Many years ago, as an intern at Google, one of my mentors said to me "Google found a hose that money pours out of, and it's name is 'online advertising'. All we do now is improve that hose and desperately search for another one".
I would love to see Waymo become another hose. I'd love to see it launch in my city (whenever the laws are amended to allow such things).
(Yes, I know arguably they've had a few other successes.)
Google has YouTube, Android, gmail, GCP and a bunch of other big businesses.
I have a ton of criticism about Google but they've been able to diversify a lot better than I expected and I totally understand why companies with big cash "hoses" like you describe are making these sort of 'long shot but highly profitable' investments.
Their top 3 revenue sources are ads, ads, and ads. (Respectively ads on their own properties, "Google Network" ads, and YouTube ads.) That's more than 80% of their revenue. GCP is 7.5% of their total revenue. Details here: https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/how-does-google-make-money
One of the interesting questions for me is where the profits come in. Android definitely started as a loss leader so that they didn't get shut out of the mobile advertising market. But I could believe that it's in the black now due to the Apple-like model of charging a slice of everything that goes through the phone. Google Cloud is definitely not profitable yet, but they claim they will get there: https://accelerationeconomy.com/cloud-wars/google-cloud-has-...
Android probably pays for itself right now. But its primary purpose is forcing about 70% of phones sold globally to have Google apps pre-installed. And mobile ads, as you said.
Is that true though? The Chinese market is huge, and even if most phones are running Android, they aren’t including google apps. But if we exclude Chinese android phones, I would guess that Google doesn’t hit that 70% mark.
That’s true, but China is 1.4 billion people with not much iPhone penetration either (relatively speaking). That’s 17.5% of the world, so getting to 80% with that handicap (google being blocked in china) seems like a huge problem.
It is not such a big problem as you would imagine. The money comes from businesses, not consumers. As far as I know, the US and EU markets have the highest value consumers, so even Google is outside China, it is making a lot money from Chinese advertisers. The biggest problem for Google is competition from other advertising platforms, I don't remember last time I searched for a product on Google to be honest.
I believe the core ad platform for Google is going to be YouTube, it is the only one I am not leaving now.
All those businesses (except GCP) boils back down to ads. They still manage to diversify better than Facebook, because they diversified where they show ads, but it's still pretty much just ads.
My learned experience with mergers/acquisitions is that it is a genuine skill to pull them off correctly.
In YouTube's case it's more likely that they saved it, IIRC the bandwidth bills and legal threats were getting pretty existential around the time of the purchase. Inheriting those legal problems was a chance they took that could have sunk the entire company in a slightly dumber legal outcome for the status quo of the web, which was still very much in limbo at the time.
Being able to pull off being the only company to successfully do self-driving is a similarly masterful execution and I'm not sure how long it's going to take for competitors to catch up to them at this point. More likely they'll just be licensing any tech/patent use to competitors and taking a cut off of that too.
Google has screwed up plenty of projects but this isn't one of them. The upsides to human mobility are substantial and well worth the effort and I hope everyone involved is ultimately rewarded for it.
>Inheriting those legal problems was a chance they took that could have sunk the entire company in a slightly dumber legal outcome for the status quo of the web, which was still very much in limbo at the time.
Yeah. Smartphones were barely a thing when Google bought YouTube and, more broadly, user-created video wasn't very widespread generally. YouTube's money-losing business, such as it was, mostly consisted of users violating copyright by uploading TV and movie clips.
However, it would be silly to imply that either of those products were nearly as popular and solid/full-featured as they are now, by many magnitudes. Those products today are nothing compared to what they were back then. Even for me, as someone who has been using YouTube since way back then, just randomly seeing screenshots of the old YouTube throws me off and makes me go "is that what it really was back then? it doesn't even look similar at all".
And no, I don't mean it in a bad way. Up until about Honeycomb (3.0) or Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0), Android imo felt more like "minimum viable product that technically has feature parity with Apple and some more, but you have to have some really good justification to willingly pick it for any reason other than the price", and the experience of using it felt entirely subpar. The release of 4.0 (or 3.0, i honestly forgot) was when Android started feeling like an actual solid competitor to Apple for the first time, and not just an obvious "second best option".
Google has a pretty solid acquisition record, and definitely a solid record of investing in the products that do work and really upgrading them. It’s a shame they have cancelled a lot of products, but let’s be honest do they cancel stuff that’s making money or could be making money at scale? Generally not much I think.
Google bought the seed that became Android. The startup had only been working on the mobile phone OS concept for about a year when Google acquired it in 2005 (originally they'd planned a camera OS). The first public Android phone wasn't released until 2008.
They bought DoubleClick with revenues from paid search. (Google's market share was about 50% at the time.) The acquisition certainly helped them establish display marketing, though.
YouTube is thought to only break even as far as profits.
Android makes very little money in the grand scheme of things. It came out during the Oracle trial that Android only had made $17 billion between 2011-2017. On the other hand, they pay Apple $18B+ to be the default search engine on iOS devices. Apple makes far more from Google paying them in mobile than Google makes from Android.
