Waymo in Arizona will be the first autonomous taxi service to ditch the human safety driver

[Master Disaster]

Waymo has said its confident enough in its technology to ditch the human safety driver entirely and will begin this process in Phoenix, Arizona within just a few months (though it will keep a human on hand in the back of the vehicle for a while)

 

Quote

Self-driving car company Waymo has said it is confident enough in its technology to ditch the human safety driver and open up its fleet to the public.

Companies testing autonomous cars typically have a human on hand ready to step in if the car malfunctions.

 

But Waymo, owned by Google parent company Alphabet, said it no longer needed that protection - though at first one of its employees will ride in the back with customers.

The service will be made available in Phoenix, Arizona over the next few months, Waymo’s chief executive John Krafcik said.

 

It is the not the first time Waymo has demonstrated cars without human drivers - even as a back-up - on public roads.

 

Its driverless prototype has been tested over short journeys on pre-defined routes, including taking a blind man to a doctor’s appointment.

 

But this latest move will greatly increase the ambition, and risk, of Waymo’s technology - it will eventually cover an area the size of Greater London, the company said.

At first the service will be free however this is likely to change in the future

Quote

Members of the public will be riding in Fiat Chrysler Pacifica minivans. Initially a Waymo employee will travel with the customers, but not behind the wheel as has been the case previously. Eventually the public will be allowed to travel alone.

 

The self-driving taxi fleet will at first be free to use, but the company envisions it will charge for the journeys at a later date.

 

Waymo is a company created out of Google’s self-driving programme, and was seen as a way to step up efforts to commercialise the firm’s industry-leading efforts in autonomy.

Of course experts are now chiming in with with opinion son the move

Quote

Over time it is expected that self-driving technology could dramatically improve the safety on our roads. But experts have said the public should not expect this problem to be solved quickly.

 

Instances of people being killed in accidents involving self-driving cars will likely increase, argued Nidhi Kalra, leader author on a new study looking at self-driving safety.

 

But her report said that should not be a reason to delay adoption.

 

“Waiting for highly autonomous vehicles that are many times safer than human drivers misses opportunities to save lives,” the report concluded.

 

"It is the very definition of allowing perfect to be the enemy of good.”

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-41909594

 

Interesting that they're so confident however I feel this is a bit premature tbh. There is just to many unanswered questions surrounding this tech.

 

Who is to blame if the car kills somebody?

Should the cars be designed to preserve passenger lives over pedestrian lives?

What happens if the system breaks down entirely?

Does traditional insurance for Taxi services cover driverless taxis?

 

 

 

[Xander Cousins]

@Master Disaster What kind of help is having a Human in the backseat with you if they can't stop what the automated taxi is doing?

 

Secondly Still wouldn't trust Automated anything that puts a human life at risk due to some advances in Hackers Capabilities etc.

 

Just wouldn't be for me TBH,

 

What's your thought on it Master Disaster?

[Bananasplit_00]

Interesting, I'd use it for the fact that it's free. I can't say I feel especially safe in human driven taxis so I doubt I'll feel less safe without the driver

[Master Disaster]

1 minute ago, Alex Colson said:

@Master Disaster What kind of help is having a Human in the backseat with you if they can't stop what the automated taxi is doing?

 

Secondly Still wouldn't trust Automated anything that puts a human life at risk due to some advances in Hackers Capabilities etc.

 

Just wouldn't be for me TBH,

 

What's your thought on it Master Disaster?

I updated the OP to include my thoughts as soon as I realised I had forgotten them

[Master Disaster]

Just now, Bananasplit_00 said:

Interesting, I'd use it for the fact that it's free. I can't say I feel especially safe in human driven taxis so I doubt I'll feel less safe without the driver

That's pretty true tbh, I've certainly had some dodgy AF taxi rides in the past.

[Xander Cousins]

I Would agree in the sense that you have some shady taxi drivers at times but being left to the whim of a driverless taxi would seem just in nerving for me. As much as a like technological advances this one would be a sceptical area as it becomes like you mention who's at fault? is their any systems to have the  passenger take control or advise on what the taxi should do? Like if they require to get out early can they get it to pull over when safe etc. Can a automated Taxi think what is the best course of action if in a accident or trying to avoid one, Is their a failsafe if it goes faulty. you wouldn't want it going haywire and driving 90 on city roads due to a 'glitch'

 

Similar thought would go towards A.I systems, They seem amazing but is it worth the risk that they could come with?

