r/mildlyinfuriating • u/GhostKW • 8h ago
Ruined by Technology Autonomous driving, except for the driving part
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u/NotGoodName 7h ago
Should have let it drive into the hole. Then get to take a break untill someone shows up to remove it.
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u/XxyxXII 47m ago
Every time I see a video like this I always wonder why people go so easy on them. Like... the Waymo has stopped. Walk up to it and rap hard on the front sensor with your knuckles. It will detect a possible collision and shut down temporarily (I've seen this done), wait for waymo service to fix it, costing the company way more money and making it turn around. No need to go out of your way to let it through...
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u/kauymattyman 8h ago
I had a 30m convo with my asshole boss on why fully autonomous all the time isn't a good idea. He smirks like a gremlin and said it's been perfected
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u/GhostKW 7h ago
I’ve worked on construction sites long enough to know how much we rely on flaggers to keep workers safe. If a human driver ignores a flagger, there are clear consequences. But if a "Waymo" drives straight past one, who’s accountable here? As an engineer I’m not comfortable having autonomous vehicles moving around an active site when nobody can clearly explain who takes responsibility if someone gets hurt. I’d rather keep them out until that’s figured out, this technology is still far from perfect unfortunately.
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u/redclawx 6h ago
The company needs to be held accountable. CA has laws on the books specifically for autonomous vehicles. I don’t know why every other state doesn’t and the states need to be reactive to this.
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u/brownsdragon 6h ago
Honestly, if they already aren't, governments should start fining the companies that make the automatic cars for every illegal decision those things make. Maybe that'll get them to pay attention.
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u/HoneyBadger_Cares 6h ago
Yeh but tech bros hire tech bro lobbyists that pay law makers good money to not bother them
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u/Lopsided_Flight_2986 7h ago
I’ve always felt it’s an all or nothing sort of thing. Either all vehicles are autonomous and fully connected to each other at all times or not in which case the system doesn’t work and these cars shouldn’t be on the street because they are very poor at judging situations for themselves.
I’ve always expected it to be like a grid type system like how the cars in iRobot work for example.
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u/IlliniDawg01 7h ago
Yep. Certain roadways should have electronic grids that all cars can "snap" into, but as soon as you leave the grid, all cars should be full manual/human operation.
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u/mcampo84 6h ago
It took me way too long to realize you weren't having a 30 meter conversation as though that's a thing that people do.
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u/SpiritualWindow3855 8h ago
How is this a convo? It is obviously a good idea _if you can achieve it_, almost tautologically so. Having a human half-pay attention is a bandaid, but that's where things are today.
That Waymo has a remote operator, but the vehicle didn't escalate to them because it thought that was a normal stop sign.
If a way hadn't opened up, a human would get pinged to take over (they don't drive it directly, but they start telling it where to drive towards)
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u/AnimalBolide 7h ago
I think they're arguing that it will never be able to examine situations and come up with safe options on the fly like a human can. They're arguing against the edge cases, I think, like this. Obviously, to a human, the road is inaccessible.
And of course you can argue that we're still in the infancy of autonomous cars, but there will always be edge cases, and almost every fix for them in these situations are in hindsight.
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u/SpiritualWindow3855 7h ago
Except you can't rely on humans for the edge cases is the point.
If the human isn't already paying full attention, hitting them with a "think fast!" actually goes worse than the AVs tend to do
There's an entire field of study around this called human factors. At the end of the day the goal should 100% be full autonomy, or no autonomy. Halfway is the worst, but Waymo is easily the company making the fastest progress out of that valley.
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I don't also think this video is as damning as the comments are making it out to be fwiw: there many humans who would stop at that stop sign, then continue forward and wait for them to move out of the way.
And I don't mean a gotcha like the dumbest 1%... I mean on an average day that is probably happening constantly, and the main difference is normally someone might shout and the driver to go around.
If anything I trust the Waymo not to have hit someone if they got in the way more than the human who gets in the same situation and starts panicking and trying to back out.
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u/AnimalBolide 7h ago
Sure.
Until your car drives you off of a cliff because it confuses it for a road.
You have to realize the difference between human lack-of-attention and a robotic completely inability to regard what it's seeing.
That's likely why they said "all the time".
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u/kauymattyman 7h ago
You are really good at dissecting what I meant!
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u/AnimalBolide 7h ago
Don't mean to put words in your mouth, I felt like that commentor missed the mark, though.
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u/kauymattyman 7h ago
No no I meant it as a genuine compliment haha. You managed to catch the essence of what I was saying from the little snippets. Just thought it was neat :)
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u/SpiritualWindow3855 7h ago
Humans don't inherently regard what we're seeing anymore than an AV does, and I'm extremely concerned if you drive on public roads and think that you do.
Every single day humans die because they thought the open road was in front of them... and instead it was another car, or a construction zone, or even a cliff.