GCP is still losing money.
Google has no successful profitable business besides advertising and has the focus of a crack addles flea.
If Waymo works this will all sound like gibberish in 5 years. They will have successfully revolutionised the entire world’s transportation, or started the revolution.
We also forget DeepMind which is run as an independent company but I believe is Google owned.
YouTube may be a business but, if you take away online advertising there, it wouldn't be a successful one. In fact, one of the first things people bring up when discussing YouTube from that standpoint is how much money it loses. If Google wasn't one of the richest corporations in the world, YouTube would have been killed off a long time ago. I'm frankly not even sure that the advertisements are enough to sustain it even now, would have to check the recent data.
Waymo is just another way to add more water to the hose.
More leisure time not focusing on the road = more eyeballs.
What percent of our lives do we spend driving?[0]
"Our best guess? Six percent of our waking hours are spent in a car, en route. There are 4.12 million miles of road in the United States, and that’s a lot of ground for the 222 million drivers in this country to cover."
I disagree. There’s a ton of profit margin on the table selling driverless rideshares and licensing the tech to other automakers. While Google will be able to serve a few ads during the ride, that will amount to a few cents of ad revenue vs. several dollars of transportation services. Tesla is already setting a price for full self driving that does not even work or exist at 15k, so the actual retail price could easily be tens of thousands, absolutely dwarfing the 5 year ad revenue per user, let alone the incremental increase from a few extra hours of screen time a week.
I'm not an expert but I doubt there's really a ton of profit in rides. Uber, Lyft, even taxi companies are barely profitable after many years. With the amount of money and time spent on making self driving work I'm not sure they'll ever make their money back.
Nobody is saying it’s a livable wage for a human. In many competitive markets drivers spend more time driving around looking for a ride than making money. But it’s still a huge cost to Uber/Lyft to pay people even if they’re paying a pittance.
Yes, 60% of the money including tip (which is a cost that gets passed onto the consumer and therefore reduces ridership) seems more or less correct to me. A forum where people to go to complain about Uber/Lyft doesn’t seem like a representative enough sample to refute that.
Moving people and things (Waymo Via[1] is their autonomous trucking and delivery subdivision) via roadways is worth (in revenue) hundreds of billions of dollars in the U.S. alone. Even capturing a fraction of that market, and carving out profit (by displacing expensive, accident-prone and sleep-needing humans), is a money hose on its own.
I believe that the current ad revenue model is facing a challenge due to the shift from a search-based approach to a dialogue-based one. People are more likely to use a local model to filter the web and communicate in a Q&A format. This means that fewer ads will be visible, making it more difficult for businesses to generate revenue in this new paradigm. Why search when you can ask directly for the answer?
BTW, local models underperform GPT-3 but they can still perform decently (eg. FLAN T5, GPT NeoX)
No kind of ads will work if your LM is skipping them. I am thinking along the lines of having an OS-LM or a browser-LM, should be a standard component.
I suspect that when it becomes a business we might not know about it for a while. Why show your cards if you don’t have to? Their medical research alone seems very promising. Obviously OpenAI has been doing incredible things, but I suspect DeepMind is doing really cool stuff in the background too.
I took a Waymo in Phoenix the other night. Works like magic. I’m honestly fine waiting four times as long for one because it’s fun, and it’s cheaper. Even when they had to send out a manual driver, the experience was smooth and fast.
I also had a magical autonomous ride when I visited Phoenix a couple years ago.
I asked a friend who works at waymo why it's taking forever to build up a critical mass of vehicles to get the wait times down to a more reasonable level.
He said the issue was cost. I guess all those sensors are actually more expensive than the cost of a human driver at this point?
> I guess all those sensors are actually more expensive than the cost of a human driver at this point?
Waymo inhoused their sensors and claimed a 90% cost reduction, but before that they were at $200k+.
Still, even at $200k+ that's not terribly high compared to a human driver once you amortize it over 8+ years. Higher than minimum wage, but really it's probably a matter of the upfront cost more than anything.
I'll also point out that even if they 100% solved self driving... somebody has to fill the things up with gas in most states, lol.
I don't think wireless EV charging will really take off- it's always going to be MUCH slower because of the I^2 losses. It's always going to be much more expensive and heavier than a plug. Solutions like battery swaps[1] or even just automatic plugs will win out at the large scale.
It really only has anything to offer to individual consumers, specifically saving the seconds it takes to just plug in your car. That seems like an insane trade to make, to me. Maybe in theory some city could invest in embedding them into street parking, but I just don't think that will happen. Even if vandals started cutting plugs or something, you can buy a LOT of replacement cables for the price of one wireless charging pad.
It has to be deeper. Google has deep pockets. Even it doesn’t want to touch them, one could sell interests in individual cars’ cash flows, a quasi-debt which neither dilutes the company’s equity nor puts its survival at risk.
