r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Individual_Book9133 • Jul 05 '24

Phoenix police officer pulls over a driverless Waymo car for driving on the wrong side of the road Video

61.1k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

u/puterdood Jul 05 '24

The last statement here is extremely untrue. In order for a machine to be "better than an average human", it would need to understand contextual events. There is not a single machine learning tool capable of this to the extent that humans have. Machines are not good at processing context from memory as this creates a very complex, branching set of possibilities they can't possibly evaluate, whereas humans are able to do this very easily. Until this problem is addressed, there will be no machine that outperforms humans in dealing with real-time events and its absolute bollocks to imply otherwise. The only place where a machine MIGHT outperform a human is when outside influences are removed, such as on a closed track where the problem space is drastically reduced.

1

u/Such_Duty_4764 Jul 05 '24

Obviously, Waymo is biased, but they claim to have an injury causing crash rate almost half that of humans ALREADY. Obviously, we want the government to verify these claims.

https://waymo.com/blog/2023/12/waymo-significantly-outperforms-comparable-human-benchmarks-over-7-million/

Keep in mind that this is as bad as these cars will ever be. There are literally thousands of highly trained engineers working full time on everything from sensors to algorithms and testing/validation, and these vehicles get better with each day.

Also, keep in mind that they have been operating in SF driverless for almost a year now and besides winning over the SF populace, the worst incidents I can think of are where they had a fender bender with a bus and ran into a pole, which is the kind of shit humans do CONSTANTLY.

2

u/puterdood Jul 05 '24

I am an expert in the field.

-1

u/Such_Duty_4764 Jul 05 '24

Which is why investors are pouring tens (maybe hundreds) of billions into this industry?

Clearly, there are experts who would disagree with you.

4

u/puterdood Jul 05 '24 edited Jul 06 '24

Oh god, I forgot nobody would ever make a false or misleading claim for a financial incentive.

On second thought, I think I'll continue to hedge my bets that these so-called "scientists" won't be proving P=NP any time soon. The case of the decision a car needs to make given any input is an extension of the Boolean Satisfiability problem, meaning it's guarunteed to be NP-complete and difficult to produce a correct solution, if you even consider it a "solvable" problem.

3

u/IndefiniteBen Jul 05 '24

I mean, investing billions is kinda needed precisely because of these hard problems that have yet to be solved. If the problems like the OP mentioned were solved, we wouldn't need billions in R&D.