[Bananasplit_00]

1 minute ago, Master Disaster said:

That's pretty true tbh, I've certainly had some dodgy AF taxi rides in the past.

Most time, for me at least, the drivers drive like shit and take risks at every opportunity... That paired with the price sees me almost never taking a taxi, which of course gives me a lot less experience with them, but the ones I have had have been pretty shit. I have no trust for the taxi drivers ability to get me to the destination at all, an automated system I would trust more. Also computers don't really rape people so I can see a lot of interest from especially women for this tech 

[Master Disaster]

3 minutes ago, VegetableStu said:

Company that owns the robot if pedestrian wasn't dicking about with the car. Even if it means robot "did what it was coded for" (which is a wormy Pandora's box in terms of AI and "can it be malicious code if you can't fix or decipher the source?"), as a form of compensation.

If provable that someone toyed with bot behaviour and that causes mortal or monetary damage then yeah that guy's at fault

That's a very hard question to implement an answer to. Even if you want to design it to preserve either one, you have to figure out how to train it to do so most of the time. 

See internet outage

Taxi insurance vs Equipment insurance? (despite being probably different in coverage scope)

Thing about it is (and I mean no disrespect to you, everything I'm about to say applies to most of us here)...

 

It all well and good us discussing these things but ultimately these we unanswerable questions until the unthinkable happens and the case ends up in front of a judge, and even then it situational based.

 

The point of a human driver is culpability, the buck stops with them. If an autonomous system fails who exactly along the chain is to blame? The owners? The license holder? The guy who coded the system? What happens if the accident was caused by a GPS fault? Some random and untraceable dude hacked the system and change the protocols?

 

The entire system causes more problems than it ultimately solves.

 

My other concern is the way every system uses a different protocol. How exactly were roads supposed to go fully automated if every system is entirely different and none of them can communicate with each other? There needs to be a global effort to standardise the tech (or at least the protocols) so everyone is singing the same song. Once that happens it will be easier to fully automate entire road networks.

[Sniperfox47]

24 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

Thing about it is (and I mean no disrespect to you, everything I'm about to say applies to most of us here)...

 

It all well and good us discussing these things but ultimately these we unanswerable questions until the unthinkable happens and the case ends up in front of a judge, and even then it situational based.

 

The point of a human driver is culpability, the buck stops with them. If an autonomous system fails who exactly along the chain is to blame? The owners? The license holder? The guy who coded the system? What happens if the accident was caused by a GPS fault? Some random and untraceable dude hacked the system and change the protocols?

The same place the responsibility falls right now. If a company has a forklift and the employee driving that forklift hits someone, the blame falls to the company. They can then go on to blame the driver for driving recklessly, or the equipment manufacturer for selling them defective equipment, but ultimately it falls on the company for hiring the employee or buying the equipment.

 

The company is choosing to buy and field the equipment. Ultimately, even if the real blame falls further up the production chain, they're the ones responsible for the equipment.

 

28 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

The entire system causes more problems than it ultimately solves.

More problems? Maybe... Depends what problems you think it makes.

 

But with issues being solved like traffic congestion, pedestrian safety, user safety, and environmental impact the issues it solves are far more *important* than the issues it causes, even if fewer in number.

 

31 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

My other concern is the way every system uses a different protocol. How exactly were roads supposed to go fully automated if every system is entirely different and none of them can communicate with each other? There needs to be a global effort to standardise the tech (or at least the protocols) so everyone is singing the same song. Once that happens it will be easier to fully automate entire road networks.

And why do you think they need to communicate to replace current cars? The current automated systems don't communicate because there's practically no need to.

 

The ability to identify placement of other cars and transfer road mapping information they've processed might be useful for improving efficiency but not by much. The computer vision aspect of automated driving isn't going to go away because you still have to worry about pedestrians, road hazards, and other concerns that don't have the same electronic communication. You also need to be able to operate on roads that aren't "smart roads".

 

There's currently work on standard comm protocols for automated cars, but they're only going to be there to make things more efficient and convenient, not because they're necessary in any way for driverless tech to succeed.

