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The weaponization of Waymo
(www.bloodinthemachine.com)
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this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2025
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Closed course testing has been near perfect. At some point it needs to be real world tested. It's arguably already far safer than human performance. That seems like a reasonable threshold for prod testing. If this were a vaccine it would likely be on schedule already.
Assuming that what you say is true about closed course testing (and that they truly made an effort to replicate the dynamism of a city), why do they gotta test this snack dab in the middle of cities (where we should rather invest in public transportations anyway) instead of, I don't know, some trails in the woods, where there would also be a bunch of unknowns?
All this reeks of "gotta go to market ASAP to please the investors / shareholders above the rest of humanity" to me.
I work in an area adjacent to autonomous vehicles, and the primary reason has to do with data availability and stability of terrain. In the woods you're naturally going to have worse coverage of typical behaviors just because the set of observations is much wider ("anomalies" are more common). The terrain being less maintained also makes planning and perception much more critical. So in some sense, cities are ideal.
Some companies are specifically targeting offs road AVs, but as you can guess the primary use cases are going to be military.