I saw the Tesla Robotaxi:
- Drive into oncoming traffic, getting honked at in the process.
- Signal a turn and then go straight at a stop sign with turn signal on.
- Park in a fire lane to drop off the passenger.
And that was in a single 22 minute ride. Not great performance at all.
And this is why DOGE gutted the Office for Vehicle Automation Safety at the NHTSA.
I thought that was to economize for expenses?!
So naturally they started with 5 employees in the smallest office of one of the smallest divisions of the NHTSA. Nooooo ulterior motive, nosiree
this would get a normal person’s car impounded and drivers license revoked. why can a company get away with it?
Systemic corruption.
Regulatory
capturedecapitationIt wouldn’t say corruption, I think it’s more that the law around the road was designed with a driver in mind, not with a company or even a robot. the consequences have been thought to hurt a person at fault because at the time only a person could drive
Elon has enough fuck-you money to pay off anyone who would’ve complained.
The rent seeking is so hard with this automate-the-profits bullshit.
The moment we perfect auto-taxis the service should be a public benefit and run by a nonprofit.
NYC Mayoral candidate Mamdani is talking about making busses free, and that makes a radical shitload of sense.
Free autotaxis would be a boon for productivity and personal freedom, like AI promises to be but democratized for everybody rather than just the richest fraction of a percent.
People are going to take a shit in them. And ride them around for fun
ride them around for fun
Imagine the horror!
Remember guys, Tesla wants to have a living person sitting behind the wheel for “safety.” Don’t YOU want to get paid minimum wage to sit in a car all day, paying attention but doing nothing unless it’s about to crash, at which point you’ll be made the scapegoat for not preventing the crash?
Welcome to the future, you’re gonna hate it here.
I mean, compared to getting minimum wage flipping burgers in a hot kitchen, or picking vegetables in the sun, or working the register in a store in a bad neighborhood, or even restocking stuff at Walmart… yes, I would sit all day in an air conditioned car doing nothing but “paying attention”.
The unfortunate thing about people is we acclimatise quickly to the demands of our situation. If everything seems OK, the car seems to be driving itself, we start to pay less attention. Fighting that impulse is extremely hard.
A good example is ADHD. I have severe ADHD so I take meds to manage it. If I am driving an automatic car on cruise control I find it very difficult to maintain long term high intensity concentration. The solution for me is to drive a manual. The constant involvement of maintaining speed, revs, gear ratio, and so on mean I can pay attention much easier. Add to that thinking about hypermiling and defensive driving and I have become a very safe driver, putting about 25-30 thousand kms on my car each year for over a decade without so much as a fender bender. In an automatic I was always tense, forcing focus on the road, and honestly it hurt my neck and shoulders because of the tension. In my zippy little manual I have no trouble driving at all.
So imagine that but up to an even higher level. Someone is supervising a car which handles most situations well enough to make you feel like a passenger. They will switch off and stop paying attention eventually. At that point it is on them, not the car itself being unfit. I want self driving to be a reality but right now it is not. We can do all sorts of driver assist stuff but not full self driving.
A good example is ADHD. I have severe ADHD so I take meds to manage it. If I am driving an automatic car on cruise control I find it very difficult to maintain long term high intensity concentration. The solution for me is to drive a manual. The constant involvement of maintaining speed, revs, gear ratio, and so on mean I can pay attention much easier. Add to that thinking about hypermiling and defensive driving and I have become a very safe driver, putting about 25-30 thousand kms on my car each year for over a decade without so much as a fender bender. In an automatic I was always tense, forcing focus on the road, and honestly it hurt my neck and shoulders because of the tension. In my zippy little manual I have no trouble driving at all.
Are you me? I love weaving through traffic as fast as I can… in a video game (like Motor Town behind the wheel). In real life I drive very safe and it is boring af for my ADHD so I do things like try to hit the apex of turns just perfect as if I was driving at the limit but I am in reality driving at a normal speed.
