Disclaimer up front: I work for General Motors. I don't work on AV. Any opinions are my own. I have no special knowledge of GM's AV strategy.
> It didn’t matter that that jump from “sometimes working” to statistically reliable was 10–1000x more work.
There's 2 states of functionality:
1) It doesn't work
2) It sometimes works
The inverse, for disk drives: Failing and Failed.
Think about apps/services. You could say that your app is working, but over a long enough time period, it is only sometimes working. It's working while you have disk space, free memory, and a working network connection. It's working while your business assumptions hold true. It's working while your datacenter has power. We've developed strategies for managing all of these things; for load balancing and Active/Active hosting. But even with that, it only sometimes works.
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With all that, I think it may be useful to think of self driving in terms of tasks.
If you can put a box around what you expect a computer to be able to do, you can define tasks that will always return a reasonable output.
The more tasks a computer handles, the easier it is for the human in control (think driver assist, like lane keeping and automatic cruise control).
If you add enough tasks, and perform them well enough, maybe you can take the human in control out of the vehicle.
I think I'm in agreement with the authors that I don't see the day when there isn't a human in control. Or the other way to say that is that if there isn't a human in control, sometimes your AV will just stop.
Just stopping is ok is ok in some use cases, but not others. It will be a long time before robotaxis "just stop" less frequently than uberdrivers, but AV trucks can already be more reliable than contemporary drivers.
> It didn’t matter that that jump from “sometimes working” to statistically reliable was 10–1000x more work.
There's 2 states of functionality:
1) It doesn't work
2) It sometimes works
The inverse, for disk drives: Failing and Failed.
Think about apps/services. You could say that your app is working, but over a long enough time period, it is only sometimes working. It's working while you have disk space, free memory, and a working network connection. It's working while your business assumptions hold true. It's working while your datacenter has power. We've developed strategies for managing all of these things; for load balancing and Active/Active hosting. But even with that, it only sometimes works.
---
With all that, I think it may be useful to think of self driving in terms of tasks.
If you can put a box around what you expect a computer to be able to do, you can define tasks that will always return a reasonable output.
The more tasks a computer handles, the easier it is for the human in control (think driver assist, like lane keeping and automatic cruise control).
If you add enough tasks, and perform them well enough, maybe you can take the human in control out of the vehicle.
I think I'm in agreement with the authors that I don't see the day when there isn't a human in control. Or the other way to say that is that if there isn't a human in control, sometimes your AV will just stop.