They're spending a bunch of money on this already. Deep pockets doesn't mean infinite pockets. Google Fiber over promised, and the infinite pockets evaporated.
It makes a lot of sense to roll something like this out slowly. Taxi service is a commodity, putting out a bunch of cars that are have negative ROI doesn't get you much over having a few cars.
Google has a shitload of money. But it also has 150,000+ employees. If everybody has loose pockets it becomes a disaster. Supply chain is also a problem. Even if a single piece of hardware is cheap, buying a gazillion of them is hard.
I find resource planning to be difficult and frustrating here at Google, despite billions and billions in the bank.
An improperly-rolled-out software update could kill a lot of people, including people not riding in Waymo vehicles. That bug could be in every Waymo vehicle on the road right now, waiting for the environmental conditions that make it turn deadly.
Is it possible that he was talking about a different cost than that of vehicle parts? Even at a million dollars a piece, I'd imagine google would be happy to spend a hundred million or two to get dozens/hundreds of higher visible vehicles out in aive environment.
Perhaps the expense he was talking about is that it would be super expensive to create a factory to be able to increase the volume whilst the vehicles are still rather custom built.
I will say that I have very little knowledge about anything here, just that Google has already spent billions on this effort and it would seem strange that they are shying away from spending a few hundred thousand per vehicle.
> Could you say more about the "they had to send out a manual driver" bit?
Car encountered an unmarked dead end and got confused turning around (there was a badly-parked car on the narrow road). Car called for help and we were told a person was en route. A few minutes later, a guy arrived in a truck and manually drove us to our destination.
Toyota lost a lot of money the first few years they sold the Prius, but they were happy to do it because they believed they'd work out the production cost issues over time. And they were right. Clearly Waymo's going for a similar strategy here. But one difference is that Toyota at that point had decades of experience wrangling the cost curve for cars. It'll be interesting to see if they can get capital cost plus mapping cost plus operational cost down low enough so that they can at least break even on a ride.
I personally think they should just update the stack so they can do realtime control.
Pay 5G networks to have priority data feeds for video, and send all the data back to an operator with 50ms glass to glass latency. Then have the remote operator drive.
Always have the car in a position to take over and stop incase the comms link gets cut. Usually that will involve either slamming the brakes on hard or gently, depending if there is an obstacle ahead or someone following behind.
That means they no longer need to handle 99.9999999999% of cases, but instead just handle 99.9% and detect the rest for a human to do.
You are potentially overlooking application level latency, just because the packets arrive in 50ms time does not mean the video latency is upper bounded to that. I think 100-200ms is more realistic.
If your one way network latency is 50ms, it takes 150ms minimum to send a packet on 1.5x round trips which is necessary to confirm round trip connectivity and notify the other party. If you can assume clocks are synchronized you can send packets one way in 50ms to confirm connectivity and latency.
> Usually that will involve either slamming the brakes on hard or gently, depending if there is an obstacle ahead or someone following behind.
you’re specifically in a situation in which the car has failed, so im not sure how you can assume the car will make these kinds of decisions correctly.
> I personally think they should just update the stack so they can do realtime control.
Lets assume video latency of 100-200ms can be achieved, its still potentially dangerous. There are however some companies i am aware of in certain countries that are doing it anyway!
Even if glass to glass latency was 1ms, perhaps its not a technological issue but a PR issue. Maybe they don’t want news headlines about people driving cars with mario kart steering wheels or it’s easier to get regulatory approval by reassuring the public they will do the safest thing possibly.
I wonder if the problem could be solved via a semi autonomous mode with manual input from a remote human source? Yes, it would still be slow, but for weird situations where the car is just stuck it might be good enough? They could incorporate some techniques from multiplayer games where things are estimated via simulation so that the experience doesn’t suck too much.
I wonder what the air force does with remote drone pilots?
> took four times as long to get it, you had to endure this also and you still liked it?
Yup! It as far more forgivable than an Uber driver taking the wrong turn half a dozen times in a row. It was half the cost, before tip. And it was up to four times as long a wait, not always four times as long. All of that more than makes up for the fun.
It’s not ready for mass roll-out. But there is a massive beachhead to grab.
That is exactly how an early-adopter outlier would feel about that. And I'm not saying you're wrong; those are valid feelings. But if you look at the distribution of people like that [1], it's not representative. Imagine how most people would feel if a taxi driver did that to them: "Oh, sorry, I'm scared to turn the car around; please wait until a supervisor can pick you up." They'd be annoyed at the delay and would be less likely to rely on the service again.
Props to Waymo for what they've accomplished; they've been very clever in working around the limitations of the tech. But it sounds like it has a long way to go before they're ready for general-audience usage.
[1] E.g., the Crossing the Chasm model, although this is more the behavior of the "visionary" segment than what he calls "early adopter"; scroll down to the first big graph here: https://thinkinsights.net/strategy/crossing-the-chasm/
I'd do it once for the experience. I doubt there's any real appreciable actual personal danger. But, with that experience, I probably wouldn't do it again anytime soon.