Part of living with severe ADHD is you don’t get breaks from having to play these games to survive everyday life, as you say it is a stressful reality in part of this. You brought up a great point too that both of us know, when our focus is on something and activated we can perform at a high level, but accidents don’t wait for your focus, they just happen, and this is why we are always beating ourselves up.
We can look at self driving car tech and intuit a lot about the current follies of it because we know what focus is better than anyone else, especially successful tech company execs.
Yeah, it is absolutely insane to think that as a person with a literal disability in attentional regulation I have had fewer collisions than most people who are not disabled. It seems like if it is too easy people stop trying and don’t take it seriously, so they text or change the music or reach over the back. I know I can’t do that without risking a major issue and I actively have to maintain focus, so I simply do not ever “let it slide” or “just this once”. Rules can save lives if followed, but do nothing if ignored.
You seem to have missed the point. Whether or not you think that would be an easy job, the whole reason you’d be there is to be the one that takes all the blame when the autopilot kills someone. It will be your name, your face, every single record of your past mistakes getting blasted on the news and in court because Elon’s shitty vanity project finally killed a real child instead of a test dummy. You’ll be the one having to explain to a grieving family just how hard it is to actually pay complete attention every moment of every day, when all you’ve had to do before is just sit there.
How about you pay attention and PREVENT the autopilot from killing someone? Like it’s your job to do?
This is sarcasm, right?
Imagine you’re the guy who invented SawStop, the table saw that can detect fingers touching the saw blade and immediately bury the blade in an aluminum block to avoid cutting off someone’s finger. Your system took a lot of R&D, it’s expensive, requires a custom table saw with specialized internal parts so it’s much more expensive than a normal table saw, but it works, and it works well. You’ve now got it down that someone can go full-speed into the blade and most likely not even get the smallest cut. Every time the device activates, it’s a finger saved. Yeah, it’s a bit expensive to own. And, because of the safety mechanism, every time it activates you need to buy a few new parts which aren’t cheap. But, an activation means you avoided having a finger cut off, so good deal! You start selling these devices and while it’s not replacing every table saw sold, it’s slowly being something that people consider when buying.
Meanwhile, some dude out of Silicon Valley hears about this, and hacks up a system that just uses a $30 webcam, an AI model that detects fingers (trained exclusively on pudgy white fingers of Silicon Valley executives) and a pinball flipper attached to a rubber brake that slows the blade to a stop within a second when the AI model sees a finger in danger.
This new device, the, “Finger Saver” doesn’t work very well at all. In demos with a hotdog, sometimes the hotdog is sawed in half. Sometimes the saw blade goes flying out of the machine into the audience. After a while, the company has the demo down so that when they do it in extremely controlled conditions, it does stop the hotdog from being sawed in half, but it does take a good few chunks out of it before the blade fully stops. It doesn’t work at all with black fingers, but the Finger Saver company will sell you some cream-coloured paint that you can paint your finger with before using it if your finger isn’t the right shade.
Now, imagine if the media just referred to these two devices interchangeably as “finger saving devices”. Imagine if the Finger Saver company heavily promoted their things and got them installed in workshops in high schools, telling the shop teachers that students are now 100% safe from injuries while using the table saw, so they can just throw out all safety equipment. When, inevitably, someone gets a serious wound while using a “Finger Saver” the media goes on a rant about whether you can really trust “finger saving devices” at all.
Anyhow, this is a rant about Waymo vs. Tesla.
some dude out of Silicon Valley hears about this, and hacks up a system that just uses a $30 webcam, an AI model that detects fingers (trained exclusively on pudgy white fingers of Silicon Valley executives)
Hotdog / not hotdog
That was great, the first comparison that came to mind after reading it was they are both a game of russian roulette…
Waymo - you get one chamber loaded with a blank, might kill you if you get it.
Tesla - you get one empty chamber… And the gun is loaded by your worst enemy
I mean Waymo is way better at their job than Tesla and are more responsible, but this rant makes them out to seem perfectly safe. Whilst they are miles safer than Tesla, they still struggle with edge cases and aren’t perfect.