And it's not that the driver didn't see these things: they often saw them, were not paying attention, and did not regard them.
AVs have plenty of actual problems, you don't need to invent an alternate reality where human cognition is infallible to address them.
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u/kauymattyman 7h ago
Yeah Animal got it right with what I was saying.
I mean it's self demonstrated that edge cases are hard here.
And I just hope not to witness edge cases at pace involving people.
Humans are conscious and a machine simply isn't. But I could get comfortable with a combination of the 2.
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u/SilverNeptuneAbyss 6h ago
Plenty of humans do this shit all the time LOL so this car doesn't really seem like that big of an issue.
Looks like it's just a normal human driver to me
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u/Jijonbreaker1 8h ago
If society were logical, the company executives would be the one to arrest for driving like this. They put it on the road, they get held responsible for it.
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u/impossibletree26 8h ago
At minimum they should be paying massive fines anytime this shit happens. A person doing this would surely be ticketed and fined.
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u/AdjNounNumbers 8h ago
I'm going to just put a Waymo decal on my truck and just do what I want now. Thanks for the idea
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u/impossibletree26 7h ago
You'll just have to jump into the back seat when you get pulled over. Life hack.
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u/Slickity 7h ago
Hey they kinda validated waymo's shitty aggressive driving by letting it move past
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u/FlorpFlap 7h ago
The fuck you supposed to do, tell it to stop?
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u/Slickity 4h ago
Yea no doubt the construction workers chose the path of least resistance. Can't fault them.
Otherwise, let the waymo wig out and figure out what to do. If it strikes equipment, call the police and let them sort it out and file insurance claims. Harder and more work so I get it not doing it.
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u/Mercurydriver 7h ago
If I were the excavator operator, I would have smashed the front end of the Waymo. When they inevitably ask why that was necessary, I would say that the vehicle entered a construction zone illegally, and that I had to stop the Waymo car to prevent it from causing an accident/injuries to my crew.
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u/PotatoesAndChill 7h ago
I see the comments being pretty very negative about Waymo.
These situations are not that common, and when they do happen, there's rarely any danger. It's mostly a mild inconvenience, where someone has to deal with a driverless car that's in the way until the remote operators fix it.
And on the flip side, think about how many accidents are being prevented by replacing potentially drunk/distracted/tired/angry uber drivers with these robots that are fully aware of their surroundings 100% of the time.
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u/CobaltCaterpillar 7h ago
Yeah, lol?
This is quite mild? Also quite impressive it seems to respond to any human hand gestures/direction at all?!
Meanwhile, you could make a feature length film every week (or perhaps every hour?) of human motorists failing to move on a green light while texting, swerving while texting, driving drunk, running red lights, aggressive tailgating, making dangeorus/bad passes, crashing into each other, road raging on a schoolbus, backing over kids, mixing up brake and accelerator, and more?!
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u/choadspanker RED 6h ago
for every waymo doing what it did in this video there are 1000 human drivers blowing through construction sites except they're also texting/drunk/road raging and going way faster. if i was standing out there i'd rather be facing a waymo every time
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u/Adorable_Wolf_8387 7h ago
Stop typically means continue when the area is clear, and the area was clear as far as it could see. They might have different logic if the guy was actually holding the sign. But that's also just an assumption on my part.
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u/aguywithbrushes 2h ago
They do, there’s a video somewhere out there of some guy fucking with a waymo by showing and hiding a stop sign it on repeat so the Waymo keeps starting and stopping.
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u/SoulReddit13 2h ago
Feel like if the guy was holding ta stop sign instead of his phone it would've stopped
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u/PierogiCoyote 1h ago
We use the same sign to mean stop and wait at gates and school crossings or it could mean stop and then go at an intersection. The sign was propped up so the car got confused and though it was an intersection.
This is an extremely dangerous example of autonomous vehicles being unable to apply context to a situation that would be obvious to most human drivers.
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u/Embarrassed_Use6918 1h ago
They gotta put a button on the hood or something that just sends a notification to Waymo for one of their remote drivers to take over. Maybe a QR code. I don't know. Someone figure that out.
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u/hiimtoddornot 5h ago
as much as that guy is getting paid to stand there, the car didn't crash and got around multiple obstacles in the road
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u/Anti_Up_Up_Down 1h ago
Seems like it worked out well
Only flaw is the construction workers didn't know how to immediately contact Waymo for a remote driver to take over
Seems like something Waymo needs to figure out for expanded coverage across the US
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u/15th_imp 8h ago
what's even the point of it if no one is sitting inside? is it just used for deliveries?
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u/Expert_Green_2816 5h ago
We’re not gonna talk about how that back right wheel is not moving but the car is?
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u/Da_Question 4h ago
If rpm is similar to fps you get it where it looks like it isn't moving. There are tons of examples of this for different stuff.
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u/CdnTreeGuy89 8h ago
I need this guy to narrate my life