Psience Quest

‘No! You stay!’ Cops, firefighters bewildered as driverless cars behave badly

Joe Eskenazi

Quote:...fire officials who’ve worked with the autonomous vehicle companies had nice things to say about their representatives. But not about their vehicles.

“They’ve made every effort to work with us in public safety measures and be a good partner,” said one. “But they do not have a good product.”

Quote:Mission Local has obtained some 15 Fire Department incident reports documenting dangerous and/or nuisance situations in which Waymo or Cruise vehicles interfered with fire vehicles or emergency scenes. The vast majority of these reported incidents occurred in recent months, and a majority took place in April (driverless cars were only in December given the green light by the state to traverse San Francisco 24/7).

These incidents are either happening more regularly or being documented more regularly — or both. Within the marginalia of reports written last week, fire department officials complain that driverless car incursions are now a “daily occurrence.” This does not appear to be an overstatement: The notes on an April 26 report state, “This is an increasing problem. I believe there are many more incidents that are not being reported.” A subsequent note states “Number 3 today!”

Quote:A firefighter then spoke via a radio in the car to a Cruise employee. “The individual apologized for the ‘inconvenience,’ and said a team was working on moving the car,” reads the report. “Even after talking to him, the car did not immediately get moved from the scene. I informed him that this time it was an ‘inconvenience,’ but if someone needed to be rescued by the Truck it could have been a life and death situation.”

Quote:Every firefighter I spoke with wanted them off city streets to work out the kinks, posthaste. But that’s not the call of a local fire department — or, it turns out, any local official. Autonomous vehicles are regulated at a statewide level. And, in addition to tech wizards, all of these companies have government wranglers on the payroll.

Get a Tesla if you want to learn about AI trying to kill you, says Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak

Fred Lambert

Quote:When talking about Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s statements promising self-driving capabilities through future software updates during a new CNN interview, Wozniak implied that Tesla vehicles on FSD are trying to “kill” people:

Quote:I actually believed those things, and it’s not even close to reality. And boy, if you want a study of AI gone wrong and taking a lot of claims and trying to kill you every chance it can, get a Tesla.

Quote:It looks like Woz is not scared of Tesla’s “hardcore litigation” team, which has been a bit trigger-happy when it comes to suing people for defamation lately.

One unapologetic capitalist cheap shotting another unapologetic capitalist.  Doesn't tell me much.

(2023-05-04, 06:55 PM)Silence Wrote: [ -> ]One unapologetic capitalist cheap shotting another unapologetic capitalist.  Doesn't tell me much.

I'd say it's a big sign of dwindling investor confidence in AI as it exists to provide driverless cars.

People are going to pay attention to what Wozniak says/thinks about tech.

Police tried to unstick a cluster of confused Waymos in Arizona, but to no avail

Sam Smith

Quote:The jam occurred along Roosevelt Street in Downtown Phoenix last month and saw 12 Waymos get “confused” and ended up clogging the road. According to one TikTok user, police attempted to intervene, but as there were no human drivers behind the wheel, the cops weren’t exactly able to tell the befuddled Waymos where to go.

Quote:Waymo blamed the jam on a software glitch, reports the AZ Mirror. A spokesperson said, “As safety is central to our mission, our autonomous driving technology prioritizes the safest driving path with the information it has at any given moment. Sometimes, that means our vehicle will pull over or come to a stop if it’s assessed to be the safest course of action in that instance, as happened here. We identified the software that contributed to this situation and made appropriate updates across our fleet within 24 hours.”

However, the incident is the latest in a long line of run-ins with authorities for driverless cars...

(2023-05-07, 10:20 PM)Sciborg_S_Patel Wrote: [ -> ]Police tried to unstick a cluster of confused Waymos in Arizona, but to no avail

Sam Smith

Some more info:

Waymo says software glitch caused a driverless traffic jam in Phoenix last month

Jerod MacDonald-Evoy

Quote:“My sense is that there are probably ways to disrupt the system if you were creative enough, but certainly not on the level of a conventional DDOS, simply because of the current scale of autonomous vehicle deployment at the moment,” said Andrew Maynard, a professor of advanced technology transitions at Arizona State University’s School for Future of Innovation in Society. 