Waymo is also a silicon valley AI project to put transit workers out of work. It’s another project to get AI money and destroy labor rights. At least it kind of works isn’t exactly helping my opinion of it. Transit is incredibly underfunded and misregulated in California/the USA and robotaxis are a criminal misinvestment in resources.
a silicon valley AI project to put transit workers out of work
Silicon valley doesn’t have objectives like “putting transit workers out of work”. They only care about growth and profit.
In this case, the potential for growth is replacing every driver, not merely targeting transit workers. If they can do that, it would mean millions fewer cars on the road, and millions fewer cars being produced. Great for the environment, but yeah, some people might lose their jobs. But, other new jobs might be created.
The original car boom also destroyed all kinds of jobs. Farriers, stable hands, grooms, riding instructors, equine veterinarians, horse trainers, etc. But, should we have held back technology so those jobs were all around today? We’d still have streets absolutely covered in horse poop, and horses regularly dying in the street, along with all the resulting disease. Would that be a better world? I don’t think so.
It’s another project to get AI money and destroy labor rights.
Waymo obviously uses a form of AI, but they’ve been around a lot longer than the current AI / LLM boom. It’s 16 years old as a Google project, 21 years old if you consider the original Stanford team. As for destroying labour rights, sure, every capitalist company wants weaker labour rights. But, that includes the car companies making normal human-driven cars, it includes the companies manufacturing city buses and trains. There’s nothing special about Waymo / Google in that regard.
Sure, strengthening labour rights would be a good idea, but I don’t think it really has anything to do with Waymo. But, sure, we should organize and unionize Google if that’s at all possible.
Transit is incredibly underfunded and misregulated in California/the USA
Sure. That has nothing to do with Waymo though.
robotaxis are a criminal misinvestment in resources.
Misinvestment by whom? Google? What should Google be investing in instead?
Wow it’s almost like having an AI with a 2D view to go off of is a bad idea? Hmmm who’d have thunk it?
You’re telling me we’re not at the point where self driving cars are a thing? But a Tech CEO said so? Who am I supposed to believe if not a Tech CEO?
Self-driving cars are a thing, Weymo is doing pretty fine.
But you might be able to spot a few (dozen) teeny-tiny (huge, bulky and extremely obvious) differences between a Waymo and a Tesla cybercab.
Lie dare you claim Waymo is better than Tesla
Watch that stock price fall… wheeeee
What real world problem does this solve?
Actually, lots. The issue is that if it doesn’t work it’s dangerous.
Task automation
Is it really task automation if it does it worse than a drunk human could have done it?
I didn’t claim Tesla has solved this automation problem.
Waymo is closer to human levels, but not yet considerably better.
Nothing that a train + scooter / bicycle cannot solve imo
Parking in a fire lane to drop off a passenger just makes it seem more human.
Yea, this one isn’t an issue. If you are dropping off passengers, you are allowed to stop in a fire lane because that is not parking.
Which brings up an interesting question, when is a driverless car ‘parked’ vs. ‘stopped’?
When the engine is off?
Of course, how to tell this with an electric car?
So it emulates a standard BMW driver. Well done.
Still work to be done, it uses the blinkers.
Wow that turn signal sound is annoying. Why does it even need to make a sound in a car that’s supposed to be driving itself?
Important feedback for the passenger to ensure the car is actually following the rules. I would freak out at a corner if I couldn’t tell the car was signaling.
Oh, stop your complaining. It’s not perfect, but we’ve all seen how easy this is to fix. Just barge into Tesla tomorrow and randomly fire 20% of the employees. That’s how real leaders get things done.
/s
If we’re gonna let them on the road, I say that software should get points just like a driver, but when it gets suspended all the cars running that software get shut down.
Hooray! I feel so safe. I think I’ll move to Texas so I can get obliterated by this taxi from the future.
It is probably being remotely driven from India and they just lost wifi for a minute.
To quote AVCH, “His controller disconnected.”
AI=ALways indian.
