[raldi]

I'm surprised that either:

1. Nobody at Waymo thought of this,

2. Somebody did think of it but it wasn't considered important enough to prioritize, or

3. They tried to prep the cars for this and yet they nonetheless failed so badly

[add-sub-mul-div]

Everyone should have understood that driving requires improvisation in the face of uncommon but inevitable bespoke challenges that this generation of AI is not suited for. Either because it's common sense or because so many people have been shouting it for so long.

[slavik81]

What improvisation is required? A traffic light being out is a standard problem with a standard solution. It's just a four-way stop.

[Nasrudith]

To be fair 'common sense' and 'many people have been shouting it' about technical matters have a long history of being hilariously wrong. Like claims that trains would cause organ damage to their riders from going at the blistering speed of either 35 or 50 mph, IIRC. Or about manned flight being impossible. Common sense would tell you that launching a bunch of broadcasting precise clocks into orbit wouldn't be usable to determine the distance, and yet here we are with GPS.

[srdjanr]

I'd say driving only requires not to handle uncommon situation dangerously. And stopping when you can't handle something fits my criteria.

Also I'm not sure it's entirely AI's fault. What do you do when you realistically have to break some rules? Like here, I assume you'd have to cut someone off if you don't want to wait forever. Who's gonna build a car that breaks rules sometimes, and what regulator will approve it?

[raldi]

But a citywide blackout isn’t that uncommon.

[confidantlake]

Likely 2. Not something that will make it into in their kpis. No one is getting promoted for mitigating black swan events.

[cjsplat]

Actually that is specifically not true at Google, and I expect it applies to Waymo also.

People get promoted for running DiTR exercises and addressing the issues that are exposed.

Of course the problem is that you can't DiRT all the various Black Swans.

[dzhiurgis]

Clearly cars can navigate themselves, it's the lack of remote ops that halted everything