As a Londoner who used to have to ride up Abbey Road at least once per week there are people on that crossing pretty much all day every day reproducing that picture. So now Waymo are in Beta in London[1] they have only to drive up there and they'll get plenty of footage they could use for taht.
[1] I've seen a couple of them but they're not available to hire yet and are still very rare.
Yeah it’s interesting to imagine a London that had such a rebuild, like Napoleon’s rebuild of Paris. I personally love the weird narrow streets and little alleyways of the City, but that’s because when I’m there I’m pretty much exclusively on foot having taken the tube in.
Looking at the massive downvote of my comment and all the subsequent replies, lots of people here missed their MIT class of Ethics in Software Engineering...
In safety critical engineering, ethics are not opinions but process guarantees.
Waymo system is ML dominant, non deterministic, and validated statistically, without a public end to end safety case, formal failure bounds, or provably safe fallback under unknown conditions.
Shipping anyway is not a technical necessity but a choice to externalize unbounded risk onto non consenting bystanders. Comparing that to bad human drivers or stock prices misses the point that this about what risks you knowingly impose.
Looks like the Waymo Software team could apply at Boeing. I hear they are hiring....
I'd bet all my money, and all the money I could borrow, that a waymo would stop/swerve for a child running out before the sensory nerves in a humans eye reacted to that child. Just thinking it's not as egregious a violation when committed by something with a 0.1ms response time. Still a violation, still shouldn't do it, but the worst case outcome would be much much harder to realize than with a human driver.
Also just to add, the fact that there aren't cases of this from Phoenix or SF seems to signal it's a dumb mistake bug in the "Atlanta" build.
You’re giving a technical answer to a question that’s actually about the economic and policy incentives.
Yes, electronic sensors can enable the car to react more quickly: But react how?
A buggy or unexpected reaction will just lead to equal or faster tragedy.
Individual drivers are incentivized to keep their behavior (or be taken off the road). What legal incentives are there when a faceless company is involved and creates one or two drivers “at scale”?
"Benchmarks were aligned to the same vehicle types, road types, and locations as where the Waymo Driver operated."
So yes, it's apples to apples... I'm sure there's some inherent variation, so maybe it's fuji to granny smith apples, but it seems there's nothing wildly off in their methodology.
It appears not to be. Here are the ones in Santa Clara County:
- Milpitas
- Mountain View
- Palo Alto Santa
- San Jose
- Sunnyvale
- Unincorporated Area (Lexington
Hills area, overlapping Santa
Clara and Santa Cruz Counties)
I don't know why it says "Palo Alto Santa"
Edit: I guess it's "Palo Alto Santa" to disambiguate between Palo Alto, which is in Santa Clara County, and East Palo Alto, which is in San Mateo County (BTW the westmost point of East Palo Alto is east of the westmost point of Palo Alto, but the eastmost point of East Palo Alto is not east of the eastmost point of Palo Alto).
It looks like the map includes north of 280, so you can use it to go to Gamba Karaoke and Tea Era. And really, what else could you need from Cupertino?
