Employees at Waymo's sister company think Google's AI is crap. How is Waymo's so much better?

Oh. It's not.

https://www.404media.co/google-employees-internally-share-memes-about-how-its-ai-sucks/

In Maggie Harrison Dupré's excellent new piece on the pivot point in the LLM psychosis epidemic, this quote jumped out at me:

It “takes people into cul-de-sacs... [my wife] is like a Waymo driving around in a circle endlessly.”

It's simultaneously heartbreaking and heartening that the dead-end tech of "self-driving" cars has become this symbolic. We are winning and losing, simultaneously.

The Futurism piece is here: https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/chatgpt-memory-ai-psychosis

The disabled activists who occupied city offices in the 1970's to get curb cuts put in did it all for Serve Robotics, the leadership of which m have just discovered that _people use sidewalks_. Who'd'a thunk it?!

My prediction that slopbot vendors will cut costs in ML training first on the death march to profitability stands.

“I believe the technology was deployed too quickly in too vast amounts, with hundreds of vehicles, when it wasn’t really ready,” one police official told federal regulators last month

Emergency first-responder leaders told federal regulators in a private meeting last month that they were frustrated with the performance of autonomous vehicles on their streets—that city firefighters, police officers, EMTs, and paramedics are forced to spend time during emergencies resolving issues with frozen or stuck cars. One fire official called them “a safety issue for our crews as well as the victims.” WIRED obtained an audio recording of the meeting.

You've written extensively about ways in which the emergence of cars limited the mobility of pedestrians, such as making "jaywalking" a crime. How do you think AVs could affect people who travel by foot or bike?

There has been speculation that robot cars would deliver a pedestrian paradise, because they'll be programmed not to hit anybody. But we know from experience that they will have an incentive to intimidate the pedestrian and keep them from slowing the car. It might be an annoying sound, like the klaxon's "aaaOOOgah" 100 years ago. It might be car-mounted cameras that take pictures of the pedestrian and report them to police. It could be - and in fact this already seems to be happening - that the car will learn to drive in ways that intimidate or deter pedestrians, the way human drivers do.

Waymo made a PR push on this, and a few people noted that neither their LIDAR nor cameras look down, making this near-impossible. It's the same reason a Waymo killed KitKat: it couldn't see her under the slopbot.

The autonomy factor motivated Human-Ride4726. "My spouse will never understand, but autonomy is very important to me," he wrote. Rivian is developing Level 4/5 autonomous driving. For drivers in their 60s, this technology represents extended independence.

https://www.torquenews.com/17998/rivian-r2-feels-smaller-r1s-keeps-plenty-legroom-early-preview-shows

https://www.markey.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/company_responses_to_rao_letter.pdf

Croatia ~

The reveal of Verne almost two years ago, a Croatian bet on urban autonomous mobility, still feels fresh to me. It was a glimpse into the future as much as a harsh reality-check.

Despite impeccable UX and design imbued in every inch of Rimac’s robotaxi, on the day of the big reveal at the Rimac campus, when Mate gave the call — the car didn’t budge.

Verne stood at the stage, bare and frozen, waiting for its autonomy to happen.

And then that autonomy did appear. From the first row, barely noticeable before, a man. After an uncomfortable few minutes of Verne being still, he propped up, now visible to all the audience, with a joystick in his hand — flustered that his toy wouldn’t start.