Wednesday Morning Rant

This week, there was a minor traffic accident in San Francisco. Two cars bumped into each other at low speed, and a third stopped for the accident and further blocked traffic. A mere nothing. This happens all the time, and we all know what happens next: the drivers exchange insurance information (and if they're thinking, they move their cars out of traffic first) and leave. Maybe they call the cops and file a report. But not this time.

This time, the three cars just sat there, deadlocked. Nobody moved, nobody talked, nobody took any action. This is because there was nobody to take action. No humans were involved. All three cars were autonomous vehicles operated by Waymo. Following the minor crash, none of them could figure out how to proceed and so just sat there, patiently waiting. They're good at that. Machines are very patient.

Eventually, someone (presumably from the company) came down and got things cleared up, but it exposed an obvious gap in how driverless cars handle fairly routine problems. In this case, the cars (or a car - the company's statement is unclear) got snarled up in a dead-end street and had a collision while one or more of them was trying to do a multi-point turn to get out of it. Per the company:

In a statement, Waymo officials said that while making a multi-point turn on a dead-end street, two Waymos made "minor contact at low speed."

"We are looking into this further, and when we encounter situations like this, we are able to learn from them and make improvements," a Waymo representative said.

A third Waymo, traveling downhill, is unable to get through.

Then a man comes out of his garage, dubbing the white cars stuck in the middle of the street as a "Waymo standoff."

"I'm just trying to get out of here," the man said ...

Machines can't. They need to be programmed to make decisions. This was clearly a decision-making condition that hadn't been adequately predicted or handled. There were several weird variables here. Both cars were driverless. There was a dead-end street. At least one of the cars was doing a complex maneuver. There was cross-traffic. Tricky indeed, unless you're a person. If you're a person, you can cut through it and go with, "there's only minor damage. Give me your info and let's move on with our lives." To a person, one minor wreck is much like another. Machines, not so much.

It's amazing that this stuff works at all, but incidents like this show just how complex the real world is, and how hard it is to deal with when you have to program ersatz intelligence into a machine with no real knowledge of the world. These are really hard problems to solve, and sometimes tiny little unpredictable problems expose that.

They also expose just how far away we are from the dream of autonomous vehicles. We're a long way off from "feel free to take a nap in the back seat while the car takes you home."

posted by Joe Mannix at 11:00 AM

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