I'm curious too. I assumed they'd just use manual remote control for situations that the AI can't handle. Actually sending out a driver sounds anything but smooth and fast.
Waymo's remote support can't drive the car. I'm surprised by how many people seem to have assumed that would be a good idea. What happens when, inevitably, there's a communication fault while driving in this way ?
Leaving a passenger in a stopped car in the middle of an intersection is not safe. And your logic is circular, the car hypothetically fails and calls for remote assistance, and the link gets cut, the car “safe stops” and youre right back at square one and need to send someone out still. I dont think its as easy as youre characterizing
It's pretty clear that with Waymo the first response is to fail safe: when in doubt, pull over and ask for help. I was expecting that the help could include a semi-assisted remote override mode. The remote support would not be turning the wheel and pressing the gas, but giving it higher-level overrides, like "do a u-turn here". So in that case if it loses touch it's reasonable to resume traveling if it now can or once again pull over and ask for help.
Remote Waymo support can reach into the car's model of the world to a limited extent to resolve problems, but if the situation is just screwed then it makes sense to have a human driver take over rather than waste the passenger's time while somebody futzes with the model for an unknown length of time.
I find it funny imagining an army of ex-tuktuk drivers working from home on a simulator and using their expertise to get the world’s self-driving cars out of tricky situations. If the AI ever learns their ways, it will be terrifying but we will get to work 30% faster.
Yeah, I think if we want driverless taxis in major cities ASAP, then Waymo is probably the way forward. It should be relatively easy to continuously map a city with a fleet of vehicles and keep them geofenced. It's will be a good revenue generator that can sustain the company while they work on a more general video based solution.
The counter argument is lidar isn’t strictly necessary (case in point humans use vision, and roads are designed for visual drivers). Furthermore, there is potential added complexity in fusing lidar and video data. When lidar says the path is blocked and video says it is not, you essentially have to either trust lidar and stop unnecessarily or just ignore lidar and go anyway (and then what was the point of the lidar?). Having to make a decision like this is a form of complexity and addressing that complexity potentially takes resources away from iterating on the vision part of the stack.
> When lidar says the path is blocked and video says it is not, you essentially have to either trust lidar and stop unnecessarily or just ignore lidar and go anyway (and then what was the point of the lidar?).
If it's actually blocked then decision becomes stop and prevent harm or go forward and hurt someone.
I don't think it's a very good counter argument.
Edit: without meaningful data as to which is more meaningful I'd lean towards LIDAR being safer because there's less info (depth) to infer, and to me color seems less important than depth, barring stuff like signs and lights. Which shouldn't be hard to correlate between the two.
But without more meaningful data this comes off as a "you should x people people did x anciently and it seems like that worked"
That's a very important difference. If it turns out that LIDAR (and maybe other sensors) are needed in addition to machine vision for level 5 automation, all the data Tesla cameras have been gathering may be worth much less than the 3D models Google is building.
> Level 5 is still very far away, and will require more than just LIDAR.
I don't think that's true. In my view, by scaling these AI models we will arrive there. But even if I am wrong, we don't need level 5 for this technology to be revolutionary. I am mostly interested in using Waymo as my new Uber, so if it can decently navigate cities costing half the price, then sign me in.
The problem is the definition of level 5 is amorphous.
That is, "everywhere in all conditions" exceeds what any human will do. If I won't drive in a blizzard or specific cities, does it make a car level 4 if it punts under these conditions?
I think we need a better definition that encompasses the different capabilities of things calling themselves level 4, and avoids an impossible standard for level 5.
I will be happy to consider a car to be "level 5" if it can drive to Lake Tahoe through a snowstorm and then park itself in a specific spot of a ski resort parking lot by following the vague and confusing hand signals given by the lot attendant.
"For those of you in San Francisco, join the waitlist today."
Aw. Not quite yet. But getting steadily closer. What's pricing?
When the service turns on as a commercial service in San Francisco, autonomous vehicles will really be here. Phoenix is the easy case. SF is moderately hard. NYC will be tough.
It's interesting how different the rollout of autonomous cars has been from what people were expecting a decade ago. Not just the speed of things, but also the way they're being adopted. So far, we don't seem to be anywhere close to the nationwide mass layoffs of truck and taxi drivers that people were predicting would happen when self-driving cars started to take of.
Instead, current trends seem to be for an additional form of transportation within limited geographic areas. One can imagine a scenario where, for instance, we have a number of cities where self-driving cars are the dominant form of transportation in the center, but traditional cars are still owned and operated by the people who live on the periphery, and most cities don't have self-driving networks at all. Something similar to how the subway functions in Manhattan New York, perhaps.
Or maybe not. But I think this all shows that it's not just difficult to predict which pieces of future technology we will have, but also how a particular piece of technology will actually be implemented and impact society.
It feels like there's always an imminent threat of computers and technology replacing more human jobs, but it might wind up being harder than it looks for one reason or another.
