It’s even less than that. The act of plotting a course (which we called Augmented Trajectories), was used very sparingly, and mostly just to do “illegal” maneuvers like crossing a double yellow line in order to get around debris in the road. The Waymo won’t (knowingly) break the law on its own, even in those exceptional situations like road obstructions, so we could either tell the car “this road is inaccessible due to the obstruction” and let it try to make a 30-point u-turn and reroute itself 8 miles in another direction, or we can tell the car “let me direct you through this tiny lil one-time crime”. ATs are very limited in scope; we could basically plot out several points in the car’s path, and then tell it to drive itself to those points while ignoring other traffic rules, and then the car will complete that course while steering itself along the path you’ve plotted. You can only set a max distance of like 20 meters or so before having to make the car pull over and plot a new AT again, and the car will only ever go about 3 MPH during an AT. Even during an AT, the car will still refuse to drive over anything it doesn’t recognize as safe and will not collide itself with anything at all.
Almost all of the remote dispatcher’s job is just identifying objects (usually road signs, traffic signals, and other vehicles) that the Waymo isn’t able to immediately identify. No remote driving, and very little manual course-plotting is being done by humans.
Source: was a Waymo remote dispatcher for a year and identified tens of thousands of road objects, and conducted maybe 4 ATs in total. They’re very rare. We mostly had to use them in road work areas, where the workers would leave a very complicated temporary path with road cones that the car just couldn’t figure out, or where the cones had fallen over.
On a completely unrelated note, this type of online conversation is what makes me most pessimistic about LLMs. I’m fairly certain Chozo is a human, but as time goes on it will become much more likely companies will have bots crawling all social media looking for conversations like this as a standard part of their PR team. It will make it impossible to discern truth from hallucination and ultimately just erode trust in everything. It’s such a bleak future.
Almost all of the remote dispatcher’s job is just identifying objects (usually road signs, traffic signals, and other vehicles) that the Waymo isn’t able to immediately identify. No remote driving, and very little manual course-plotting is being done by humans.
So basically Waymo needs humans to do what humans do daily while driving.
I do get your point, but what’s the point of this tech if it cannot actually do what human drivers constantly do? you mention road work, in Canada, basically if it’s not winter (hard to drive because of conditions and almost complete lack of visibility of the road and signs), it’s road construction time…
For a long time now, humans have been utilising machines and robots to perform tasks that humans would otherwise have had to perform - particularly when it comes to manufacturing. Occasionally, one of those machines will encounter an error or issue, and a human will need to intervene to either fix the machine or guide the process before it can resume its task.
These advancements have allowed a very small number of humans to oversee what would have otherwise required hundreds, potentially thousands of humans to do independently. Even when humans were performing these tasks, they would occasionally need someone with more specialisation or experience to help them with completing such a task.
The point of this tech - the point of all tech that I’ve described above - is to reduce the amount of humans needed to produce a given result. It’s a reduction in the need for labour. It’s a matter of efficiency, not a complete replacement of any need for any human to ever intervene under any circumstances. Under communism, or even well-fleshed out socialism, it would free up humans from having to perform menial labour to instead pursue their passions, work on vital human skills, create and consume art… just live better lives.
Now, would I ride in a self-driving vehicle? Certainly not yet. The tech still needs time to develop before I’m confident in it. As time goes on, the need for human intervention will continue to drop, and hopefully my confidence will grow.
The point is you can have say 100 people in an office someone manage 5,000 cars instead of having 5,000 drivers operating those 5,000 cars and it’s a way more efficient.
Also well built self driving cars like the Waymo ones are actually significantly safer than human drivers.
Being able to autonomously drive itself in the vast majority of scenarios is a big fucking deal.
In a controlled limited area, with human intervention… hmmm again, not sure I would use the words “Fully autonomous driving” for this but English is not my first language so maybe it is like the “unlimited” plans from cell phone companies
It’s even less than that. The act of plotting a course (which we called Augmented Trajectories), was used very sparingly, and mostly just to do “illegal” maneuvers like crossing a double yellow line in order to get around debris in the road. The Waymo won’t (knowingly) break the law on its own, even in those exceptional situations like road obstructions, so we could either tell the car “this road is inaccessible due to the obstruction” and let it try to make a 30-point u-turn and reroute itself 8 miles in another direction, or we can tell the car “let me direct you through this tiny lil one-time crime”. ATs are very limited in scope; we could basically plot out several points in the car’s path, and then tell it to drive itself to those points while ignoring other traffic rules, and then the car will complete that course while steering itself along the path you’ve plotted. You can only set a max distance of like 20 meters or so before having to make the car pull over and plot a new AT again, and the car will only ever go about 3 MPH during an AT. Even during an AT, the car will still refuse to drive over anything it doesn’t recognize as safe and will not collide itself with anything at all.
Almost all of the remote dispatcher’s job is just identifying objects (usually road signs, traffic signals, and other vehicles) that the Waymo isn’t able to immediately identify. No remote driving, and very little manual course-plotting is being done by humans.
Source: was a Waymo remote dispatcher for a year and identified tens of thousands of road objects, and conducted maybe 4 ATs in total. They’re very rare. We mostly had to use them in road work areas, where the workers would leave a very complicated temporary path with road cones that the car just couldn’t figure out, or where the cones had fallen over.
Thank you for the insight and write up.
On a completely unrelated note, this type of online conversation is what makes me most pessimistic about LLMs. I’m fairly certain Chozo is a human, but as time goes on it will become much more likely companies will have bots crawling all social media looking for conversations like this as a standard part of their PR team. It will make it impossible to discern truth from hallucination and ultimately just erode trust in everything. It’s such a bleak future.
So basically Waymo needs humans to do what humans do daily while driving.
I do get your point, but what’s the point of this tech if it cannot actually do what human drivers constantly do? you mention road work, in Canada, basically if it’s not winter (hard to drive because of conditions and almost complete lack of visibility of the road and signs), it’s road construction time…
For a long time now, humans have been utilising machines and robots to perform tasks that humans would otherwise have had to perform - particularly when it comes to manufacturing. Occasionally, one of those machines will encounter an error or issue, and a human will need to intervene to either fix the machine or guide the process before it can resume its task.
These advancements have allowed a very small number of humans to oversee what would have otherwise required hundreds, potentially thousands of humans to do independently. Even when humans were performing these tasks, they would occasionally need someone with more specialisation or experience to help them with completing such a task.
The point of this tech - the point of all tech that I’ve described above - is to reduce the amount of humans needed to produce a given result. It’s a reduction in the need for labour. It’s a matter of efficiency, not a complete replacement of any need for any human to ever intervene under any circumstances. Under communism, or even well-fleshed out socialism, it would free up humans from having to perform menial labour to instead pursue their passions, work on vital human skills, create and consume art… just live better lives.
Now, would I ride in a self-driving vehicle? Certainly not yet. The tech still needs time to develop before I’m confident in it. As time goes on, the need for human intervention will continue to drop, and hopefully my confidence will grow.
The point is you can have say 100 people in an office someone manage 5,000 cars instead of having 5,000 drivers operating those 5,000 cars and it’s a way more efficient.
Also well built self driving cars like the Waymo ones are actually significantly safer than human drivers.
You realize the tech is still under development, right?
Being able to autonomously drive itself in the vast majority of scenarios is a big fucking deal.
yes, and I am calling a spade a spade
In a controlled limited area, with human intervention… hmmm again, not sure I would use the words “Fully autonomous driving” for this but English is not my first language so maybe it is like the “unlimited” plans from cell phone companies