621
Self-driving Waymo cars keep SF residents awake all night by honking at each other
(arstechnica.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
That seems... Fine, on a skim. Plausible.
But like... are we sure we come out ahead spending decades on machine vision and self driving versus just having more human taxi drivers, and spending the money on the end goals we actually want?
I guess that's a shit job, driving taxis at weird times and places, and doesn't scale super well. But machine vision and self driving seems to be a decades long project.
Related: I'm not really comfortable with critical infrastructure (eg: transit) being privately owned and operated. So that might be a problem.
Though the political will being absent for anything good remains a problem, too.
Human driving cost is forever. A self driving programme cost is for today only.
The money has been spent. Waymo is operating without a driver in Phoenix, LA and San Francisco.
Ultimately it's private money. No public money is being spent on it. The government can (and should) invest in public transport also. But how alphabet spends their money isn't up to the government.
Anything can be nationalised.
But didn’t it come out recently that Waymo has human “drivers” behind a remote control and that it is nearly a 1:1 relationship of driver to car because the self driving tech just hasn’t made it far enough?
I think you might be thinking of Cruise?
https://gizmodo.com/cruise-robotaxi-human-assistance-kyle-vogt-1850997279