[Master Disaster]

13 minutes ago, Sniperfox47 said:

The same place the responsibility falls right now. If a company has a forklift and the employee driving that forklift hits someone, the blame falls to the company. They can then go on to blame the driver for driving recklessly, or the equipment manufacturer for selling them defective equipment, but ultimately it falls on the company for hiring the employee or buying the equipment.

 

The company is choosing to buy and field the equipment. Ultimately, even if the real blame falls further up the production chain, they're the ones responsible for the equipment.

 

More problems? Maybe... Depends what problems you think it makes.

 

But with issues being solved like traffic congestion, pedestrian safety, user safety, and environmental impact the issues it solves are far more *important* than the issues it causes, even if fewer in number.

 

And why do you think they need to communicate to replace current cars? The current automated systems don't communicate because there's practically no need to.

 

The ability to identify placement of other cars and transfer road mapping information they've processed might be useful for improving efficiency but not by much. The computer vision aspect of automated driving isn't going to go away because you still have to worry about pedestrians, road hazards, and other concerns that don't have the same electronic communication. You also need to be able to operate on roads that aren't "smart roads".

 

There's currently work on standard comm protocols for automated cars, but they're only going to be there to make things more efficient and convenient, not because they're necessary in any way for driverless tech to succeed.

Fully autonomous systems require both a master controller and the ability for drones to be able to talk to each other otherwise chaos theory kicks in and you end up with bedlam.

 

On smaller roads I don't see it being such as big of an issue but for larger roads cars absolutely need to be able to talk to each other and preferably to a master controller too. I wouldn't trust a driverless car to take me to work along a small road let alone join a motorway/highway where traffic is moving at 70Mph and a mistake guarantees loss of life.

[goodtofufriday]

A free ride is a free ride. 

[Commodus]

I would.  Yeah, the technology is still early, and Waymo is doing this in Arizona because it's a relatively easy environment to support (current self-driving cars would flounder in snowy climates).  But I'd rather trust a self-driving car than a taxi or ridesharing driver who's consistently driving too quickly, taking shortcuts and struggling with directions despite having a GPS in front of them.

 

Besides, I'm tired of waiting for the future to show up!

[Sniperfox47]

4 hours ago, Master Disaster said:

Fully autonomous systems require both a master controller and the ability for drones to be able to talk to each other otherwise chaos theory kicks in and you end up with bedlam.

 

On smaller roads I don't see it being such as big of an issue but for larger roads cars absolutely need to be able to talk to each other and preferably to a master controller too. I wouldn't trust a driverless car to take me to work along a small road let alone join a motorway/highway where traffic is moving at 70Mph and a mistake guarantees loss of life.

A) What central control do humans have that these cars wouldn't? If you consider legal legislation and traffic lights to be a controller, then the autonomous vehicles have this too. And if that's the case, there is a standardized communication method... Signal lights...

 

Humans are, ourselves, autonomous systems, so why would these cars result in any more "bedlam" than we do? In reality because they can perceive things via more methods than we can, and can react to that data faster, shouldn't the chaos that results be more ordered and accrue slower?

 

B) Autonomous cars have already been on the road for a few years now, including on highways, and have been almost universally safer driver's than humans.

 

They may have resulted in more petty accidents, especially early on when they followed the law to the letter because humans tend to *not* follow the rules of the road, but at the same time have resulted in less accidents causing injury or death than human drivers.

 

The sample sizes available are small and may not represent the actual likelihood, but they're good indicators that if autonomous cars are less safe than human drivers it's not by much.

[Misanthrope]

Phoenix you say? Let's see if the AI doesn't gets trained by Joe Arpaio to change the destination of brown looking people to the nearest ICE detention center.

[IDprofile]

Living where I live I've never been in a taxi before. To answer the question though, I wouldn't ride in one. Not because of the safety of it(I've had my grandma drive before). But because I'm just scared of the idea that in the future it will become illegal to drive your own car because AI cars become safer.

[Commodus]

1 hour ago, IDprofile said:

Living where I live I've never been in a taxi before. To answer the question though, I wouldn't ride in one. Not because of the safety of it(I've had my grandma drive before). But because I'm just scared of the idea that in the future it will become illegal to drive your own car because AI cars become safer.

If it ever gets to the point where driving your own car becomes illegal, it'll be at a time when self-driving cars are so ubiquitous that you'll have been riding in them for quite a few years... and by then, you'll probably be much more comfortable with a ban on driving.  And even then, you'll probably be allowed to drive on closed circuits for fun.