• Etterra@discuss.online
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    2 hours ago

    If you keep doing the work for them, they’ll never learn. They need to figure it out for themselves.

  • Jason2357@lemmy.ca
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    5 hours ago

    Automation has always been about de-skilling to cheaper, more abuse-able labour, and not about actually eliminating work. This goes all the way back to the broad looms and the luddites. There were still loom workers in the new factories - its just that they were children who could be worked to death for pennies.

  • THE_GR8_MIKE@lemmy.world
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    6 hours ago

    I still have no idea how these are legally able to operate on public roads. Shit seems wild to me. Wouldn’t last 5 seconds here in Chicago, for numerous reasons lol

  • Deacon@lemmy.world
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    10 hours ago

    This would have actually been a great thing to not only acknowledge but promote if they weren’t so caught up in their own hype.

    Not that I will ever get into one of those death traps but if you tell the average consumer that any failures in autonomy immediately engage a tele-operator “to keep you moving on your way” they would probably feel better about riding.

    I’ve done tele-driving before and it’s remarkably good, even if latency is a concern.

    It’s the facade of it all, the need to seem to live up to the hype. It’s going to get more people killed.

    • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
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      3 hours ago

      any failures in autonomy immediately engage a tele-operator

      One of the problems is that these “failures in autonomy” could include a failure to engage a tele-operator when one is needed.

    • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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      6 hours ago

      I work near downtown Austin, where both Waymo and Robotaxi operate.

      Waymo cars are some of the best drivers on the road because they actuallyt ested their product, use multiple Lidar sensors instead of just cameras, and have remote driver backups for unusual situations.

      Teslas drive like maniacs and will end a ride and tell the driver to get out in the middle of a lane.

    • nixon@sh.itjust.works
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      8 hours ago

      I’ve ridden in a few Waymo’s before, in SF they can be more dependable or easier to get than other ride options. I never felt like I was ever in danger in one.

      Within my handful of experiences with them I’ve never had to use the help button or features to request assistance from a tele-operator but it was clear that they weren’t trying to hide the function from the passengers as the feature was explained and clearly labeled.

      A friend who uses them often told me of the one time he needed to ask for assistance when their Waymo was stuck behind a doordash scooter with its hazard lights on that was either delivering or picking up and blocking a turn lane in downtown SF. The Waymo didn’t know what to do to get around it, my friend hit the button for assistance, a voice came over the speakers asking how they could help, my friend explained the situation and the tele-operator drove the car to safely navigate the situation. He said it was probably 1.5-2mins of tota inconvenience with 75% of that time was him wondering if he should hit the help button or not.

      I understand a lot of AI implementation, such as Amazon Fresh or other business models have been hiding offshored human assistance within their “AI” features, which I do agree with you is deceitful but my experience with Waymo was not that. They did not hide or obfuscate that function and feature of the service but actively informed the passenger of its existence.

      Granted, I haven’t ridden in one for almost a year at this point and I only did so in the SF market so things may have changed since or are different elsewhere.

      Also, I can’t say that I follow the news intently about Waymo, I know they have run over a couple cats but I hadn’t heard anything about them killing people. Has that happened?

  • Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org
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    13 hours ago

    And these foreign crowd workers know the local traffic rules? Maybe they even have regular drivers licenses?

    • Chozo@fedia.io
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      11 hours ago

      This used to be my job. They’re not controlling the cars. They’re basically completing real-time CAPTCHAs, telling the car whether the cameras see a stop sign, a bicycle, temporary barriers, etc. If the car can’t identify an object that could possibly cross its path, it pulls over and stops until an operator can do a sanity-check on whatever the car’s confused by. They only need to be able to identify objects on the road, not know the rules of the road.

    • Perspectivist@feddit.uk
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      13 hours ago

      I think the interventions here are more like: “that’s a trash can someone pushed onto the road - let me help you around it” rather than: “let me drive you all the way to your destination.”

      It’s usually not the genuinely hard stuff that stumps AI drivers - it’s the really stupid, obvious things it simply never encountered in its training data before.

      • MoffKalast@lemmy.world
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        11 hours ago

        Saw this blog post recently about waymo’s sim setup for generating synthetic data and they really do seem to be generating pretty much everything in existence. The level of generalization of the model they seem to be using is either shockingly low or they abort immediately at the earliest sign of high perplexity.

        • Kushan@lemmy.world
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          7 hours ago

          I’m guessing it’s the latter, they need to keep accidents to a minimum if they’re ever going to get broad legislation to legalise them.

          Every single accident is analysed to death by the media and onlookers alike, with a large group of people wanting it to fail.

          This is a prime example, we’ve known about the human intervention for a while now but period people seem surprised that those people are in another country.

      • Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org
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        13 hours ago

        it’s the really stupid, obvious things

        Hm. Interesting. But that makes them look even mode incapable than I feared.

        • Perspectivist@feddit.uk
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          13 hours ago

          Broadly speaking, an AI driver getting stumped means it’s stuck in the middle of the road - while a human driver getting stumped means plowing into a semi truck.

          I’d rather be inconvenienced than killed. And from what I’ve seen, even our current AI drivers are already statistically safer than the average human driver - and they’re only going to keep getting better.

          They’ll never be flawless though. Nothing is.

          • MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works
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            13 hours ago

            Ai drivers have run over and crushed people slowly before too though because they didn’t see the person as an “obstacle” to be avoided, or because they were on the ground, it didn’t see them

            • Perspectivist@feddit.uk
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              12 hours ago

              And they always will. You need to look at the big picture here, not individual cases. If we replaced every single car on US roads with one driven by AI - proven to be 10 times better a driver than a human - that would still mean 4,000 people getting killed by them each year. That, however, doesn’t mean we should go back to human drivers and 40,000 people killed annually.

              • ltxrtquq@lemmy.ml
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                12 hours ago

                You need to look at the big picture here, not individual cases.

                By that logic…

                We should really be investing in trains and buses, not cars of any type.

          • Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org
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            12 hours ago

            current AI drivers are already statistically safer than

            As long as they use level 3 autonomous cars and then cheat with remote operators instead of using real level 5 cars, such statistics remain quite meaningless.

            However, they tell about the people who use them as arguments.

            • errer@lemmy.world
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              9 hours ago

              As the OP stated, the low velocity cases are not causing deadly accidents. And you can’t drive by wire at high speed (too much latency). So I doubt it’s affecting the stats in any meaningful way.

              Honestly I much prefer they have a human as a backup than not.

      • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world
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        8 minutes ago

        This is how it generally behaves, but they are capable of taking direct control in more difficult situations. It’s only very slow maneurvers though, it’s not like they would be driving it down the street. They could move it off the road onto the shoulder though if needed.

        Edit: I am trying to find the source, but having problems. It was only ever mentioned in 1 official waymo document that I’ve seen that it was technically possible. My guess is they say their remote helpers can’t / don’t do it because they truly can’t, and it’s some highly restricted type of person who can, who isn’t classified like these other employees. I’ll keep looking though because I was really surprised to see them admit it when I saw it in an official document.

  • ChicoSuave@lemmy.world
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    8 hours ago

    This is way better than Robo Taxi convoys of 2 chase cars following one driverless vehicle. A fraction of the footprint and manpower cost of Musk’s venture.

  • Bappity@lemmy.world
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    9 hours ago

    the same thing happened with that Amazon shop that you could apparently take anything out without checking out and it would automatically charge your account…

    turns out they had workers watching the camera footage