Maynard said that a DDOS attack, or distributed denial of service attack, would be unlikely given the current way Waymo operates and how the company identifies threats and glitches within its system. 

“I suspect here that autonomous vehicle systems are developing at a measured enough rate that, as they grow, they will be pretty resilient to DDOS-type attacks,” Maynard said. “This doesn’t make them immune, but it does suggest that very disruptive attacks will be challenging (and therefore not worth it to most perpetrators) and quickly addressed.” 

...people could still try to create havoc and game the system. 

In 2020, an artist used 99 phones to create a phantom traffic jam in Google Maps, something that theoretically could create problems for self-driving systems like Waymo, which rely on mapping programs like Google Maps. 

Quote:The Self-Driving Vehicle Oversight Committee that Ducey created has only met once, in 2016.

(2023-05-04, 07:22 PM)Sciborg_S_Patel Wrote: [ -> ]I'd say it's a big sign of dwindling investor confidence in AI as it exists to provide driverless cars.

People are going to pay attention to what Wozniak says/thinks about tech.

I don't think so Sci.

Time will tell but I fully expect capital to keep flowing into all forms of automation, including autonomous driving.  Wozniak doesn't seem plugged into the flow of capital anyway and comes off more like a consumer with an axe to grind.  (A fair perspective to be sure as Tesla has epically overpromised.)

(2023-05-08, 01:02 PM)Silence Wrote: [ -> ]I don't think so Sci.

Time will tell but I fully expect capital to keep flowing into all forms of automation, including autonomous driving.  Wozniak doesn't seem plugged into the flow of capital anyway and comes off more like a consumer with an axe to grind.  (A fair perspective to be sure as Tesla has epically overpromised.)

Automation in general sure, but the current iteration of driverless cars are not looking good with all these problems. I think we're one or two fatalities away from them getting pulled off the streets, though ideally they'd be taken off before then.

That said, I do think driverless cars are possible just you need a different approach that allows one to properly model the problem rather than just accumulate data and hope it works out. Someday I'm sure we'll have them, just when is hard to say.

Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” sees pedestrian, chooses not to slow down

Jonathan M. Gitlin

Quote:The version 11.4 update in April was supposed to improve how the cars behaved, but there's now more evidence that the FSD Beta still leads to Teslas breaking traffic laws. Section 7 of California's Driver's Handbook, which deals with laws and rules of the road, says that pedestrians are considered vulnerable road users and that "pedestrians have the right-of-way in marked or unmarked crosswalks. If there is a limit line before the crosswalk, stop at the limit line and allow pedestrians to cross the street."

This is not the first time Tesla's software has been programmed to break traffic laws, either.

Quote:Despite that bold stance in public, Tesla has been far more circumspect when dealing with authorities—in 2020, it told the California Department of Motor Vehicles that it did not expect FSD to become significantly more capable and that it would never pass beyond so-called SAE level 2, which requires an alert human in the driver's seat who remains liable for the car's actions.

Or, as author Ed Niedermeyer more concisely put it, "Full Self-Driving" is not, and never will be, actually self-driving."

Driverless cars are causing more and more traffic issues in San Francisco

John Callaham

Quote:Driverless cars were once touted as the saviour of transportation, but the reality is that the current automated vehicle technology efforts are causing real problems for the city of San Francisco.

Quote:An NBC News report on YouTube talks about how driverless cars from GM's Cruise and Google's Waymo, which got permission to offer cab services in San Fransico in 2022, are now responsible for three 911 calls a day in the city. The report says the cars can get confused and stop entirely if they encounter construction or red lights from emergency vehicles, leading to traffic jams.

It's a particular problem for the city's fire department and first responders. One fire chief says she sees at least one incident a day with driverless vehicles. Other reports filed by the department include autonomous vehicles driving toward active fire scenes and running over hoses. One report claims firefighters had to break one of these cars' windows in order to stop it. The fire chief interviewed stated she doesn't believe these cars are "ready for prime time."

The local Department of Transportation doesn't have much power over Google or GM to control these vehicles, thanks to special rules made at the state level that doesn't allow the city of San Francisco to regulate driverless vehicles.