Could Cruise Be the Theranos of AI?
garymarcus.substack.com
garymarcus.substack.com
The cars were clearly driving themselves. But what did happen fairly often was that they would get confused and stop.
For example, my Cruise car needed to make a right turn and a van had parked on the corner, sticking out into the perpendicular street. The Cruise car went up to the corner and then stopped. It was apparently not programmed to go further out into the street and also wasn't programmed to be allowed to turn if it couldn't see around the corner.
We sat there for a couple of minutes, then I called Cruise support. They did not notice the problem themselves until I called.
I suggested that they inch the car forward because I had the above hypothesis about why it wouldn't turn, but instead I was told to wait. After a couple of minutes, the car inched back a few feet. Then, after a pause in which I assume they were transferring control back to the car's computer, it went to the corner again and stopped.
I told them again that they should move it forward, not back. But after another couple of minutes they moved it back again. Again it went forward and stopped on the corner. They tried this at least three times before accepting my suggestion. As soon as the car was able to see around the corner, it took off again, clearly under its own power.
So I don't think it's a case of remote drivers operating the cars, it's a case of remote drivers having to intervene when the cars stopped, and even in that case they try to make the cars do it on their own.
This is not Theranos behavior. This is debugging.
The article just said that the cars needed a "remote human intervention" every few miles. Well, what you described was exactly that, an intervention.
The point is that if they need this kind of intervention every few miles, on average, than they're still not really at the level of driving themselves around town.
This is clearly not the case. When I was in Cruise cars they did all kinds of things that looked really difficult, like figuring out that a truck was stopped and double-parked and going around it, dodging cyclists that got in front of it, navigating around cars that were double parked on both sides of the street like a maze, etc.
Then, they would get stumped by unusual configurations like the one I recounted.
So whether they are 'at the level of driving themselves around town' or not depends on your definition. They drove around quite deftly although a bit erratically, and using sometimes very circuitous routes, but they definitely seemed to get all around town with only occasional glitches, none of which seemed at all unsafe (when I was in the car at least).
It makes sense too, as you really don't wanna deal with the cell network to provide realtime updates to the dispatch. Better to just send a car out.
Heck it would even seem sensible to allow the customer support staff to update the model of the world that the car sees but still allowing it to travel autonomously.
Allowing direct remote control is wild
On public roads. This shouldn't be allowed. If they want to do R&D, they need to build their own roads instead of endangering people going about their lives. None of these "automated" cars should be allowed on the roads, including Tesla cars with "self-driving" features enabled.
Like what?
I mean, there are literally requirements even for these very products. It's just that they were given special permits to operate. California revoked these permits for Cruise. It is my opinion that they shouldn't have been given in the first place for such nascient and unproven technology. But the government and taxpayers, the latter unwittingly, have been swindled into dumping money into these companies.
Well remember that staff only work about 40 hours/week while Cruise is in operation day and night (168 hours/week). With sick days and vacations it probably takes about 5 people to provide one person always on duty. And a lot of these workers are doing other things than monitoring individual Cruise vehicles.
In summary a Cruise worker is monitoring several vehicles.
It does not seem otherwise to be viable to replace a cheap driver person to expensive engineer as 1 to 1. At least as 1 to 10, probably even more.
That might work because for say 10 cars that is 15 regular people, or about 4 "24 hour people"
My wife refuses to use the service, and after that horrible accident in SF, I hesitate to use it myself (despite being able to use it)
Such an intervention can (and will) simply kill passengers.
Insurance helps a bit, but does not recover from death.
that and their potential ability to do radio sensing to provide high resolution realtime maps of their environment.
It's not rational, of course: just knowing how much things regularily goes wrong in a low-level net makes me feel that way.
Theranos could test your blood if they took it to another lab to be tested. Cruise can drive you autonomously as long as there’s someone to drive the autonomous car every 5 or so minutes.
Sorry, this got away from me. If Tesla is somehow the "most responsible" of the lot, then surely everyone else is as crooked as Holmes (and really, so is Musk).
(Not a kit car)
This isn’t uncommon at all. Toyota has two models currently that have drivetrains made by BMW and Subaru. Subaru sells the car under their own brand as well.
For limited run cars it is very common for the coach work to be done by a completely different company than the mechanicals
For a better example look at Ram’s trucks that you can order with a Cummins engine and Allison transmission.
Or look at commercial trucks where it is still very much the norm to have the chassis and driveline be completely different companies.
Or look at Pagani who use engines from AMG and Xtrac transmissions for something closer to Tesla’s situation.
Having a drivetrain sourced from outside the frame/body manufacturer isn’t common at all, but it is common enough that calling the Elise/Tesla a “kit car” or somehow unheard of is inaccurate.
So, an AI self-driving car is assisted by human drivers anywhere in the world. They learn more and get better over the years.
A few months back, I was walking in the neighborhood of the Townsend Building and Oracle Park in San Francisco. I saw a line of Cruise cars returning home. I stood on the side of the narrow road and thought that was the perfect spot to take a video where self-driving cars pass through and return home. I realize every one of them has someone in the driver's seat. That didn't feel dramatic enough, and I just ignored it. I only shot and edited where they were already parked[1]. Won't it be cool -- the robotic vehicles, after a day of learning about the humans they plan to overthrow, now returning to their overlords?
Manually intervening with your own employees does not scale.
To be clear, every autonomous car company has human intervention.
It's a very good idea.
Yet we call it fraud. Perhaps it is when you claim not to use humans ...
I think things will be worse in a mixed human and self-driving environment, though. I say this as someone who lives in a zip code where Waymo has been testing for years. The only reason those cars are even able to integrate at all is because they are so incredibly conspicuous. If their sensors were entirely stealth, accidents would be incredibly common.
Driverless private vehicles driven on public roads will remain a pipe dream. The solutions to mass driverless transit already exists - we have trains, buses, planes, ferries, etc etc.
Not only is the technology borderline impossible in the general case, the arguments around safety are at best... hopeful. At worst, they're criminally dishonest.
Train infrastructure is horrible in the US and not a realistic competitor in the next many decades. Buses are not driverless, and the labor shortage will be rough to this industry. Planes don’t scale to all those in need.