the environment.