I think in the past, technology mostly threatened to replace and eliminate jobs nobody really wanted, or merely assist people in their jobs to make them more effective. AI is really doing a number on us, though. I really like programming, and I have plenty of friends who really like drawing. It would be a shame if the main incentive to be good at those things in society were to disappear due to the job market being partially eaten, but it does seem like that's what is going to happen eventually. Sometimes I wonder if it's even worth fighting it, as it seems like it's just another inevitable mess that winds up the same either way because people with more money than I can fathom have a pretty good incentive to make it so.
Either way, driving seems somewhere down the middle. I think automating driving would be great, but I also assume plenty of truckers do enjoy the job, and would be lost without it.
It's good that this transition is taking a while. I don't think we're equipped to handle it.
For sure. "We tend to over-estimate the impact of a phenomenon in the short run and under-estimate it in the long run."
I think part of what's going on here is that the actual pattern of technology use is heavily dependent on technical and economic details that can't be known up front. It turns out that SAE level 5 autonomy is much harder than a lot of people expected, so the thing that disrupted the cab industry is not the long-anticipated robo-cab but a mechanical-turk version of that. Or consider mass adoption of flying cars and/or personal helicopters. It has been technically possible for a while, but the economics and practicalities don't work out.
I think a lot of people thought it would be exactly as hard as it has turned out to be but were dismissed as being luddites or lacking imagination.
I think it’s always been apparent that self driving is one of those problems where the first 90% is hard but solvable, but where the difficulty just keeps increasing in the last 10%.
When I was growing up in the 80s and 90s I was constantly seeing coverage of cars driving themselves around circuits and even handling skids in a skid pan better than any human. I fully expected to never have to drive. Sadly I was very wrong.
I’ve never wanted more to be wrong about my cynicism about a technology than with self driving.
I think a lot of people thought it would be exactly as hard as it has turned out to be but were dismissed as being luddites or lacking imagination.
There may have been a lot of people like that, but there were very few knowledgeable people who were making such predictions in public. The only one I know of is Rodney Brooks, and even he went public for the first time only in 2017 [0].
John Leonard of MIT said something similar around the same time.
"Taking me from Cambridge to Logan Airport with no driver in any Boston weather or traffic condition — that might not be in my lifetime," Leonard told Bloomberg. (2018) (I think he actually said the "not in my lifetime" thing originally a few years earlier.)
And yet here there is an article about expanding the service area of a working self driving system and you are still implying that you believe it's impossible.
In a limited area in cities with good weather. It would be foolish to bet that we'll never have fully autonomous driving on most roads in most conditions. It's probably also foolish to bet that kids growing up today can generally get by without ever learning to drive. (Yes, some cities are better than others and some just accept they can't easily go many places or pursue certain activities but that's not the general case.)
It’s just US implementing proper public transportation via contemporary means. I’ve always thought US has the advantage of a genuine need for robotaxis compared to other advanced economies where public transport already works well.
With work fromn home and the efficiency, its worth asking if billion-dollar right-of-way public transiy makes sense anywhere. Waymo is to rail as packet-based networking is to dedicated copper analog phone lines.
I've also had a variation of this thought, and have received mostly revulsion from my fairly technical social circles.
When most people think of "public transit", they only picture busses, trains and multi-billion dollar corruption-laden mass transit projects. However, in many cases, it is far far cheaper to (as a municipal government) purchase and operate fleets of self-driving electric vehicles. Don't get me wrong, there are still cases where dedicated rights-of-way for trains make more sense, but we should be using the optimal solution for each given situation, and the optimal solution is not always "trains and busses".
"Public transit" can also be "publicly owned electric self-driving vehicles, making use of the roads that already exist". However, a lot of people have an entrenched opinion of "CAR BAD NO MATTER WHAT", with no objective basis of what "bad" is.
Yes, a car can bring people point to point, however it still isn't space efficient. Each traveller in their own vehicle is read of a compact bus or train. Still requiring broad roads and space in the attractive areas.
Yes, cars are less space efficient. However, what is the objective line of "too space inefficient", and are cars over that line? If not, why should one care? We aren't optimizing for "most space efficient as possible", there are other factors in the mix.
Despite all the complaining, Western society seems to generally be accepting of the space inefficiency of cars as it currently stands. And computer modelling has shown that, all other things being equal, autonomous vehicles are expected to increase the capacity of existing roadways.
Also, don't forget that a lot of people want to get around in a car, regardless of bus/train availability, despite what your personal feelings on the subject might be. However, don't get me wrong here, a lot of people also want to get around on foot, by bike, and by bus. Admittedly these options are lacking in most Western urban environments. We should also be building up these options for the people who want to use them. Transportation doesn't have to be a winner-take-all, one-solution-for-everyone fight. Different people want different things, and there's no reason that transportation options shouldn't reflect this.
