Technology

And this is why DOGE gutted the Office for Vehicle Automation Safety at the NHTSA.

this would get a normal person's car impounded and drivers license revoked. why can a company get away with it?

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.

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.

It is probably being remotely driven from India and they just lost wifi for a minute.

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.

You can tell it’s a Tesla because of the way it is.

So it emulates a standard BMW driver. Well done.

Parking in a fire lane to drop off a passenger just makes it seem more human.

Yea, I am not surprised given that the regular lane keep is still ghost braking when going under bridges.

Still, I am surprised how well they are doing, using only cameras.

I am entirely opposed to driving algorithms. Autopilot on planes works very well because it is used in open sky and does not have to make major decisions about moving in close proximity to other planes and obstacles. Its almost entirely mathematical, and even then in specific circumstances it is designed to disengage and put control back in the hands of a human.

Cars do not have this luxury and operate entirely in close proximity to other vehicles and obstacles. Very little of the act of driving a car is math. It's almost entirely decision making. It requires fast and instinctive response to subtle changes in environment, pattern recognition that human brains are better at than algorithms.

To me this technology perfectly encapsulates the difficulty in making algorithms that mimic human behavior. The last 10% of optimization to make par with humans requires an exponential amount more energy and research than the first 90% does. 90% of the performance of a human is entirely insufficient where life and death is concerned.

Investment costs should be going to public transport systems. They are more cost efficient, more accessible, more fuel/resource efficient, and far far far safer than cars could ever be even with all human drivers. This is a colossal waste of energy time and money for a product that will not be par with human performance for a long time. Those resources could be making our world more accessible for everyone, instead they're making it more accessible for no one and making the roads significantly more dangerous. Capitalism will be the end of us all if we let them. Sorry that train and bus infrastructure isnt "flashy enough" for you. You clearly havent seen the public transport systems in Beijing. The technology we have here is decades behind and so underfunded its infuriating.

Navigation issue / hesitation

The video really understates the level of fuck up that the car did there...

And the guy sitting there just casually being ok with the car ignoring the forced left going straight into oncoming lanes and flipping the steering wheel all over the place because it has no idea what the hell just happened... I would not be just chilling there..

Of course, I wouldn't have gotten in this car in the first place, and I know they cherry picked some hard core Tesla fans to be allowed to ride at all...

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.

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?

Haaa, finally !! An AI taxi that behaves like a normal taxi driver. It must feel so refreshing.

Fucking hell. We don't let drunks drive taxis, and that goddamn thing drove like it was under the influence.

Does Tesla get sent tickets for traffic violations, or are we OK with this?

So, Tesla Robitaxis drive like a slightly drunk and confused tourist with asshole driving etiquette.

Those right turns on red were like, "oh you get to go? That's permission for me to go too!"

Oof, these highlighted parts from only one video are already enough for me. This looks very stressful, I don't think I could finish a whole ride with one of these.

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

Not great performance at all.

That's better than I was expecting to be perfectly honest.

I'm pretty impressed with the technology, but clearly it's not ready for field use.

Well obviously it's been trained on human taxi driver behaviour

A man who can’t launch a rocket to save his life is also incompetent at making self driving cars? His mediocrity knows no bounds.

Watch that stock price fall... wheeeee