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Alphabet Is Finally Taking the Driver Out of Some of Its Driverless Cars (recode.net)
An anonymous reader shares a report: After almost a decade, Google's parent company Alphabet is getting closer to fulfilling its promise of rolling out cars that can take anyone anywhere without a driver behind the wheel. Alphabet's self-driving car company, Waymo, is introducing truly driverless cars to public roads for the first time, the company's CEO John Krafcik announced today at the Web Summit conference. That means there won't have to be a person sitting in the driver's seat, waiting to take over, and that the car's computer system will complete all parts of the driving task -- though for now, only in some of the company's cars in Phoenix, Ariz. While this move is still geographically limited, it marks the beginnings of Alphabet's driverless future finally becoming a reality. No other company has succeeded in operating a fleet of fully driverless cars on public roads.
I've seen other posts on Slashdot before that were dubious we'd see self driving cars in the next 20 years... but it's not even going to be five before they are in use with real people in all sorts of areas, as this article indicates.
There is just too much demand, too much benefit, and SO much effort being put into making self driving cars work. People seem concerned these cars may make mistakes but the benefits are so huge mistakes will be overlooked, because in the end even now they are probably safer than most human drivers, much less after a few more years of effort.
The largest obstacle I see really is how to deal with snow, which can really block up pretty much any kind of sensor. Otherwise the technology to drive correctly has advanced and will continue to advance at a very rapid clip...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Phoenix, Arizona. Probably one of the driest spots in the USA, and one with nice, straight roads. Hmmm... Is it possible that the Waymo / Alphabet / Googleplex cars are not that good at self-driving?
When you're running code for the first time, do you present it with the most complicated input you can imagine? Maybe if you're really sure of yourself and have little consequence for errors. I start with simple test cases and work my way up. My dad was always fond of telling me to "shoot the cripples first."
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
I don't understand why we have driving schools. We don't we just put humans in to the worst possible situation behind the wheel and see how the driver will handle it. Is it possible that the humans are not that good at driving?
I mean this seriously: the more I think about it, and the harder it is for me to take the idea of human driving seriously in anything that is not in the southwestern United States.
Driving a car in some parts of Europe would simply be very, very difficult for humans.
All of this to say, centuries into this human driving car project and humans still kill over million people every year.
What utter nonsense. You start with something that works for the general case. Then you start exploring the edge cases. Writing a test for each potential issue. that's standard Test Driven Development. And standard practice (minus doing the tests first) for every other kind of coder too.
If you are trying to tell me that people deal with the hard cases first, before the general cases, I won't believe you have any experience at all.
And given that self-driving cars have cameras pointing in every direction, plus logging of every action they take, these will be the least likely of all cars to suffer from insurance fraudsters.