Because of global warming? The idea is fairly straightforward:
- less space efficient means less fuel efficient which means heavier carbon footprint
- less space efficient means more vehicles which means heavier carbon footprint
- less space efficient encourages suburban sprawl which means lower city service efficiency which means heavier carbon footprint
- less space efficient encourages suburban sprawl which means more efficient alternatives like public transit are more costly and less convenient which means heavier carbon footprint
You say transportation doesn't have to be a winner-take-all fight but that completely ignores market/political forces shaped by city planning. You handwave it away by saying "admittedly these options are lacking in most Western urban environments" but why do you think that is? It's a consequence of American city space-inefficiency which makes efficient public transit worse and favors inefficient cars. It doesn't have to be winner-take-all, winner-take-most is enough to change climate change outcomes significantly.
On the converse, you don't get to say the words "global warming" to handwave away human wants and desires. Especially when there are alternative solutions that allow car users to keep doing their thing, while also completely mitigating global warming concerns.
Carbon footprints can be offset. It just needs to be done honestly. Specifically, an "honest offset" is an offset that has already occurred prior to purchase of the offset, and prior to the production of the carbon being offset. If vehicular use was required to be honestly offset, your global warming concerns completely evaporate. It really is that simple. The one downside is that you don't get the emotional satisfaction of "sticking it" to car users.
If your sincere and sole goal is to fight global warming, you have to remember that most people simply do not care. If your proposed solution is to take comfortable things away from people that want those comfortable things, you are simply going to lose.
There's nothing really fundamental about humans wanting cars. In European cities with a long history of public transit, people like public transit. In American cities where cars have been king for a long time and have almost never been pressured to build good public transit, people like cars. Public transit can be comfortable.
If vehicular use was required to be honestly offset, the comfortable thing that is the modern car and suburban sprawl would no longer be affordable.
I don't doubt that most people don't care, it's why we're in this mess in the first place. It's also why humanity is on track to lose a lot to the damage from climate change. I find myself wondering whether I care either, I appreciate the reminder that I'm simply going to lose even if I do.
> There's nothing really fundamental about humans wanting cars.
This was never claimed, and is irrelevant anyway. Fundamental or not, a large segment of Western society wants to use cars. Quibbling over whether or not this behavior is learned, intrinsic, or a mix does not help anyone on timescales that matter. Accept this reality and move on.
> Public transit can be comfortable.
For you maybe. Not everyone is you. I've experienced public transit in a variety of European cities known for their excellent transit systems. I simply am not comfortable on public transit, as I hate not having personal space.
> If vehicular use was required to be honestly offset, the comfortable thing that is the modern car and suburban sprawl would no longer be affordable.
This isn't true, but let's pretend it is. Towards your goal of mitigating global warming through reducing car usage, wouldn't this be a better approach than directly prohibiting car usage? People are easily misled by layers of indirection. Market forces pushing people away from "unaffordable" car usage is more palatable than "fuck your way of life, you now have to ride a bus or three".
> I find myself wondering whether I care either, I appreciate the reminder that I'm simply going to lose even if I do.
It's a tough pill to swallow, but you can choose to work with the people you don't like and advocate for solutions that are amenable to them as well. Hostility to their way of life will not get you very far. There is enough solar energy reaching our planet to power our entire civilization at the energy usage of a typical American, and to start unwinding our past century of carbon emission. Most people would simply be apathetic about working towards such a goal. Try to take away their comforts, and most will actively work against you.
Once robocars are clearly about ready to scale up, there'll be a variety of designs including one- or two-passenger cars.
Conversely, buses usually go mostly empty except during rush hour.
Finally, small on-demand robocars should be a great way to conveniently connect to a local train station and then to your ultimate destination, raising demand for complementary mass transit.
Given autonomous driving, computer-dispatched and scheduled mini-buses and vans could make sense for a lot of scenarios where there's reasonable demand and no transit.
Mass transit is often less cost (and therefore environmentally) efficient than private vehicles per passenger mile. Multi-ton busses and trains run empty most of the time. A self-driving car never wastes a trip.
Trains are a completely different beast: they can't stop in line-of-sight so the complexities are mostly in engineering a safe (and failsafe) path for the train, rather than the driver watching for obstacles. There are self-driving systems, but they look quite different from self-driving cars and likely have zero AI.
Fascinating article, thanks! It didn't touch on why people want driverless trains. Personally, and I'm not a train engineer, but I think driverless trains would let them run trains every 15 minutes at all times of the day, not just rush hour.
There are advantages in things like braking consistency that will let you pack more trains per hour down a tunnel with automated systems. London's underground rail network increasingly has this kind of automation, where the driver presses a 'go' button and the train takes itself to the next stop, in the key bits under the city centre. It has a fairly high capital cost, though, and doesn't save you the driver, as the LonRec article shows.
The main people who want fully driverless systems are politicians who hope that no drivers == no strikes and lower salaries. Though honestly that would just move the labour power to the control room operators, even if there were a good financial case for the upgrade (which there isn't).
