> I wouldn't try it with the same car I drive to work with every day.
Most people who do this do indeed use their daily drivers. Most people can't afford to own a second $30,000 vehicle they can take out only on the weekends.
> I think the main purpose is [...] not to remove options from people.
And I quote: "Google had long distinguished itself from other companies for committing to the development of a true robot car without a steering wheel or pedals."
> (This is why I want to work on self-driving cars...)
This is why I’m skeptical (as much as I’d like not to be) about self-driving cars. Black-hat SEO, intentionally incorrect metadata, it’s why we can’t have nice things and it will impact self-driving cars as well.
> I still cannot comprehend the current push for automated driving.
Google and Uber believe they can make an insane amount of money with the transition to automated driving. This is being sold to the public as the solution to a public safety crisis with the narrative that human controlled cars are death machines which need to be taken off the roads as soon as possible.
> Self-driving cars will be the norm. Humans will not be allowed to drive.
> Humans will work fewer hours, fewer humans will work, and fewer workers will work from work.
I think these two things have been predicted every few years for the last 60 years and we're nowhere close to getting them. I'd say it's even the opposite for working hours, people are working more, paid less and retire later than in the recent past. If you added AI to the list you'd have a wonky predictions bingo.
>> Google's existing strategy for self-driving cars isn't practical at a national level because of that extensive mapping requirement, and it possibly never will be.
>> Google's sensor platform is the most expensive out there.
>> Google has never tested in bad weather
What about a self-driving cars as a service ? they can be the first to start a very profitable service that is limited in area and in weather even thought the sensors are more expensive(and they can claim "we aren't cutting corners like everybody else!")
And that could be a great place to be in, strategically.
>I don't think Google ever (OK, in the past couple of years) really intended for self-driving cars to happen, or expected self-driving cars to happen (within a few decades).
Self-driving cars will roll-out to select markets within the next couple of years.
Google just doesn't want to manufacture the vehicles.
>Meanwhile Google engineers have actual L4 level self-driving
They don't have L4 self-driving they just made a contrived railway system for their cars. The second the car is out of the hardcoded route it's not a self driving car anymore.
> No worries, they won't put you in a self driving car that isn't perfectly safe.
That they think isn't perfectly safe.
It's not about what they will allow or not. It is about what will happen. Whether or not it will happen remains to be seen, even if Waymo does not allow it.
>> There are already videos of assisted-driving cars avoiding accidents
I'm not concerend about assisted driving. I'm concerned about fully autonomous cars being handed complete control in real-world situations.
I'm not just "concerned" about them- they scare the hell out of me.
>> Many being scenarios that Google's self-driving cars have the technology to avoid.
What Google says it programs its cars to do, what it really programs its cars to do and what its cars can really do are all separate things.
The problem is that the current technology level is nowhere near advanced enough to allow fully autonomous vehicles to operate safely. There is a huge number of situations that those cars aren't programmed for, that they can't be programmed for, because those situations are completely unforseeable.
Machine learning has a huge problem with data sparsness. You may train a learner in petabytes and petabytes of data collected from the real world and still miss the vast majority of events that may occur.
That is why, like I say elsewhere, machine learning-based AI makes utterly ludicrous mistakes that humans would never do, even in difficult situations were they can't be expected to perform with 0% error. I've used a few metaphors- here's another one: a human would never mistake a truck for a cucumber. A machine learning algorithm, might.
And what's worse, there's no way to prevent this sort of mistake, or even correct it, because most of the time the models built by such algorithms are simply too complex to be processed by humans in the way a hand-crafted system would be (and goddess knows how hard those can be to process).
> Waymo cars could drive on any US road, they don’t need detailed mapping efforts. Their limitation is legal not software.
Again, you’re mixing up “could drive” with actual ability to reliably take me where I want to go. Yeah, NavLab drove from Pittsburgh to San Diego in 1995. That doesn’t mean we had self-driving cars.
And no, Waymo’s limitation is not just legal. Where are you getting that impression from? Sure, they don’t have permits to do other routes, but there’s a good reason for that: they cannot stand behind their product except within their geofence.
I am not saying intelligence equals self driving. I am saying that even if you define it that way, we are far, far away still.
> Finally, unless you outright _force_ all drivers to use the autonomous mode, then users can still take control of their cars as they see fit and we're really not improving anything.
I mean, Google has prototypes with no steering wheels, and has as an explicit goal the ability to transport children, blind people, the elderly, etc. Eventually they absolutely do want to force drivers to use autonomous mode (at least "force" in the sense that users will need to opt in when they choose a vehicle or service, rather than minute by minute during a trip).
> However, overhauling the current system because it is incapable of handling the future where autonomous vehicles flood the skies, now that is something I can get behind.
Until cars can drive themselves without crashing into stopped fire trucks[1], I don’t want anything autonomous flying anywhere near where I live.
https://www.cnet.com/news/alphabet-google-waymo-ceo-john-kra...
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