I saw the Tesla Robotaxi:
- Drive into oncoming traffic, getting honked at in the process.
- Signal a turn and then go straight at a stop sign with turn signal on.
- Park in a fire lane to drop off the passenger.
And that was in a single 22 minute ride. Not great performance at all.
Imagine you’re the guy who invented SawStop, the table saw that can detect fingers touching the saw blade and immediately bury the blade in an aluminum block to avoid cutting off someone’s finger. Your system took a lot of R&D, it’s expensive, requires a custom table saw with specialized internal parts so it’s much more expensive than a normal table saw, but it works, and it works well. You’ve now got it down that someone can go full-speed into the blade and most likely not even get the smallest cut. Every time the device activates, it’s a finger saved. Yeah, it’s a bit expensive to own. And, because of the safety mechanism, every time it activates you need to buy a few new parts which aren’t cheap. But, an activation means you avoided having a finger cut off, so good deal! You start selling these devices and while it’s not replacing every table saw sold, it’s slowly being something that people consider when buying.
Meanwhile, some dude out of Silicon Valley hears about this, and hacks up a system that just uses a $30 webcam, an AI model that detects fingers (trained exclusively on pudgy white fingers of Silicon Valley executives) and a pinball flipper attached to a rubber brake that slows the blade to a stop within a second when the AI model sees a finger in danger.
This new device, the, “Finger Saver” doesn’t work very well at all. In demos with a hotdog, sometimes the hotdog is sawed in half. Sometimes the saw blade goes flying out of the machine into the audience. After a while, the company has the demo down so that when they do it in extremely controlled conditions, it does stop the hotdog from being sawed in half, but it does take a good few chunks out of it before the blade fully stops. It doesn’t work at all with black fingers, but the Finger Saver company will sell you some cream-coloured paint that you can paint your finger with before using it if your finger isn’t the right shade.
Now, imagine if the media just referred to these two devices interchangeably as “finger saving devices”. Imagine if the Finger Saver company heavily promoted their things and got them installed in workshops in high schools, telling the shop teachers that students are now 100% safe from injuries while using the table saw, so they can just throw out all safety equipment. When, inevitably, someone gets a serious wound while using a “Finger Saver” the media goes on a rant about whether you can really trust “finger saving devices” at all.
Anyhow, this is a rant about Waymo vs. Tesla.
I mean Waymo is way better at their job than Tesla and are more responsible, but this rant makes them out to seem perfectly safe. Whilst they are miles safer than Tesla, they still struggle with edge cases and aren’t perfect.
AFAIK they’re as safe as SawStop table saws. There has only ever been one collision involving a Waymo car that resulted in a serious injury. It was when a driver in another car, who was fleeing from police, sideswiped two cars, went onto the sidewalk and hit 2 pedestrians. One of the cars that was hit was a Waymo car, and the passenger was injured. Obviously, this wasn’t the fault of Waymo, but it was included in their list of 25 crashes with injuries, and was the only one involving a serious injury.
Of the rest, 17 involved the Waymo car being rear-ended. 3 involved another car running a red light and hitting the Waymo car. 2 were sideswipes caused by the other driver. 2 were vehicles turning left across the path of the Waymo car, one a bike, one a car. One was a Waymo car turning left and being hit on the passenger side. It’s possible that a few of these cases involving a collision between a vehicle turning and a vehicle going straight could be at least partially blamed on the Waymo car. But, based on the descriptions of the crashes it certainly wasn’t making an obvious error.
IMO it would be hard to argue that the cars aren’t already significantly safer than the average driver. There are still plenty of bugs to be ironed out, but for the most part they don’t seem to be safety-related bugs.
If the math were simple and every Waymo car on the road meant one human driver off the road with no other consequences or costs, it would be a no-brainer to start replacing human drivers with Waymo’s tech. But, of course, nothing is ever that simple.
Source: https://www.understandingai.org/p/human-drivers-are-to-blame-for-most
I was a Waymo stan before Tesla made it cool!
https://fuelarc.com/news-and-features/insurer-study-waymo-is-12-5-times-safer-than-human-drivers/
Seriously, though. I am an avowed enemy of the grim reaper, I’m a fan of Volvos for the same reason. And I like how transparent Waymo is with their data. The independent study linked is really illuminating if you like automotive safety stats.
Waymo is also a silicon valley AI project to put transit workers out of work. It’s another project to get AI money and destroy labor rights. At least it kind of works isn’t exactly helping my opinion of it. Transit is incredibly underfunded and misregulated in California/the USA and robotaxis are a criminal misinvestment in resources.
Silicon valley doesn’t have objectives like “putting transit workers out of work”. They only care about growth and profit.
In this case, the potential for growth is replacing every driver, not merely targeting transit workers. If they can do that, it would mean millions fewer cars on the road, and millions fewer cars being produced. Great for the environment, but yeah, some people might lose their jobs. But, other new jobs might be created.
The original car boom also destroyed all kinds of jobs. Farriers, stable hands, grooms, riding instructors, equine veterinarians, horse trainers, etc. But, should we have held back technology so those jobs were all around today? We’d still have streets absolutely covered in horse poop, and horses regularly dying in the street, along with all the resulting disease. Would that be a better world? I don’t think so.
Waymo obviously uses a form of AI, but they’ve been around a lot longer than the current AI / LLM boom. It’s 16 years old as a Google project, 21 years old if you consider the original Stanford team. As for destroying labour rights, sure, every capitalist company wants weaker labour rights. But, that includes the car companies making normal human-driven cars, it includes the companies manufacturing city buses and trains. There’s nothing special about Waymo / Google in that regard.
Sure, strengthening labour rights would be a good idea, but I don’t think it really has anything to do with Waymo. But, sure, we should organize and unionize Google if that’s at all possible.
Sure. That has nothing to do with Waymo though.
Misinvestment by whom? Google? What should Google be investing in instead?
Waymo is so much better, yeah. No problems with waymo. except all the times they almost hit me.
Waymo times than Teslas?
Ba dum tish
That was great, the first comparison that came to mind after reading it was they are both a game of russian roulette…
Waymo - you get one chamber loaded with a blank, might kill you if you get it.
Tesla - you get one empty chamber… And the gun is loaded by your worst enemy
This put a smile on my face.
Awesome read, thanks!
Excellent work
Really good analogy. loved this
Wow…