If you squint inhumanly hard you can argue I live in my country's sixth biggest "city" (ie a contiguous area of urban and semi-urban development - but under such a view the city's "name" doesn't make sense to the people who live in it and that city doesn't have good public transport as a whole because it's not really a city)
But the city I actually live in (the one whose residents recognise its name) is only a couple hundred thousand people, and it has good enough public transport that I lived here for almost thirty years now with no desire to own a car. Have I gone in somebody else's car to an event? Yeah, maybe a few times per year. But day-to-day and week-to-week I don't need a car. I have a license, I own a car parking space, I could easily afford a car, but it makes no sense to buy one, so I don't.
If what you are describing turns out to be true in the long term, it would have to mean that there is something fundamentally different and harder about self-driving outside of cities.
If anything, I would think the opposite was true, at least with respect to major roads. To be honest, I'm surprised there hasn't been more of a push to get to something like fully hands-off Super Cruise [1] system. I'm not sure I'm that unusual in not generally caring that much about door-to-door self-driving but would love something to take over on boring highway drives.
Yes, I got on the trusted riders list. I usually only use ride shares to go to the airport, and sadly it doesn't go there yet, so I've only used it a few times
Does anybody know how much this is currently backed with human intervention? My understanding is that Waymo is bridging the gap between their current level and full automation with having humans on tap via the network. But I'd love to know more about the frequency and circumstances of remote interventions.
Waymo has to do SAE Level 4 because there literally is no human driver in the vehicle. You aren't allowed to sit in the seat where the pedals and wheel are, this isn't assistance, it's a driver, like in a taxi.
Remote humans can correct the machine's model of the world, to a limited extent. A human looking at the data might conclude that's a life-size cardboard cut out of Luke Skywalker, not Mark Hamill stood motionless in the road in costume for no reason, and so it's OK for the Waymo to squeeze past it, whereas driving very close to humans is unacceptable.
They don't have any means to remotely drive the car, if for any reason that's the solution to a problem, the Waymo will stop somewhere, a vehicle with Waymo employees in will turn up in a few minutes, then a human driver gets into your car and takes over.
It's been a good year for machine learning overall, and that includes autonomous vehicles. There's more optimism this year, the survivors are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.
Have Waymo announced which cities they will work on in 2023/2024? One of the comments in here mentions their vehicles in Los Angeles. Any guesses on when they may start service in New York City?
without knowing phoenix, it's hard to get a sense of how much area is actually covered from this blog post. is this just an expansion to a couple neighbourhoods, or is this getting towards covering most of the city?
Having tried Tesla FSD many times, I'm very bearish on self driving technology. Genuinely alarmed how Waymo was able to get a permit for rides without human supervision. If I had not intervened multiple times when I tried FSD in a Model S for just a 30 minute trip, I certainly would have crashed.
If your only sample has been Tesla "FSD", your bearishness is appropriate. However, Tesla's level of development is infantile compared to Waymo's.
It's clear that Waymo has run into some costs/limits in physically scaling their operations, as the software side of things appears to already be "good enough" and is not the limiting factor.
You can’t compare Tesla FSD with Waymo, they are using fundamentally different techniques. Specifically, Tesla decided to do everything based on video images, while Waymo uses LIDAR.
Additionally, there’s a cultural difference where Tesla doesn’t care about quality/safety as much as Waymo does.
At this rate will be 2060 before waymo is profitable. Curious how long the shareholders are going to tolerate such a large expense over dividend/share repurchases
One question is to what degree safety is dependent on testing in these specific good weather areas for literally years. And even the SF public self-driving area excludes what is almost certainly the somewhat harder area of SF for self-driving (though opening up much of SF is more impressive than Phoenix generally).
Seems like fair weather tech at best at the moment. I just can't see these things working in a place like a Canadian winter without a few generational improvements. It starts with the basics, like knowing you have to start slowing down 3 blocks before the intersection if you don't want to slide through it, but also involves knowing how the driving culture changes during a storm.
We can install like IR reflectors in the road so that they know where the lines are under the snow, but people don't know where the lines are, and so during a heavy snow day the lanes change and take on people's best guess and it becomes the new default choice as more people take the new paths.
As is often repeated the most dangerous thing to be on the road is unpredictable, and I don't know if the self driving cars would have the ability to see the changes in lane positions and adjust, or if they'd be trying to follow the old lanes in a crowd of cars making their best guesses to make it home. Seems one of those "it won't work well until the vast majority of the cars are automated" type deals.
Humans suck in these conditions too. The solution is to go slower, pull over in the worst conditions, take an off ramp, don't drive in the first place, etc. These are all things humans have been known to do.
Road lines are important but physical obstacles like other vehicles are more important.
> the most dangerous thing to be on the road is unpredictable
Google already has the biggest hive mind for predicting what's ahead. One reason I turn on Waze even when driving a familiar route is that I can see traffic and conditions ahead of me. Totally saved my butt when I noticed dozens of accidents ahead in what seemed like a light rain. The road had iced over. I got off at the next exit and waited it out, using Waze to know when traffic was moving again. Passed some horrifying big truck accident scenes yet to be cleared by tow trucks.
