Relevant XKCD:
Why not post a link to the actual XKCD comic and give the author the views instead of a random site?
The random site is their lemmy instance’s pictrs. Randall doesn’t care about reposting, and this is nicer since you don’t have to leave lemmy
In fact he doesn’t care about reposting so much that he Creative Commons licensed his whole comic.
Aw man I’ve been making this joke thinking I’m clever for years but I read xkcd pretty frequently. I must have inadvertently stolen the joke from Randall.
Well there’s https://xkcd.com/16/. Or https://xkcd.com/33/.
At first I was thinking, a bit of human supervision could not be too bad. And then I got to the part where they said 1.5 workers per vehicle. My maths may be off, but to me that sounds like 0.5 more than is necessary to drive a normal vehicle.
Theranos? Maybe, but at that point, I’d compare it to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk too.
When I worked at Waymo, we had a ratio of about 10 cars to 1 remote human. I dunno if Cruise is being over-protective, if their tech is just that bad that they need more people than cars, or if the number is just incorrect.
Either way, it hardly matters. It’s not like these things are commercially available for a long time yet, anyway. In the testing stages - which Cruise 100% is still in - you definitely want a sturdy team of humans capable of intervening for safety reasons.
Chonky TL;DR because I was a little annoyed that there wasn’t one here -
Certainly no commercial product could ever work at a profit if you needed remote operators anything like that often. As Brooks points out, the term “autonomous” barely applies.
Beyond what Brooks pointed out, the story also notes “Those vehicles were supported by a vast operations staff, with 1.5 workers per vehicle”.
Fitting with this general vibe, a source (that in fairness, I don’t know well) just told me that his impression having visited with them not so long ago was that “they’re definitely relying on remote interventions to create an illusion of stronger AI than they really have”.
if Cruise’s vehicles really need an intervention every few miles, and 1.5 external operators for every vehicle, they don’t seem to even be remotely close to what they have been alleging to the public. Shareholders will certainly sue, and if it’s bad as it looks, I doubt that GM will continue the project, which was recently suspended.
As safety expert Missy Cummings said to me this morning, remote operators could well be “the dark secret of ALL self-driving.”
Human lives at are stake.
Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt essentially confirmed that their “driverless” cars need very regular human intervention:
1.5 operators per vehicle!?
Consider that"dumb" cars are only 1 operator per vehicle. This is somehow reverse-AI
- NYT writes article
- Roboticist tweets about one fact in it
- Substack blogger turns that tweet into a sensational headline
You can just watch the different food chains interacting here from legit media to independent authority to bottom feeding headline-shagger.
Unfortunately, the substack article seems to be freely accessible, while the NYT isn’t. I understand the whole supporting journalists angle, but having to sign up to read stuff so they can more easily correlate what I click on and sell usage pattern data rubs me the wrong way.
I’m a paying NYT subscriber so I guess “supporting journalists” (why did you even put this in quotes?) is more important to me than “vague fears” of “personalized advertising” which are probably much the same on every “website” in “the world.”
why did you even put this in quotes?
IDK, it’s early morning and I felt like it was an established term. I’m sure I was thinking something, but I can’t reconstruct just what. I’ll fix that.
I have a personal distaste for login-walls. I’m fine with disabling my adblocker for sites I trust and enjoy, but I just don’t like walled-off content. I’m doing my best to avoid tracking cookies, including manually going through the cookie settings on those notifications and clearing cookies on sites I don’t need to stay logged in on. Courtesy of GDPR and judging by the variety of irrelevant ads I do get, I like to think I’m doing a mostly solid job.
