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By way of @garymarcus newsletter I was made aware of the following:

In a New York Times article on the self-driving company Cruise that recently suspended its cars, some interesting figured were revealed:

”Half of Cruise’s 400 cars were in San Francisco when the driverless operations were stopped. Those vehicles were supported by a vast operations staff, with 1.5 workers per vehicle. The workers intervened to assist the company’s vehicles every 2.5 to five miles, according to two people familiar with is operations. In other words, they frequently had to do something to remotely control a car after receiving a cellular signal that it was having problems.”

That’s a human intervention every 4-8 kilometres. More and more people are becoming aware of how many people are involved in the development, maintenance and running of machine-learning models. It’s safe to assume that machine-controlled cars are no different.

Most of the world is talking about self-driving and autonomous as if those are apt descriptions of what is already happening. Reality begs to differ. I think we need words that better describe what is really going on, and for media (and evangelists) to stop parroting whatever the companies feed them.

Autonomous used to mean something. Let’s ask the companies what they intend for the words to mean, and urge them to disclose the number of humans involved in making something appear ”autonomous”.

In light of these numbers being talked about, Cruise CEO Vogt clarifies (on Hacker News) that Cruise AVs are remotely assisted 2-4% of the time on average.* Interestingly he also says: ”This is low enough already that there isn’t a huge cost benefit to optimizing much further.” He also goes on to say that they are intentionally over staffed ”in order to handle localized bursts of RA demand”.

So maybe that’s what self-driving means.

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*Note that the numbers ”every 2.5 to 5 miles” and ”2-4% of the time” are not necessarily in conflict, especially in San Francisco.

LET ME KNOW what other terms you find have been invented or shifted to mean something else to obscure limited functionality. I may have to make a glossary. ”Hallucination” is for example another one of those for me.

1) Gary Marcus’ writeup of his reflections around these figures, using the Theranos scam as a metaphor: https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/could-cruise-be-the-theranos-of-ai

2) The New York Times article, by Tripp Mickle, Cade Metz and Yiwen Lu: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/technology/cruise-general-motors-self-driving-cars.html

3) Cruise CEO Vogt on Hacker News, giving his context for those numbers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38145997

4) Reddit thread discussing the whole matter and how the numbers may add up, or not: https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/17nyki2/kyle_vogt_clarifies_on_hacker_news_that_cruise/

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