You are right. You wrote: <<3 blocks before the intersection if you don't want to slide through it>> It sounds like road maintenance needs improvement in your city.
That's funny, with that framing it seems as though it won't be the robot cars fault for screwing up even though the majority of drivers can get home safe in those conditions.
When it's -30 for a week you end up in a situation where road salt doesn't work and the exhaust from cars polishes intersections to an icy sheen. It's hard to protect against that.
Even if it's safe...what's the short term benefit for riders beyond curiosity? Presumably cheaper fares + more throughput but the math is not obvious to me that owning a fleet of robotaxis will be a lucrative business to be in anytime soon, even if you are the only robotaxi company in town.
Seems like they need to license this tech to have it payoff.
cheaper fares is a really big deal. if you can deliver the same service 30% cheaper with 20% higher profit margins, that's massive. driver pay is a significant component of cost so cutting it is pretty massive.
I guess, but if I'm getting a taxi, replacing a human with a computer is not a huge benefit to me, as I'm already not driving. If I'm driving myself to work every day, replacing that repetitive and boring task with a computer is a huge user benefit and thus I'd be more willing to pay and at a higher price for the tech.
I just think that's the only real way to make this thing pay off. Also potentially it might work for long haul trucking.
Maybe? Not that I use Uber/Lyft/taxis much but, when I do, I of course prefer them to be cheaper but +/- 30% pricing pretty much wouldn't affect if I take them or not. It's still a significant premium relative to driving myself at home and, if I'm traveling, I may not have much of a choice.
if +/-30% pricing isn't significant, then the benefit isn't lower fares, it's higher profits for the company operating the cars. either way you slice it, not having to pay drivers would be a significant win for a taxi company.
Not necessarily if the technology (both development and hardware cost) to replace the drivers costs enough. I don't doubt it will get there someday but Waymo certainly isn't making money off current riders.
> Seems like they need to license this tech to have it payoff.
Seems like that's the plan. Volvo and some other car OEMs are using Android on the dashboard. A total package of infotainment, autonation, and the cloud services behind the in-vehicle systems is a likely destination for this and other products than can be sold into cars at the OEM or end-user level.
Tesla charges $12,000 for the FSD package. Not sure what a Waymo package might be worth, but it could be a hell of a lot more lucrative business than Android.
There are a dozen competitors, and the price of the actual hardware is a few thousand dollars. I don’t imagine this will be a high margin business. A $1000/car markup over hardware cost seems about right to me.
I can name a dozen mobile operating systems as well. Some serious ones: Symbian, BlackBerry, Microsoft, Tizen, iOS, Android. The question is if there is a network effect… a powerful one such as “waymo doesn’t manslaughter cyclists”.
From a consumer's standpoint, is that bad? I'd rather wait longer and know for a fact that the product is 100% safe and tested. This isn't something I would be willing to take a risk on, getting into a car crash because I was really anxious to try a driverless taxi seems embarrassing.
I find it interesting how deeply downvoted this comment is. This is pretty much what TCI Management, a not insignificant investor in Alphabet, has said in a note that they published recently [0]:
TCI also pointed out that Alphabet's Other Bets division – which houses operations including Waymo, Nest, Access, Calico and more – generated $3 billion in revenues in the past five years but incurred operating losses of $20 billion. "Other Bets have been unsuccessful" and operating losses estimated at $6 billion in 2022 should be reduced by 50 percent.
"The biggest component of Other Bets is Waymo," TCI added. "Unfortunately, enthusiasm for self-driving cars has collapsed and competitors have exited the market. Ford and Volkswagen recently decided to shut down their self-driving venture" saying that achieving profit in the short term was not likely.
This will not end well as ml/dl has no intelligence, and given the ever changing world we live in, intelligence is needed for safe driving. Phoenix has less variation than many places, but statistics on the past won't help when something unexpected arises as it always will in time. My guess is they are only doing this now to convince investors (or google itself) that the technology is viable, when in fact, is simply is not. Best to just shut all these companies down until machine intelligence has been achieved rather than waste so many resources.
> intelligence is needed for safe driving... won't get when something unexpected arises as it always will in time
I don't think that's true. While unexpected situations do arise, I don't think people use much "intelligence" to handle them. When an elephant falls out of the semi truck in front of you, your response is to hit the breaks. You don't spend a minute thinking about the likelihood of the event, or question whether allowing the elephant to hit your car might improve the likelihood of it surviving (and whether that justifies sacrificing yourself.)
The fact is that most accidents aren't very atypical. They're everyday things that happen, and people aren't paying attention, or they make a mistake. Handling just these scenarios will result in net saved lives. In other words, autonomous driving doesn't have to be perfect to be useful.
I would love to see Waymo become another hose. I'd love to see it launch in my city (whenever the laws are amended to allow such things).
(Yes, I know arguably they've had a few other successes.)